7

Father Heard came to our house one Sunday night.

When my father opened the door, the two men hugged in the vestibule.

“Come in. Come in,” my father said.

They stepped into the living room, where I sat with my mother. She stood, pinched the blue bathrobe tight around her neck, waved, and walked out of the room. Several minutes later she came back in after changing into black slacks and a loose, button-up gray sweater that she held tight at her waist. Her hair was still tangled and flattened from lying on the couch. She held a plate with a cut-up pear and cheese slices.

“I need to speak with you, Hans,” Father Heard said.

He had received a letter that the Dutch archbishop had sent to all the priests in the country with the order to read it aloud to their parish congregation that Tuesday. Father Heard placed the letter on the coffee table next to the untouched plate of cheese and the pear slices, already browning.

The simultaneous reading of the letter was meant to inspire a general strike of workers in Amsterdam. The news from the rest of Holland, funneled in by commuting workers, said the encroaching Germans had removed Jews from all public functions, including universities. Protests had begun in Leiden and spread throughout the country. The Germans sought control and were met with violence. Jewish sections of Amsterdam had been fenced off and non-Jews were blocked from entering. They rounded up over four hundred Jewish men and took them away, to where we didn’t know.

“Jacob should go upstairs,” my mother said.

“No, he needs to hear this,” my father said.

Some part of me thought those missing young men had been taken to the training camps in Germany, that they would be shown movies and taught songs, and be returned champions. But I soon learned that the Germans had stationed machine-gun nests around the Jewish quarter, a fact that couldn’t fit into my understanding of things.

The archbishop’s response to the current unrest was this letter. Father Heard said it contested the alleged mistreatment of the Jewish population by the Germans in the country. Though, of course, there was never any mention of it in the new German newspapers, which had started circulating in the town the previous fall, the archbishop had ordered the Catholic Church to voice its concern to the congregation, to draw light to what was happening.

“I’m going to read it. I came to tell you because we’re friends, and I know it may complicate your relationship with the Germans in your factory.”

“But, Father, this might not be safe for you,” my father said. “Let’s think about this. We can play it safer, I’m sure.”

“Hans. I am going to call the congregation together. My mind is made up. Like I said, I’m trying to be respectful and give you fair warning.”

“This sounds bad to me,” my father said, and I heard the tremulousness in his voice. For years, my mind would crawl back to this revelation, and I would blame my own timidity on the intense shadow he cast over my childhood. I come back to this conversation as the one that illuminated my father’s cautious and scared nature, which felt to me like my unfortunate birthright. It had slipped right past Edwin, who was certain about his life and how to carry himself, while it struck me clean on.

“They’re trying to silence us,” Father Heard said. His upper lip rose over the jumbled line of his yellowed teeth. The whites of his eyes engulfed the dark iris. Blood pumped to his large ears.

“But we don’t want to stir up trouble. Make things worse.”

“Hans. How is the status quo working for you? How has that been going?”

“I don’t want to risk anything else.”

“We have to. Look around you, Hans,” Father Heard spoke in his booming sermon voice. Then he lowered his tone. “Look around. Edwin’s gone. Look at Drika here.” He held his hand out to my mourning mother. “Your factory. And for heaven’s sake, Martin has now taken up with them. Seemingly in spirit as much as in body.”

“Leave him out of this,” my mother spit out.

Father Heard took a moment. “Security is off the table. Nothing is safe, and that’s why I have to do this.”

My mother picked up a pillow, cradled it in her lap, and sunk her face into it. My father turned to look out the window.

“I’m sorry to be so harsh,” Father Heard said. “But the archbishop’s letter is the voice of reason. The voice of pacifism in the face of all of this aggression.”

My father held up his hand to stop him from talking. “Jacob. See Father Heard to the door please.”

Father Heard picked up his letter and let me lead him out.

“I’ll see you on Tuesday, I’m sure,” he said as he left the room.

