Later she walked into his office and I could hear her curdling voice. “To hell with you and your lights!”
At night my dreams were of my brother’s last breath before he slipped under the water, and how it was so giant, it sucked up all the air around him, and he was now adrift in some underground river, immersed in water, shifting somewhere under Rotterdam, or under the country, his fingertips rubbing against the underside of the continent. His eyes wide open. Edwin never sang, but in my dreams, he had gills, sang, and his words bubbled above him and soaked into the soil roof of the river. The rhythm of his song shifted the earth. His words rose and whispered softly up through the grasses. In my sleep my brother was very much still alive. So each time I woke clutching a pillow into my hollows, the deep fear and guilt of having lost him or having left before he resurfaced descended all over again.
When the red flare and glow of the German bombs on Rotterdam entered my mind, I pictured my brother tucked safe beneath the streets, or carried off to some floodplain or leach field clear of the city’s firebombed limits, where he worked his way home.
When we got back from Rotterdam, the papers said that Germany had dropped one thousand paratroopers on Den Haag and several units on Rotterdam on the night of May 10, all dressed as Dutch Marines in an attempt to capture our royal family and government. Then, when that didn’t work, they issued a warning that they’d bomb Rotterdam if we didn’t surrender. It was only the day after they bombed us that we did surrender. Queen Wilhelmina and her family had been put on boats and escaped to England, but she swore on a public address over BBC Radio that her government would do its duty for us, for Holland.
Reliving that first night when we ran into the streets, I flashed over the memory of my pleading with Edwin to go find our father. Edwin had cursed our country for releasing the dykes, which, in my mind at the time, computed to it being our government’s fault that that paltry section of road had flooded. I tried to make sense of it in my bed at night, but ended up listening to my mother getting out of bed and wandering the downstairs of the house. Soon after that, my father would descend the stairs, and they would both spend the dark hours of the night passing each other below my room. They did this nightly, until their footsteps and whispers became poisonous to me, setting off my stormy moods instead of letting me fall asleep.
“I had to protect Jacob.” My father’s voice carried through the house. “I couldn’t stay there any longer without putting him in danger.”
There was a long silence. In that silence I wanted to cry out my brother’s name. In every silence I wanted that.
“I’ll go in the morning,” my father finally said.
And in the morning after refusing to let me come along, he did go back to Rotterdam. He wired Uncle Martin to meet him at the train station that night. Uncle Martin had no news so far. My father went to the factory to make sure the shifts kept running, and then he took the train that afternoon. It rained hard as I saw him off. When the train left, I went to Uncle Martin’s boat in the harbor and imagined my brother on the deck, bossing me around or telling stories about our time last year at the youth camp.
On the way home I stopped at the church, where the organ played. After we had returned without Edwin, my mother started going to the church every afternoon to play sad songs on the organ. She played the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” and Schubert’s “Wiegenlied,” which was about a mother singing over the grave of her infant. With all the stained-glass windows shattered from the bombings, there was nothing to keep the sound inside. Her music rose out of the building while she played, often improvising and making some new melody, a continuation of song. She was trying to call my brother home.
I tucked myself along the back wall so the roof’s overhang would protect me from some of the rain. Her song reverberated through the walls and the notes ran link by link down the knuckles of my spine. I didn’t know what to do for my mother. I felt losing Edwin was my fault and if I said one word about him to her I’d tip us both into an abyss. Along the road behind the church, Stanislaw Heigel walked with his wife toward the lightbulb factory. The second shift was about to start. With their heads down in the rain they didn’t notice me.
“That woman’s grief will cause her to lose her hearing,” Mrs. Heigel said.
A senseless and sudden urge flared up in me to run after the older couple and push them face-down in the mud, standing on their backs until they flopped around like beached fish for making light of my mother’s suffering. My anger was an arrow that hadn’t yet landed.
I walked to Ludo’s house, a three-level brownstone a few blocks west of my father’s factory. I hadn’t seen Hilda or Ludo since returning from Rotterdam, in hopes of avoiding having to tell someone else about Edwin. Besides, Ludo would have heard by now, and he hadn’t come over. Everyone by then had heard. Ludo’s mother opened their door. She was a sturdy brown-haired woman, short, with heavy thighs and extra weight around her bottom and hips. Her arms engulfed me and she made an exasperated cooing sound and patted her meaty hands against the middle of my back as she pulled me into her foyer.
“You sweet boy,” Mrs. Shoemackher said. Behind her on the floor a scarlet and beige runner covered a polished oak table. I wanted to pick the fabric up and wrap it over my head so it would muffle her sympathies, swallow all noise.
Mr. Shoemackher, the carpenter, came to the door then. He was a quiet, short, gaunt man, tanned and windburned, dressed in brown trousers and a soiled gray shirt. He walked up to me and put his rough, wood-scented hand on my shoulder. His eyes were pale blue and sympathetic, and I couldn’t look into them for long.
“Let me get Ludo.” Mrs. Shoemackher turned and walked to the back of the house.
When Ludo came out, he held his youth camp dagger and a block of wilding wood he had carved into. When he saw me his eyes dropped to the floor. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by yet.”
“That’s okay.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
Ludo rocked back on his heels, shy and unassuming like he always was. Being an only child had made him eager for friends, and as I was suddenly an only child, I felt the same longing for his company that he must have felt for mine and Edwin’s.
“I have something to show you, if you want to go for a walk,” Ludo said.