Читать книгу Gliding Flight - Anne-Gine Goemans - Страница 14

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PART I

Ide & Sophia

He was expected to take up his father’s trade, but Ide Warrens preferred to follow his own dreams. So he brought Sophia along with him without letting their parents know. She was barely fifteen years old, but she suited his dream perfectly. Sophia was not particularly beautiful. Her front teeth were broken off like bits of chalk and her face was asymmetrical, but he didn’t care. Sophia was the most big-hearted creature Ide Warrens had ever met. Her caresses, her laugh, her humour, her fury: she was extravagant in everything she did, a rare trait in their part of the country.

They left Zeeland and arrived two weeks later on the other side of the world. The girl never complained during the entire journey, even though her plump thighs had turned black-and-blue from the bumping of the covered wagons they rode in. Her feet, too, were battered by the long trek.

Sophia sat down on the sidewalk in front of a cafe, looking with curiosity at the unfamiliar village square before her. Hillegom. She had never heard of it. Farther on she saw a linden tree with a pear-shaped opening in the trunk. She smiled. She was crazy about hollow trees. Limping forward, she went up to the tree and squeezed herself inside, along with her suitcase. She stroked the bark. Then she carefully took off her shoes and saw that her woollen socks were stuck to the blisters. With a jerk she tore off one sock and examined the bloody, blistery expanse. It looked awful. Her right foot was even worse.

‘Sophia!’ she heard Ide calling. ‘Sophia!’

Peering through the cleft in the tree she could see him walking nervously back and forth. He had been searching for a place to spend the night. Once more he called her name, but she waited to respond. She stared out at him, forgetting her feet, and a glorious feeling ran through her. Ide was finally hers alone. She pressed her hand against the brocade shawl she had stolen from her mother, along with the two gold rings. At the end of this adventure she swore she would give the things back.

She began to whistle as Ide walked away from the tree. He looked around, scanning the square and following the sound of her whistle. First his boots appeared in front of the tree opening, and when he crouched down she could see his face. ‘That looks bad,’ he said, glancing at her feet. She pulled her skirt up over her knees. The red hairs on her legs were a shade darker than the curls on her head, and a few shades lighter than her pubic hair. Ide had examined and kissed every millimetre of her body.

‘I need jenever.’ With her chin she pointed in the direction of the cafe. Without asking any questions, Ide stood up and returned with a bottle of jenever. He looked on with surprise as Sophia poured the liquor over her feet.

‘I learned this from my father,’ she explained. Her father was a modern-minded physician. He abhorred the practice of bloodletting and the opium drinks his colleagues prescribed.

Ide’s mother had been keeping house for the doctor and his wife for twenty years. According to his mother, the doctor had more brains than the mayor, the minister and the schoolmaster put together. The way she said this bespoke total veneration. Ide’s father despised the doctor. In fits of drunkenness he would beat his wife, which for the moment made him think he was striking the physician as well. This gave him a pleasant feeling. But as soon as the man was sober again he regretted what he had done.

Ide hated his father’s short temper and his mother’s black eyes. His greatest fear was that she would have to stop working for the doctor. Her job was Ide’s only means of access to Sophia.

Sophia tore a strip of cloth from her petticoat and wrapped it around her heel. Then she poured a splash of jenever over it and took a swig from the bottle. ‘Pretty good,’ she said, sucking on her tongue. She firmly pulled Ide’s battered hands into the hollow tree and rinsed them clean with the liquor.

‘That stings.’

‘Stinging is good.’ Sophia licked his fingers off. Laughing mischievously, she opened her suitcase. She set aside the doll she slept with every night and pulled out a pair of socks from the jumble of clothes. ‘Come here.’ Obediently he squeezed his head and limbs inside. His torso remained outside the tree, as if he were stuck in the birth canal. Her father had dealt with that problem many times: babies who wouldn’t come out and midwives who called on him for help.

‘Shut your eyes. Come on, nothing’s going to happen.’

She grabbed his right hand tightly and emptied the sock. Ide heard her giggle as she pushed something cold onto his finger. He opened his eyes.

‘I’m not a woman!’ he shouted, looking at the ring with disapproval.

‘And now you have to put this one on me.’

Sophia held up her mother’s ring.

‘Too big,’ Ide concluded.

