Old Heart Page 10

  On the main street, called the Kromstraat, there was a café that seemed to be the center of town life. It was full of cats and ferns and old men, some wearing wooden shoes, some smoking pipes, some even smoking clay pipes. I asked for the burgomaster and someone was sent to get him. The bartender put a glass of beer in front of me. “No coffee,” he said, wagging his finger. “No tea. Beer. In Nederland, beer always.” He smiled. The old men smiled. There was something I liked in this attempt at humor, in their self-deprecation, in their commonness, in their ability to have a light moment surrounded as they were by the ruins of their country.

  The burgomaster came in with a slight young woman whose dark hair was chopped off short, parted in the middle, and pushed behind her ears. She was Sarah van Praag, although when the burgomaster opened his palm in front of her, he called her something else at first. She corrected him. That she would correct her elder not firmly but clearly, that she would know her mind so well and so comfortably, made her seem older than she was. She had a faith in herself, in both her beliefs and actions, that is rare in young people. It was apparent in everything about her, including her manner, which was to be inconspicuous, not in an obsequious way but as one does when one understands and accepts that one’s part is ancillary. During our interview she never looked at me. (Perhaps it was then that my doubts about her began.) She looked at the burgomaster’s face, and he looked at mine.

  I explained who I was and that I’d been sent to offer assistance.

  She translated, and the burgomaster nodded, thought and spoke.

  Still looking at him, Sarah quite formally conveyed his thanks for driving out the Germans and freeing Brabant. He then asked for a few things. As I recall, these included flour, dried beans and peas, a little sugar, cooking oil plus insulin, penicillin, morphine, and iodine, and he wondered if we had any coffee. The Dutch had colonized Indonesia, introduced coffee to Europe, and were addicted to the stuff.

  At a staff meeting later, Colonel McDougal said I’d done a good job with the townspeople. The mayor liked that I rode a bike. I was to be the liaison to the community. I was to give them all the help I could. I didn’t know it then, but this meant I’d be spending most of the rest of the war in Veldhoven.

  Each time I met with the burgomaster, Sarah translated. She seemed almost like a child who thinks that if she doesn’t look at you, she can’t be seen. I came to realize that she was actually quite young but both poised and frightened. She was hiding something. I wondered if she had, perhaps, translated for the Germans, or something graver.

  On November 28th our beleaguered 101st was finally withdrawn after seventy-two days of unrelieved combat, but I stayed on with a quartermaster and a company of clerks and drivers to supply the English and Scottish divisions that replaced them. Then in mid-December the Germans launched the massive last-ditch offensive in the Ardennes in Belgium that grew into the Battle of the Bulge. Clearly they wanted to retake Antwerp, and if they succeeded, they would not only cut our supply lines but divide the Allied forces and either isolate those in the Netherlands or force them to withdraw. For five weeks the battle raged. If these were the Reich’s death throes, as we all hoped, they were mighty ones. By late January Bastogne, around which the battle had been fought, was secured, but at enormous cost. Over twenty thousand Allied soldiers had died, and our entire supply operation was in tatters. It had to be rebuilt in order to fuel the push into Germany.

  Back at the Supreme Allied Command Headquarters in London, the decision had been made not to attack Holland’s German-held Randstad, which included Rotterdam, Amsterdam, the Hague, Utrecht, and most of the Dutch population. It was feared that civilian casualties would be too great, and it might mean getting bogged down in The Netherlands. Instead the Canadian First, which had been rushed east to the Bulge, would now push northward to Groningen. In this way the Germans occupying Holland would be surrounded by the Canadians, the British, and the sea, and their supply lines would be cut. The depot outside Veldhoven would be maintained and would supply the northern Allied divisions as they pushed across the Rhine and on toward Berlin.

