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Thaw: Part 3

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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 16, 2009

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the third installment of Tribune staffer Michael Winter's novella about a Dutch family coping with the upheavals of German occupation during World War II. It runs in four parts, publishing each Sunday through Jan. 25.

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, Part III

We waited seven hours. None of us left the kitchen. Through the windows, we watched the day grow dim. The wind rattled the panes against the sills, and there was ice in the corner of the glass. Joop asked many questions that I could not answer: Would they beat Papa? Would we go away like the Jews had? What about the medicine for Papa's ulcers? How will he survive without it? Is Mama going to jail, too? I could only shake my head. I do not know. I do not know. Please, Joop, be still. I do not know. Everything will be all right.

Finally he nestled into the crook of my arm and began crying again. But he wept silently, and after a time, his breathing was deep and regular and he was asleep.

Pieter did not speak. He sat in the corner, his chair turned and his back to me. With his thumbnail, he picked away the paint from the window frame until there was a strip of bare wood near his head and white chips covering his lap like pieces of eggshell.

I tried to speak to him once. It was late in the afternoon. Mama and Papa had been gone for perhaps four hours. The hotel was silent. The prisoners had stopped ripping apart the paneling. They must have been asleep. Soon, they would be roused to trudge back to the tracks and repair the new holes. We had heard the bombs falling earlier, twisting the rails so the prisoners could put them straight again.

I must have dozed. When I looked up at the windows, the light was nearly gone. My arms and legs were cramped and numb. Joop had slid to an impossible position in his chair. He snored softly, drooling against my leg. I shifted my weight, feeling the first tingling of restored circulation in my toes and fingertips, and glanced in Pieter's corner. He was awake and staring at me. That's what I thought at first. And then I began to think that perhaps he was asleep after all, asleep with his eyes open, eyes pointed in my direction but not seeing me. Eyes veiled in black dreams. His stare was blank, unblinking, unflickering. I became so convinced he was asleep that I leaned to the right as far as I could, as if to peek around the kitchen door. His eyes followed me.

"You're awake," I said, not liking the hollow sound of my voice. It rang through my head like a scream in an empty church. Pieter did not answer. His eyes moved to follow my head as I righted myself in the chair. Joop sighed and shifted beside me. I was grateful for the tiny sound of his breathing.

"It's almost dark," I said, turning to the window and away from his gaze, and then, because I did not want the silence to return: "The Germans will wake the prisoners soon. They will be busy, I think. The bombs, they are too much. The war cannot continue like this. The bombs are everywhere."

Still he said nothing. I watched the light fade in silence. My face hurt where Pieter had scratched me, and I took great satisfaction in those wounds. The fire in the kitchen stove had gone out during the afternoon. The room was cold now, almost cold enough to see our breath. The shutters Papa had scavenged this morning rested in the corner. They were made of thick, dense wood and painted green. If I could break them up, they would keep us warm for several hours, maybe all night. But I did not want to move and feel Pieter's eyes on me. And now that the silence had retuned, I was loath to break it.

I reached up to the clothesline and stroked the shirt Mama had been washing before Papa came home. I did not look at Pieter. It was dry and I pulled it down and covered Joop with it and I did not look at Pieter. I blew into my hands and cupped my cold nose in my palms and I did not look at Pieter.

When the clock in the hall struck eight, I heard the usual sounds of groaning and coughing from the prisoners. It was time to go to work. The guards spoke to them, low barking orders that held neither malice nor interest. Still, I was grateful for even these muted sounds. Joop awoke and looked up at me in sleepy confusion.

"Where is Mama?"

"Shush. She is still out."

"I want Mama," he whined, already on the verge of tears.

"Go back to sleep. Mama will be back soon."

"With Papa?"

"I don't know. Sleep now."

But Joop would have none of it. He squirmed out of my grasp and slid to the floor. In the hall, the prisoners filed by. One of them, a younger man in the tattered remains of a Polish officer's heavy overcoat, reached down and ran his fingers through Joop's hair. He did it mechanically, without turning his head. The guards did not seem to care.

When they were gone, I pulled a potato from among the half-dozen soaking in a pot on the cold stove. "Here," I said, cutting it into slices. "Let's eat supper. Are you hungry, Joop?" I held out a slice to him, and he silently took it and began gnawing as his eyes grew heavy again. But now that the hotel was nearly empty, I did not want him going back to sleep. I was afraid of the silence. The silence and Pieter's eyes upon me.

Just then the kitchen door swung open with a bang and there was Papa, striding through the room in long, quick steps that took him into the hall and up the stairs before any of us could more than gasp at his sudden, explosive entrance.

"Papa!" Joop cried, dropping his morsel and reaching out for the hem of his coat. But if Papa heard him, he gave no sign. He brushed past him and was gone without a glance to his left or right. A moment later Mama stood in the doorway, shaking a light dusting of snow from her collar and stamping her boots against the low sill of the stoop.

"Mama," I said. "What happened? Is Papa going to prison?" Joop was tangled in her legs, half-hidden in the folds of her coat. Even from several feet away, I could feel the cold radiating off it.

"No, Papa is back with us. He will not go to prison. Now quickly, gather as many clothes as you can carry in your suitcases. We must leave."

"Leave?" It was Pieter. He stood in the middle of the room, hands at his sides, clenching and unclenching. "What do you mean? Where are we going?"

"Away from here. The hauptmann said we must leave. It is the only way." She moved briskly, not looking at us, not even at Joop, who clung to her skirt like a moth. She began to gather up what few kitchen items we still possessed.

