SUNDAY MORNING WAS SPENT AT church, the smell of varnish and old curtains. Monday morning had the sun beating down broadly, open-armed, and Isabel went to work on the garden. The lilac shrubs needed pruning and the roses needed tying in, and Isabel rooted around in the ground for other sharp objects that might be found. There was nothing but earth. Monday afternoon she paid a visit to the solicitor about her allowance, Tuesday she had an appointment with the upholsterer about the chair, on Wednesday she did the groceries she didn’t trust Neelke to do, and on Thursday she had tea at the Van den Berg household because Johan was in town—and if Isabel went to him then he would not come to her, which was how she liked it: parking by his mother’s home, saying her neat hellos, being invited for coffee before dinner. If she did not do this, Johan would take matters into his own hands. He would show up unannounced at her front door, walk himself inside with his keen eyes, and linger in the room, touching things, asking about her life. He would press close in doorways.
She did not know what to do when he did this. It made her dizzy, a little nauseated, all of it, but she had been told by Hendrik these were only nerves, and perfectly normal. At his mother’s dinner table Johan put his hot hand over Isabel’s under the table, under the fall of the tablecloth. He kept it on her knee, while his mother went on about Did Isabel hear what happened with the Huijers? The weekly help had been caught stealing, things had been disappearing for a while, but “Oh, just small things, a spoon, a plate, and then of course one morning Mother Huijers wakes up and where is her best necklace? Well, they caught the girl eventually. Tipped out her bag before she left. What do you think? A whole drawer of silver came falling out: knives and forks and—”
Johan pushed his hand up Isabel’s thigh. The fabric of her dress bunched, slid. She excused herself to the bathroom. The house was once a farm and still smelled of straw. Johan’s mother didn’t grow anything on the land but kept a lovely rose garden in the back. Isabel rearranged her dress, pinched her stockings into order. When she returned to the table, her breath was even, her hands steady.
She stayed for dinner and then the weather turned: a rumble of fast-moving clouds, wind, a young tree near the end of the pasture bending deeply. Isabel said she must get back before the rain would start. Johan’s mother didn’t approve, worried, insisted that Isabel stay longer, or stay the night—they had plenty of rooms. Johan agreed eagerly. He licked his bottom lip.
Isabel said she must get back.
The rain started when she was in the car. The wipers whipped fast over the window and still she could barely see the path ahead. The debris of the storm ticked against the car. The road was muddy, and the tires slipped occasionally, but home was close. Between the trees the horizon had darkened fully.
At the house, Louis’s car was parked up the gravel path. The living room lights were on. Isabel found a newspaper in the glove compartment and used it as an umbrella. She ran and was still miserably soaked by the time she was inside. Two coats on the rack, one of which was Louis’s. A bright red hat hanging from a hook.
“Louis!” Isabel called into the house. The stairwell was dark, the hallway was dark. One hum of light came from under a closed door—through the drawing room, the dining room. The two of them were sitting at her mother’s table, Eva with a glass of sweet port, Louis gesturing around the room at the various paintings of old family members—making fun of them. Making Eva laugh.
Isabel still had the wet newspaper in hand. She was dripping on the floor. She said, “Louis.” They both noticed her then, a skipping pause—Eva’s laughter quieting, Louis’s hand still in midmotion—and then Louis was up, walking, saying:
“Ah, you’re back, great, wonderful, we’ve been waiting, see—”
“What are you doing?” Isabel asked, by which she meant, Why are you here?
Louis’s good humor faltered. He put his hand on the back of a chair. He seemed as though he’d hoped to find her in a better mood, and now had to rethink his approach. Louis only ever came to the house twice a year: Easter, and to visit their mother’s grave on the day of her passing. The cemetery was on the outskirts of Zwolle, a twenty-minute drive from the house.
Their mother died in September. It was now the end of May.
Eva said, “You have a lovely home, Isabel.” Her mouth was port-stained. The bleach made her hair frizz out of its pins. She was wearing a different dress today, just as badly made. The fabric looked like it had once been a quilt. Isabel wanted her out of the house.
