The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

The war was stored in her memory unclearly, all out of order. In 1939, on a Monday, her father fell down the stairs. On Friday he had a nosebleed in a three-piece suit and was dead before month’s end. Nineteen forty-three was the year popular Vera called her shit-breath Isa, and so the rest of the class began to call her shit-breath Isa, too. In 1941 Louis got a little train for his birthday, which had an engine and went around and around and around. Bombs fell on Rotterdam. Trucks rolled over the loose bricks of the Sarphatistraat, where she and her mother got their pickles. She went to school, she walked home. Bombs fell on Amsterdam.

Their years in the east following the war were louder: chaos at the train stations, hollow-faced people wandering the streets on bare feet. Craters that filled up with rainwater, bunkers shaded green with moss. People showing up at the driveway to their new house to ask for coal, for food.

The house was empty, except for Isabel.

Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving. There was no one now, no one to walk through the door unannounced, no one to open and close a drawer in the other room. Outside, meadows. Outside, land and more land.

She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

“It was foul, St. Augustine wrote of his childish actions. It was foul and I loved it. I loved my own undoing.

I am not worried: Louis does not notice me much or the things I have or the things I do. He wants me! Obviously. He does not notice me.

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever.