Eastbound

Chapter 1

Amsterdam, winter 1942

The city had not gone quiet. It had only learned to keep its voice down.

Trams still ran. Their bells carried through the cold, thin and distant, as if even sound had grown cautious. People still moved through the streets, but no one drifted any more. They walked with purpose. Conversations ended quickly. Front doors closed at once. Windows gave away less than they once had.

Pieter Vermeer stood outside the garage where he worked, his collar turned up against the wind off the canal. It got through all the same. It always did. After a while you stopped bracing against that kind of cold. You simply carried it.

Behind him, the garage stood open as usual. One car was up on its supports with a wheel off. Tools lay on the bench where they had been left. The smell of oil and metal drifted out into the street, steady and familiar. Piet liked that smell. It still belonged to a world that made sense. Metal wore down. Bolts came loose. Gaskets failed. If something had gone wrong, there was usually a reason for it, and if you listened properly, you could often find that reason.

The work had changed, though. There were fewer parts now, and what came in stayed longer than it should have. Engines that ought to have been stripped and rebuilt were patched instead. Worn pieces were cleaned, adjusted, and put back. Nothing was thrown away if it could be made to serve again. Even a machine that should have been finished could often be coaxed a little further if you were patient.

That part suited him. It asked for attention, not charm. You listened, watched, and kept at it until the fault showed itself. Often you heard it before you saw it. A break in the rhythm. A drag where there should have been none. Once you noticed it, you could not stop hearing it.

That was how the city felt now.

Even the garage had changed in ways that had nothing to do with engines. Rags were washed out and used again. Oil was stretched. Small parts went missing and stayed missing. Men who came in for work did not always want the work done straight away. Sometimes they only wanted to stand in the doorway and ask if anyone had heard anything. About a nephew. A neighbour. A man from church. Someone who had gone in for questioning and had not come back when he should have. Their voices dropped without being told. After a while they stopped asking as openly.

Jan Bakker stood beside him, talking about football. He had probably been talking for several minutes already. Piet caught bits of it. A player’s name. A match from weeks before. A pass that should have been made. None of it stayed in his head.

He nodded once at what seemed like the right point.

Jan carried on. That was how it usually worked. Jan filled silences as if he had been born knowing how, and when things were strained he talked even more, as though words themselves might keep trouble back.

Piet did not mind. It saved him from having to say much.

“You’re not listening,” Jan said.

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

Piet gave a small shrug. “Just thinking.”

“That’ll get you in trouble.”

There was no smile with it.

Piet kept his eyes on the street. A woman went past with a basket over her arm, walking faster than she needed to without quite hurrying. A man on a bicycle slowed at the corner, looked down the side street, then rode on. Two boys crossed the road without speaking, one a few paces ahead of the other. Neither looked back.

No one lingered anywhere now. If they could help it, they kept moving.

It had not always been like that.

There were things Piet had heard without really hearing them. Names mentioned once, then dropped. Men gone from one day to the next. Streets spoken of quietly, then not spoken of at all. He had learned not to pull at those things. There was work. There was always work. You went where you were needed, did what was in front of you, and kept out of the way.

Still, something felt wrong.

Not enough to name. Just there.

Like an engine running unevenly.

He felt it again and straightened slightly.

Jan noticed. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You always say that.”

Piet let it go.

Across the canal a shutter banged once in the wind and was shut at once from inside. Somewhere further off a tram bell rang twice and then was swallowed by the cold. From inside the garage came the faint metallic tick of a cooling engine. Small sounds. Ordinary ones. But each of them seemed to stand out more than it should have, as if the city had gone hollow and was carrying every little thing a bit further.

Jan was still talking, though more slowly now. Even he had begun to feel it.

He heard the truck before he saw it.

The engine did not belong to the street. It was heavier than the usual traffic, louder too, pushing through the rest of the city’s noise instead of blending with it. Piet felt it in his chest before the vehicle turned into view.

Jan heard it as well. He stopped in the middle of a sentence. “That’s not—”

The truck came too fast for the narrowness of the road, then braked hard and pulled up.

No one said anything.

No one ran.

They knew better.

The doors opened. Boots hit the ground. German voices followed, clipped and direct.

“Alle Männer hier. Papiere.”

After that it happened quickly. Not chaotically. Just quickly.

Men were pulled off the pavement and turned where they stood. A boy too young for any of it was grabbed by the arm before he had worked out what was happening. Someone protested too loudly and was shoved back against a wall hard enough to silence him.

The street changed around them. People stepped away without seeming to. A door shut. A curtain twitched, then stayed still.

Piet slipped a hand inside his coat and took out his papers. What struck him most was that his fingers worked steadily.

“Don’t run,” Jan said quietly.

“I’m not.”

But his body had already tightened.

