“They’re coming.”
We stayed in the basement for several minutes. I thought about the general talking to us camp boys on the beach about how one scalding push of violence would put the world back to its proper order. I had not imagined that heat touching my own country.
“We have to go get Father,” I said to Edwin.
“He’ll come back for us,” Edwin said.
“We told him we’d meet him, we have to go the restaurant to meet him,” I pleaded. Chaos pounded from outside, but if it was the Germans who were coming, we would be fine. We were dagger-carrying members of the youth camps, after all.
This. This is what I honestly thought. Now, I can track any memory back to this moment. This moment when I proved to be such a fool.
“This changes the plan, Jacob. He’ll know to come back here.” My brother hunkered against the basement wall, bobbing on his bent knees, coiled to spring up. His hair was messy on the left side from resting on the pillow. His eyes were recessed pools of dark liquid as he scanned the room.
“No. We have to go get him, we have to,” I insisted. “We have to go,” I continued until Edwin agreed to at least go up to the lobby.
“Boys, stay here,” a woman said.
“Go, go.” I pushed Edwin.
At street level a young bellhop leaned against the corner of the door and looked down the road. We ran up and crouched next to him. The sun rose and cut the street with slanting light. Streams ran over the cobblestones.
“What’s the water from?” Edwin asked the bellhop.
“Either the artillery hit and broke a canal wall or we opened it as a defense, because some of the dykes are opened and the streets are flooding.” He had pouch cheeks, aquamarine eyes with long lashes, and thick, dark eyebrows, each the size of a mustache.
“We won’t be able to get to him,” Edwin said.
I gripped his arm. I felt the rush and lift of panic—a feeling of total powerlessness of not finding my father worming around my chest. “We have to.”
Edwin looked up and down the street, then at me for a long time. I don’t know what he thought of me in that moment—if I wanted to be brave and save my father or if I truly needed him near to save me. In truth, it was the latter—but whatever Edwin saw in me made him act.
“Do you have your identification papers?” he asked me.
I nodded.
The water in the street in front of the hotel didn’t look very deep. Edwin peered at me closely again. The start of a light silk mustache shadowed his upper lip. He looked up and down the street again and then back at me.
“All right,” he said. “Come on.”
Outside, the rattle of heavy machine-gun fire echoed from every direction. When the first major wave of planes stopped flying overhead, Edwin started down the street toward the port. Nothing was said between us. We walked with our shoulders touching the wall of buildings along the road. Over the rooftops, a paratrooper floated under his inverted bowl-shaped parachute. The white, silk chute bloomed out of the sky. A limp body descended the last hundred meters onto the street, landing between us and the road to the port. The man crashed hard and his parachute covered him as if he had never been there. I froze. My legs locked, my shoulders squared toward the man. The canvas of the chute ruffled with the breeze as we passed. It was the first dead body I’d ever seen.
“Don’t look at him, Jacob,” Edwin said. He grabbed my hand and pulled me away, but his eyes never left the dead paratrooper. His eyes were wide open. I imagined soon I’d be seeing such men drifting down slabs of butcher paper, through charcoal clouds.
At last I came unstuck and walked on, passing a dozen other similar lumps on our way up Plantagestraat to the market. People huddled in the wedges of door frames. Faces gazed out of shop windows as we walked along the edge of the canal. Sewers brimmed over. The water in the canal surged. Some levies had been shifted to control the flow. It rose up along the brick walls toward street level.
Our father had taken us to the docks the day before while he signed the incoming shipment over to the customs workers. He would have been by the docks waiting to see off the freight.
Small artillery cracked from the foxholes the Dutch Marines had dug around the city’s bridges. The few people on the street moved toward the waterfront. The whole city, which had feared the Germans coming, hunkered down or crept toward the dock, seeking safe passage elsewhere. Several blocks from the hotel along the Plantagestraat, the street level dipped below the canal. The canal wall tunneled in that portion of the road and held the water back. But the water had flowed down the canal too fast and surged over the lip down into the cup of the road. Water roared over the wall and flushed the street out for about fifty meters. Beyond the washout, the brick road angled up and rose out of the brown water, and there was the pier building and restaurant we had arranged to meet our father, but the three intersections between us were washed out.
Water poured over the flooded road, ran up the tree trunks, spilt over the wooden entrances of first-floor shops and the lower lips of windowsills that had shattered from the pressure. Torn strips of leather and random wooden shoes floated out of a broken storefront window at a cobbler’s. Water crept up our shinbones as we moved to another doorway. Ahead of us, a man moved through the water in the street. On his shoulders was a little girl cradling a dulled gray pillowcase. As soon as the man with his child cleared the sunken street, other people started running after them. It got deep at the middle of the intersection, but it was doable, and looked only about knee-deep nearer the dock.
“What a stupid defense plan,” Edwin said.
Water covered a bicycle rack. A row of handlebars stuck above the surface and each cut a little V in the current. Dirt and trash floated to the high-water mark, which kept rising. A Packard 180 shimmied toward the lowest point of the road. We watched the hood shift, dip backward, and submerge, which lifted the automobile’s grill and headlights for a brief moment before the whole thing disappeared.
I felt a swampy heat in my armpits. I was too scared to go into the flooded street and decided to tell Edwin. We were wrong to have come looking for our father. I was wrong. I’d tell him before the tree branch floated by. Before the wooden sign. Before . . . But I didn’t say anything. My mouth formed the words, but I had no tongue, windpipe, or lungs to push them out.
“Swim where it gets deep so you don’t get caught on anything underwater,” Edwin said. He moved forward and marched into the flooded street. I followed. The water was knee-deep right away. The heavy flow rushed against my wet pant legs. The brownstone buildings on both sides of the street became canyon walls rising out of a river.