Chasing Shadows Page 24

  She swallowed hard, struggling to speak the next words. “Then we have to decide what we’re going to do. Should we keep seeing each other even though we’re on opposite sides, or say goodbye?”

  “No,” he groaned. “I don’t want to say goodbye. You’re the only person who makes my life bearable. I need you, Ans. I need your goodness and your love to make up for all the things I’m forced to see and do every day.”

  “Would it help if you talked to me about it?” She knew how much she longed to unload the burden she was carrying.

  “I can’t talk about my work.”

  “Because you aren’t allowed to or because it’s too hard?”

  “Both.” They sat in silence watching a duck waddle out of the canal, shaking its feathers. Erik gently caressed her shoulder, giving her comfort.

  She lifted his other hand to her lips and kissed it. “I don’t want to lose you, Erik. But I can’t stop doing my work.”

  “Ans, please . . . how can I make you understand how dangerous—?”

  “I know how dangerous it is. But I’m a Christian, and my faith compels me to fight against evil.”

  Erik wouldn’t know what she meant because he didn’t know Jesus. But maybe that was why she needed to stay with him, so she could share her faith with him. She swiveled on the bench to face him. “Erik, you know that what the Nazis are doing is wrong. You know it.”

  “Yes, but please don’t talk about it in public,” he said in a low voice. “You might be overheard.”

  “And then what? What would happen if someone overheard me?”

  “I can’t speak of the things they would do.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! They’re evil! The whole point of my faith, the whole point of why God sent His Son, is to destroy evil and rescue mankind. I have to do the same. Any goodness you see in me is only because of Christ.”

  Erik tilted his head back and gazed up as if searching for words written in the sky. “It’s very hard for me to understand your . . . zeal,” he said when he looked at her again. “I’ve seen Christianity only as an outsider, and I have to say that what you are compelled to do seems . . . extreme. And foolhardy.” He searched her face, perhaps afraid he’d been too blunt.

  “It didn’t make much sense to me, either, even though my parents and grandparents are Christians. I grew up going to church and hearing my papa read from the Bible after our meals, but it didn’t seem to have any connection with my life. Attending services twice every Sunday didn’t make any difference in people’s lives, as far as I could tell, so why suffer through them? I left home and came to Leiden because I thought there must be more to life than what I’d seen so far. Then the war started, and for the first time I saw that real evil exists in this world.”

  “But it always has existed. I see it every day as a policeman. We arrest the criminals if we can, but it’s a drop in the sea. What can you and I do to stop evil when it’s all over the world?”

  “We can fight it. Work to destroy it. Listen, not many soldiers on either side of this war really want to go into battle and risk their lives. But they do it because they believe in the cause they’re fighting for. Nazi soldiers fight because they believe in the Third Reich. Allied soldiers fight because they believe in freedom and liberty.”

  “You aren’t a soldier, Ans.”

  “As a Christian, I’m supposed to be. I go into this battle and risk my life because Jesus gave His life for me. He told us to love each other the way He loved us, which means giving our lives for one another.”

  “And what good will that do?” He was growing agitated, losing patience. “We can’t defeat them. They’re too powerful!”

  “Jesus said that when we put others ahead of ourselves, the world will see God’s love through us.”

  Erik didn’t reply. She wondered what he was thinking. Ans knew she couldn’t expect him to grasp so quickly what had taken her years to finally understand. She needed to be patient and give him time. “I love you, Erik,” she said. She hoped, for now, that he understood that much.

  “And I love you. More than I can ever say with words. I want to shelter you and protect you. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you.”

  “I know. But when we’re apart, you can trust the God I serve to take care of me.”

  He drew a deep breath, then sighed and said, “All right.” After looking around to see if anyone was watching, he took Ans’s face in his hands and kissed her, tenderly at first, then passionately. “Let’s just be together and hold each other as often as we can,” he murmured when he finished, “so we can forget about everything else for just a little while.”

  Two days later, Ans met with Havik outside a pharmacy on Rapenburg Street. They greeted each other as if they had met by chance, then bent their heads together. “Tell Professor Huizenga to go to the train station at 5:10 tomorrow afternoon to meet his ‘relatives,’ Max and Ina Huizenga. Their cover story is that they were forced to evacuate from Scheveningen.”

  “How will he recognize them?”

  “Max will wear a white boutonniere. Are you still dating your policeman?” The abrupt change in subjects made her pause.

  “Yes . . . Yes, we love each other, and—”

  “Make sure you tell him that you have refugees from the coast staying with you. We need these people to hide in plain sight, and if you act like you’re keeping secrets from him, it will arouse his suspicions.”

  Ans wanted to repeat that Erik loved her and that she trusted him with her secrets, but she remained silent.

  “I understand you’re in need of a new housekeeper and a cook,” Havik continued as strangers passed them on the street.

  “Eloise let her last cook and housekeeper go when our Jewish friends needed to be hidden. We had no idea if they could be trusted.”

  “You’ll receive a new live-in cook and housekeeper in a day or two. I trust you have room for these assistants?”

  Ans nodded. “But what if the Gestapo returns to search the town house? They’re still looking for our Jewish friends.”