‘Put it on my thumb. It fits—look. From now on I’m Mrs Warrens.’ Speaking in a falsetto voice to imitate the tone of his mother, she said, ‘Mrs Warrens. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

She laughed with her mouth wide open, so that Ide got a good look at her crumbling teeth.

Then she stopped abruptly. ‘But you must never hit me? Is that clear?’ As she said this, she gave Ide a slap on his cheek. Not hard, but hard enough to leave a red mark.

‘I don’t wear jewellery.’

Ide tossed the ring in her lap and stood up. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’ll be dark soon.’

The landlord raised his eyebrows doubtfully when the couple entered the inn. They were still youngsters, and such an amusing sight that it made him chuckle. The blond, blue-eyed giant was at least three heads taller than the girl. They didn’t even bargain over the high price.

He gave them coffee, and bacon with potatoes, which they attacked with relish. They were starving. Sophia abandoned her good table manners and imitated Ide, who shovelled the food in with his spoon.

‘Delicious potatoes,’ said Ide, smacking his lips.

‘Dune spuds,’ replied the landlord. ‘We pamper our potatoes as if they were eggs. That’s why they taste so good.’

Standing behind the counter he sized up the young guests and felt embarrassed about the high rate he had charged them.

‘You come here to work on the polder?’ the landlord asked as he served them a stack of syrup waffles and a pot of coffee.

Ide and Sophia nodded, chewing busily.

‘Then I don’t envy you.’

‘I’m strong,’ said Ide, and he made a muscle.

‘He’s as strong as a draft horse.’ Sophia pinched his upper arm and kissed it unashamedly. She realised how fine it was not to have to hide her love for Ide and kissed the muscle once again.

It was the first time they had ever slept in a box bed together. At home they had explored each other furtively in the dark corners of the doctor’s house. Although the box bed was stuffy and cramped, to them the space seemed endless. Sophia climbed on top of Ide and brushed her breasts over his face until his cheeks glowed. She plunged her tongue into Ide’s mouth and ran it around till both of them were breathless. Ide could taste the jenever, and he felt intoxicated without having had a drop to drink. The straw on the dilapidated plank bed poked him in the back, but he couldn’t feel it. She pulled on his lip with her teeth and thrust her tongue into his ears and nostrils.

With a face wet from sweat and saliva, Sophia got down on her hands and knees and offered Ide her backside. Ide pulled himself up and bumped his head against the wooden ceiling. He gazed at her sloping back with admiration, while a feeling of perfect happiness came over him. He had no hunger, thirst or pain. All he had was Sophia. He needed nothing else.

Ide languidly stroked her bottom, sticky with sand. Sophia responded to his caresses by impatiently pressing against his erection. ‘Hey, what are you waiting for?’ she said hoarsely, looking over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go for a ride!’

The next day, 20 May 1840, Ide Warrens reported to the foreman behind the Treslong farmstead. They weren’t the only ones. The yard was swarming with hundreds of men, women and children, and all of them looked impoverished. Sophia gazed with astonishment at the sallow mothers and their even sallower children. She was on an adventure. For her none of this was real. She could always go back to another life, a luxurious existence filled with clean fingernails, tea services and pastries, poetry evenings, her mother’s smell of lavender and school books. But these people had absolutely nothing to do with her world. Everything on two legs here was filthy and penniless. Generations of poverty had preceded them. You could see it in their crooked backs, dull hair, drab skin, hobbling legs, sickly eyes, toothless maws.

Sophia knew she was no beauty, but her imperfections paled in comparison with so much physical infirmity.

She found a tree and sat down beneath it to give her feet a rest. Some of the men were busy building shanties from reeds and straw. Others just hung around, bored. Drinking, chewing tobacco, shouting, drifting.

Sophia tried to understand what they were saying, but it was all a cacophony of dialects. Leaning against one of the shanties was a little girl. She couldn’t have been more than four years old and she was crying long strings of snot. Sophia thought for a moment that she was wearing black pants, but her legs were dark from the filth. The only thing the little girl had on was a torn shirt.

‘Is that sack of shit yours?’ someone yelled. ‘I hope not!’ came the bellowing response. With her eyes narrowed to slits, Sophia peered at a bunch of young male specimens. Suddenly one of them turned and ran up to the crying child. He was a wiry guy with a birthmark on his face. The mark was shaped like a star. The man picked up the crying girl by the back of her shirt so her head hung down. He ran a finger between her buttocks as if he were about to take a lick from a pot of syrup, then smelled his finger.

