“I need your help with something,” he said. “But I have to know you’ll keep this quiet. You have to promise me. Whatever you think about all this insanity in town and this war, you have to promise to keep this quiet. Can you do that?”
“Okay, what’s going on?”
“Today, those soldiers killed the Van Den Bosches for hiding a Jew.”
“Is your family hiding someone?”
“You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone, Jacob,” Ludo said. “That could be my family dead on the ground.”
“Who are you hiding?” I wanted it to be my father. I wanted it to be connected to his disappearance.
“My father found a British airman who’d been shot down last week. His leg was broken, and he would have been captured.”
I rubbed my hands over my eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why now?”
“I don’t want what happened to the Van Den Bosches to happen to my parents. I’m terrified, and now they are too. They won’t send him away though. How could they?”
“What a mess. Where is he?”
“He’s in our house.”
“Where?”
“We have a hidden cubby off the attic. Can you—”
“Can I what?”
“Martin knows people.” Ludo said. “People suspect he’s part of an underground escape system. But no one will approach him about it because they’re afraid of him. Can you and your uncle get him out on your boat?”
“Don’t you think we would have gotten ourselves out? We’re all trapped here.”
We stood staring at each other in the early dark of the evening. The trees around us that had always been so familiar seemed to create a barbed meshing that walled us in.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Ludo said.
“Ludo, I don’t know how to help you.”
“Promise not to tell anyone. Promise, not even your uncle if you don’t think he can get him out of here.”
“I thought you wanted me to ask my uncle?”
“I did, but if you know he can’t do it, I’d rather he doesn’t know. After all, he works with the Germans.”
That phrase sank into my heart. I also worked with the Germans for all Ludo knew. That was why he hadn’t told me anything about the downed airman until now. Ludo walked back through the woods toward his home. I was hurt by his distrust of me or my uncle. All my plans, no, they were fantasies, but all my fantasies of getting away had included him. He was my best friend, and it felt like this conversation wedged suspicion between us.
I tried to picture life in Ludo’s attic for the pilot, which must have felt claustrophobic and cramped compared to the giant sky he cut through in his plane. The darkness of the school’s basement filled my mind again, the palpable worry over how and when death would come for each of the huddled townspeople. I walked to the overturned stone with my brother’s name carved into it and rested my palms flat trying in some way to communicate with those missing. In the woods that night, it seemed all of the light in my country was now going dark or being blocked by some antiaircraft cover. Chaos had shattered my own family and now worked its way along the seams of the only place I’d ever known.
Two nights later, after finishing work on the docks, I went to my father’s factory and waited for my mother to walk home with her. They had covered the entire building with a giant mesh tarp that was supposed to hide it from bombers.
“Your father’s factory is having a little camping trip,” my mother said when she exited. She was hunched over and exhausted. She wore a smock over her clothes so the fabric of her dress wouldn’t get rubbed thin from leaning against the metal conveyor line all day long.
We walked out of the village. On the road out of town were several orange splatters on the gravel. They were spaced far apart and looked like rain drops. One smudged into the dirt when my shoe slid over it. My hand looped under my mother’s elbow and she relaxed under my touch. Her stern face slackened, and she looked like she could fall asleep while walking. I wished she would. She had not been sleeping well for months, and though she had gotten into a routine, she had been up every night for the last few weeks, worried about my eighteenth birthday and if or when and where the Germans might take me. She kept trying to find a way to hide all of my records, to claim I was younger, in hopes that some Allied force would liberate Holland within the next few years.
Several hundred yards from home, something moved off to the side of the road ahead of us. It looked like a waterlogged and deflated barrel. Then it moved again. It was a brown blanket huddled over someone’s back and head. The person leaned their shoulders against a tree. My mother saw it too. Part of us both must have wanted for it to be my father waiting for us. We both wanted every shadow to be him or Edwin returning.
“Go. Go look,” my mother said. The gravel crunched under my feet and rolled away after each footfall. The person under the blanket was no bigger than a teenage boy. Maybe it was Edwin, who had been preserved under the water, I thought. A sick thought. A desperate thought, that he had not grown, and had just now found his way back home.
“Hello,” I said. The person balled up and pressed farther into the tree and whimpered. Their knees pushed into the dead leaves that covered the ground in wet clumps. The blanket was rust brown and covered in bright, orange drops that splattered across it. Then I saw the split lip and naked thigh.
I kneeled down. “Are you okay?”
The head under the blanket lifted. There were those supple green eyes.
“Oh. No. No.”
Strands of red hair were glued to her face by orange paint and blood. “Hilda. No. No. Not you.”
Beneath the blanket, Hilda was naked and trembling.
My mother ran up to us and helped Hilda stand, and I caught a glimpse of her pale left breast and soft pink nipple. Her bare spine was beautiful. But this was so far from how I imagined her when we had kissed and I imagined my hand inside her dress. She had been beaten, and her eyes would have been swollen shut if they hadn’t burst open and bled over her temples. Her head was shaved and covered with orange paint that smeared down her neck and on her hands where she tried to rub it off. The fine red hairs over her ears that cupped her face in parentheses were the only hair she had left on her head. The rest had been shorn off, and there was a cropping of red, bloody dots on her skull.
Hilda leaned into my mother’s arms and started weeping.
It was foolish of me, but I had always thought of her as virginal and pure and this new reality filled me with confusion, anger, and shame. I helped hold her up despite an immediate desire to banish her from my life. All memory of Hilda and Hilda’s touch—I wanted to whitewash it away.
“We’ll take you inside, dear,” my mother said.
“Take me home,” Hilda gurgled out of her swollen lips.