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Isabel looked at her. “God,” Eva said, a sob. And then, all in a blurry rush: “I don’t, I don’t want to be rid of you, but what can we do, Isabel? What can we have? Louis is—The house—Isabel, can’t you see? In the end there will be nothing. Can’t you see how it’ll be just—” “I can’t,” Isabel said. “I can’t see. There must—” A car approached. Eva swallowed a word, an exclamation, turned away, went to arrange her face with her back turned to Isabel. Isabel took a step, took her elbow, said, “Don’t leave us. Eat with us, please, don’t leave me with him, stay, you must stay.” “I can’t,” Eva said.
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The look Eva gave her was wide and dark. Her mouth set as though in anger. It wasn’t anger. Isabel recognized it this time. Found it echoed in herself, a shiver. It wasn’t anger at all.
Eva closed her eyes the moment he was out of sight. Isabel touched her hand on passing: her smallest finger to Eva’s smallest finger. A touch, a hook, and gone. How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit.
10
FOR A BEAT, THE DISTANCE to the bed stretched like an open field, a thin horizon; she looked at it and did not know how long it would take to cross it. She looked at it and thought, This will go on forever. Then Eva said, “You let him kiss you.” The doorjamb dug into Isabel’s back. She leaned away from it. She said, “You let him take me away.” A flicker of an emotion. Eva tightened her jaw, said, “Did you—” She was still sitting primly. “Did you enjoy it?” She said it and then turned her face away. She meant the kiss. She meant Johan’s kiss.
Isabel, too full to be teased, came to stand behind her. Wrapped her arms around her, pressed her face to Eva’s neck and stayed there. Eva’s laughter went quiet. She let herself be held a moment. She stroked Isabel’s arms. She said, quiet, “Who are you?” She said, “Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?”
“I will have to go with Louis. You understand that, don’t you, Isabel?” “No,” said Isabel. “Darling,” Eva said. “You can’t.” “Isn’t it better than nothing?” Eva said. “Isn’t it enough?” Isabel took a breath to answer and found that she had no answer to give. Found that she did not know the precise meaning of the word enough, the way Eva used it—not what it meant in relation to another, in relation to her. She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open
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Eva stared at the diary. She looked—distant, out of it, and Isabel wanted to clap her hands, bring her back. Make her bear witness. She raised her voice, said, “Have you sold it? How much money could that have possibly been—a few spoons, a knife. Pathetic. I’m certain it was worth the trouble.” Eva said, tar rolled in gravel: “You are blind.” “I was, yes. I was, when it came to you. No more. No—” She touched the back of her hand to her lips, swallowed it down. She did not look at Eva. She said, “Leave.” The kitchen was silent. Isabel said, “Leave this house. Go get your suitcase, leave.”
12
She’s been gone ten years today. New diary. When she passed it snowed badly. It took very long for the rabbi to arrive. Tante Malcha got nervous and opened all the windows for the spirit to leave and Mum’s body turned blue in the bed.
Little baby Jesus everywhere. They have no problem letting Jews into their homes as long as they’re carved from wood, do they.
The sun in the mornings and the shadows of the trees on the curtain. It was dark & evening the time we drove there in ’46. We parked by the front of the house and so I couldn’t see anything except that the lights were on inside. Do I remember what the family who lived there looked like? No. I think I looked inside but maybe what I remember is made up. A few kids, younger than me, at the table and a big dinner. It was a cold night, I wanted to run away when that woman answered the door but I just stood there. Do I remember what they said to each other? They were shouting, and Mum said something
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She insisted on speaking to me. She wanted me to come have tea at a café at the corner. I thought, Oh, she has someone waiting there who will get me and send me to the Germans. That’s what I thought! And then I thought: that can’t happen anymore. Isn’t that strange, how that works? You can think something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore but still believe it in your bones.
When I went to leave she held on to my arm and said that I looked just like my mother, and that my mother was also such a pretty Jewess. I said please let me go. She said do you forgive me, tell me you forgive me. I said I forgive you so that she would let go. She did let go. Before I left I turned to her and I said, Who lives there now? And she said that a family without a father used to live there but the mother died a few years ago and that the two sons had since moved out. Only the daughter lives there now on her own. I said what are their names. And she told me their family name is Den
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I wonder if I ask him about the hearth in the kitchen will he have anything to say about it. Will he say, That is my favorite place in the house. That is where it gets warmest and where I can sit on a chair and hold the bare soles of my feet to the fire. I wonder if I ask him about the creak in the hallway and the firs and my mother’s spoons will he know which spoons I mean will he have used them will he know
She keeps this place so neat. Today she took out every piece of Mother’s hare china and rolled it in water with a hand soft like to a baby’s neck. She’s found a shard of the old broken plate in the garden and now keeps it on the mantel like some treasure. She’s all alone here. For years she has sat at the kitchen table all alone and taken my mother’s things into her hands and cleaned them.