‘Nope, this rag ain’t mine!’ he shouted, letting the child drop where he found her.

Sophia glared at the men with rage. She jumped up and ran to the little girl, who was lying on the ground, crying. Carefully she picked up the child, surprised at how light she was. She weighed practically nothing. Then Sophia strode back to the men and spat at them. But they were only interested in their drink. The people here paid no attention to each other.

It wasn’t until she returned to the tree that she realised how much the little girl stank: it was the smell of decay. She took a nightgown from her suitcase and on it she placed the child who promptly fell asleep, lying on her side, her little knees drawn up to her chin. Sophia studied the stinking child with a mixture of tenderness and disgust. Lice and nits were tumbling all through her mass of tangled hair. Her shirt and legs were caked with crusts of dried shit. Sophia swallowed hard. She had gone with her father sometimes when he made house calls and had seen a thing or two: women on the edge of death after childbirth and men who had turned blue from cholera. But this little girl was by far the foulest creature she had ever seen in her life.

Ide stood in line to present himself to the foreman. He turned his head away when the child was dumped on the ground like a sack of garbage. It wasn’t that it left him cold, but he wanted to stay focused on the good things, not the bad. He looked around intently for something to cheer him up. The people near him all looked so miserable. Sophia was sitting behind the trunk of a tree, and all he could see of her was a bit of her back. So Ide turned his gaze to the horizon. He didn’t believe in God. His parents had raised him to be so God-fearing that he had lost his faith altogether. But he did trust in nature. There was little about nature that frightened him.

The land he was standing in was gentle and green. There were canals and pastures alternating with poplars that were arranged around the farms in perfectly straight rows. When he looked north he could see the edges of a forest. The sweeping expanse of the landscape eased his mind. Ide understood how life was lived here without having any knowledge of the area. Orderly and consistent. They didn’t like extravagance here, you could see that.

Ide stared into the distance and saw the sails of a passing ship against a clear blue sky. In only a couple of years the lake would be filled in.

‘Name?’ a voice barked.

Ide looked up and saw a head of frizzy flaxen hair sitting behind a table. It looked like the sea foam that washed up on the beach, the kind he used to kick at when he was a boy. Unlike all the others, this man did not wear a hat.

‘Name!’ he repeated impatiently.

Ide blurted out his name. His thick Zeeland accent sounded impenetrable.

‘What?’

Ide said his name again.

‘Hidde Warren,’ wrote the man without a hat. Silently he turned the notebook around so Ide could read it. ‘Correct,’ Ide guessed. He couldn’t even read his own name. Without knowing it he had become untraceable on paper.

‘Work starts at three-thirty. You get seventy cents a day and you sleep in that shanty.’ He waved a brown finger off to the side.

‘You mean that shack without a roof?’ Ide asked the yellow top of the man’s head. This was a man who only cared about his papers.

‘Sophia, my … my wife, is with me, too.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘But there’s no … uh … it’s a shack without any …’

‘Something wrong with your legs?’ the man shouted, pounding his fist on the table. ‘Next!’

Ide walked over to Sophia. Her eyes were still dark with anger. She told him about the brutal way the little girl had been treated and pointed to her dirty sleeping body. Ide didn’t want to look at her. He wanted to build a roof on the shanty so he could protect his beloved from the elements.

‘We’re taking her with us,’ said Sophia maternally.

‘Out of the question.’ He gave the child a quick glance. ‘Her pa and ma are around here somewhere. You can’t just pick someone up and carry them away.’

‘She has no one!’ cried Sophia. ‘What kind of mother lets her child walk around like that! The lice have made her sick. They’ve sucked all the blood out of her!’

‘Sophia, all the children here are skinny and sick. Just look!’

She crossed her arms angrily. She knew he was right, but she refused to look at the other children.

The next day Sophia was awakened by screaming. She would have to get used to it, although she did not find it unpleasant. Her parents seldom raised their voices let alone scream, even when Sophia drove them to their wits’ end with her tempestuous disposition.

She beat the straw out of her clammy clothes and hair. Standing up was barely possible, the shanty being no more than a metre and a half high. Yawning, she went outside. The air was still hazy with morning dew. She wondered where Ide was now. He had left that night after having made a thatched roof. A neighbour man had helped him in exchange for the half-filled bottle of jenever.