The soldier in front of him looked younger than Piet had expected. He checked the papers, glanced up, then shifted his grip on the rifle.

“Du. Mitkommen.”

The words did not settle at once. Piet stood where he was for a second, not because he thought he could refuse, but because the moment had not yet caught up with him.

“He’s with me,” Jan said.

The soldier ignored him. Another stepped in behind them. A hand came down on Piet’s shoulder, hard and certain.

That was that.

They were turned with the others towards the truck. Piet did not look at Jan. He could feel him close by, and that was enough.

Then another thought came through him, sharp enough to hurt.

His mother.

At home. Alone.

She would not know where he had gone. No one would come and tell her that day. Probably not the next either. It would take time before she understood something was wrong, and longer before she understood what kind of wrong it was.

He saw the kitchen with painful clarity. The table. The chair she always used. The cup she had a habit of leaving too near the edge. Everything exactly where it should be.

That was the worst part.

Nothing there would have changed. Not yet.

Years before, when his father had finally stopped being someone who stayed, Piet had put him out and shut the door behind him. After that it had been just the two of them. He had done what he could. Worked. Brought money home. Kept things going. Now there was nothing he could do at all.

The line moved. A man ahead of him stumbled and was dragged upright without a word.

No one resisted. There was no room for it.

Jan climbed into the truck first, moving as far inside as the crush would let him. Piet followed. The metal floor rang dully under his boots. The air inside was already thick with old coats, damp wool and breath.

More men were shoved in after them until there was no room left to choose where to stand. Then the doors slammed shut and the darkness turned the men around him into heat, weight and noise.

No one spoke at first.

Only breathing. Close and uneven.

The engine started. The vibration came up through the floor into Piet’s legs. The truck moved off, slow at first, then steadier as it gathered speed.

No one asked where they were going.

They already knew enough.

Piet stayed where he was and let his eyes do what they could with the dark. Men shifted, trying to settle their balance, and each movement passed through the others before the space closed again. Someone near the door was breathing through his mouth. Another kept clearing his throat as if that might somehow make more air appear. The truck smelled of damp cloth, sweat, old metal and fear held in too tightly.

Jan leaned slightly towards him. “You all right?”

Piet nodded.

There was nothing useful to say.

The truck turned, then turned again, each corner pushing the men into one another before letting them ease apart by inches. No one complained. The city was still outside somewhere, but already it felt farther away than it should have.

Piet did not try to follow the route. There was no point. Streets folded into one another. Direction meant nothing in the dark.

Still, pieces of Amsterdam came back to him whether he wanted them or not. The canal outside the garage in early morning. The oily film that sometimes gathered in the corners when the water stood still. The tram stop near the bridge. The bread shop his mother used when she had enough coupons left to choose where to go. The kind of things a man hardly noticed while he still had them.

For a moment he thought of the garage again. The bench. The tools. The job left half done. Someone would clear it away, or leave it where it was.

It did not matter now.

At some point the truck slowed, then picked up again. Men shifted and pressed shoulder to shoulder in the dark. A hand groped for balance and found Piet’s sleeve, then let go without apology. Somewhere near his left side a man started whispering under his breath. Prayer maybe. Numbers maybe. Piet could not tell. Jan said nothing more. He was close enough that Piet could still feel the heat from him in the crush.

At last the truck slowed properly.

The engine cut out.

The silence that followed felt wrong.

Boots outside. Voices nearer now. Metal scraping against metal.

The doors opened and cold light came in hard.

“Raus.”

The pushing began again. Bodies moved whether they wanted to or not. Jan’s shoulder knocked against Piet’s.

“Stay close,” he said.

Piet stepped down with the others.

The ground felt too wide. Too open.

He lifted his head.

Tracks stretched out ahead of them.

And the train was waiting.

Chapter 2

They were not kept on the platform for long.

The line made itself. No one told them how. It simply formed, one man behind another, each closing the gap as soon as it opened. It moved in short, awkward steps. The Germans walked alongside without hurry, boots hard on the boards, rifles low, keeping everyone facing the same way. There was no need to shout. The shape of things was already clear enough.

Piet stepped when the man in front stepped. He stopped when that man stopped. After a few moments it stopped feeling like choice. The body took over before the mind could do anything useful.

The train stood waiting.

It was longer than he had expected. The carriages were not for passengers. They were dark wooden wagons with sliding doors already open. Men were being pushed into them in batches. One wagon was filled before the next was used. There was method in it. No waste. No hurry either.

No one explained anything.

They did not need to.

Jan was close behind him, near enough for Piet to feel the shift of his weight each time the line checked and started again.

“Stay near,” Jan said quietly.

Piet gave a small nod.

They moved on.

