When she let me go, she walked out of the room while peeling off her blue bathrobe. Several moments later, the shower began running, and within a half hour, my mother stood in front of me in her gray winter slacks, a heavy sweater, and her jacket, hat, and gloves. She looked nothing like the woman we had left behind when we went to Rotterdam and lost Edwin. Her face was gaunt, her cheeks sunken and ruddy. Deep furrows ran from midway down her nose to the corners of her mouth. Though somehow it was her standing in front of me—her brief luxury of mourning now stripped away without food rations. She placed her hands on my shoulders and smoothed out the wrinkles in my coat, then looked at me the way she had when I was a child.
Together we walked to the factory, the product of my father’s life’s work. Two German guards had been assigned to check off workers’ names as they arrived, to make sure everyone contributed as expected. Those men stood by the entrance to the assembly plant and the sight of them left a burning resentment in my chest. But my mother led me to the office entrance. Inside the room was bright, too hot, full with lamps and file cabinets. Several of the German engineers my father had shown around were at the desks.
“The workers’ entrance is around the back,” one of the officers said to us in Dutch as we walked in.
“I’m Mrs. Koopman,” my mother said.
“Ah, goedemiddag, Mrs. Koopman. Where is your husband?” the officer asked.
“I don’t know. Several soldiers came last night to our home to look for him, but he has not come home, and they took our ration cards.”
“Well, that is because we need to speak to him immediately.”
My heart jumped. They hadn’t caught him yet. Maybe he’d gotten away.
“We would like to know where he is too, but since he is not here, and we have no ration cards, I would like to work instead of him and have his ration card.”
“Ah, I see. The good Mrs. Koopman has arrived to make claims on us,” the officer said, loud enough so the engineers would hear. “Well, well. Why don’t you start working on the lines starting this morning, and you can have your son’s card back. I presume this is your son.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, you can have his for your working. But we would like you, young man”—the officer pointed at me; I didn’t look at him but at the glowing thread of his typewriter ribbon—“not to come back unless you have your father. We know what that slippery bastard was up to.”
10
My mother went to work at the factory every day that winter after my father left. That first Sunday, she showed up to church and played her organ for the people who came. In my father’s absence, she played louder and harder, and for once since Edwin left, she was animated, and wailed on the keys and pedal, giving a wild concert. Her song trailed off into its last echoes, each note coming to silence like a dark bird piercing a silver cloud. Week after week she showed up to play the organ, letting the voice of those pipes clear and sing whatever mourning or worry she had locked in her, but fewer and fewer people came.
During the rest of the time she was frantic with worry, pestering me about where I was going and when I’d be back, pacing around the house, saying, “I can do this. I can do this.” She did this until she crested some new height of fear, and then in an act I will always be proud of, she got herself dressed.
“I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t wait,” she said. “Martin is doing everything he can, but I can’t wait.” She decided she was going to go find my father. She bundled herself in three sweaters and an overcoat and marched from house to house all through the town and looked into the eyes of the people who lived there.
“Please. Have you seen or heard from my husband?”
I accompanied her on the first several rounds through town.
For me, my brother was always present, floating in a blue underground river. I imagined my father, who belly-crawled through the frozen woods with his cheek to the ground, had heard some trace of that current, that he was rubbing his body over it to understand where to go next. I glommed onto that image of my father, driven by a purpose and not merely a deserter. Though how I thought of him shifted and spun like the Devil in his story, coming out of each dance turn in a new disguise. The businessman. Storyteller. Drinker. Inventor. Coward. Saboteur. Runaway. The Missing. The Gone.
Sadly, my mother, who was very much present, I tried to dismiss as a stranger. Her worry poisoned me. It compounded my hurt and anger. I was angry with my people for releasing the dams and flooding my brother away, with the Germans for pushing forward with their wild expansion, and most with my father for breaking the rules and being forced to run away. For my mother, I was angry with her for her obvious and glaring pain, as it kept me from going numb.
At home, rock piles by the pit in our backyard looked like they were placed in the forms of arrows, pointing toward my father’s hiding spot. Everything became some indecipherable clue. Because of this, I avoided going home as much as possible. I started going to the woods behind Hilda’s house to watch for movement behind lit windows or to the docks to help Uncle Martin on his boat. My options were very limited. After my eighteenth birthday, the Germans would make me join a labor crew in the German factories, the Heer, or the Waffen SS, and probably send me to the eastern front. For a while that winter, I was actually eager to leave.
On a warm morning, Hilda came by our house.
“Will you come watch me ride?”
“Sure.”
We walked up the road between our houses.
“Thank you,” she said and reached over and held my hand.
My body felt so tight I didn’t dare turn and look at her. For a moment I thought things might begin to get better.
I climbed and sat on a wood split-rail fence as she saddled and led a black-and-white quarter horse into the paddock.
“Here we go,” she said. “You ready?”
“I’m watching.”
She eased the horse in a circle close to me and then picked up speed and started doing fast jaunts about the field. I tried to memorize the way her body moved on the horse’s back through that beautiful wooded meadow.
When we were children, Hilda’s father had a white horse that he let be used by whomever in town dressed up as St. Nicholas that year. So on St. Nicholas Day, December 5, the parade started from Hilda’s house and worked its way down our road into town. When we still believed, we waited in our driveway and joined the procession of St. Nicholas and his gang of boys in blackface called Black Peters. When we were old enough to understand what was happening, we went to Hilda’s first thing in the morning every December 5. Hilda’s mother, a redheaded woman who smelled like dried flowers, painted all of the kids’ faces black with shoe polish, and gave us bags of candies and gingersnaps to throw at people once we got into town.
“Don’t eat all of this yourself,” she’d say, giving us a soft smile, knowing we would eat our fair share.
One year, when Hilda was nine and we were dressed, and our skin blackened, we ran around half wild until the adults readied the horse and St. Nicholas. It was during that intermission some of the kids knocked over Hilda’s wooden dollhouse. She dropped her bag of candy and knelt next to the large house and picked up the far wall that had broken off.
“Don’t worry, Hilda,” Ludo said, “We’ll get my dad to fix it.”
“I can help. My dad can help too,” I said, wanting to be the one to do it.