  My orders were not only to help run this operation but also to try to get some assistance to the occupied Dutch. “They’re eatin’ tulip bulbs up there,” McDougal had told me before he had left. Intelligence said the German command in Holland was getting soft. There were commanders who might be anxious to ease their own way, make things better for themselves when the war was over. McDougal had said to work with the underground to try to locate a resistance organization called the Albrecht Group and get some relief to occupied territory by going through the network of wetlands, islands, and deltas called De Biesbosch. He had told me to hire Sarah to help.

  I didn’t want to. I was still suspicious. The only thing that recommended her was that she didn’t want to be hired—that and the fact that she was the only good candidate. I reluctantly offered the job, and the burgomaster talked her into it. I’d keep her on a short leash and use our intelligence people whenever I could. They gave us a list of contacts. The first of these was a grocer, and I wasn’t much taken with him even before Sarah said anything. He was too anxious to please. The second was a dairy farmer. I asked Sarah’s reaction to the two men as much as a test of her as of them. She wouldn’t give it. She said she was just a translator. But I pressed her and pointed out that intelligence said they could help us.

  She said that they would help us the same way they had helped the Germans or would help anyone who paid them. She told me that they were not patriots, that they were not in the underground.

  I asked her who was, but she was not ready to answer my question. Still, I sensed that she was right. I was not inclined to trust either man, but neither was I inclined to trust her. At the same time, I couldn’t figure out why she would offer her opinion if she was up to no good unless it was part of the no good. The next day I asked her how to find the local underground.

  She hesitated. She said she would help me but only if I didn’t question her. She said to do so could endanger someone. I could see that she had thought this through thoroughly. I imagined her doing so while walking in the light drizzle that had fallen the night before. I could see she was taking a chance, so I decided to as well.

  A few days later Sarah van Praag took me to see another Dutch farmer whose name was Van Helst. She gave me Dutch clothes and a Dutch bike, and just at twilight we drove out northwest across the farmland beyond Tilburg. Then we left the truck and biked into the night. We sat around the farmer’s kitchen table. I said we wanted to supply the resistance with some medicine and food. And I told him we were looking for German officers who were sympathetic to the Dutch people. Sarah said all of this in Dutch and then a good deal more. The man leaned on his elbows, nodded, and told us to return the next night.

  Riding back, I asked why all the secrecy? After all, the Germans were gone.

  “Germans have a way of coming back,” she said. “Like a bad penny.” She said they were still watching, that not all Nazis were German.

  I asked her where she had learned to speak English so well.

  She said she had had a British teacher in school.

  “But that’s an American expression, isn’t it? ‘A bad penny’?”

  She said she had probably learned it from a movie. Sarah liked American movies.

  And with that, as if she’d somehow said too much, she pedaled ahead. Perhaps the British had taught her their reticence as well as their language, I thought. I watched her easy gait in the moonlight. It was steady, unhurried, strong, rhythmic, relentless like that of all Dutch cyclists, who never stood up on a bicycle, never coasted, just plodded on and on and on. She no longer seemed fragile to me, but what she seemed I could not say. She was changing as time was passing. I tried to imagine any possible way Sarah could do me harm, but I couldn’t. What good would it do to turn one lowly deskbound junior officer over to the Germans? They wouldn’t want me. And why wouldn’t she leap at the chance to help her countrymen
? Still, there was something secretive about everything Sarah did.

  The next night we repeated the long, circuitous trip, and the farmer was waiting for us on his own bicycle. The three of us turned out of the gate and almost immediately into dense woods where the hard-packed path twisted, turned, and forked. It was dark, and we rode without lights so that my companions were only shapes, dark Dutch shapes loping, loping, loping. Who were these people, I thought, and why was I trusting them? The farther away we got, the darker the night, the lower the clouds, the more foolish and vulnerable I felt. I was hopelessly lost. Was that the idea? We came to a short wooden dock and stopped. After a while another dark shape appeared. It was a small bicycle ferry. A couple of people got off, lifting their bikes onto the dock, and we lifted ours onto the ferry. There were no lights and no talk. We waited for something for several minutes, then crossed the estuary and were deposited on the other side. Once again we had a long, labyrinthine ride through dark woods and darkened villages until we came to more water and another farmhouse. We propped our bikes against the wall, knocked softly on a door, and entered a smoky little kitchen lighted only by oil lamps. We sat with a new man, who asked in English to see our papers. He was squat and solid with a very pronounced chin and a cap pulled low on his brow almost as if he didn’t want us to see his face. We sat around a small table and drank shots of Dutch gin. Then we heard something outside, and I realized that we had been waiting again. The man handed Sarah’s papers back but held on to mine.