  “Everyone under your roof will have a regular Dutch ID card. They’ll all have legitimate reasons for living there. And now I need to go. We’ve talked too long.”

  Eloise and the professor went to the train station the next day to meet their new relatives from Scheveningen. Ans stayed home to cook dinner so it would be ready when they arrived. She’d been doing all the cooking with only a little help from Eloise and was getting tired of it. The Huizengas were probably getting tired of her farm-style soups and stews too. She hoped the new cook that Havik sent really did know how to cook.

  “My cousin Max is going to need a place to do his work,” Professor Huizenga told them over dinner. “He was a skilled draftsman before the Nazis fired him for being Jewish, and his skills are now being put to use altering identification cards. He tells me he’s very good at signatures.”

  “Especially Nazi ones,” Max said. He and the professor exchanged smiles. Ina and Max were in their late sixties and seemed devoted to each other. Their only son and his family had fled to England before the war, and it had been nearly two years since they’d heard from them.

  “Won’t Max’s work need to be hidden?” Eloise asked. Ans thought she seemed distant from the couple as they ate dinner together, almost as if she was reluctant to get to know them and grow fond of them.

  “Naturally,” her husband replied. “We’ll take a tour of the house after dinner and see about finding a secure place where he can work.”

  In the end, Max decided to set up his work space in the attic. The buzzer to warn of a Gestapo raid was still in place. The dormer window offered light, and the wooden crate would hide his forgery tools and serve as a desk. Ans taught him how to walk on the narrow rafters as Miriam and Avi had done. As displaced relatives of Professor Huizenga, Max and Ina could settle into one of the third-floor bedrooms, hiding in plain sight. The town house curtains could be opened during the day again
.

  Ans brought blank identity cards to Max, stolen by the Resistance from various government offices. She traveled by bicycle or train to deliver the newly forged cards to her underground contacts in Amsterdam and Den Haag.

  Not long after Max and Ina moved in, the town house’s new cook and housekeeper arrived. Sientje and Meta were Jewish sisters-in-law in their early fifties from Amsterdam. Their husbands, who were brothers, had been partners in a small accounting firm and had paid to safely smuggle all of their adult children across the border into Switzerland. The women had gone into hiding just before the first roundups began in Amsterdam and now hoped that their husbands had also found safe refuge. Sientje and Meta gladly agreed to share the servants’ quarters behind the town house’s kitchen and to take over the cooking and cleaning duties. All of the newcomers seemed to settle in very well.

  Ans was preparing to leave to fetch a new batch of stolen ration cards a few days later when she noticed that Eloise hadn’t joined the others for breakfast. The professor had left earlier for his job at the bank, so Ans went looking for her. She found her sitting in her sumptuous bedroom, rocking in place and staring out the window. Ans had seen Eloise this way before and knew it meant the beginning of a downward spiral into depression. Ans crossed the room and knelt on the floor beside her. “Talk to me, Eloise.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “I know you must be tired after working so hard to get everyone settled. They’re going to be safe here. Max is able to do his work, and it’s going to make a difference in so many people’s lives. You’re doing it, Eloise. You’re fighting back like you wanted to do.”

  Eloise still didn’t reply as she rocked in place, her elegant hands clenched into fists.

  “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

  “We’re losing the war,” she said, still gazing through the window.

  “No, we’re not. The Americans have joined the Allies, like they did in the first war.”

  “I’m going to lose everyone I love again. Miriam and Avi and their baby . . . they’re gone. They were like family to me, and they’re gone.”

  “Eloise, listen—”

  “You need to leave me too. Aren’t you supposed to go meet your contact now?”

  “Yes, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. And I’ll be safe.” Even as she said the words, Ans knew she was making a promise she couldn’t keep. “Why don’t you take some of your medicine before I go?” Ans hated to suggest it, knowing that the drug would put Eloise to sleep and cause the brilliant, vibrant, animated woman she knew and loved to disappear. But at least she wouldn’t harm herself.

  “Yes . . . perhaps I should take it now. I would like to go to sleep.” And never wake up. Eloise didn’t say the words, but Ans knew she was thinking them.

  CHAPTER 36

  MARCH 1943

  The doll had been an extravagance, but well worth it. “Oh, Mama! Pretty!” Bep had exclaimed when she’d torn away the wrappings to see her birthday present. “Look, Papa! Look, Opa!” She circled the kitchen table showing off her doll and collecting birthday kisses along the way.

  According to her birth certificate, Bep was two years old on this wintry March day. Lena had been raising rabbits this winter, hiding them from the Nazis, and had sold three of them in town to pay for the doll. Seeing the joy it brought this child she now thought of as her daughter made Lena glad for the sacrifice, even if it meant less meat in their soup this month. Maaike had sewn a tiny coat for the doll from an old blanket, and Wim had carved a pair of little wooden shoes for her. Papa had saved up enough sugar from his rations for Lena to bake a small cake.

  Bep was still hugging her doll as Lena tucked her into bed that night beside her big sister, their tummies full of cinnamon cake. Bep had outgrown her crib and had moved into Maaike’s bed, where Ans used to sleep. Friends from church had loaned Lena clothes as Bep had grown from a baby into a toddler, and Lena had cut down and resewn some of Maaike’s clothes as well, including a warm winter coat.