“The thing is,” Louis started, and then Eva jumped in with “Darling, should I—” And Louis stilled her with a gesture, said, “No, no, just—”
“What are you talking about?” Isabel looked between the two of them. The rain clattered loudly against the windows. Louis took her by her elbow, tried to steer her toward the kitchen, and Isabel pulled away from him with an eye on Eva and said, “Don’t—just tell me what—”
“Please,” Louis said, and nodded to the kitchen door. “A moment, Isabel, just…”
She went, but wouldn’t let him touch her when he tried again. The rain cooled quickly on her skin, fabric heavy, and Louis and his girl hadn’t got any of the fireplaces going. The kitchen was colder than the rest of the house. It was several steps down, had a high ceiling for hanging game. No one hung game these days, but the rack was still in place, metal slats and a series of ropes, levers.
An old round table and a painting of the house itself over the mantelpiece. Isabel threw away the wet newspaper, went to wring out her braid over the sink. Louis gently closed the door behind them.
“So I have to go for a while, Isabel,” was how he started, hand still on the door handle. “Nelis was supposed to oversee the Brighton conference, but his wife just gave birth, he asked if anyone could go in his place and it’s a—an opportunity, you see, a big one, I don’t know how long before something like this could—”
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t care for the buildup. “Why are you here?”
“Eva,” he said, lowering his voice now. Trying to whisper.
Isabel leaned back against the sink. “No,” she said.
“She can’t stay alone in my room for all that time, can she? Sharing with Maurice? And—”
“Let her stay with friends. Let her stay with her own family.”
“She doesn’t have any.”
“No friends?” Isabel said it in the way she meant it: that Eva seemed like the kind of person to have plenty of friends, and that this, in Isabel’s view, spoke badly of her. Friendship had always seemed a distrustful thing to Isabel.
“No family,” Louis said. He was still whispering. Isabel wasn’t.
“Not my concern.”
“It’ll only be, what, a few weeks, a month at most, and you’re all alone here, Isa, all these rooms for what? All this space, for what? Why can’t she stay? And who knows, it might be good for you, no, for once, to have someone to—to get to—”
“It’s my house,” she said, and it was out and she knew she had misspoken, and Louis knew it as well, barely letting her finish the phrase to cut in with an “Is it, Isabel?” He took a step forward. “Yours?”
Isabel’s heart gave a dull thud. She looked away. Uncle Karel had promised the house to Louis, should he ever want it. The unspoken caveat was: should he ever want it for a family of his own. Isabel never had reason to worry: Louis never did seem to want for a family, never did seem to want the house at all. Had kept himself so far away from it. Isabel had developed a thought over the years and the thought was: They would allow her to stay here, her brothers. Her uncle. They had to, where else could she go? She had nothing else in this world. Nothing but these clean floors and neatly made beds. It was enough. If she could keep it, it would be enough.
She made herself stand taller. “Well, I’m the one who actually lives here, Louis, the one who keeps it in order, who cleans, who—So I get, I’m the one who gets to…” Her breath didn’t sound as steady as she intended.
Louis softened, sat down at the table. “Listen. The thing is, she really likes you, Isa. She barely stopped speaking about you since you met. You made an impression, you know. Actually, she was the one who suggested—”
“Oh, she did?”
“Don’t be like that.” He glanced at the door, went back to a whisper: “She’s very shy, you know. Don’t embarrass her about it. She’s not happy to be in this position, to have to, to… to be so reliant on—”
“She’s tricking you,” Isabel said. She hadn’t even thought the thought to herself yet. The words were out and then she had no choice but to own them as her own belief.
“Pardon?” Louis said, and Isabel started with a quick:
“Who is she, Louis? Who is she, where did she come from, do you even know her, how long have you known her, who’s to say she is who she says she is, that she’s not trying to—”
“Keep your voice down!” Then: “Trying to what?” He looked at her, bewildered. She didn’t know how to finish that thought, now that it had been cut off. She breathed high in her chest, and he just looked at her. The silence stretched. Then he said, “You’ve been alone for too long. You’ve not been around people for too long.”
“I’m not alone.”
“The maid doesn’t count,” he said. “Saying hello to the baker twice a week doesn’t count.”
She could feel a flush rising. There was no reply she could give that wouldn’t confirm the awful way he saw her: sometimes she went for tea at the Van den Bergs. Sometimes called with Hendrik. Small moments, too small for someone who lived with others; who went to work, who went to bars, who had girlfriends who decorated his apartment for him. Hung up gauzes for him.
“So what now?” she said. “I’m to play hotel for every girl you bring home, just because you think I’m in need of—”
“Not every girl,” he said, adding an emphasis like it meant something. Isabel looked at him, hoped he wouldn’t elaborate. He did all the same: “I like her, Isa. A lot. I think I…”
“Oh, God,” she said, and turned away, pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes. The swirling dredge of a headache. They were quiet for a while. Then Louis said:
“It won’t be that long.”
