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Thaw: Part 1

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Michael Winter's short story is the tale of a Dutch family coping with the upheavals of German occupation during World War II.

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By MICHAEL WINTER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 2, 2009

EDITOR'S NOTE: During the 19th century, serialized fiction was a popular feature in British newspapers. It made novels available for pennies, so even the poorest Brits could read Charles Dickens' or George Eliot's newest works.

Winter is a Tribune page designer whose parenting column, Pop & Circumstance, appears twice a month in Baylife Magazine. His fiction has been published in Modern Short Stories, The Tampa Review, Other Voices and Fourteen Hills.

Thaw
First of four parts

By December of 1943, the time before the war was a distant thing, small, unreal, more ethereal even than our memories of summer. It was cold that December. We huddled around the big, potbellied stove in the kitchen, and sometimes, after we had fed the German soldiers breakfast and the prisoners were asleep in the banquet room, we would reminisce about our summer adventures: hikes hiking along the forest roads, skipping stones across the green sluggish waters of the Noordhollandsch Kanaal and capturing grasshoppers in glass jars. Joop, the youngest, would lean forward in his chair, his face in his hands, and listen raptly to my stories.

"I remember! I remember!" he would exclaim and hasten to add a bit of extra detail. "The grasshoppers spit brown juice." Or, "The poppies were as high as my stomach."

Mama and Papa would not speak of the time before the war. If the hauptmann heard such talk, he might interpret it as a sign of brooding rebellion. When the German engineering corps took over our hotel, it was as if a bomb had landed in the center of our lives. But instead of destroying us instantly, it sat there, waiting for a sudden motion to fulfill its promise of violence.

All of us, even Papa, feared the soldiers. And Papa hated the hauptmann. He and his mistress occupied what had once been our parents' room. The soldiers slept in six more. We now lived in the small storage room at the end of a second floor hall. It still smelled of cleaning solutions and stale air. Mama said all things considered, it could have been much worse. Mama was always the optimist.

I said Papa hated the hauptmann, and that is true. But he did not hate him equally at all times. His anger expanded and contracted like mercury. Mama once joked she could predict his mood by the barometer in the kitchen. When the pressure was low, Papa would stalk around in a foul gloom. When the barometer rose so, too, did Papa's spirits. Yet even during his darkest sulks, he was polite, even respectful, to the Germans. I remember seeing him on many occasions addressing the feldwebel with his fedora clutched in his hands, his head bowed as if in prayer, asking for permission to order more soap or coal, or asking for a travel voucher so he could drive across town to pick up another box of toilet paper.

Father disliked the Germans for what they had done to Holland. He hated them for what they had done to our hotel.

The German engineers came in the spring of 1943 to rebuild the railroad tracks the Allies kept destroying. The trains brought supplies to the front. The lines needed to be kept open. During the day, the bombers would destroy the tracks - sometimes we could see the smoke rising from the impacts and feel the explosions like a fist pounding our chests - and at night, the engineers, along with the Russian and Polish POWs, would rebuild them. It was the same every day and every night.

The Germans slept in the rooms upstairs. The prisoners slept in the banquet room. All the furniture had been removed. Men in trucks came one day and hauled it all away, even the rugs. Papa tried to find out where the furniture was being taken and was told it was not his concern anymore. I believe that was the day he began to hate the Germans.

In our room at night, our parents would whisper to each other. If Papa was in a brood, he would speak of treachery and sabotage until Mama soothed him into a sullen hush that eventually slid into sleep. If his mood was light, we would talk of things happily trivial: a holiday meal, a neighbor's mischievous goat, the dismal state of Papa's shoes, stuffed with brown paper and burlap to keep the snow from soaking in. Pieter would tell us which bird, which plover or sandpiper or tern he had seen that day. Joop would show his skinned knee, and Mama would fuss over it and kiss it until Joop laughed. And I, being the oldest, would tell Papa what the hotel was running low on so he could go, hat in hand, to the feldwebel the next day.

To hate the Germans was a dangerous thing. It was like keeping a poisoned apple always in your pocket. One day, if hunger made your thinking sluggish, you might swallow a bite before realizing you had it in your hand. Papa's hate was dangerous, but he kept it from his lips, at least outside our little room.

Mama had no hate, although sometimes she would comment on Miss Brackenhouser's nylons and painted nails. Miss Brackenhouser was the woman who shared the hauptmann's room. She wore furs and often made presents of chocolate bars to Joop and me.