  “The boat’s here,” he said to me in English.

  “I want her to come too,” I said.

  “I’ll translate,” he said.

  I said I wanted Sarah to translate.

  He said that wasn’t possible. He said she might be in some danger. He had motioned to her and was unfolding her papers on the table.

  I pointed out that if she would be in danger, I would be in danger, too. I said this very calmly. I thought my reasoning was quite clear.

  “Oh, are you a Jew?” I remember him asking. “A Jood?” he said, this time in Dutch. Then he was tapping on the paper with one big farmer’s finger. “See? Van Praag. She is a Jew. Besides, these are not German papers. They are old Dutch papers that are coming from before the war. They’re no good.”

  This boat was a little fishing skiff. It was just the chin man, me, and the man at the tiller. No bikes. No farmer. No Sarah. We didn’t speak, but finally the chin man pointed, and I began to see dark shapes with corners and edges and spires on the far shore. The skiff let us off at a wharf. We crossed to knock on a door in a wall and found ourselves in a café that, compared to everything else, was brightly lighted. Half-a-dozen men sat around a large table, drinking beer and gin. The three in the middle seemed military. True, they wore no uniforms, but they did so uncomfortably. The one in the very middle was glassy-eyed and swaying even as he sat. Chin man handed over our papers and did all the talking, this time in German. The others looked from him to me, listened, and spoke. Neither he nor I sat down.

  Chin man turned to me and said that they wanted letters of passage and that I should agree to provide these.

  I did. I asked for a guarantee that none of the goods would go to supply troops. The chin man didn’t bother to translate this. He told me not to worry. Then my papers were returned, and we were outside again, stepping back onto the skiff. The whole business had not taken three minutes, and that seemed fine with everyone.

  “What are letters of passage?” I whispered

  He said he didn’t know. “Make somesing looking official. It can be your job.” Back on the other side, he told me they would use rowboats and skiffs. He said they’d start the next night.

  And so began my part in Operation Manna during the Hongerwinter, as the Dutch people came to call it, of 1945. I rode the bicycle back that night with true joy in my heart. But it could be only partly explained by the mission we had accomplished and the danger, real or imagined, we had escaped. There was also a strong north wind now at our backs that made the journey shorter and easier, and then there was Sarah van Praag. I was so relieved to have an explanation of her odd behavior. Of course she was guarded, suspicious, nervous, even paranoid—she was a Jew.

  But what did it even matter to me? Was this something personal, or had she become emblematic of a humankind I’d learned to doubt and distrust and now found worthy again? All the way back, as I watched her constantly shifting shape ahead of me, I realized that she had taken a great risk that night. And I realized, too, that I admired her for it. As I rode along I phrased and rephrased a little apology in my head. But when on the last ferry I finally found myself alone with her for a few moments and tried to deliver it, she stopped me, and for the first time she smiled at me. She said I had done what was right. The last leg of our ride and then our drive home was in a heavy rain. We got back to Veldhoven just before dawn. By then I was sick and a little bit in love.

  Veldhoven, August 8, 2007 The War, Part II

  That early spring my workload increased, and so did my hours as our supply lines stretched on toward Berlin and living conditions in the Randstad worsened. I worked at a big table in a little office that was really a shed. And whenever our dealings were in Dutch, Sarah sat and worked across from me. Outside the depot was a farmyard supervised by a warrant officer, defined by a perimeter fence of barbed wire and consisting of cartons and crates stacked on wooden pallets and protected by canvas tarpaulins. All day every day trucks brought supplies and other trucks took them away.