“How long?”
“Look, I have to go ahead, arrange some—It doesn’t matter. I’ll be a little while is the thing, if I do well enough and they want me to finalize the negotiations; they’ve—they’ve put an awful lot of trust in me, Isabel. A promotion could be, it could mean—”
“When,” Isabel said. “Will you be back?”
He swallowed. “July.”
“July first.”
“Isabel.”
“July first.”
“The first week of July, let’s say, yes.”
“God,” Isabel said again. A month. Even Hendrik, when he visited, never stayed longer than a few days.
Louis rose, scraped the chair back into place. The wind pushed wildly against the windows. Louis said, “You will be nice to her.”
“I will be nothing to her,” Isabel said, and when she cast him a glance he seemed tired with her. Seemed to have tired of the conversation, and her company, and then he left her. He would be staying, for the night, and would leave in the morning, make for the coast, be on the ferry before the day’s end.
Isabel stayed in the kitchen for a while longer. She lit a small fire, pulled a chair near, and sat there to dry. There were low voices in the dining room, then a giggle, then a playful hushing. Footsteps up and down the stairs. Once she had dried, Isabel went through the cupboards and the drawers and the cabinets and made sure there were no missing things. She thought, perhaps, one teaspoon had gone, but wasn’t sure anymore how many they had in the first place. She counted them: twelve. Laid all the spoons out on the table from biggest to smallest. That’s when Eva leaned into the room, hand on the doorpost, and said:
“I just wanted to say thank you. I appreciate it so much that I can stay here. You really have no idea.”
She had put on the voice again. Isabel looked up at her with an even gaze. “It wasn’t my suggestion,” she said.
“No, I know,” Eva said, and smiled like that was a good thing. A kind thing. Like she was having a conversation with a different person, someone who was nice to her. “It’s so warm in here! Lovely. What are you doing? Are you polishing the spoons, in the middle of the night?”
“No,” Isabel said, and offered no other explanation.
“Well,” Eva said. “Well. Well, good night then, Isabel. Can I call you Isa? Louis does. Like we’re sisters. We almost are, no?”
Isabel didn’t answer. She collected her spoons and put them back in the drawer, kept her back to the door. Eventually, Eva left. Did so with a soft “Well, good night,” and sounded less sure now. We’ll see about that, Eva had said at the restaurant, and she had been someone else in that moment. Someone whom Isabel could only think of indirectly, vaguely. A pinprick of a person.
She waited for the shuffling upstairs to die down, then went up herself. The corridor was shadowed, lights off, but a strip of light shone from under one door: her mother’s old room. Inside, the two lovers were talking, laughing quietly.
Isabel showered in stilted movements, had to rebraid her hair several times, got into bed, and seethed. The chimney breast from downstairs ran through her room and warmed the space just enough. Still she shook under her sheets. She stayed awake for a long time, listening to the sounds from down the hall. Once, she thought she heard a hum. Once, a gasp. She ran hot, and then cold. Eventually, the house quieted, and there was nothing to listen to but the slowing of the storm.
She woke up early, exhausted, the back of her hand pinched red.
It was Uncle Karel who had found the house for them in the winter of ’44. It was the tail end of war and a famine tore through the west of the Netherlands. The three siblings were sent ahead: on a boat heading east, huddled with other children their age—strange children, children who coughed like it was a secret, behind the lapels of their jacket. One girl showed Isabel what was in her suitcase: a doll and a pair of shoes and a fork, a plate. The foster family would feed her, she said, but they did not have enough forks. Isabel had thought it was a made-up story, and she disliked made-up stories. She had gotten angry, said, “Nonsense, who doesn’t have enough forks?” and didn’t speak to the girl for the rest of the trip.
Uncle Karel came to collect Louis, Isabel, and Hendrik at the harbor. It was freezing. They stood there a long time, outside of the car, while a German soldier held their papers in a rough-gloved grip and asked many questions. Uncle answered them all jovially, smiling, nodding.