That Tuesday afternoon, when Father Heard had called everyone in his congregation together, my father and I were the last two people to arrive. Inside the church, the windows had not been repaired since that first dusting of bombs dropped over Delfzijl. The large stained-glass window above the altar of three dark crosses on a jade green hill was now a yawning hole with glass-shard teeth, jagged and translucent. The smell of incense and smoky wool rose off the congregation as we joined them, huddled together in wet coats and hats. Steam rose off their heads as they tucked themselves further into their clothes.

A wave of chills rolled down my spine. I was always cold then, always breathing into cupped hands to warm them. Father Heard had swept all the glass debris off the floor, but there were still pieces lodged in the organ pipes, shifting inside them as my mother played. It was a subtle sound the other people in church would not have picked up on, but I’d been listening to the smallest nuances of her playing for years, ever since my father donated the money to Father Heard to first install the organ. In the front of the church, the organ pipes now seemed like they lifted out of my mother’s body, like it was her breath that set the timbre of each wailing tube of alloy. Since we lost Edwin, the songs she played had been slower, more morbid. Even the standards she played during the Mass had a different tone to them. They were the same songs everyone knew, but it lacked her clarity of rhythm, as if she had plunged her hands into a clear stream but her fingers mucked up a cloud of silt and dirtied the water. Her mournful sound made its way out from under the rafters into the immense, open sky, where the dark essence of her dirge drifted over all of Holland.

My father and I stepped to the side of the back door and listened to my mother play. Father Heard walked out from the door off to the side of the altar, keeping his shoulder to the wall. He walked to the back of the church and leaned in close to my father.

“Please don’t do this,” my father said.

“Hans, Samuel is missing,” Father Heard said.

The news made no sense to me. Samuel, the air-writer, had been a fixture of our town my whole life, furiously scribbling out his thoughts above his head. I could close my eyes and see him feeding pigeons, hear Ludo mocking his spasms.

“The vendors who provide him with food spoke to one another after the bags went unclaimed. This was yesterday. They let me know this morning, and he wasn’t in his apartment.”

I imagined Father Heard trying to find a trace of Samuel, wanting to read the writing that must have filled the air between those apartment walls.

“Should we go look for him?” my father asked.

“I had people out all morning. He’s gone.”

“What do you think happened?” my father said.

“What do you think happened!” Father Heard spit back.

The people in the back rows all watched the priest and my father exchange animated whispers.

“You both can help me look after I read this letter. You see why I need to read it now, don’t you?”

My father blankly nodded to Father Heard.

“Okay,” my father said. “Okay.” He leaned in to hug Father Heard. “We’ll look for him.”

Father Heard returned the embrace, then walked down the center aisle to the altar. My mother stopped playing. As Father Heard read the letter, his voice was calm and steady. His deep-set eyes narrowed and scanned the room to single each of us out. His right hand wrapped around the podium, his knuckles were white where he gripped the edge, and his left hand chopped the air in front of him in rhythm with the enunciation of his words. He was once again the familiar authority figure our little church knew him to be.

“We must protest this abominable persecution.” His voice boomed out over the room. The shoulders of the men in front of me scrunched up beneath their heavy jackets each time he uttered the word strike.

My mother turned on her bench to face Father Heard. The organ pipes rose up behind her to the exposed wooden rafters of the A-frame roof. My father sat in the back row of varnished pine pews. Ludo and Hilda were sitting in the front with their parents. Men from the factory and their children filled the rest of the pews. A random smattering of fishermen sat among them. From behind, the whole congregation looked like rodents peeking out of holes. Their spines arched forward, their bodies doubled over either for warmth or to hide, perhaps, from the call for ethical action to be taken.

“Lord, please keep your finger on our shoulder to protect us during these trying times,” Father Heard concluded.

Then the children in the church walked out of their pews and gathered in the back corner, like it was a regular Sunday Mass. They all looked at my father. It was striking to not see Samuel sitting among them. Once my father stood up, the children sat in a half circle. He walked by me and put a hand on my shoulder. He chewed the inside of his lip, causing his left cheek to suction in and out.

He walked to where the children waited, sat in the chair one of the little boys put out for him, and started telling us a story.