  When Sarah was there she would make herself a morning cup of “English tea” with milk and sugar. She began to make me one, too. I had always associated tea with sickrooms because my mother had made it, stirred with honey and lemon, only when I was ill. Even during the months I spent in England, I favored instant coffee or chicory coffee. But Sarah converted me. I’ve been drinking tea ever since. Later we began to eat dark Dutch bread with unpasteurized butter and sometimes at lunch with very mild new white cheese. Later still, during breaks, we began to tell each other about ourselves.

  I told Sarah about the house I lived in, the street I lived on, about the brilliant colors of the sugar maples in the autumn and how yellow leaves would stick to the wet bricks of the street, how ash logs split so easily and cleanly when you put an ax to them, how root beer tasted, how loons sounded. I told her about delivering newspapers before dawn, when the only sounds in the world were your footsteps and the papers thudding onto people’s porches. I told her about the lakes where I lived, about paying five dollars to go up in a barnstormer’s biplane once and seeing them all below me like shiny silver coins scattered on green felt. I told her how people drove cars out onto the ice and cut holes in it to fish. I told her about pan-frying walleye. And I told her that living on the lakes is a way of life out there.

  Sarah told me about Holland before the war, about riding bikes along the dikes in Zeeland in the springtime when every field is filled with tiny white newborn lambs, about digging mussels in the wet sand, about empty Sunday streets and families walking their dogs in the woods after mass, about Belgian beers and Dutch cheeses, about Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet and the various kinds, qualities, and potencies of licorice. Later, when the confectionaries opened again, she would sometimes bring little bags of these to try to educate me. She told me about horses and horse carts and guild parades.

  I asked her if she rode. Everyone in Brabant seemed to. She said she had as a girl but didn’t like to because horses scared her.

  “But you rode?”

  She said she’d had no choice. When she told her parents she was frightened, they said she had to master her fear. When she told them she wanted to quit, they wouldn’t hear of it. Her grandfather even said he’d give her anything she wanted if she placed in the village competition. Sarah knew he meant her own pony. She trained and trained all year long and won the blue ribbon in the steeplechase. Her family was very happy. They raised three cheers for her and toasted her with champagne. Then her grandfather
asked what she wanted as a reward, and she said she wanted to quit riding.

  “Really? And did you?”

  “I did. I never rode again.”

  I looked at Sarah a little differently after I heard that story.

  In April of ’45 new orders came through. I was to follow the supply lines into Germany to the village of Krefeld just north of Dusseldorf on the Rhine River, where lines from France and Belgium converged and where a major supply depot had been established. It happened quickly. I was to leave the next day. I remember we had a modest meal at Sarah’s parents’ house. We ate omelets. Her mother, who didn’t speak English, smiled. Her father, who did, talked, and when I complimented him, he tapped his ear and said he’d learned English listening to the BBC. We may also have looked at photos from Sarah’s childhood. It was all very awkward.

  When Sarah and I parted at her front door, we shook hands. I remember that. I think we both doubted that we’d ever see each other again. But during the weeks I spent in Germany, I thought almost constantly about her. I told myself it was because I was lonely and far from home. I tried hard not to trust my feelings, but I had trouble denying them. I missed her terribly. I longed to talk with her. I dreamt of her. I feared I had lost her before I’d ever really known her.

  The end of the war had left me with a kind of hangover. All that remained was rubble and poverty and an astonishing amount of death. Then in June I got a message from a field hospital outside Cologne that made matters even worse. A Captain Anthony Longo who was a patient there had asked to see me. I requested a jeep and went there as soon as I could. Tony’s head was heavily bandaged and his torso was wrapped, but there was no mistaking his big nose and big teeth. He was groggy but coherent. We avoided talking about what had happened to him. I blabbed on and on until he interrupted me.