I wonder if she remembers the time we almost met. After the war when I was sixteen and on that side of the door and she was only just a few years younger on this side of the door. Mum knocked and knocked and they wouldn’t let us in. Sometimes I can feel her eyes on me like it’s on my skin. I think she thinks I don’t notice. She looks at me like she wants to embrace me, hold me, and then I look back at her and she says the nastiest things. I want to see what happens if I crawl into the attic and hide and she can’t find me. Will she lose her mind? Will she turn the house upside down looking for
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Have I ever been a body before? I don’t know. I think I’m a body now. Last night she woke me up from a terror and held me like a straitjacket. I could feel I had skin where she touched and where I had bone and where I was human. God what sense does this make, none none, no sense, no sense at all. She wakes up before I do and gets breakfast ready so I can have it when I am awake and it makes me want to cry. People have done this before, it is not special, and still I want to cry. I should run God I should run why am I here
13
IT WAS SUMMER’S END. GRAY-BOTTOMED clouds and a three-day drizzle. Isabel lay on her back under the secretary desk and put her fingers to the etched initials: EDH. Eva had been born in this room. Her small hand was the hand that held a knife that carved this wood.
Knowledge came at her in flashes only, truth glimpsed from between a lattice, there and then gone: a hare let loose at a party, a box of toys in the attic, a child’s crayon drawing of a horse on a wall behind a wardrobe. The rhubarb. The trees. Every day she woke up and every day the house unfolded around her like a dark hand. She leaned into rooms and the rooms leaned away. Eva had looked at her face and had written of it: Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar. Isabel would not look at herself now, could not bear to see what Eva had seen. She tried to stand tall and found it too heavy a
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She said, “You bought the house.” “What house?” “Our house. During the war.” “I did,” he said. It was slow. He considered a moment, added: “For you. You and your brothers. Your mother.” “Was it…” She smoothed her hands over her skirt, over her knees. “It was empty,” she said it like it wasn’t a question, which it was. Karel reached for his biscuit. “What an odd thing to say, Isabel. What are you wanting to know? What an odd thing to ask. It was a house, the four of you moved in, of course it was empty.
Yes, a family lived there. But they left. They did not pay their mortgage, they did not pay their taxes. This happens, it happens every day, people make gambles they cannot keep, people pack up and leave and they don’t take their—their plates and their spoons. Goodness! Do you understand? It happens every day. There is nothing untoward here, Isabel. It’s the law.”
Isabel nodded. “You think I’m soulless,” she said. “That I don’t know—” “Of course I don’t think you’re—” “I do know. I do know what it means to want. To—to only want—” She’d raised her voice and was sorry for it now. It started raining. Hendrik looked at her, startled, and she wanted to tell him—wanted to be done with it, make it someone else’s burden. No one knew of her heart and no one knew of her grief and it was torture.
“What?” she said. “You resent him. For coming with me.” “No.” “You don’t approve.” “I—” He was still holding on to her. She was tired. She didn’t want to cry in front of Sebastian. “You’re lucky to have him, that’s all. You should know that. That it’s lucky, to have someone with you. Please let me go.”
“He has regrets, you know,” Sebastian added. “You could be kinder with him.” “He left,” Isabel said. The word was wet. “I know. But he regrets it. So do you, I imagine. It is what it is. It’s done. Tomorrow we leave, what can you do. I am scared, what can I do.”
“I will not marry,” said Isabel. “Isabel. Come now, what’s—” “I will never marry. I’m telling you.” “Don’t say that,” he said. “You don’t know that.” His coffee arrived. He used pincers to put in the sugar cubes: three. He said, “You just need to get out more. Don’t you have—friends? To take you out? Of course you’re never going to meet anyone cooped up in that depressing—” “Hendrik,” Isabel said, “will never marry.”
Isabel said it again: “Louis. I will never marry. Hendrik will never marry and I will never marry. Do you understand?” She reached out quickly—unplanned, desperate, placed her hand over Louis’s where it rested on the table. She gripped it, hard. “Do you understand?” Louis stared. His eyes were restless, back and forth. A flush rose: over his jaw, his neck. He swallowed. He looked at where her hand covered his, then back to her. She said, “Give me the house.”
The stairs to the basement were slippery. She rang the bell and heard it as loudly outside as it sounded inside. She retreated several steps, did not breathe. Eva opened the door. She was wearing two jumpers, one over the other. A pair of tights and socks. A scarf around her shoulders like a shawl. Her face was a blotchy red from the cold. Isabel’s chest clenched like a vise and did not let up.
“So what is this,” Eva said. “You’re not here to fight? You’ve come to apologize? You’ve come to weep at my feet and beg for forgiveness?” She added a laugh. She made to take a drag of her smoke and found it had gone out. She said, “I was born there. Did you know? You do now. You’ve read it. My father bought the house. He was a principal at a school. He died in the camps. He didn’t pay his mortgage because he died in the camps. That’s why the house was sold—because he didn’t pay his mortgage. Because he died.”