  “Everyone in bed?” Pieter asked when Lena returned to the kitchen.

  “All tucked in. What time will your friends get here?”

  “Not for another hour.”

  “Did you take the rest of the soup out to the barn? Will it be enough for everyone?”

  “I think so. We have fewer onderduikers this month than in February.”

  “So I won’t need to make such a large pot next time?”

  “Likely not.”

  Lena fetched dried kidney beans from the root cellar, rinsed them, then put them in a bowl to soak overnight. For the past few months, her barn and windmill had housed dozens of furloughed officers from the Dutch army who had gone into hiding after the Nazis redrafted them in January. Only a tiny percentage of them had shown up to register, while the rest had become onderduikers along with the thousands of students who had gone under after so many of the universities in the Netherlands had closed.

  “Where can all of these men possibly hide?” Lena had asked when the registration had been announced. “Our country is so small and so flat. And it’s not like they can escape across any of our borders.”

  “Heaven knows,” Pieter had replied. Now he added more wood to the kitchen stove while they waited for the rest of his small Resistance cell to arrive. With the beans soaking, Lena sat down beside the kerosene lamp to do the mending. The Nazis had imposed rationing on gas and electricity, making it difficult to do chores after dark without using their precious supplies of kerosene.

  “One of our onderduikers is a former army officer,” Pieter said. “He wants to help with the robbery tonight.”

  Lena managed a small smile. “My husband the burglar. That’s something I never imagined you would become when I married you. Are you nervous?” He’d been pacing from the stove, to the kitchen door, to the door that led into the barn—then back to the stove again, peering through the window into the ink-dark night each time he passed it.

  He sighed and raked his fingers through his thick hair. “To be honest, I am nervous. But this has to be done. The underground needs those ration cards.”

  “Everything is becoming more and more dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Ja. But we have no choice. We have to fight back. You know we do. For the same reasons that I had to train and fight in the army.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice soft. She had accepted her husband’s role as an underground soldier, but she didn’t have to like it. She put down her mending for a moment. “Are we getting anywhere, Pieter? It seems like the Nazis are everywhere, and more of them than ever in the village. That’s why . . .” She didn’t want to finish.

  “What, Lena?”

  She hated telling Pieter how frightened she was, knowing that it wouldn’t change his mind, knowing he hated to hurt her. But Lena had no one else she could confide her fears to, and sharing them sometimes helped to lighten her load. “It was one thing for you and your little gang of knokploegen to steal a pig or two so the Nazis wouldn’t get them. But this . . . this is different.”

  Last fall, Pieter had banded together with other farmers to steal pigs, one at a time, from their neighbors. Lena had worked all night with the other women to help butcher and clean them. The meat was distributed among several families, who would smoke it, cure it, or make sausage with it, along with their own butchered hogs. The aggrieved farmers, who were in on the thefts, would report them to the authorities, but of course the thieves would never be caught. It meant less meat would go to feed enemy soldiers.

  “None of us like doing dangerous work,” Pieter said, “but we’ll need to get used to it. According to Wolf, we’re going to do even more in the months ahead.”

  “Sabotage?”

  Pieter nodded.

  Within an hour, his fellow knokploegen had all arrived—some on foot, some by bicycle, and some traveling down the canals by boat. They were fellow farmers, men Pieter could trust with his life. The former Dutch officer slipped in from the barn to join
them, and they sat around the kitchen table in the dim light of the kerosene lamp, talking quietly. Lena would have offered them tea or coffee if she’d had any. She sat with her mending, thinking how strange it seemed to have celebrated Bep’s birthday around this table only a few hours earlier.

  “The ration cards arrived at the post office this afternoon,” Pieter began. “I’ve been in the mail-sorting room before, so I’m pretty sure I can find my way around in the dark. It shouldn’t be hard to find the packages.”

  “Have you told the postmaster what we’ve planned?” one of the men asked. “He’s a relative of yours, isn’t he?”

  Pieter glanced at Lena for a moment. “His wife and Lena are cousins. But no, I’ve decided not to involve him.”

  “Why not? He hates the Nazis as much as we do. He’ll look the other way.”

  “He might even help by leaving the door unlocked so we won’t make a commotion breaking in.”

  “I’ve thought it all through,” Pieter said, “and if we don’t involve him, he’ll be able to report the robbery with a clear conscience. And if the Nazis apply pressure, he won’t have any idea who we are.”

  “Doesn’t he live above the post office? What if he hears us and comes down? We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “We’ll have to take that chance.”

  “Pieter’s right,” the officer said. “These missions should involve as few people as possible. I’m sorry to say, but it isn’t safe to trust our own relatives in these times.”

  “Where will we hide the ration cards afterwards?” someone asked.

  “We’ll bring them back here.”

  Lena froze at her husband’s words, her mending falling limp in her lap.

  “That’s a huge risk to take if you’re caught with them, Pieter,” one of the men said.

  “I have a cache where I can hide them. My contact with the Resistance knows where it is. They’ll be safe until he picks them up.”