She looked around and saw only women and children walking between the shanties. They were all hard at work, but Sophia had no idea what they were doing. She kicked absently at a stone and ground her heel into the dirt. She tried to find the filthy child she had dressed in her nightgown. The nightgown had been much too long.

‘Hey! Carrot Top!’ shouted two little boys who were running around in bare feet.

‘Fuck off!’ Sophia shouted back, cupping her hands around her mouth like a trumpet. ‘I’ll get you yet!’

‘Lay off with that shouting,’ snarled a passing woman.

‘Then I won’t do it again!’ Sophia screamed in a kind of snort.

The woman looked at her with surprise and pulled the corners of her mouth into an awkward grimace. Her face was friendly but dog-tired, framed by two braids.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘My mother? I’m here with Ide, my husband. We’re from Zeeland.’

Sophia spoke the words as genteelly as she could, without an accent.

The woman looked suspicious. ‘Then you must have married very young. How old are you anyway?’

‘Old enough.’ She held up her thumb with the ring on it. ‘Say, do you know where the men are working?’

‘Just follow the canal straight out in the direction of the lake.’

Sophia skipped past the shanties. Once she reached the pasture and began walking through it she forgot the steaming, stinking shantytown. She filled her lungs with the May air and walked along the canal. When the shanties were far enough behind her she had a drink of water. No people meant clean running water, her father always said. She washed her hands and feet and splashed some water between her legs. She wiped her bottom with plantain leaves and used a twig to scrape the dirt from under her fingernails. Hungry, she peered at the farm that lay beyond a row of trees. She wouldn’t ask for food; that was beneath her station. She would borrow something from the land, and one day she would return it.

She crept through the grass until she reached the field. Quickly sizing up the white-flowered plants that were growing there, she pulled one from the ground. A stalk broke off. Looking to one side she saw two women lying on their bellies further on. They were digging up the plants with their hands. Sophia followed their example and took as many plants as she could carry. Back at the canal she removed the leaves from the potatoes and rinsed them off. They weren’t full grown but they tasted all right. Whatever she couldn’t eat she wrapped up in her shawl to save for Ide.

On her way to the lake she passed the two women. Her greeting was met with looks of suspicion. Back home in Zeeland everyone said hello to her. Sophia turned around and stuck her tongue out at their backs. ‘Stupid cows,’ she said, and laughed heartily at her own behaviour, which her parents would absolutely not have tolerated.

She heard them before they came into view. It was a mixture of raw voices and scraping shovels. The sound they produced was lively, as if it held some secret promise. Then she saw them, the polder boys. They were lined up in long rows, digging a trench. The earth they shovelled up formed a small dike between them and the lake. For the first time she was standing face to face with the most notorious lake in the whole country: the Water Wolf, which kept devouring more and more land and therefore had to be tamed. Thousands of polder boys would overpower it and bury it in its own watery bed.

Sophia was shocked by the size of the lake. This was no modest puddle, no damp pit. She realised for the first time that it would be years before the men were finished digging a canal around the lake. And then they would have to pump all that water away. How much time would this venture take?

She would fall terribly behind in school, the costly private lessons that her mother insisted were so good for her development.

‘You live up to your name,’ her teacher had said.

‘Sophia’ meant ‘wisdom.’

But what good was a name like that if she wasn’t allowed to study at the university? What was the point of learning Latin if she could never become a doctor? And what was development, anyway? Marrying a rich merchant from Tholen? Bearing children?

Sophia had always felt like an observer. She saw how her father made a name for himself as a doctor, and how he proudly called himself the first hygienist in Zeeland. In the evenings he would share his knowledge with her, but she knew that her thirst for learning would never be rewarded. Sophia would have to gaze out the window as life passed her by. Year in and year out. Until her face had attained the same dull colour as the needlework on her lap.

Ide Warrens was Sophia’s ticket to freedom, but her parents would never allow her to marry him. They liked him well enough, but marrying Ide was not advancement. It wasn’t even stagnation. It was a decline, to be measured in light years.

Suddenly she saw Ide, rising head and shoulders above the crew of polder boys. His cap and his face were black with mud. He was clever, but he couldn’t read. That would be her project. She would educate him single-handedly.

Full of high spirits, Sophia ran up to him. When she got to the edge of the boggy trench she stopped and called his name. He walked up to her, shovel in hand. She kissed his dirty mouth and gave him the potatoes wrapped in the shawl. His neck was gleaming with sweat.

The pit boss was standing behind him. ‘Tell her she has to leave. The last thing we need around here are dames.’