“I know. I know you didn’t. Isn’t that funny? No one ever knows anything in this country. No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where. Everything is a mystery. Knowledge is elusive. People disappear in the night and—” “I’m not speaking in riddles. I truly—I truly didn’t know, Eva, I—” Her voice was thick, and Eva heard it, said:
“Why did you?” Eva opened her mouth, closed it. A tremor, the dimpling of her chin. She looked like she might cry. She said louder than before: “Oh, I don’t know, Isabel. You were there, you…” She decided not to finish her sentence. She shook her head, looked at things around the room: the table, the bed, the ceiling. She was trying not to look at Isabel. She said to the lampshade covered in gauze: “You see, when you spend a very long time being—being quite invisible, really, and quiet, then… You see—” A halted word. “I thought you saw me. For a second there.” Isabel was quiet. A hand was
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Eva said, “You don’t know, what it’s—To have and to lose and have and lose over and over—” It did not take a big gesture to reach for her. She was, in the end, so close. Isabel took her in her arms and Eva pushed and sobbed and Isabel tugged and Eva pulled and then pushed and then held: twisted hands in Isabel’s shirt. She fit into Isabel’s neck. She fit perfectly. Isabel held her by the back of her head, held her by her ribs, shook and kissed what was near: her cheekbone, her ear, the dear line of her ear.
She put her forehead to Isabel’s chin. “And what if that’s you?” she said. “The thing that hurts? What if—it’s who you are? What if it’s where you come from and—” Isabel turned her face down: to be closer. To feel the words with the heat of her mouth. Eva whispered, “What will you do then?” Isabel’s hands under the wings of Eva’s shoulders. She could not answer. She could touch: Eva’s back, her face, the bruised skin under her eye. Eva leaned into it, leaned into her, and then went from her. Turned her back and stepped away—a hand to the table. The space was so small and they were still in
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And then: one quiet and freezing morning Isabel went for a walk. The trees stood bare and skeletal and beautiful with their fingers all crystal and white. The frost had made everything a crunch, the pastures and the fields and the gravel paths. The canals had frozen over. Isabel tested one with her foot and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you. The sun came up slow and blushing,
“Walk me through your tasks,” and Neelke had given her a look that said: It’s you who gives me my tasks. Still, she did. They went from the kitchen to the living room, they considered the curtains and the duster and the oil that needed to be applied to the staircase railing. They went through the linens and the name of the washer who did the job in town, they went through the bathroom and the beds and the silver and the windows. Isabel said, “It’s quite a lot, isn’t it.” And Neelke, with a frown, said: “It’s a house.” She said, “There’s always a lot to do in a house.”
She went to town and sent out her mail and picked up the linen from the cleaner’s. She went by the grocer’s, she went by the cheese farmer, she turned onto the Schoutenstraat on her way to her car and came to a standstill. She had seen the synagogue before. She had seen it as she had seen most buildings in Zwolle: as places that were either there for her or not there for her. The post office, broad and surrounded by trees: for her.
The synagogue, an undefined broad facade, had not been for her. With its red brick and inlaid windows and a wrought iron fence it sat like a bad taste, a bad memory of something old. She had walked by it before and had quickened her pace. She had tried not to think of it too much, she did not wonder at the people behind its doors—how many of them were left at all. The lettering above the windows looked frightening: she did not know what it meant, what it said. It could mean anything. She could not read it and it could mean anything. She considered it now again.
The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it. Isabel found the quote. For my house will be called, she read, finger next to the number seven, a house of devotion for all.
She opened the door. “I walked from the station,” Eva said. Her teeth were chattering. She was in a hat but the ends of her hair that peeked out below had frozen. Her shoes weren’t winter shoes. She laughed and said, “I didn’t—think, God this was a bad idea, oh God I should—” She made as if to turn, as if to go away, and Isabel reached out and didn’t touch her—was careful this time. “No,” she said. “No, please—please don’t go. Please. Come in. You’re—you’re freezing, come in.”
Isabel reached for a glass and now knew what it meant to be so distracted by another’s presence that she could barely move. Now she knew of that suffering, too. She poured the wine, miserable. She gave Eva the wine and found that her heart had not grown any lighter over the months, had not grown any lighter at the sight of Eva. She loved her. She might always.
“Ah. Is that what you wanted me here for?” Eva said. “Is that what you wanted to give me? Boxes?” She turned to Isabel. “Did you want to send me off with boxes?” “No,” she started, but Eva would not let her answer, added a fast: “Packed it all away. Very neat, very efficient. Can’t imagine you wanted all of that lying around, now knowing who it belonged to, knowing—” “That’s not true,” Isabel said. Eva
“I know,” Isabel said, and she did—knew it in her bones, in her marrow, had been haunted by it for weeks, months. Eva, a teen wrapped in her own arms, outside by the bush, waiting as her mother screamed to be let in, to have her house back. Eva before the war, a child, collecting her things in a box, colored pencils and a doll with long hair and a little stuffed hare.
