Soon after they arrived, the Germans built a temporary tent city in the middle of town. More soldiers came by small boats along the water, and when their tent city was set up and the presence of the soldiers was ubiquitous, they sent men down to the Koopman Light Company’s factory.
At first they just walked the factory floor. But one day, my father came home saying that they came in and stationed a soldier who wanted to go over all of the company’s accounting. “All of your production will be going to Germany now,” the soldier told my father. “You will operate as normal. We will have people here to help you load the trucks from now on and we will cover the distribution of your lights.”
“What about payment?” he asked.
“‘You will be maintained’ is what he told me. Maintained. What does that mean? Most of our money was sunk into the Volkswagen order.”
My mother didn’t have much of a reaction. She listened from the couch, her blue bathrobe wrapped tightly around her.
“They’ve handcuffed me.”
Still, my mother said nothing. For days after that my father came home and did not try to share his visible frustrations. In fact, whole days went by when I didn’t hear either of their voices.
That silence I remember most. That silence spoke to me. We will not share these hurts. We will not voice this pain.
Then, one night, my father walked into my room with Fergus at his heels. “I’m going back to Rotterdam,” he said.
The next morning, Uncle Martin and I walked my father to the train station.
“They’re going to run the factory for you?” Uncle Martin asked.
“They asked me to repair a downed machine, but they can do that without me,” my father said.
“That’s not like you,” I said.
“Well. They’re doing the books. Everything. They only want me for repairs and as a consultant. They can manage without me for a spell.”
When my father’s train left, Uncle Martin and I walked to the harbor.
“Where else is there to look?” I asked Uncle Martin.
“I guess we look until we find,” he said.
The soldiers set up large gun turrets to protect the troop transport boats that came in every day. Several soldiers smoked cigarettes by the tent city. More walked past the outdoor market booths, thumbed over the assorted seeds, coriander, beans, and potatoes Mr. Graaf sold. He was the only one selling anything outside that day.
There was a commotion up the road in front of the pharmacy. Above it were several floors of apartment houses. A woman screamed and then several soldiers ran up the street.
When we got closer we saw Patrice Mueller being propped up by two German soldiers. Her head had been shaved and slopped in heavy orange paint from a wide brush dragged across her scalp. Rivulets of orange paint ran off her forehead and cheeks and mixed in with a smudge of blood under her nostrils.
“What happened to her?” I asked Uncle Martin.
“She’s been with a German man. Some of the locals didn’t think too highly of it.”
“My god. The townspeople did that to her?”
“Yes.” Uncle Martin turned away from the commotion and started walking back.
The front of Patrice’s gray wool skirt had splatters of orange paint on it. Her breasts visibly hung loose under her white blouse. They were wide apart and made it clear how large a woman she was. Little red blotches on her scalp bled where the knife had shorn off the hair too closely and cut the skin. To me, there was nothing sexual about her, and I had a hard time understanding how sex had put her in such a position. I turned away and caught up with Uncle Martin.
“But Father Heard said that was a sin.” My uncle gave me a sideways look. “I mean, being with anyone before marriage.” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I was confused and angry at Patrice Mueller, the German man she was with, and our own townspeople who had done this terrible thing to her.
“Don’t be so certain of what Father Heard preaches. The good father’s book doesn’t bend enough to cater to its audience. I’ll tell you something about being human. Captain Cook’s bosun had to keep guard of his ship from his own crew, who traded nails for sex in Tahiti. The locals thought it an acceptable form of barter, and the bosun realized the men would have stripped the ship to a floating pile of loose logs at the rate they stole nails. And Columbus found the New World, discovered syphilis, and three years later it was an epidemic in Moscow. That ought to tell you all you need about how real people live, and to be wary of preaching that is so rigid and unforgiving of human nature.”
I looked at him and started to speak, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt an odd and welling sorrow, as if he’d peeled back the skin, red muscle, and porous bone of how I had constructed a part of the world in my mind. What was beneath all those teachings of Father Heard was a savage and raw pulsing heart, full of longing and lust and void of any ethereal or divine spark.
Late one evening, after my father returned yet again empty-handed from his trip to Rotterdam, Fergus barked at a car that came up the driveway. Two German soldiers got out, straightened their jackets, and marched to the house. One of them looked up and saw me in the window. He nodded and pointed at the front door.
“There are soldiers here,” I yelled.
My father, Uncle Martin, and my mother came into the foyer as our buckle-shaped ironworks door knocker shook the whole frame.
“Open the door,” my father said.
The two soldiers stood side by side in the doorway. Both men were very young, probably twenty at the oldest. Weapons bulged in their pockets. The sudden urge to salute them came over me.
Fergus strained against his collar to say hello to them, but my mother held him back.
“We are looking for Hans Koopman,” one of the men in the doorway said.
“That’s me,” my father said.
“Come with us.”
“What do you want with him?” my mother jumped in. The soldier seemed taken aback by the leap to urgency in her voice, her tone signaling a fierce protectiveness to keep the family together he couldn’t have guessed at. He straightened up. The one closer to me stepped inside the frame of the house. My uncle eased closer to the men, but my mother reached out her hand and placed it on his forearm, a subtle touch that was not one of affection, but of a brief caution, telling him to wait, wait until she told him to act.
“You had orders to get a machine up and running. To get shipments of lights out.”
“I had to go to Rotterdam to look for . . . ” He didn’t finish his sentence.
“You were given many opportunities to get that work done. Too many.”
“I can still do it,” my father said.
“No. We have something else for you now. We need you and your boat, Mr. Koopman,” the soldier said. “We are commandeering all the boats in the harbor and we need people to run them for us. Seeing how you like to travel so much, you can travel for us now.”
I was both scared my father had done something wrong and strangely proud they wanted him.
“Wait,” Uncle Martin said. The crimson flush of blood painted his neck again, and I knew then it would be impossible to know the true topography of his inner life. “Hans runs the only factory in town. You need him for that.”