Now he could see into one of the wagons. There were no benches. No straw. Nothing made for comfort. Only men, already packed close, turned sideways where they had to be, shoulders caught against one another, faces half lost in the dark inside. Some looked out, but not at anything. Others kept their heads down, as if not seeing it properly might make it happen to somebody else.

The smell reached him before he got there. Not strong at first. Just stale air trapped too long in timber, damp wood under it, and something sour with nowhere to go.

The man in front of him faltered.

Not enough to stop.

A hand at his back finished the matter.

Piet followed. The step up was higher than it needed to be. His foot slipped on the edge before he found it properly. He felt rough timber through the sole of his shoe as he hauled himself in. A hand brushed his shoulder from behind, not helping, only urging him further.

Inside, the space closed over him at once.

There was nowhere to choose. Nowhere to turn. The men already there shifted as he came in, making room without wanting to, small adjustments passing through them one after another until the shape settled again.

Jan came in behind him.

That mattered more than it should have.

The door stayed open for a little longer while more men were forced inside. Each one took something from the space. A shoulder. A patch of air. The slight chance of standing without touching a stranger. Someone near the wall muttered under his breath. Piet did not catch the words. A guard outside answered with one sharp word of his own.

Then the door slid shut.

The bolt dropped.

The change was immediate. Whatever little open feeling had remained near the doorway went at once. The air seemed thicker. The dark changed too. It no longer felt temporary.

Piet stood still. Shifting would have achieved nothing. Any movement only pressed into another man, and another pressed back, though neither meant it. The wagon settled around them, tighter than before.

It took his eyes time to adjust, though they never really did. At first there were only shapes. Then outlines. Faces did not come clear. He saw heads, shoulders, the line of a neck, the way a man leaned when there was no room to stand straight.

Jan was still beside him.

He did not need to look to know it.

The train jolted once, then again.

The movement ran through the wagon and through the bodies inside it, weight coming off one foot and dropping onto the other. Someone lost his balance for a second, found it again, and pressed into the men next to him without apology.

Then the train began to move.

Slowly first.

Then with more certainty.

The sound settled into a rhythm that did not change. Metal on metal. Wheels on rails. The same hard repetition going on and on. No one spoke for a while. There was only breathing, too close and too uneven, the sort you noticed because it had stopped being separate from your own.

Piet kept his head level and let the movement come into him. The vibration rose through the floorboards into his boots and legs and stayed there.

Time altered inside the wagon.

It stretched and lost its edges. There was no change in light. No sense of direction. Nothing to mark distance or tell them how long they had been moving. The train went on. The sound went on with it. After a while the body stopped trying to divide one stretch from the next.

At some point his legs began to ache.

Not sharply. It came on slowly, a steady build from standing without room to shift properly. His knees stiffened first. Then his feet. He tried once to lean a fraction to one side and take the weight off.

It did nothing.

The space closed at once and put him back where he had been.

After that he stayed still.

Not because it helped, but because there was no better way to stand. His weight settled into both feet and changed only when the train changed under him. It did not ease the strain. It only moved it. The man in front leaned back from time to time, never by choice, only because there was nowhere else for him to go. Piet felt it through his coat, the slow transfer of weight from one body into the next until the whole wagon had taken it.

No one apologised.

There was no point.

Time passed.

He did not try to count it.

After a while the ache in his legs became something else. Not pain exactly. More a condition of standing. His feet had gone numb before he noticed. When he shifted again the feeling came back in a dull, ugly wave and he stopped.

The air worsened.

Not all at once. It thickened so slowly he might not have noticed if there had been anything else to pay attention to. Breathing began to feel used before it reached him. The wagon held too much of everything. Heat. Damp. Breath. The stale sourness of men with nowhere to go and no way to escape one another.

Somewhere near the far side a man tried to sit.

It did not work.

There was not enough room to lower himself properly. He got halfway down and stuck there, caught between crouching and standing, pressed from both sides.

A voice told him to get up.

He answered, but too low for Piet to hear the words.

A few men shifted.

Then the movement stopped.

No one else tried.

Piet kept his eyes open, though there was little worth seeing. The dark had changed again. Not lighter, only more defined. He could make out the thin line where the door met the frame. Nothing came through it. No air worth noticing. No light that meant anything.

The train did not slow.

Jan moved beside him once, then again, small changes of footing that achieved nothing but seemed necessary all the same.

“Still there?” Jan said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

That was enough talk.

The sound of the wheels kept going, flat and unbroken, filling the wagon where speech had failed. Piet let his head incline slightly, not enough to rest, only enough to ease the drag in his neck. He shut his eyes for a moment, not to sleep, only to stop looking at what was not there.

When he opened them again, nothing had changed.

Somewhere to his left a voice asked where they were being taken.

No one answered at first.

Then somebody said, “East.”

The word stayed where it landed.

Another voice asked how far.

There was a pause before the answer came.