My Family for the War (25 page)

It was this bitter little half sentence in her letter that immediately dispelled my anger. Amanda was without Gary and Uncle Matthew, without Millie, without her flower garden. She must have felt like I did whenever I started thinking about my earlier life.

For several days after receiving that letter, I sensed the closeness that had meant so much to me in London, and I longed to return. But other things forced themselves into the foreground: life with the Stones, which was sorting itself out; school, which was becoming more and more fun; my first little circle of friends. More children returned to London at Christmastime, since a German attack had failed to occur. I didn’t even ask if I was allowed to go with them. I had only been with the Shepards for half a year, and now they were gradually fading into memory.

The situation was much the same with my parents. I could still picture Papa when he was arrested, but wasn’t able to imagine him in his spotless, white bed at the sanatorium. And when I thought about my mother I thought about fields of strawberries, as if all the other, more recent reports from her simply hadn’t reached me.

In addition to the three subjects Mrs. Collins taught us in Tail’s End—English, math, and geography—we girls picked up a fourth that winter that became an addiction in no time: knitting. We tirelessly made scarves at first, and then as we improved we knitted socks and mittens for the soldiers. And we mailed them off with personal Christmas greetings.

We were infinitely pleased when the greetings were returned several weeks later, and it wasn’t long before each of us had her own soldier. Mine was named Frank Duffy, a twenty-two-year-old from Cornwall, and I tried as hard as I could to look serious and grown-up in the photo I sent him. On one wall of the classroom, Mrs. Collins hung a map of the world so we could keep track of our soldiers’ movements. But Gary was the only one who moved: I pushed the flag with his name across the Atlantic, between Europe and the USA, while all the others remained in France.

For Hanukkah, Gary sent me a necklace made from tiny, smooth, white shells. “I hope you’re still learning Hebrew and not neglecting your prayers!” he wrote on the accompanying card.

That remark put a serious damper on my joy about the necklace. My Hebrew book had been in the things Amanda sent with me to Tail’s End, but I hadn’t opened it since I had been here. While I had lived with the Shepards, it had been my greatest desire to be entirely Jewish. How could it have lost its importance for me so quickly? Whatever it was, the mystery I had experienced before was gone. The Stones’ relaxed Judaism, which recognized no laws and only the most important of festivals, was enough for me now.

That evening I took out my tin box and buried Gary’s necklace deep beneath my letters and photos. I wasn’t worthy of wearing it.

January 26 arrived, the one-year anniversary of the day I had left home. It upset me a little that Mamu didn’t mention it, but to my surprise I received a letter from Papa! We had been separated since November 9—I hadn’t seen my father for fifteen months.

At first Hazel cheerfully accepted my invitation to walk to the beach with me on my twelfth birthday, but when the day arrived, I was in for a surprise. With a conspiratorial smile, she took me aside before school started and whispered, “I’m glad to come with you, but you should know that someone else would be even happier to go!”

She gave a significant half nod over her shoulder, and I saw Wesley Howard, beet red, leaning against the wall. “Wesley?” I asked, puzzled. “Why him?”

“I guess he has something to tell you,” responded Hazel knowingly.

The walk with Wesley seemed interminable. If he had something important to tell me, he must have forgotten it. At the Stones’, where we picked up Adolf, he did manage a “Good day,” but then he just marched along next to me in silence, driving me to exasperation.

“Just imagine if the Germans landed on the beach at the very moment we got there! What would you do?”

“Uh…”

“We’d be sure to hear guns firing if they did, don’t you think?”

“Hmm… yeah…”

“Personally, I don’t think they would try to land without taking out our fleet first. In that case we’d have plenty of time to run back to the village… or would it be better to hide in the woods?”

“Well… er…”

Disappointed and angry, I shoved my hands in my coat pockets and gave up. After a while I called, “Come, Adolf, let’s run a bit!” and simply ran away from him.

Wasn’t this my birthday? Wasn’t this my walk to the beach?

If the Germans were planning to land on our beach, my birthday wasn’t the day they had chosen. The sea stretched out pale and gray before me, and only one ship—a tiny bright spot far, far out—was visible. The pebbles crunched with the
cold as the waves quietly rolled up and broke on them. I thought about my previous birthday, when I had resolved to find a foster family myself. In that sense, the Shepards had been my birthday present. That one wish had been fulfilled in a most beautiful way.

