“Here we are,” my father said as we approached the giant Rijksmuseum. “We’ll have to hurry, but you’ll love this.”
We walked through the Renaissance palace, under horseshoe-arch doorways and down the giant marble corridors in barrel-vaulted rooms where Edwin stopped in front of at least one piece of artwork in each display. He squared his shoulders to a Vermeer painting, a maid with a white bonnet pouring a pitcher of milk, and let his eyes fall over the lines.
“Why don’t you just lick it?” I said, but he didn’t break his gaze, his admiration.
I was quiet after that and watched as he leaned in closer, studying the direction of the brushstrokes, the flow of brush hairs. He tilted his head to study how those strokes changed tint with the angle of the light. It would not have surprised me if he reached his fingers out to touch where the color floated from the cracked paint on the canvas, or if he fell to his knees before the frame. Vermeer. Van Gogh. Dutchmen. Masters. Keepers of my brother’s heart.
After the museum, we made our way to the train and finally got to Rotterdam as the sun went down. The nut-brown faces of foreigners strolled along Stieltjesstraat. Outdoor cafés angled toward the harbor with its giant ships and schooners. The men smoked cigarettes and the women in black gloves spun umbrella necks resting against their shoulders so that discs of cloth twirled over their heads.
“Has Uncle Martin been on boats like those?” Edwin asked.
“He’s been on almost every kind of ship you could imagine,” my father said.
The sun dropped to the water and disappeared below it. It made all the sailing boats look like lean, long-necked birds paddling on the horizon. Along the main roads potted trees with russet branches with small, green buds punching out lined the canal, where deeply weathered canal boats were moored side by side.
Edwin kept eyeing the harbor and the ships. “I’d love to be out on one of those,” he said, slapping at my shoulder and pointing from one vessel to the next.
We ate at a pancake restaurant along the water. At the tables around us were women in dark blue dresses and men in gray and brown suits, similar to our father. A counter on the way to the kitchen had four large wheels of Gouda cheese; the waiters cut thin wedges from them to deliver to each table. My father cut our wedge into slices, and we passed them around until our orders came.
A girl my age sat at the table behind my father. She had loose yellow hair and a tight little face. Her bones seemed so close below the skin. She took a chocolate from the table, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth. Her fingers straightened the paper on the tablecloth, pushing out the folds. She didn’t chew. I imagined the chocolate on her tongue. A communion of sorts. Her head was down but I suddenly wanted to see her teeth, the curve of her white throat, the specks of her eyes. I wanted her to glance at me.
We each ate thick pancakes with apple, bacon, and syrup. Then we shared a fillet of pan-fried herring covered in olive oil and crushed almonds. My father drank a glass of red wine served from a straw-covered bottle. We shared an artichoke that had been boiled and soaked in melted butter, and we each ate two oranges, leaving a pile of husked artichoke leaves and quartered orange rinds in the middle of the table. Strange accents hung in the air. A girl on a bicycle ticked past. Rims rattled over cobbles. Her basket was full of flowers. Horse carts clopped along the cobblestone between the cars.
At dinner, we decided that our father would leave first thing in the morning to go back to the rail yard to see the shipment of lights from the train to the harbor, where the boat was scheduled for a midmorning departure. We would meet him at the same pancake restaurant for lunch before going to meet his contact at Volkswagen, Mr. Gunnelburg.
Finished eating, we worked our way to the hotel, which was a five-story brick structure that shared walls with the office buildings on both sides. It had a wall of windows in the lobby, a key rack and letter rack with pigeonholes behind the reception counter, and a frosted globe chandelier by the fireside. On the hearth’s mantel was a large wooden carving of two eagles that we ran our hands over as our father checked us in. Each set of the eagles’ wings spread out wide, and their heads faced each other in a fierce wooden stare, one on top of the other with their talons interwoven. They were both rising and falling, competing and fighting—locked in some thrall that engaged each, locked in a moment that would mark them forever. When my father had the keys, we followed him up the marble stairs instead of riding the groaning cage elevator. He walked ahead of us with the keys dangling like an ornament from his hooked finger. My father went to sleep in his room, and Edwin and I went to our shared room.
We stayed up well past normal looking into the street and the surrounding buildings. Edwin sketched how the angle of the buildings descended down the road. I pulled the flyer from my pocket and studied the picture of the woman, imagining the place where this figure, or smoky women like her, might walk slowly toward me, gather up their long hair, and drape it over my body. How I’d get lost in the scent of her cascading locks before they pressed into me.
We had planned on sleeping until we had to wake and go meet our father. But that didn’t happen.
Very early the next morning, we were awakened by the loud hum of approaching airplane engines, followed by heavy artillery gunfire. I lay in bed, trying to remember where I was. Voices came in from the hallway. Doors swung open. People yelled to one another. Others ran down the corridor, their footfalls manic and heavy.
The strange noises washed over my bed.
“Jacob. Get dressed,” Edwin yelled, and then something in me snapped to attention. I pushed the covers off and pulled clothes on. We stepped into the hallway. My father had already left to oversee the light shipment. People ducked down the stairwell and we followed. The stairwell sounded like Pauwel’s drum line at camp. There must have been thirty people hurrying down to the lobby, where the hotel workers pointed everyone into the basement.
“Down the steps, down the steps,” a bellhop yelled. Behind him, through the hotel’s main glass doors, came the steady and terrible howl of an air raid siren.
The hotel’s basement was an unfinished room full of guests in their nightclothes. Most were silent except for a woman our mother’s age in the back who kept praying in quavering utterances.
With each crack of gunfire, dust shook loose from the corners of the walls. Several of the people huddled up and started wrapping their arms around one another. Some of them must have been strangers, but they hugged like old friends. Their faces sour with fear, arms around shoulders, heads tucked into each other’s chests. The room became one giant tangle of a frightened body. The noise of planes overhead echoed down through the skeleton of the building.
“What is this?”