"Where will we go?" Pieter demanded. "This is our hotel. Papa owns it. They cannot make us leave. This is our hotel," he repeated.

"They can do anything they want. It was the only way the hauptmann and the acting mayor would dismiss the charges against your father." I thought something passed over her face then, a shudder or twitch, something deep and profoundly sad. I reached out to her, but she turned away, busying herself with the packing. When she faced me again, she was tight-lipped and determined, an old and familiar look.

Pieter remained where he stood, rooted in place by outrage. "I will not go!" he stammered. "They cannot make me!"

"You will go and you will not make a fuss." My mother's voice was a thin dry rustle, low and ominous. She continued packing. "Now go get your things. We must be gone within the hour."

"No! I'm staying here!"

She was across the room before I realized she was in motion, grasping Pieter by the shoulders, shaking him with each word hissed through clenched teeth. "You WILL go! If we stay, we will be shot, and I will not allow that to happen. Do you understand? That … will … NOT… happen!"

Pieter swayed under her grip, rigid and pale.

"You will live. Your father will live. We all will live. And if that means dragging you out of here kicking and screaming, so be it."

I saw her head dip, as if she were on the verge of collapse, and I took a quick step toward her, placing a hand on her shoulder. I could feel her quivering beneath the thick fabric of the coat and for a moment, I thought she was going to fall. I braced myself to catch her, but instead of her weight in my arms, I felt her stiffen and shift away from me. She raised her head, and in her face there was no mercy. Not for Pieter. Not for herself. Not for any of us.

"Now pack your things. We are leaving." She let go of Pieter's shoulders, and when she turned from him, I saw her for the first time not as my mother, but as a distinct individual, independent from me and Pieter and Joop and Papa. A person without boundaries or definitions. She was an old woman; old, yes, I could see that now, old beyond her years, but hard, too. A figure callused by more than the war, more than the occupation and what had occurred today. What had her life been like before my life began? I wanted to know. In that instant, I desperately wanted to know.

It took only a few minutes to pack. Everything I owned fit into a small satchel: a few shirts, a pair of patched and faded corduroy pants, socks, underthings. And, of course, my coat, hat, scarf, boots and mittens. I helped Joop with his small things.

"Can I take Mr. Hop-A-Long?" he asked. Mr. Hop-A-Long was a small metal frog. It had a key poking out of its side. There was a coiled spring inside. When it had been new, it would hop when the key was turned, but Joop had over-wound it a few months earlier and sprung the mechanism. Now it just sat there with one leg tucked under its belly and the other stretched out, frozen in midleap.

"It's broken," I said, but made no move to take it from him.

"So? It's mine. I want to take it." He ran a hand over its chipped back. Then, in a lower voice, "are we going to jail, Henk?"

"No."

"Then where are we going?"

"I don't know. To another place. Mama and Papa will take care of us."

"I'm afraid." Mr. Hop-A-Long stared up at him with painted eyes.

"We're all afraid. It will be all right. Take your frog. You must be brave for him."

"It's just a piece of metal." Joop tossed it into the suitcase, but he asked no more questions. When we were done, he took his things and looked up at me with eyes as flat and dry as his toy. I turned quickly away.

We gathered around the kitchen stove one last time, all of us. In addition to a small suitcase, Mama had stuffed her pockets with utensils, and under her coat a frying pan was tucked in the crook of her arm. All of us carried blankets draped over our shoulders. We were tortoises. Our world extended as far as the ends of our fingertips. We were self-contained.

Papa came into the kitchen and stood with us, holding his hands over the cold stove as if warming them. No one moved. The hotel was silent except for our breathing. In a few moments, we would be homeless. I wanted to look around one last time, memorize every corner, every niche. There was something growing inside me, a negative space, a vacuum. I could feel it melting away my connective tissues, my sinews, until everything collapsed in a tangle at the bottom of me. I would rattle when shaken.

Finally, Papa looked up. I was shocked. Here before me was not the man I had known this morning. This was an ancient thing, ancient and dried. Sometimes in the winter we would find a cicada husk still clinging to the side of a tree, translucent like the skin of an onion, hollow. This man was empty. Someone had made a slit, and my father had fallen free of his old skin. This was not my father. This was an imposter.

Pieter saw it as well, and I was struck by the grim certainty that my brother would never draw anything again. Never. Father's metamorphosis would still his pencil as surely as losing his hands.

"You should have left me in jail." Papa's voice was thin and harsh. It came from some small place in the center of his chest.

Mama straightened, filled with a terrible, burning strength that sucked the breath out of me. Such strength would consume any who came too near, but for an agonizing moment, I was overcome with such love for her I wanted nothing more than to embrace her and turn to ash within the fire of her resolve.

"Don't be a fool," she said evenly.

"I would have preferred death. At least I would have died knowing my family was without shame. My wife was without shame."

Mama did not flinch. In her ragged coat with spoons and forks and knives gleaming from the pockets, she looked like a beggar woman, but her shoulders were square and her jaw was set.

"I am sorry they told you. They wanted to be cruel, to hurt you one last time. But I will never be sorry for saving your life. God will be my judge, no one else. Not the Germans. Not the hauptmann. And not you."

"It will never be the same between us."

Mama smiled then, a tired grin, but one that still touched her eyes.

"But you will live. That is enough. You will live!"

And without another word, she spun and stormed out of the kitchen, leaving the rest of us to gather our things and follow her into the dark and the cold.

NEXT WEEK: As the winter drags on, family bonds prove stronger than the forces that would sever them.

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