Our Otto,
He is walking – he’d be running if I allowed it, but of course we have to mind the noise, always the noise – doing laps around our little cellar. Sometimes he falls, though he never cries out, silent as ever. I confess, I am worried that he’s still so quiet, that he still says no words. But I console myself with the thought that, as soon as we are free again, he’ll be able to run down the streets, laughing and shouting like any other little boy. Of course, it’ll probably take time for him to get used to such a different way of life, to know that it’s safe to be bold and loud, to reach out and touch the edges of life, instead of curling and trying to remain unseen. But I hear that children are resilient creatures – so Mrs X tells me – and it won’t be for long that he will be scared and shy, once we are free again.
But are we so resilient? Will we bounce back so easily? I cannot imagine it. These four walls have been my home now for so long, and I have been scared for every minute of every day, so that my skin sweats with fear and my breath smells of it. Will we ever be the same again? When we finally see each other, will a great deal have changed? Of course. And, perhaps, we will also need some time until we fit together as we did before. But we will. I don’t think it will take so long and, if it does, it’s of no matter. I was so impatient when I first came. I couldn’t bear the thought of just a few days apart from you but, slowly, patience was forced upon me. And now, like fear, it is a part of me. So I can wait now, for any amount of time, for as long as it takes to fit together with you again.
Ever Yours,
Marthe
Shit. Shit. Shit.
It can’t be. It simply can’t be.
Clara stares at the dates in her diary, flicking the pages back and forth. She’s fifteen days late. How can that be? How can she not have noticed? And they’ve been so safe, so careful, Pieter not wanting to take any risks. Admittedly, the night outside the Herzogenbusch camp, when they’d torn at each other’s clothes in the car, in the dark of the parking lot, under the barely visible stars, the electricity of Otto’s response still firing through their veins, they hadn’t used any protection. But that had only been four days ago. It was far too early and her period had been due two weeks before. So the mathematics didn’t add up. And yet, there is no denying that she is late.
Clara was alone in Pieter’s house when she woke – all pretence of the B&B having been abandoned weeks before – the bed half empty and cold since he left early for the Institute and an important meeting with his director.
Now she sits in the kitchen, having showered and dressed, with her diary open on the table, staring into her cup of clear, bright herbal tea. For the first time, Clara resents the tea. She wants murky, milky tea. She wants to feel at home, safe, comforted. Instead, she feels alone, abandoned and scared.
Will Pieter think she did it on purpose? That she sabotaged his precautions somehow? Will he resent her for the rest of their lives, for giving him the one gift he never wanted? Will he dismiss her protestations outright, or will he try to believe her but, every now and then, succumb to doubt? Clara can’t bear the thought of it, of him hating her or thinking that she’s deceptive and untrue.
Finally, unable to stand all the worrying any more, Clara realises that she simply needs to know for certain. So, casting the tea aside and stumbling across the kitchen, nearly slipping on several stacks of paper, she walks along the hallway in a daze and opens the front door. Once on her bike, Clara pedals as fast as she can, her thighs aching as she stands, pushing faster and faster, hardly noticing the wind in her hair, not feeling a single spark of joy at the speed as she soars along the streets, finally screeching to a halt outside the pharmacy.
It’s not until she takes the pregnancy test to the counter that Clara realises she has no bag, no purse. It’s then that she starts to cry. Mercifully, miraculously, the pharmacist takes pity, nodding as Clara makes desperate promises to return with money later in the day, directing her to his own private toilet and telling her to take all the time she needs.
After a hundred ‘thank yous’ and an awkward parting, Clara closes the toilet door. Five minutes later she’s staring at the unmistakable pair of pink lines on the little white stick she grips between sweaty thumb and forefinger. Clara sits on the closed toilet seat and shakes. How can this have happened? How the hell can this have happened? The timing is awful and the circumstances so far from ideal as to be disastrous. She’s not ready. She wasn’t ready for a baby as part of a loving partnership in which the father would fully and happily participate. She’s certainly not ready for single motherhood. This is not something she can do alone. She cannot. She simply cannot.
And yet, even though Clara would give anything not to be in this particular situation right now, nor can she contemplate the alternative. And she knows, even as she stares shakily, shell-shocked, at the twin pink lines, that she will not terminate this pregnancy. Even though the cluster of cells rapidly expanding inside her is now surely smaller than a pea, still she cannot. Instead, in such unthinkable circumstances, she will do the unthinkable and return home and ask her mother for help.
Clara dreads the thought of raising a baby with her mother’s assistance. The constant criticisms, the undermining of her every impulse and instinct, the decrees that she’s ruined her life. It’ll be unbearable. But still, probably slightly less unbearable than trying to do it all alone.
The other thing Clara knows, now that the reality of the facts have set in, is that she cannot tell Pieter. She cannot risk that instead of (or as well as) being angry he’ll also be noble and insist on raising the baby with her. And, inevitably, as the screaming days and sleepless nights pass, he’ll grow to hate them both with a passion, perhaps the same degree of passion with which he once loved her. And, although Clara imagines she could possibly endure that force of hatred being directed at her, she cannot allow it to be directed at an innocent party, the little soul she is now responsible for protecting, emotionally and physically, for the next eighteen years or so.
Clara sighs. And then, in a flash of mercy, she thinks of her great-grandmother who raised a baby in truly unbearable circumstances. Marthe would have, no doubt, embraced and kissed the ground in gratitude for a snippy mother, had one been offered to her, in exchange for freedom and food and a life without fear.
It is the thought of Marthe that enables Clara to get up and leave the safety of the toilet, to emerge out into the real world to face what needs to be faced. After thanking the bemused pharmacist several more times, Clara steps out onto the street to find that she’d forgotten to lock her bike and it has been stolen.
It’s a long, heavy walk back to Pieter’s house. Every few metres, Clara wants to sit down on the cobblestones and cry. But she thinks of Marthe and keeps walking. It’s not until she opens his front door that the full force of him returns to her: his smell, his eyes, his kindness, the way he looks at her with such unadulterated adoration. And then, Clara finds a space on the floor, squeezing between two stacks of papers and lets herself sob, great big, heaving sobs, fat tears falling into her cupped hands, for all that she’s lost, for all that she wants and will now never have.
Clara allows herself half an hour of self-pity and then she stands, wipes her eyes and walks up the stairs to the bedroom. She has to leave before he gets home. She has to write him a note, a letter, a lie that will, ultimately in the long run, prevent more pain than it bestows. She packs her bag quickly. She doesn’t have many things. She’d only been intending to stay in Amsterdam for three days and has ended up staying six weeks. She gives herself an hour to write the letter. She doesn’t want to rush it. She wants to be as kind and gentle as she can. She leaves the envelope on the kitchen table, since it’s the first place he’ll come, then picks up her bag, walking slowly along the corridor for the last time. And shuts the door behind her.
Dearest Pieter,
I’m so sorry to do this so suddenly, you’ll think it the strangest thing and it is. I have to leave you. I have to go home. We can’t be together any more. Not because I don’t love you, I do, with all my heart, more deeply and completely than I ever thought it possible to love anyone.
But you don’t want children and I realise – rather suddenly and unexpectedly, I know – that I do. And, of course, I can’t ask you to change. I wouldn’t want to. It’s an impossible obstacle, a dreadful one, an immovable one. I should have waited for you and told you tonight, in person, I know. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t bear it. For this I’m deeply sorry and I do hope you’ll forgive me. Though, if you don’t, for a good long while at least, I understand. Completely.
I will always think of you with infinite love and affection. And I will think of you every day, for the rest of my life. Of this, I am quite certain.
Ever Yours,
Clara