“Behind Thump-Drag’s cabin in the woods there was a giant open pit that he could not see the bottom of,” my father began. “When he walked to the side he looked down and saw only a pool of darkness. Every morning when he woke, he walked to the lip of the pit and peered inside, tossing pebbles and stones down and listening for them to land. Townspeople knew of the pit too, and they brought their wagons full of trash, dead cows, and piles of stones they unearthed from their fields, and they dumped everything off the edge and were happy to be rid of it.

“‘We have never had to dig a hole to bury our dead or to dispose of our waste because of this pit,’ an old woman told Thump-Drag.

“Thump-Drag could not keep from thinking of the bottom of the hole and all the mess people had let fall down there. He stood beside it late into the evening, peering into the dark and seeking out the bottom. He did this until he imagined himself sinking into the mouth of the hole, weightless and descending into the cup of earth, sinking away from the surface of the world. When he could no longer withstand not knowing where the hole ended, he built himself a chariot out of ropes and an old claw-footed bathtub. He stood in the tub and held a torch with several unlit torches at his feet. He had the town’s people help him by lowering the tub with him into the pit.

“The pit’s walls twitched with shadows in the light of his torch as he descended, deeper and deeper, until the last of the rope pulled tight and he still had not yet reached the end. He dipped a torch into the pit and watched it fall, then fade into an orange pinprick until it disappeared altogether. He swung there in his tub and cursed the dark abyss. So he got out his knife and yelled good-bye to the people above, and he cut loose the rope and fell down the hole.

“And still, he is falling, being swallowed by the slow darkness and beginning to fear that it is, in fact, a bottomless hole.”

I was choked with sudden emotion. It was clear that my father was saddled with the endless burden of wondering where his other son was, a burden that bubbled up through his stories, and I felt it too, the pressure of being responsible for Edwin, for the loss of him.

The children leaned in close to my father, expecting the rest of the story, what was at the bottom, what adventures were to be had down there, and how Thump-Drag gets out. But my father stood up. It was the first time in all the years of telling stories he got up from his chair before the children around him did, before they were satisfied with the experience he’d given them.

“Dear god, Hans,” my mother said as we left the church together. Her face was red and grimy. She’d been crying. “You’ll give them all nightmares.”

“A taste of darkness won’t kill them,” he said.

After a fruitless night of searching for Samuel, my father looked very near collapse. But instead of getting some rest, he holed himself up in his lab again. When I went there to see him, he called out, “Not now,” so I left him alone.

Three days later, my family and Ludo and Hilda went to the harbor. Soldiers stood nearby around a fire they’d made in a steel drum. They’d punched holes at the base of the drum for air to get in, and the flames looked like fiery eyeballs and reflected off the snow and all the polished, black boots. It was still strange to hear the guttural German language spoken everywhere in my own village. Other soldiers loaded and unloaded boats on the dock. They pushed little lorries and wobbly wheelbarrows up the icy path toward waiting trucks.

There was a loud roar from planes flying overhead. The hum of German planes on maneuver sounded like a quickened thunderhead from a great distance, and was followed by the high whine of their propellers sucking the air off the ground as they hammered across the sky.

“Heinkels?” Ludo asked.

“I think they’re Messerschmitts,” I said. “They have a deeper growl when they fly at those altitudes.”

Most of the fishing boats in the harbor were iced over and looked like they hadn’t been used in a long time. Three kids skated on the frozen canal, but the channel itself was open and clear of ice as the Germans used the port. A constant, streamlined movement of soldiers cleaned and painted the military boats in the harbor, loading and unloading even more soldiers and supplies from the pontoon dock.

Before the Germans’ arrival, when the cold came and froze the water, everyone would sharpen their skates on their whetstones. They’d skate the canal, carving looping alphabets across the ice, some of the adults and older kids going on for dozens of kilometers.

“People drown under the ice every year,” our mother would say. “Don’t trust any patch of ice unless there are already many people on it. Be careful at the edges and under bridges. Those don’t freeze properly.”

But on the occasions she went out herself, she enjoyed gliding over the ice as much as we did and took long, graceful strides that appeared effortless as she cut down the canal, past the row of hollow post windmills, calling after us, “Keep up boys, keep up if you can!”