Ladies did not paint their nails, Mama said. It was the sign of an ostentatious life.

Joop hated only the cold and breakfasts without vlokken or hagelslag to sprinkle on his bread. And my hate, if it was there, came only in vague nightmares and then infrequently.

Pieter's hate was different. It made him brave, and that was a frightening thing, for courage of that sort led only to prison or death.

It was sometime in the late fall that I first began to fear for my brother's life. It was late in the afternoon. Mama was in the small lobby anteroom, darning socks for the engineers. Mama said the light was better in there, but it was also the best place to keep watch for Papa, who was out gathering scrap wood and coal for the furnace. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for that evening's dinner when Joop came stumbling through the door sobbing, his face in his hands.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Did you fall?" Joop was always scraping a knee or elbow. He spent as much time sprawled across the floor as he did on his feet.

He shook his head. His cheeks were red and wet beneath his splayed fingers.

"What, then? Have you been making mischief? Did the feldwebel yell at you?"

"No," he gasped though his wet heaves. "Pieter took my candy bar."

"What? Why would he do that?" I asked, although I already knew. Pieter would not accept Miss Brackenhouser's gifts. Mama said we should be polite and take the chocolate bars with a "thank you" when offered. To refuse was considered an insult, and we were not to be rude. But Pieter would not take them. He told Miss Brackenhouser he was sick, that he was allergic to chocolate, that his tooth was sore. After a while she stopped offering.

Pieter's hatred would not allow him to accept anything German. When Joop and I took the bars, we became an extension of German in his eyes, and for a time, he hated us as well.

"He called me a name. A bad name. He pushed me down and took my candy and said he was going to give it to the prisoners."

I stood there stupidly for a moment, a wet, half-peeled potato dripping in one hand, a paring knife in the other, and in my mind, my brother's death unfolded before me. He would be handcuffed and led to the city jail. We would not be allowed to see him, but Papa would try and he would be shot while sneaking through an alley. Then Pieter would be hung the next day and his body laid next to Papa's in an unmarked grave while Mama, Joop and I were sent to prison.

"Did anyone see this? Did Miss Brackenhouser?"

Black dots swam before my eyes. I felt the kitchen expand like the inside of a bellows, then contract again in a whoosh that left me breathless.

"No. He took my chocolate, Henk. He pushed me and took it. He slapped me." Joop let his hands fall, and I could see the left side of his face where the mark was already beginning to swell.

I took a rag and dipped it in the water the potatoes were soaking in. I held it to his face until his sobs had tapered to irregular hitching. When he was quiet, I went looking for Pieter.

You may think because I had lived with my brother for all of his 11 years that I knew him well. This is not so. I knew many things about him, that is true, but these things did not add up to an understanding of any great depth. Rather, they were like a spatter of greenery poking above the snowdrifts, hinting at a network of living things beneath the white crust but offering few insights as to their nature. Even at that age, Pieter was a private person. He chose with great care which pieces of himself to share with the rest of us, as a merchant displays his most alluring wares in the shop window, keeping the rest locked securely in a room behind the counter. And the things he did share often left me vaguely disquieted, as if they were part of a grand riddle he laid before me to solve.

Pieter spent hours atop the roof of the hotel. He would climb out the dormer and wedge himself in the gable nook with Papa's binoculars around his neck and a sketch book in his lap. With his legs dangling over the eaves, he would draw swallows and thrushes, pigeons, mockingbirds and finches. Our city was overrun with finches.

He would hold the enormous optic in his left hand while his right scribbled charcoal furiously onto the thick pages. He never took his eyes from the bird, never once looked down at what was appearing across the paper. The lines would blur and cross, seemingly at random, until the disorder became a wing, a tail, here a beak, there a leg branching into a delicate talon. It was a conjuring act. Pieter pulled images of birds from chaos.

When I asked him once why he did not hang his pictures in the dining room or lobby where others could enjoy them, he shook his head and said if he did that, they would no longer be his.

When I could not find Pieter in the hotel, I went to the attic widow, opened it and leaned out. It was bitterly cold. The leaden sky had drained the color from the day, and the icy wind took my breath and pushed it back down into my lungs. Pieter was huddled, coatless, in his usual cranny among the snow-covered shingles.

"I've been searching everywhere for you."

"Were you worried?" he said through chattering teeth.

"Yes. Come inside. It's freezing. You'll catch your death."

