7

I jolt awake in the middle of the night. My duvet feels clammy with sweat, and the planets and moons on it seem to give off less light. Or maybe they give off the same amount of light but it’s no longer enough for me, as the effect is gradually fading. I push away the damp duvet and sit on the edge of my bed. Immediately my body begins to shiver beneath the thin fabric of my pyjamas, and the draught that comes under the door grabs me by the ankles. I pull the duvet over my shoulders and think about the nightmare I had, in which my parents were lying under the ice like two frozen eels, which Farmer Evertsen sometimes gives us, wrapped up in the Reformist Daily. Dad always used to say, ‘Wrapped up in God’s words they taste even better.’

Evertsen was there too. He was wearing his Sunday suit with the narrow lapels and a shiny black tie. When he saw me, he began to sprinkle salt on the ice and he said, ‘They’ll be preserved for longer like that.’ I lay flat on the ice, like a snow angel fallen from heaven, and looked at my parents – they looked like the dinosaur figures in a pot I got for my birthday once that were stuck in a kind of jelly. Obbe and I had dug them out of the jelly with an apple corer. Once they were out there wasn’t much point to them: their inaccessibility made them interesting, like my frozen parents. I tapped the ice, laid my ear to it, and heard the singing sound of skates. I wanted to call out to them but nothing escaped my throat.

When I got up again I suddenly noticed Reverend Renkema standing at the edge of the water in the special robe he only wears at Easter, when all the children from the community walk down the aisle with wooden crosses. An Easter bunny made of freshly baked bread with two currants for eyes hangs on each cross. Before we leave the church, Obbe has often scoffed half of his. I never dare start mine for fear that I’ll come home to an empty rabbit hutch, that if I break off its ears, the same will happen to Dieuwertje. I let the bunny go mouldy in my desk drawer. That’s less awful. Going mouldy is at least a long process of disintegration. But in my nightmare, Renkema stood there in the tufts of reeds, waiting like a cormorant to peck at something. Before I woke up, he said in a solemn voice, ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s plans are your plans.’ After that everything went black: the grains of salt beneath me began to dissolve, and I seemed to glide slowly under the ice until I saw a hole in it: the light in the socket in my bedroom, next to the bookcase.

‘God’s plans are your plans.’ Could the pastor be referring to Obbe and Hanna’s missions? I turn on the globe on my bedside table, and feel around the floor with my feet until I find my slippers, and smooth the creases from my coat. I don’t know what my plan is, except I want Mum and Dad to mate and become happy again one day, so that Mum starts eating and they don’t die. Once I’ve fulfilled that mission, I can go to the other side with peace of mind. I take the milk pail out from under my desk and glance at the toads that look up at me with drowsy eyes. They seem thinner, their warts whiter, like the pictures of bang snaps that Obbe circles in the fireworks brochure for New Year’s Eve – he spends weeks poring over the rockets and fountains to put together the best package. Hanna and I just pick the ground spinners, as we find them the prettiest and the least scary.

I tilt the bucket slightly so that I can see whether they’ve eaten anything, but the lettuce leaves at the bottom are brown and soggy. Toads can’t see motionless things, I know that, and that’s why they can starve. I move a lettuce leaf up and down in front of their faces. ‘This will taste nice. Eat it up. Eat it up,’ I sing quietly. It doesn’t help, and the stupid creatures refuse to eat.

‘Then it’s time to mate now,’ I say decisively, picking up the smallest of the two. I gently rub its underbelly over the back of the other toad. I once saw this on a nature programme on School TV. The toads sat on top of each other for days, but there’s no time for that now. My parents don’t have days left: they lie in our hands like touchpapers waiting for someone to light them so they can give us warmth. While I rub the toads together, I whisper to them, ‘Otherwise you’ll die. Do you want to die or what? Well?’ I feel the webbed feet pressing against my palm. I clutch the toads tighter and tighter and press them together more and more insistently. After a few minutes it gets boring and I put them back in the bucket. I take a couple of leaves of spinach I stole from dinner out of a paper napkin, and a chunk of toasted bread which has gone soft in the meantime. The toads still look like they’re dead. I wait for them to eat but nothing happens. I sigh and stand up. Perhaps they need time, change always takes time. The cows don’t just eat a new food mix: you have to add it handful by handful to their old food, until they no longer notice that the pellets are different.

I push the bucket back under my desk with my food, and see a pin lying on the top of it next to my pen pot. It’s fallen from my pinboard, from Lien next door’s postcard. She sends me a postcard every once in a while because I complained about never getting any post when Dad did – pretty blue letters. I think that some of them are about the Jews. Someone must miss them now they’ve been in hiding with us for so long? I’d wanted to tell my teacher about them but was worried someone might overhear. A couple of boys in my class are a bit Nazi-ish, especially David, who smuggled his mouse to school once in his pencil case. He kept it hidden among his leaky pens all day and finally let it out during biology, shouting, ‘A mouse! A mouse!’ The teacher caught it in a trap with some breadcrumbs, where it died because of the shock and all the class’s cheers.

Lien next door doesn’t write much on the cards she sends. It’s often about the weather or their cows, but the pictures on the front are lovely – white beaches, small and big kangaroos, one of Villa Villekulla where Pippi Longstocking lives, and a brave jerboa that has finally dared to swim. I suddenly get an idea. The teacher once stuck a pin in the world map on the wall at the back of the classroom. Belle wanted to go to Canada because her uncle lives there. It’s good, the teacher said, to dream about places you’d like to visit one day. I pull up my coat and shirt until my navel is bare. Hanna’s the only one with a sticking-out belly button – a pale bobble like a newborn mouse that is still blind and curled up, the way we sometimes find them under the tarpaulin in the mound of silage grass.

‘One day I’d like to go to myself,’ I say quietly, pushing the pin into the soft flesh of my navel. I bite my lip so as not to make a sound, and a trickle of blood runs down to the elastic of my pants and soaks into the fabric. I daren’t take out the pin, afraid blood will gush out everywhere, and everyone in the house will know that I don’t want to go to God but to myself.