It had been six months since the soldiers had come to my house and left with Uncle Martin. They had him operating as a ferryman since then, and it turned out he was often back in Delfzijl, navigating his own boat across the water, delivering soldiers, equipment, and supplies. He was due back again that afternoon, and as we got to the docks we could already see the Lighthouse Lady off in the distance narrowing in on the shore. The boat cut straight toward us and shone in the sun like a jewel. We waited, tucked into our clothing, surrounded by little clouds of our own breath until the boat crossed the break wall.

We could see Uncle Martin on the steering station on top of the wheelhouse. He wore a long dark jacket and a twin-peaked hat with the red and black German insignia on it. Once he tossed mooring lines to the shore man and the boat was cleated to its berthing spot, he cut the engines. He hadn’t seen us yet when he stepped off the ship with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and a giant wooden bucket in one hand. He patted the man who tied off the lines of his boat and said something to him, and the man smiled and sort of shrank away from my uncle’s giant presence. Martin spotted us and walked over. It seemed everyone knew his name and he smiled or winked at them all as he passed, tall, wide, lumbering back home.

“You’ve gone native,” my father said when they shook hands on the shore.

“Playing along,” he said.

He put his bag and bucket down and hugged my mother, picking her up and giving her a full-circle swing. Then he did the same thing to me. I was sixteen then, and embarrassed to be engulfed in front of Hilda. He took a swat at Ludo’s head and shoulders and then rustled his hair.

“Hello, Martin,” Ludo said, making a show of straightening his hair back down.

“Little lady,” Uncle Martin said and bent down to kiss Hilda’s hand, which made her blush.

Inside the bucket was a commotion of leaf-sized crabs with shimmery blue-brown alligator spiked shells jostling on top of one another. Beady black eyes were set wide across the ridge of their broken shale backs. Every time one tried climbing up the side, the others pinched onto it and pulled it down into the clump of shells.

“You think you can boil these up for our dinner, Drika?” Martin asked.

“I’m not sure I want to touch those.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Hilda said.

“Come on. Boiling water isn’t beyond you, is it?

My mother tucked her body into him for another giant hug.

Martin had been told to stay on his boat or in the soldiers’ bunks when on shore, but by that winter he’d worked with the Germans long enough that they trusted him to do his own paperwork, run his ship by himself, and come home for a meal with our family. My father had made bread the night before because he couldn’t sleep. He was nervous about the repercussions of Father Heard’s reading. He didn’t even bother going into the factory that day. The Germans were maintaining all of it by then anyway.

We walked up our road without speaking. The bucket of crabs swung at my side and Ludo held Martin’s duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The familiar blaze of blue ink rose up from Martin’s collar just below his left ear. The briny scent of gasoline fumes fell off his coat, which was so long he looked like a giant bat from behind. When we got home, everyone, even Ludo and Hilda, started asking him questions about what was happening in Germany and what they had him doing.

“There’s a complete naval blockade around the country,” Martin answered, “so there’s no escaping by sea.”

My parents wanted us to leave as soon as possible, and I’d convinced them to at least talk to Ludo and Hilda’s parents about letting Ludo and Hilda come with us if it came to that, but my mother could not bring herself to imagine leaving without final news of Edwin.

“You and Ludo will get drafted when you’re eighteen,” my father told us. He and my mother were anxious to think of ways to get us clear of that.

“Why is that so bad?” I asked.

“Wake up, son,” my father said. “Ludo’s arm will ensure he’s sent to a work camp. God knows what will happen to you.”

“We were there. We know,” I said, my feelings hurt. I was trying to act smart in front of Hilda.

“You weren’t really there, and you don’t know. We’ve kept you from knowing what’s really happening.”

“Well, you did send them to camp, Hans,” my mother said.

“Not now, Drika.”

My mother curled over on her side on the couch, the wind taken out of her questioning. She reached over and took my hand in hers. “You have to carry your family in your heart, all of your family,” she said, “and make it out of this nightmare.”