‘She’s already going,’ Ide said, and gave the shawl back to her.

‘What am I supposed to do there?’ asked Sophia angrily.

‘Well, housework. That kind of thing.’ Ide glanced back at the boss nervously. He couldn’t let himself be fired. His father would break his legs.

‘But we don’t have a house! We have a stinking hovel without windows or furniture.’

‘Please, just go home.’ Ide gently pushed her away from the trench. ‘I’ll be back this afternoon and I’ll be good and ready for those spuds.’

Sullenly, Sophia walked back to the shantytown.

At one of the first shanties she saw the woman with the braids and the dog-tired face. Sophia followed her through the narrow doorway.

‘Hi,’ she said when they got inside.

‘You again,’ the woman noted. She knelt down on the hard dirt floor and tried to start a fire in a pit. Lying along the edges of the shanty were piles of straw and blankets.

‘How many people sleep here?’ asked Sophia with surprise when her eyes got used to the dim light.

‘Ten men and me.’

‘That’s a lot! Ide and I have the whole shanty to ourselves.’

‘That’s what you think.’ The woman looked at her with contempt. ‘One of these days you’ll end up with ten others in that shack, just like us. And if you’re not careful, you’ll be sharing every hole in your body with them, too.’

Sophia’s eyes widened. She was too overcome to say another word. She’d never heard anything so lewd before.

The woman lit a branch and laughed. Her mouth was a dark cavern.

‘Don’t worry. You’re married, aren’t you?’

Sophia nodded and coughed. The room was already blue with smoke. There was no chimney; the only way for the smoke to get out was through the hole that served as a doorway.

‘Are you married, too?’ asked Sophia hopefully.

‘Over the broomstick, with Hayo. It’s not official.’

She rose with difficulty. ‘But it’s just enough to keep the other fellows away from me. And this helps, too.’ She tapped her bulging dress. Only now could Sophia see that she was pregnant.

Sophia wished she could shake off the grim feeling that had taken possession of her. ‘You’re having a baby!’ she cried through her coughing, and stuck her head outside to get some fresh air.

The woman shrugged her shoulders laconically. She picked up a frying pan and put it on the smouldering fire. Then she poured some batter from a bowl into the pan. The stuffy shanty was filled with the smell of pancakes. It made Sophia’s mouth water. She tried to hold them back, but the tears suddenly began streaming down her cheeks.

‘Jesus, girl,’ said the woman with irritation. ‘What have you got to cry about?’

‘Nothing,’ bawled Sophia.

‘Listen,’ said the woman, ‘when you’ve reached the end of your tether, there’s always jenever. Jenever washes everything away.’ She picked up an earthenware jug, took a long swig and wiped her mouth off with the back of her hand.

‘It’s not that,’ wailed Sophia. ‘The problem is that I can’t cook. I can’t do anything.’

Sophia learned quickly. She struck up a peculiar sort of friendship with the pregnant Akkie from Friesland, from whom she learned all the unwritten codes. The norms and values in the shantytown could be counted on two fingers. Rape and murder were frowned upon. Otherwise it was every man for himself, Akkie instructed, except when your own people were being attacked from the outside. Then you had no choice but to form a community. No one was to be trusted, especially the contractors, the police and the Belgian polder workers. The Belgians, Akkie informed her, snapped up all the work and earned more than their husbands did. She believed it was perfectly permissible to kick a Belgian to death or set him on fire.

In addition to these survival lessons, Akkie showed Sophia how to cook. It was simple. The food was so monotonous that it allowed for little experimentation. Pancakes with bacon, bread with bacon and potatoes with bacon were the daily fare. And when there wasn’t any bacon for the bread, they spread potatoes on it.

In Sophia’s parents’ home there was always butter, fish, meat, cheese and pastries on the table. The food was prepared by their cook, a tall woman with hips like hams big enough to feed the entire village. Sophia often watched the cook as she stood over a pan and slowly stirred while her body swayed along. Never in a hurry. Always cheerful.

‘Take it easy,’ she would say to Ide’s mother, who plodded and sighed her way through the housecleaning in the doctor’s home.

Then the cook would conduct Ide’s fragile mother to a chair and make her eat a bowl of cinnamon pudding.

In the meantime the cook would scrub the mussels clean, humming as she went. Sophia’s father believed that shellfish cleansed the kidneys and activated the bladder. The kitchen smelled like a harbour as the screeching mussels opened in the pan.

