“How’d this happen?”
There was no answer I could have given him then. No confession I could have mustered. Instead I plunged my hands back into the hole and started waving beneath the road from the force of the underground river. I sensed that my arms would now always be searching and wished they would come loose from my body and float away from me.
After my father examined the hole, he ran in a full panic to the shops that lined the street and asked everyone where the sewer system let out. When no one could tell him, he led me to a corner store that had flooded ankle-deep and rooted around for a map that showed the canals fanning out from the harbor. He was on some other plane of existence then, silent, navigating by instinct, pulling me along by some magnetic force.
“Jacob,” he said, “start yelling your brother’s name, and don’t stop until we find him. Don’t stop.”
For three hours I yelled “Edwin” at the top of my lungs along the canals, until it felt like my heart would never stop echoing that call, that name. That whole time my father had not said another word, just run his finger over the map in his hand, then started taking those incredibly long strides of his around the ruined city, along every waterway, scanning the banks.
Through the roads running along the canal, we passed more dead paratroopers in their ready-made burial tarps. They were dressed as Dutch Royal Guardsmen, but were German soldiers. I looked closely at every heap on the street. I imagined myself hiding away from my father under one of those white, billowing chutes, until I was no longer trembling, wet, and cold. On one corner a parachute snagged on a broken tree trunk. The trunk cut through the tarp and held it in place. The parachute lines pulled taut downstream where they fell into the canal. At the end of the lines, a body bobbed face-down on the surface like a giant fishing lure.
We circled the flooded area a dozen times, before widening our search and walking the rest of the city. People fled in droves, heading to the bridges. In one of the small shops the radio that someone had pushed against the sill of a broken window was broadcasting. We stopped to listen for a moment. My throat hurt from yelling. My chest hurt. I was trying to rest when the broadcaster said, “German forces to bomb city of Rotterdam if the Dutch do not surrender.”
My father sank to his knees and let his body crumple onto his haunches. “Jacob,” he said from the ground. “I can’t find your brother. I can’t find him, and we’re going to have to get out of the city.”
My father looked at the map like it baffled him, like the answer to where to find his missing son had to be hidden on that surface. Eventually he stood up, and we walked toward the eastern bridge out of the city.
Rotterdam was now a giant anthill stirred up by a boot. Thousands of refugees fleeing the bomb threats filled the roads in cars, buses, lorries, wagons, mules, and horses. A drunk old man yelled from horseback for everyone to go back and wait it out as an old lady leading the horse by the reins walked with the flow of people. A boy about my age drove a cow from his bicycle by gently swatting at the animal’s flanks with a stick to keep it moving. People carried everything they could in pathetic bundles piled on carts drawn by tractors. A canary sang from its cage slung from the side of a Packard. Crates of fowl laced together by hastily tied knots swung off roof racks. Little children carried huge loads and panting Alsatian dogs harnessed to wheelbarrows dragged heaps deemed essential in such a panic. They all crossed the bridge as if it were a gangplank dropping them out of their own lives into something bottomless and unknown.
Dutch Marines had dug foxholes around the next bridge and let only a single-file line of residents pass over. A marine with a machine gun stood at the start of the bridge where everyone lined up.
“Have your hands visible as you cross,” the marine yelled. “If you do anything threatening to the bridge, you will be shot.”
“Stay in front of me,” my father said. The people around us wore business clothes, or smocks from working in restaurants. Two men covered in ash looked like they’d run out from working in an aluminum smelter.
Once we crossed the bridge, my father looked along the bank and his focus locked on something triggering him to run downhill away from me. His long, awkward stride caught me off guard as he headed to the water. He lost his balance, stumbled, slid down on his back, and got up again in stride.
“Halt,” one of the marines yelled.
My father kept moving toward the water. A few steps ahead of him a dark bulge floated against the bank. His back obscured my view as the marine yelled again.
“Halt,” the soldier boomed down off the concrete lip of the bridge.
“Wait. No,” I yelled.
Then the man aimed the muzzle of his gun at my father running to the base of the bridge and let off several rounds. Dirt ahead of my father jumped up in little clouds and disappeared like dark dandelion puffs. My father kept running and almost dove to the edge of the water. His hand reached out and pulled something up on the shore. By the time he had a good grip of it and was pulling it up I was running down the hill after him. The marine who fired his weapon didn’t yell anything at me as he must have seen what my father was after. At the bottom of the bank my father’s back curved over his lap as if he were sinking into the shore. He held a soggy wet burlap sack in his lap. Easy to mistake for a body—just a bag that was filled by the current and hung up on the rocks.
For a long time we sat by the banks of that water with the wet burlap resting over his lap.
Eventually, he took the burlap sack and placed it back in the water so it filled up and drifted off downstream, hanging under the surface until we could no longer see it. Then I helped him walk up the hillside, almost pushing his hunched, sapless body.
Everything was different then. Everything would always be different after that.
We spent the rest of that day asking everyone among the refugees if they knew where the canals or sewers let out in the city. My father paid to have a message telegraphed to my mother.
Stay put until you hear from me. Hans.
Later on, after the guns had been silent for hours and we had not heard any more airplanes, we persuaded a soldier to let us cross a bridge back into Rotterdam and we went to City Hall to look for help, and then the police station, but there was nobody there. Not in either place. Everyone was hiding. All that day we searched, and at night we didn’t sleep. Anyone we passed we asked if they knew where the water let out. If they had a guess, we followed it. We walked along the harbor where all the boats had quickly made way after the morning attack.