Would I be granted another wish? I didn’t dare say it out loud as I looked over the sea in the direction where Holland had to be. Somewhere over there, my father was standing on the beach and thinking of me, making the same wish as me, and I simply thought, “Jesus, you know.”

I hadn’t completed this thought when it happened. It was as if the sea was so close I could feel the moisture on its surface. I could see my father waiting on the other side, a thin figure in a brown overcoat that I had never seen him wearing, and there was no barbed wire between us. He looked over at me without moving, and I saw his eyes, ringed in shadows and the deep wrinkles around his mouth, but also his smile, his familiar, loving smile.

An excruciating pain shot through me, so terrible I couldn’t have endured it any longer than that one moment, before it disappeared along with the image of my father. Then the sea lay there as it had before, cold and calm.

I didn’t even have a second to collect myself before the next confusing incident. Out of the blue, someone grabbed me, spun me around, and something cold and wet attached itself to my lips. My eyes, wide with horror, stared into an equally panicked pair of eyes only an inch away!

Wesley and I flew apart like a bomb had exploded between us, he in terrified flight back over the hill, I backward into the coil of barbed wire. By the time I had regained my composure
enough to yell indignantly, “Are you completely daft, you idiot?” he was probably already halfway back to Tail’s End.

Tears welled in my eyes. I rubbed my mouth with my sleeve as if possessed, rubbed and spat; I was tempted to use sand to remove all traces of that kiss. That jerk! He had ruined my birthday, defiled that precious moment with my father. And if he dared to tell anyone, I’d murder him!

Ashamed, I stumbled home, and the next few days were completely dominated by two rapidly alternating impulses: either to bore holes into Wesley with my eyes, or to not have anything to do with him. Wesley’s inner voice seemed to have given him the same advice. I attributed his apparent dejection not so much to the fact that I hadn’t responded well to his advances, but rather that he had so unnecessarily complicated our lives.

“But what did he
say,
then?” Hazel tormented me for the rest of the week, until I made her take an oath of silence and through gritted teeth admitted to her that Wesley hadn’t said anything at all, but instead had tried to kiss me.

My own feelings about this matter were briefly, most satisfyingly reflected in Hazel’s shocked face, then she covered her mouth with her hands and passionately whispered, “Tried? Just tried? Thank God!”

I stared at her. I had led her to the farthest corner of the churchyard to tell her about Wesley’s ambush, and skeletons rattling out of their graves couldn’t have made a more sinister impression than Hazel’s words. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“But don’t you know… ? It all starts with kissing—you could have had a baby because of that!”

I heard myself swallow hard. “Are you sure he only tried?” pressed Hazel.

“Yes, of course, it was only two seconds, and I wiped my mouth off right afterward!”

Hazel’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “You won’t know for sure,” she said ominously, “for another few months.”

Horrified, I pushed it out of my mind, acted like nothing was wrong, and before long Hazel had obviously forgotten about her suspicion. I tried not to imagine the most horrible consequence: Having to marry Wesley and spend the rest of my days being kissed by him!

At last, two months after that fateful morning on the beach, the string I had tied around my belly to monitor any change in size wasn’t any tighter, so I let myself relax. I cut it off, happy that I hadn’t betrayed my embarrassing ordeal to anyone.

Chapter 14

The Germans did not attack the British coast. On April 9, they occupied Denmark and Norway without even declaring war, an announcement that required extensive repositioning of the flags on our classroom map. British and French units were shipped off to Norway, but resistance there was brief.

For my parents, who had placed all their hopes in the assumption that Hitler would respect Holland’s neutrality, the invasion of two peaceful neighbors must have been a heavy blow, so I immediately sent them encouraging letters. But the English were also becoming increasingly nervous. The Certificate of Good Standing that the Shepards had acquired for Walter was no longer enough, and he was called for a personal interview to determine if he was a friendly or hostile foreigner.

Our lives in Tail’s End seemed far removed from everything going on in the war. After my housework at the Stones’, I met Hazel and the other girls at the village well to talk and make fun of the boys, who had picked the cemetery wall for their meeting place. Our joint escapades at the bunker the previous year had ceased, an unspoken agreement by both sides. Although we were always staunchly separated, we constantly kept an eye on each other.

The idea that another girl would take her place as my best friend once the war was over didn’t bother Hazel. “My father says the way to survive war is by adapting to the out of the
ordinary,” she informed me. “So why shouldn’t I be your best friend for the rest of the war?”