That Sunday, when we prepared for Mass, my father made more loaves of bread to bring to Father Heard and several other families in town. Food was becoming harder to come by, but because we still had a full larder, my father wanted to share. My mother had stopped cooking since Edwin was lost. The only thing she continued to do was play the organ at church. It was the only time she wasn’t in her blue bathrobe.

I had been working in my father’s factory after school every day since the German occupation, and the floor was buzzing that week with talk about Father Heard’s letter. Everyone at the factory wanted to know what Father Heard was going to follow up with during his Sunday Mass; we expected his next service to be more crowded than usual.

We got there early and my mother let us in with her key. She unlocked the door that opened below where the windows used to be; Ludo’s father had finally covered the holes with plywood the day before. My father and I sat in the back row, as we usually did, while my mother went to the organ and started to warm up. She struck each key once and let it dole out and fade. Across the ivory keys, the pitch of each note changed ever so slightly, so that listening to her warming up taught my ear how to detect deviations of noise. Ludo could never guess the exact type of plane soaring overhead, but I always knew not only what it was, but which country it belonged to, and thereby what level of threat it posed, all by the pitch of its engines.

By the time she’d gone through the whole keyboard, and played a few partial songs to warm up, the church was already half full. She walked to the church’s back room, where Father Heard would get ready.

Sitting with my father, I felt an overwhelming need to call out to Edwin. To speak his name and never stop calling out to him.

“Dad,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?” he said. His mind had been elsewhere.

“I’m sorry,” I started. I needed to tell him how sorry I was for Edwin. To let those words reach his ears. To confess how Edwin wanted to stay put. That I had forced the one person with the most potential to do something great with his life to his death.

But then my mother came back out and jogged to the back pew, passed me, and sat next to my father.

“He’s not in back,” she said. There was a quick tremor of nervousness in her voice. “He’s always here by now.”

“Play some music for a bit then,” my father whispered. “Jacob, go to his house. See if he’s all right. Hurry.”

Outside all the windows of the apartment buildings in the village were iced over. Several Heinkels zoomed in from over the North Sea. They echoed off the buildings as they crossed overhead. Father Heard’s small home sat several houses past the apartment buildings, a one-level cottage with an angled roof that helped the snow slide off. I wished Edwin were with me as I knocked on the door and waited. When he didn’t answer, I knocked again, then tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and opened into the foyer.

“Father Heard. Hello. Father Heard?”

The kitchen smelled like stale tea and sage. The living room had a bookshelf and a simple wooden crucifix nailed to the wall next to the large window that overlooked the street. I remembered the word garçonniére, a bachelor’s quarters. The faint scent of church incense and an older man’s musk filled the bedroom. The blankets on the bed were unmade. A comforter was crumpled and hanging off the side like it had been tossed in a hurry.

“Father Heard,” I called out one last time before leaving.

As I walked back across the center of town, I passed my uncle standing around a garbage can fire with several soldiers. One of the soldiers, with a charcoal-colored rain cape, spread his arms out to capture the warmth like a giant vulture. He breathed little white clouds into the billowing smoke. They all laughed at something Uncle Martin had said. Then Uncle Martin saw me and walked over.

His heavy black boots left tremendous prints in the snow. His jacket was buttoned up to his neck and hung down below his knees. He had leather work gloves, worn black and smooth at the fingertips. “What are you up to?”

“Seeing if Father Heard was at home. Have you seen him?”

“No,” Uncle Martin said, falling in step with me.

When we were close to the church, I could hear my mother playing J. P. Sweelinck’s “Polyphonic Psalms,” which was something she never played during Mass, which meant Father Heard was still not inside the church.

I opened the door and everyone turned and looked at us. Hilda sat in the front pew with her parents. She gave me a small wave and I wanted to swim through the air to be beside her. Others let their eyes linger on Uncle Martin’s uniform. My mother kept playing. Uncle Martin shut the door behind him. People looked like they either were terrified of him or wanted to stab him. I sat back down next to my father and listened to the people in the pews around us, wondering where Father Heard could be.

“I couldn’t find him.”