"No. I want to sketch."

"You cannot draw with frozen hands. There is nothing to sketch anyway. All the birds are snuggling together in the tree hollows for warmth. They are smarter than you."

The wind tousled Pieter's hair with phantom fingers. He made no indication that he had heard me. He sat there shivering, the sleeves of his sweater pulled over his hands, his knees pulled up to his chest.

At last I asked, "Why did you hit Joop? His eye is swollen. Don't be a bully. Give him back his candy."

"No. He should not be accepting anything from that -" He spat out a word that shocked me. "And neither should you. I'm going to give it to the prisoners. They need it more than we do."

I had never heard Pieter use such a word. I had never heard anyone in our family use such a word. It left me groping for a way to maneuver around it, as if my brother had scrambled across a gorge and felled the bridge behind him. I was at a loss.

"Tomorrow morning, when the prisoners are being led back from their work, I will slip the chocolate to one of them."

Our family was forbidden to speak with the POWs. Even a glance in their direction might warrant a box on the ear if a guard was in a bad mood. They were a mostly silent lot, unshaven, ragged. Many were sick. Their coughing was the only thing that gave testament to their existence behind the locked banquet doors.

During the day, soldiers lounged at each of the room's entrances, smoking cigarettes and drinking the coffee Mama offered them. We saw the prisoners only when they were leaving or returning from their nightly labors. They shuffled by, heads down, shoulders hunched into what was left of their overcoats, like upright turtles trying to retract into their shells. Even if we had been allowed to speak with these men, it would have been pointless. None of them, as far as we knew, spoke Dutch.

The penalty for talking to a prisoner was to become one yourself.

Fear loosened my tongue. "You cannot. Do you want to go to prison? The guards will see. They will catch you, and if they do not shoot you right then, they will take you to jail."

Pieter looked out over the city spires and laughed without mirth. "I'm already in jail." He swept a hand out before him, indicating everything beyond his reach. "We all are."

"Pieter, please. Don't do this." I spoke each word slowly and carefully, like a teacher to a student: "You will get caught."

"Then help me!" he shouted. His sudden tears seemed to steam in the crystal air. "Go with me and distract the guard. A moment is all I need. Just enough to hand over the bar. Please, Henk! Help me."

A part of me withered under his passion. We were just boys. Our world was one of many chores and few choices, and certainly not causes. And yet here was my brother, eager, it seemed, to get himself killed for the sake of a nameless stranger who could no more thank him for his gift than play chess with the Fuhrer.

"I could tell Mama and Papa," I said, although even as I spoke it, I knew I would not.

"Would you bring them into this?" he spat. "Make them accomplices?"

"If you are caught, it will make no difference. Do you think the Germans will believe them if they say they had no knowledge? Everyone will suffer. If I help you, maybe we will succeed. But what if we do not? Are you willing to risk the family for your whims?"

Pieter said nothing for a long time. The toes of his shoes carved arches out of the packed snow. My face stung from the slap of cold. My hands were growing numb. Pieter's lips were blue, but still nothing moved except the tips of his shoes, back and forth, back and forth. His breath drifted in smoky wisps out over the street.

Finally, he reached into his pants pocket and took out the chocolate bar. He held it clenched in a strangler's grip. "This is German chocolate," he said. "I want no part of it. I know Mama has said not to refuse that... woman. But that doesn't mean you can't throw it away later."

"Joop will not understand. He is only 5. But I promise never to take another bite. Is that enough?"

He searched my face for something I hoped he would find. With a snort, he turned and threw the bar. It spun end over end, a dark rectangle of color among the white rooftops, and disappeared over the edge. We watched its flight and when the chocolate was gone, Pieter stood and climbed back through the dormer. We stood there a moment, smelling of the cold, waiting for the feeling to come back into our fingers and the red to fade from our cheeks and noses.

The attic was a dark smudge after the brilliant blankness of the cityscape. I reached out and took hold of Pieter's shoulder, and when he did not pull away, I convinced myself we had come to an understanding of sorts. Had I agreed to his schemes, we would have had a conspirators' bond, and that is a powerful thing. Instead, we had only this small, symbolic act to bind us. It did not put my fears to rest, but at least for a time, it made them bearable.

Two months later, Papa was arrested.

NEXT WEEK: The snow, the cold and the increasingly scarce supply of fuel bring the disparate assortment of hotel residents to crisis.

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