‘White, tender and plump. And right to the brim. That’s what men like.’ The cook winked. Ide’s mother blushed and bowed her head and quickly took another bite, while Sophia’s eyes flashed with pleasure. Sophia loved the cook’s risqué talk.

They could have stolen her food at home for all she cared. She never had an appetite. She was certainly never hungry. She lived her life indoors for the most part, staggering from one meal to the next until she could no longer taste the difference between lamb stew and pork roast.

There was nothing indoors that interested her. Sophia loved being outside, in the street. She loved the smells, the sounds, the bright colours in the market, the hollering vendors trying to sell their wares. Sometimes she was allowed to go to the market with the cook, a visit that took hours because the cook moved so slowly. Every step was a supreme effort. If Sophia listened closely she could hear the cook’s flesh quiver.

Sophia soaked up the market in every detail. Wrangling women. Chickens in cages. Flies on a fish head. The smell of roasted coffee and wine. The cook holding up a skinned rabbit with disapproval and shouting ‘this isn’t fresh!’

And then the offended market vendor: ‘Not fresh? That rabbit is so fresh that the grass is still green in its mouth! It doesn’t get any fresher than that.’

‘An men urehul!’ she’d exclaim in her thick Zeeland dialect. ‘If that beast is fresh then I’m as skinny as a scallion!’

The cook’s haggling, always with a coquettish undertone, was a ritual Sophia enjoyed immensely. Sometimes the cook let her give it a try.

‘Tell him they’re as old as shrivelled up dog balls,’ the cook would whisper.

And Sophia would giggle and say, ‘The potatoes are old, sir.’

‘Tell him we feel so sorry for the poor dog balls that we’ll take three kilos for two cents.’

The cook’s lessons in bargaining served Sophia well. At the market stalls in Hillegom she did her utmost to spend as little money as possible on food. Except this was no longer an amusing game. Now bargaining was a matter of necessity. Sophia’s mouth began to water. She smelled sausages and eels. She smelled freshly baked bread, artichokes and spices. She smelled the sweet flesh of partridges and oxen. She sniffed the gentle fragrance of sugar and butter. She let her hands glide over the skins of apples. But she couldn’t buy any of those delicacies. She looked at them, stored the fragrances in her memory and went back to the shanty to make pancakes for Ide and the shanty’s eight new inhabitants.

The men they were forced to share the shanty with came from every corner of the country. They slept on straw with rags as blankets, far enough from Sophia to keep from touching her yet close enough to make every inhale and exhale audible. At night she counted all the different sounds she heard until she fell asleep. Crying babies. Coughing children. Snoring, farting men, scratching and rubbing themselves in their sleep, anesthetised by alcohol to keep the cold away. Quarrelling couples. Scurrying rats and mice. Screaming, babbling, moaning, groaning, panting, hawking, scolding, wailing, puking, bawling. And Ide’s heavy breathing on her forehead.

In the shantytown it was never silent. It amazed her that people were capable of producing so many noises. At home, in the doctor’s brick residence with its spout gable, all she could hear was the refined tick of the Frisian grandfather clock.

Three a.m. brought an end to the nightly clamour. The men got up to go to work. Ide released himself from her arms. He lay on his back and she stretched half her body across his to keep from feeling the damp earth. He carefully slid out from under her and left. It was quieter without the men. The oxygen returned. During the few hours that followed Sophia got her deepest sleep.

The division of labour was unequivocal. Sophia took care of the housekeeping, the men brought in a bit of money. Sophia didn’t see much of Ide. He easily worked sixteen hours a day. The men worked as long as there was daylight. Sophia didn’t complain, although the adventure was sometimes unpleasant and harsh. The wedding ring was stolen from her suitcase, as were a pair of socks and a pair of underpants. She was also bothered by the filth that the polder people wallowed in. Their skin was even dirtier than the rags they wore. They had no idea what they were doing. They shat where they ate, put out smouldering fires with urine and drank the ditchwater they shat in. The authorities had brought in a filter to purify the drinking water but no one knew how to use it.

Sophia tried to instil in Akkie an awareness of hygiene, but to no avail.

‘You must wash your hands,’ Sophia admonished. Akkie peeled potatoes with blackened fingers. She left black smudges on the white vegetables. ‘You’ll never get rid of the runs that way.’