My father bent over with his hands on his knees. “I feel sick.” He looked at Uncle Martin. “What if they took him? What can we do?”

People whispered to one another. They began to speculate that Father Heard had been taken, and then they started to worry it was because he read the letter. Someone in the room must have told the Germans. People started looking at my father and me. We owned the factory. We owned the big house. Then they stared at Uncle Martin in his Nazi uniform. There was a feeling of shifting, uncertain loyalties. When several other dispatches came back without the missing priest, the entire congregation fell silent beneath my mother’s playing. The music had burrowed itself into the spaces between everyone and was now the common voice of worry. When she let her song fade, and then go to nothing, the silence in the room was absolute.

“I have to do something,” my father said.

Then he stood up, took the small chair that was always set out for him to sit and tell stories to the children, and carried it down the main aisle of the church, up the altar steps, and sat it down next to the lectern.

“Maybe we’ll have story time at the front of church today,” he said. “Come on up, children, come on.” The bundled children came and sat on the floor around him.

“Where is Father Heard?” someone in front called out.

“He probably knows,” a woman named Anneke Gelen said and pointed to Uncle Martin.

“He probably took him,” Edward Fass said.

I wanted to step into the aisle between the congregation and my uncle, but Uncle Martin straightened his head up, and looked even more menacing in his long German overcoat. Something in him seemed to harden.

“Let me tell everyone a story about the old goat, her seven kids, and the wolf,” my father said. This time he spoke to everyone, and we all listened like his was the only voice in the world.

“The old goat went to the forest to get some food, so she called all seven of her kids and said, ‘Now, children, be on guard against the wolf. He often disguises himself, but you will know if it’s him by his rough voice and black feet. And remember that if he comes in here, he will devour you—skin, hair, and all.’

“It was not long after that a knock came at the door, and a voice said, ‘Open up, dear children, it is your mother, and I have a treat for each and every one of you.’

“But the kids said, ‘You are not our mother because your voice is too rough and we see your dark feet leaning against the window. We will not let you in.’

“So, the wolf went into town and bought a big lump of chalk and ate it and made his voice soft. Then he went to the baker and had him rub his feet in dough. Then the wolf went to the miller and said, ‘Put white meal over my feet for me.’ The miller thought the wolf was up to no good and trying to deceive someone so he said he would not help the wolf. But the wolf threatened to devour him. Then the miller was afraid and made the wolf’s paws white.”

My father paused there. He looked over the children’s heads and around the room and said, “Some men are like this.”

“So, the wolf went back to the kids’ house and tricked them into opening the door.

“Soon afterward, the old goat came home from the forest and saw that her house had been torn apart and her children were gone. She called each of them by name, but only the youngest child who was still hiding said, ‘Dear Mother, I am in the clock-case.’ When the mother found her child, she wept hysterically for her other lost children. In her grief, she wandered out of the house and her only remaining child followed her. That is how she came across the sleeping wolf in the meadow.

“She looked at the wolf and saw something struggling in his gorged belly. ‘Oh my heavens,’ she said, then she sent her youngest child home to get her scissors, a needle, and thread. The mother goat snuck up on the sleeping wolf and cut open its stomach. Then all six of her lost children sprang out, and each was still alive and had suffered no injury at all. In his greediness, the wolf had swallowed them whole.

“The mother goat sent them each off into the woods to get a large stone. When the children came back she placed all the stones inside the wolf’s open stomach while he was still sleeping, and then the mother sewed him up as fast as she could.

“The wolf woke up because the stones settling into his stomach made him very thirsty. So he stood up to go to the well for a drink, but when he began to move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against one another and rattled. Then he cried out,

‘What rumbles and tumbles

Against my poor bones?

I thought it six kids,

But naught it’s big stones.’

“And when the wolf stooped over at the well for a drink, the heavy stones made him fall in, and there was no one to help him from drowning miserably. When the seven children saw that, they came running to the spot and cried aloud, ‘The wolf is dead! The wolf is dead!’ and they danced for joy around the well with their mother because evil, in its most cruel form, no longer belonged to the world.”