Mother remained in Amsterdam, could not come—only children were allowed to cross. A week into their stay, Isabel, eleven years old, wrote her mother a letter:
Dear Mother,
Louis wrote to you this week but I saw his letter and it was only just a few lines of very bad penmanship and I am worried you could not read it and it was boring. House is bigger much bigger than ours in Amsterdam and we all like it very much it has three floors and we are three, which means each of us can have a floor (Hendrik says he won’t mind sleeping in the kitchen where it’s warm. It gets very cold upstairs in the night yesterday they said on the radio the temperature was –1.3). Will you be here for Christmas? Louis says I shouldn’t tell you to come because it is not allowed yet but it would be very nice if you were here for Christmas. We have found a chest of toys in the attic and Uncle Karel says it was left there by Saint Nicholas for us to have. One of the toys is a stuffed toy of a hare, which I am allowed to keep. Someone has drawn a horse on the wall behind my wardrobe. I have been trying to keep a diary as the prime minister has instructed but I run out of things to say.
The house is like this (I write this as I walk so you see exactly): you walk inside and this here is the hallway where you hang your coat and then there is a stair and two doors (study to the right, drawing room to left). The drawing room has the biggest mirror above the mantelpiece and it makes everything look 2x. The dining room is here and then there is the kitchen for which you have to go down two stairs. The kitchen is old and has very high ceilings and smells like oil which I do not like but the fireplace is very big and that is where we keep the fire because Uncle Karel says there is only enough wood for one fire but it is not a nice room. I will leave it now. We have had dinner in the dining room every evening. We had potatoes, and cauliflower, and one time meat: a piece of meat each!
The garden goes around in a big circle. Everything snowed in the night. Louis says we will play badminton there in the spring if we are still here in the spring. When will you come? I have heard 5 planes today, and saw 1. Uncle Karel said last night my face was too rough for a little girl and that I should practice in the mirror to make it nicer so I won’t end up a sour maid. Hendrik cries every night and keeps us all up. Louis gets very angry with him but I do not. There’s a girl who lives on the farm down the road who came to the house to ask for food and I said I didn’t know where the food was and she said her father died because he went into the woods and was shot in the head by a German. I said, That’s terrible! I felt bad for not giving food. Now I don’t think anyone should go into the woods. I have chosen the best room for you. It is the biggest, and looks out two snow-covered firs which is your favorite tree which you have once told me I remember which is why I chose this room for you.
Write soon, come soon!
Your daughter (Isabel)
Her mother had kept this letter with all the other ones, and Isabel’s halted and confused attempt at a wartime diary, in the locked drawer of her secretary in her bedroom. Isabel found it a year after her mother’s passing. She was twenty-two, and it was summer, and she had badly sunburnt her shins that day, having dozed off on a lounge chair in the garden. She sat by the secretary, legs chafing on the grain of the carpet, and read each letter she and her siblings had sent her mother. Hendrik had mostly written rambling, single-page requests to come and be picked up; Louis dictated the literal events of the days of the week and fantasized about joining the army, flying a plane. She read a diary entry of her own, a Tuesday in October 1945: counted all the stairs in the house and there were sixty-four. Hendrik has locked himself up in the bathroom and won’t come out and it’s a great bother.
Isabel, seated on the ground, papers in hand, had locked her jaw so firmly that the joint of it got stuck in place and she had to wrench her own mouth open with her fingers.
The war was stored in her memory unclearly, all out of order. In 1939, on a Monday, her father fell down the stairs. On Friday he had a nosebleed in a three-piece suit and was dead before month’s end. Nineteen forty-three was the year popular Vera called her shit-breath Isa, and so the rest of the class began to call her shit-breath Isa, too. In 1941 Louis got a little train for his birthday, which had an engine and went around and around and around. Bombs fell on Rotterdam. Trucks rolled over the loose bricks of the Sarphatistraat, where she and her mother got their pickles. She went to school, she walked home. Bombs fell on Amsterdam.
Their years in the east following the war were louder: chaos at the train stations, hollow-faced people wandering the streets on bare feet. Craters that filled up with rainwater, bunkers shaded green with moss. People showing up at the driveway to their new house to ask for coal, for food. Once, one cold evening when Isabel was thirteen, they were having dinner and there came a loud knock on the door that wouldn’t stop. It was 1946 and the war was over but Isabel’s mother closed all the windows in a hurry and said Go upstairs, and Isabel and her brothers had to go upstairs while the food cooled on their plates. They watched from the bedroom window as outside an upset woman banged on their doors and windows and screamed and screamed. Her shouts were unintelligible, desperate. She had a young woman with her who did nothing, who stood to the side, arms crossed, head down. Isabel had asked Louis in a whisper—What do they want? And Louis, staring out the darkened window, had said simply: Our stuff. Once, a man went to his knees and began laughing uncontrollably in the middle of a shopping street. The police came to take him away. Isabel was inside a store, watching it happen. She was fifteen when she first heard about the camps. She and some classmates were waiting in a classroom for the teacher to show up, and one of the girls said: They treat us worse than Jews here, and one of the other girls said, God, I wish they’d gas us, at least that’d be a way out.
