Offcuts

Chapter One

Amsterdam

February 1941

The light goes early, as it does in the winter, suspending Merel Van Loon between who she has been when alone in her home, and what she’ll become when Pieter arrives; that is, inevitably again, a wife.

It is not until she hears the clanging rattle of his bicycle on the street that she looks down at herself and realizes she never dressed, still bundled in her houserobe from the morning. Touching the parlor window, the cold kissing her fingertips, she turns and swiftly climbs the narrow stairs to their bedroom, a desperate, sick feeling rising, fingers shaking, rushing so she will not be caught in a state of undress.

When she descends again, she has brushed her dark hair into a ponytail and put on a simple blue dress. She looks neat and, she hopes, calm. In the parlor, Pieter holds a Grolsch loosely by its green neck.

“There you are,” he says, but his voice is reserved and he doesn’t quite look at her. She grows aware of her naked face.

A mixed jenever and tonic sits on the sideboard. She takes up the icy glass, glancing at Pieter, who seems lost in thought. Crossing to the window she herself had just stood at, he puts his hand in his pocket and stares out toward the dark canal, visible in flickers from the soft cast of the lamp post.

“I think it will snow,” Merel says, uncertain. Her voice is too loud.

A gust of wind scrapes the naked tree branch into the glass. Merel flinches.

She drinks her cocktail straight down. The glass clinks when she sets it on the sideboard, but Pieter does not turn, not even when she brushes by him on her way to the stairs that go down into the kitchen.

A car drives past their house. For long after she can hear the sputter of its engine.

Their brick townhouse is on Singel and Brouwersgracht, at the edge of the canal belt. It is the right part of town, though the house is modest. Ten years earlier, she’d thought the spacious kitchen and laundry on the basement garden level, separate from the parlor and dining room on the main floor, charming. Pieter promised he’d buy a larger house as their family grew and as he rose in his position at the firm. But after Jordy, she’d wanted no more children. And after that—Merel shakes her head. There was no more talk of moving.

Overhead, Pieter’s footsteps cross the parlor to the radio. She knows it’s so, because he is dependable like that; every evening he turns on a broadcast for a few minutes while she prepares dinner, drinking his first beer. If she were with him, he’d find a music program she would enjoy, forgoing his news bulletin. She’s glad to be down here, away from him, glad he has something to enjoy. The quiet that has grown in and around them is, of course, her doing.

Muffled voices travel through the ceiling. Pieter believes they might be made to give their radios up, but Merel doesn’t believe it. The authorities will never be able to enforce such a thing in every house in Amsterdam. It is ridiculous to even think it.

Still, she looks toward the windows leading into the back garden, but can see nothing other than the twisted reflection of her own self.

There is leftover snert from Sunday that will do for supper, and she lights the stove, moving a spoon through the thick stew, loosening the vegetables from the fatty pork. Bread and butter, some cheese and jam. But her fingers tremble as she cuts the loaf, and the slices fall thick and jagged. The knife drops, clattering to the board. Her body does not feel right, her head too heavy, her breath too loud. These fingers, attached to these hands, she holds them up, close to her face, but does not recognize them as hers.

In time, she hears the radio turn off, and Pieter’s steps on the stairs. His tall, thin form appears in the kitchen, wavering in the doorway. A small frown on his face, a look of bewilderment. She thinks he does not know how he came to be here, any more than she. Pieces of him come slowly into focus: his long, skinny fingers, his boyishly snub nose, his blue eyes. His blond hair is mussed, and a thud knocks within her, for she understands he is troubled by something.

The soup burbles and she turns to the stove, stirring the spoon against the pieces stuck to the bottom of the pot. A scrape on the floor, and she knows he has sat at the table, in the spot with his back to the garden, as he always does, for he knows it makes her uncomfortable to have her back outward, that she likes to see the flowers and sky. Filling a bowl, she swallows her saliva down with the desire to throw the stew against the wall. Her hands shake. She sets the bowl in front of him. The clock on the wall ticks loudly.

“Another beer?” She takes a bottle from the cooling box, setting it on the table without waiting for his answer. The wooden board with the sliced bread comes next, scattering its crumbs across the tablecloth. She must remember to wipe the table off, but knows she’ll come down in the morning having forgotten, all the crumbs hardened and stale.

She sits down, folding her hands in the empty space on the table. He eyes her. “Are you not eating?”

“I had a late lunch,” she says. Pieter looks at her for a long moment, then bends his head over his soup. He eats rapidly, his spoon clinking against the side of the bowl. She pulls a slice of bread from the board, breaking off a small piece, toying with it.