They kept Uncle Karel’s house after the war and never went back to Amsterdam. It was better for them, Mother insisted: The green, the land. The space. Louis never forgave Mother for that, mourning all the friends he left behind in the city, and Hendrik didn’t seem to care much either way. He was an unhappy child, no matter where. Cried often, hid a lot. Isabel didn’t mind it, the move to the east. She hadn’t any friends in the city, and hadn’t any friends in the country, either. It wasn’t as bad as everyone made it out to be, all worried about her, fussing over her being alone in her room. But it was fine: she read, she took walks, she and Hendrik made up stories about the people who drove by in cars. And then Louis moved out and life got quieter, and then Hendrik ran away and life got quieter still. Rooms turned cavernous. Mother got sick. Mother passed away. Isabel, freshly in her twenties, directed several maids about the house: the sheets needed changing, the windows needed cleaning. Dinner would need to be served by six.
The day after the funeral was a bleary-bright one: mist over the meadows, weeds looking purple. There was a plate of leftover sandwiches on the table in the dining room, covered by a kitchen towel. Flies hovered over it. The house was empty, except for Isabel. Louis had driven back the previous night and Hendrik would not come into the house, had booked a bed-and-breakfast near town. He had brought a man who lingered outside the cemetery, waiting for Hendrik, umbrella in hand.
Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving. There was no one now, no one to walk through the door unannounced, no one to open and close a drawer in the other room. Outside, meadows. Outside, land and more land. Isabel sat by the window with a cup of tea and was overcome. Terror rose up slow and thunderous: Mother had died so quickly, so easily, and Isabel had had no say in it. Her uncle might die, too, just as suddenly. The deed will go to Louis, and Louis might decide to marry, and Louis might decide he wanted her out—anything could happen at any given moment and she had no say in it, not in any of it. She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.
The tea cooled. She had decided, right then, to put the issue forward to Uncle Karel—the issue of what might become of her and the house. The issue of could she perhaps have some hold on the deed, something, a promise, a certainty of being kept in safety. But then Uncle Karel came by for dinner one bleak winter day, and he sat at the big table in his dandruff-speckled jumper, leaned in, and said: “You will understand, Isabel, now that your mother is gone, that you must be your own guardian. You must make your own connections.” He wiped at his lips with a napkin. “Don’t be a burden to your brothers, they will have their own lives. You can’t ask too much. And I won’t be here, I’ll have my own business, you understand. I’m not saying this to be harsh. I am saying it because it’s how these things go, and there is no one else who will tell you.” He was nodding so that she might nod along; she did not. She watched him, unmoving. He said, “Yes?”
She stared at him until his nodding stopped.
“Yes,” she said, and swallowed, and went to take away the dishes so he wouldn’t notice how fast she was breathing, or the trembling of her hands.
And then he left, and again it was only she and the walls. The doors, the windows. She went around the house and closed everything, locked everything, the shutters and the curtains and everything that could be pulled over herself like a cloak. For a moment, for a brief and raging moment, she thought: Let him. Let him try to drag me out of here. She saw herself clawing into the walls, taking root.
She was ready for it that first year. Every time Louis met a girl, every time he came by to visit, she waited for it: for him to look around the house and say, I actually think I might have it now. But he never did. He never seemed to notice it, even: he sat in rooms as though they might be any space, looked out windows as though they might be any windows. The house, it seemed, was a blur to him—walls in the way any place might have walls, roof like any building might need a roof.
Relief set in by increments. They never spoke of it, of her never leaving, of her living in the old house, but she wondered at times. Wondered whether it was a purposeful silence on his part—that perhaps he wanted her to have it, keep it. A year passed, two. Three. The house was still Isabel’s. The house would continue to be Isabel’s.
Once a year, on the day of her mother’s passing, Isabel would breakfast off one of Mother’s plates, a rarity. Two slices of bread with aged cheese. The hares would appear in fragments from under her meal: a tail, a foot, an ear. When she’d finish she’d wash the plate and dry it and put it away where it belonged, in the vitrine, with the doors locked.