“The Germans came into Hartog today,” he says abruptly, wiping his mouth with his hand, a habit she finds disgusting in a man of his age, and of his position. “Did you hear me?” Pieter says when she does not respond. “I said the Nazis came to my work today.”

Startled, she meets his eyes. “What?”

There is a sharp silence. This is why he is worried: he is concerned for his position. But there has been trouble before, and certainly there will be trouble again. Nearly, she says so, but she looks at the way his brows are drawn together, and decides against it.

“It is not good, Merel,” he says after a moment. “They are going to all the Jewish-owned businesses, looking through financial records, collecting information. I do not know why or what will come from it.”

“Will—” she pauses, uncertain as to what she’s asking.

He looks at her, a new softening in his eyes. “The Hartogs may lose everything, yes.”

The Hartogs. The name saws unpleasantly against her back teeth, like the scrape of a knife against a plate. She shakes her head. “No, I did not mean…I wonder only if it is time for you to find a new place. Surely, with this increased scrutiny, other companies will need a good accountant.”

Something flickers in Pieter’s eyes now when he looks at her, as if he was seeing a stranger, and she floods with heat.

In a low voice he says, “I will not abandon them now.”

“But to tie yourself to Jews, now, of all times—”

He slaps the table, and she jumps. “Enough. Don’t be stupid, Merel. This kind of talk is beneath you.”

How small he always makes her feel. “I am not stupid, Piet. I am thinking of your safety. Of ours.”

“Our safety?” His face darkens. “What use is our safety now? And what of theirs?”

A new trembling rattles within her, and she loses sight of him. This isn’t the Pieter she knows, always a calm, rational man. Is this to be the rest of their lives, then, meeting and re-meeting different versions of each other? How strange that no one warned her of it.

“These people are my family, Merel. They are our friends.”

“They’re not mine,” she says softly.

He drinks from the beer bottle. “I will not do anything to draw attention. I promise you. They just want records and paperwork for now. Okay,” he shrugs, “so I will provide what they ask. And if there is an error in any of the numbers, no one will know but me.”

“But…that could be dangerous, Pieter. You said yourself that you do not know why the Germans are doing this.” She presses her lips together, not knowing why she argues. It is the most they’ve talked in years; perhaps, she thinks, that is why.

A bleak look comes into his eyes, and it frightens her. Pieter Van Loon always has the answer; in the tumult after Jasper, when she was heartbroken and thought she’d never be sadder than she was right then, Pieter saved her; his steadiness had been alluring. At twenty-one, she’d fallen in love with a future, one of stability and predictability, with no surprises.

The beer bottle hits the table with a thunk. On cue, she rises and clears his place, putting the bowl in the sink, the bread and butter on the counter. The dish towel is damp still, and she runs it over the dishes in the drying rack, putting the cup and saucers back into the dark wood hutch, trying not to think of young Jakob and Daniel Hartog, or of Anna, their mother. There is no worry, she tells herself. There is no reason for worry.

“She’s pregnant,” Pieter says.

Merel stills.

“It would be good if—”

“No,” Merel grounds out. “Do not ask that of me.”

In the silence, everything else grows loud: the chug of a motor engine by the canal, the clock ticking on the wall, shrieking laughter from a passing girl, water dripping from the faucet.

Behind her, Pieter steps close; she senses him just there, his hovering breath, his reaching hand. Quickly, she slips to the side, withdrawing to the garden doors and staring out into the darkness. She thinks if he were to touch her, she’d crumble straight to the floor.

If her bones broke from one another and scattered to the floor she stands upon, Merel would feel no surprise. Her body has been kept as an urn, full of ashes. If she coughed, certainly a black cloud would erupt from her mouth. She exists in small fragments, holding herself tightly from elbow to waist so that she will not break, and she does not open her mouth for fear of losing anything more.

After a moment, he leaves the kitchen, escaping upstairs. The radio turns back on. She puts her arms around her waist, and holds her body close.

#

In the early weeks, after the Germans took over the Dutch government in May of 1940, life went on. Merel rode her bicycle across the canal bridges, passing shop windows full of goods for sale. The markets, when she shopped, were stocked with food. The German men in their ugly gray uniforms were visible in the streets, but they did little to interfere with the citizens. Only once did she witness a pair of Germans detaining an older woman wearing a head scarf, asking to see her papers. They’d looked at each other over her red, round face, laughing as she grappled through her purse with shaking hands. Merel had stood by, more curious than perturbed, watching until one of the soldiers looked her way. She gasped then, and fled on her bike, her heart beating a quick tempo.

But in late June, cycling through Dam Square, she skidded to a halt. Reeling, she looked around. Did no one see it? The sky, pure and blue, the gentle sun, flowers growing proudly in pots. Women strolling arm in arm, men in suits walking briskly back to the office, children chasing a ball, laughter floating upon the air.

Life, as it was, continuing on under the giant red flag, adorned with a black swastika, unfurled down the front of the Royal Palace.

#

Merel comes up the stairs, her feet heavy, feeling much older than her thirty-two years. The parlor door is ajar, and through it is Pieter, sitting in the rust-colored chair by the radio, his head leaned back, his eyes closed. Mahler’s Adagietto on the airwaves. Half hidden in the shadows, she watches his hands move lightly in time with the symphony. Free in some private way, his long neck exposed, a look of ease upon his face. A blear of embarrassment moves through her; the feeling that she shouldn’t see him like this. But why?

Her heels click on the black-and-white tiled floor and his head comes up. Again, the impulse of wanting to flee, but she forces herself to remain still. The weighted silence presses into her. Gazing at each other through the gap in the door, she realizes that whatever relief she’d seen upon his face has vanished.

He looks down into his glass, breaking their contact. Merel backs further into the shadowed hall, turning to climb the stairs, itching with discontent. Nothing changes; each icy morning she opens her eyes to the day stretching empty. The night comes as it always does, and with it the preparation of supper, the cleaning of dishes, the tidying of the house. The wireless switched on, the same droning voices, the same scratchy orchestral arrangements. She holds her head. Why can’t it all end?

At the top of the stairs is a small landing, two doors on either side, a bathroom straight ahead. On the left is her bedroom, and to the right, a smaller room. She pauses, as she does each night, in the doorway of the small bedroom. Jordy’s room. The moon slumps through the open curtains, illuminating the white walls and his neat bed, with its thin navy-blue blanket tucked tightly at the corners. A teddy bear, resting against his white pillow, has fallen on its side. She looks at it, doesn’t remember the bear being in this position yesterday. Pieter doesn’t like her in this room, and she falters, but then enters. He will understand that she must right the bear.

Placing the teddy on its rump, her fingers linger on its coarse tufted brown fur, the hard edge of the ribbon at its neck lightly scrapes her finger. Beertje. Little Bear. The same endearment that she and Pieter called Jordy, her son had bestowed upon his favorite toy as soon as he could garble together syllables. Slowly, she sinks to the mattress, hugging the animal to her breast. Little Bear. How long has it been since she thought of this? Each forgotten thing, a new sorrow.

Downstairs, the Mahler has ended. There is the fuzz of static, then a voice breaks in, uttering words too faint to hear. She puts the bear down and covers her face, choking a sob so Pieter will not hear. He thinks she is only prolonging her grief. But she has not told him how terrified she is to forget, how unfair she thinks it is that Jordy lived only five quick years. Every day, she suffocates. And these long, unbearable last five years. Why can’t it have been the opposite? That each day her son was alive could have been one hundred years. Squeezing her eyes closed, she imagines her son’s face, tries to remember how he’d felt as a baby in her arms, his warmth and solidity.

The grief, when they told her Jordy was dead, had been immediate and powerful, stunning her by how loudly it came. For a time, she’d become a woman beset by ferality. She returned again and again to that moment Jordy walked out the door, wishing she had said no, wishing she’d gone in his place, wishing to die, herself. But staying alive is her penance.

She had not asked for any of it, that is the thing; in the end, she had wanted so little. And even that was taken away.

After Jordy died, she’d been glad she’d chosen Pieter after all; she needed his constancy, how he never left her on the outside or disappeared into himself the way Jasper had. But when the wildness of her pain faded—that itself was another sorrow to learn, for she thought she’d be relieved by the lessening grief but was not—Pieter’s immutability was astonishing; she could not understand how he seemed so little changed, how he still woke each morning and went to work. There. At Hartog & Zonen.

Her own heart has shaped itself around the memory of her son in a different way than it had when he was alive. Now each flap folds together, encasing him tightly within her. If she stays this way, cold and inexpugnable, she might never have to say goodbye to him again. Neither of them, neither Merel nor Jordy, can ever be free. This is what Pieter does not understand.

Standing up from Jordy’s bed, she pauses, distracted by something she sees through the large window overlooking the street and canal below: the dark outline of a man leaning against the light post. A prickling rises across her skin. He is looking at their house.