‘These,’ said Akkie, holding her hands in front of her, ‘are working hands. They’re supposed to look like this. You don’t have working hands.’

Unperturbed, she kept on peeling.

They sat outside on stools in the shadow of the shanty. It was a hot day.

Sophia had no idea how old the woman was. She looked as if most of her life was behind her, even though a child was growing in her belly. One corner of Akkie’s mouth was torn. Unbalanced diet, would have been her father’s diagnosis. Sophia resolved to ‘borrow’ some apples from the local farmers, and perhaps a chicken.

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ Akkie asked, looking at Sophia pointedly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know, just what I said. You’re not like us. Look at your hair, your hands, your face. Nothing on you is broken. Your face is crooked, but that’s all.’

‘I don’t have a crooked face,’ said Sophia defensively.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Akkie, and she rolled up her sleeve. ‘Look, that’s a burn.’ She pointed to a wrinkled spot on the inside of her forearm. ‘And this dent was once a whopper of a festering sore. It’s deep enough to drink out of now.’ Akkie pushed back some hair on the side of her head. ‘Smacked with a rake.’

‘How horrible,’ whispered Sophia. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

‘My brother,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He did such a thing.’

As if that weren’t enough, she kicked off her old shoe and turned her foot toward Sophia. Two toes were missing.

‘When I was eight, my toes froze. My pa twisted the dead stumps off my feet with a pair of pliers.’

Sophia said nothing, while Akkie kept on peeling and put her foot back in her shoe.

‘I wanted to be with Ide,’ said Sophia after a while. ‘That’s why I went with him. His mother was our housekeeper.’

‘Housekeeper?’ cried Akkie. ‘What was your pa then? Mayor? Minister? King? Ha! Get out of here!’

The Frisian woman’s voice was hard. ‘Honey, find somebody else’s leg to pull. If you had a housekeeper, you wouldn’t be sitting here now with your ass in the mud.’

Akkie stood up, shaking her head. She walked into the shanty and came back with a bottle of jenever.

‘I gotta do me some dancing,’ she said, taking a long pull from the bottle. ‘At home I danced my legs off. But here there’s not a damn thing to do.’

‘You and Hayo,’ asked Sophia, hoping that Akkie’s cynicism would disappear. ‘Was it love at first sight?’

‘Love?’ she said contemptuously. ‘Of course not. We were just drunk. And that’s where this came from.’ She thrust her belly forward and put the bottle to her mouth. ‘Here, take a swig. It kills the vexation.’

Sophia became skilled in stealing food. Her greatest asset was her normal appearance. In no time at all, the grubby people of the polder began to develop a bad name. They stank, pilfered, drank, fought, screamed and begged. The local population avoided them like an outbreak of typhus.

But not Sophia. She could go anywhere in the market without being shunned. She knew the art of keeping up a conversation while stashing a piece of bacon under her brocade shawl, a shawl that had offered shelter to eggs, beans, peas, pig’s trotters, buckwheat and parsnips.

One day, as she was slipping in a piece of cheese, she looked out of the corner of her eye and saw the little girl whom the men had dumped on the ground like a gob of spit. Sophia recognised her own nightgown. Half of it had been torn away and the rest was encrusted with dirt. The child was rummaging around the stalls in bare feet and begging for food, her filthy little hand held aloft. Everyone looked at her with contempt and disgust. The little girl was the very image of misfortune that the populace hoped to keep outside their door. Poverty and disease were lurking everywhere and ready to pounce. Cholera, holy fire, scabies, syphilis, smallpox: the people were scared to death of them.

Sophia followed the little girl through the market. When the child got to the fish stalls she was chased away with hisses. The pork seller tried to kick her, but his wooden shoe missed her head.

Rage welled up in Sophia. It started in her belly, bubbled upwards and ended on her tongue. She planted herself in front of the pork seller, legs wide apart and hands on hips.

‘Your pigs have more decency than you’ll ever have. They should put you in that sty.’ Her voice was remarkably calm. Before the pork seller was able to utter a word in response, Sophia had turned her backside to him. She walked away with her nose in the air, close on the child’s heels. When they reached the linden tree she stopped her. Squatting down, she smiled at the little girl, who stared at her with vacant eyes.

‘Are you hungry?’

Her eyes showed no sign of life. The only colour in her face was the yellow ooze in the whites of her eyes.

‘Is your mother here, too?’

She smelled the pungent odour of excrement.

‘Can you talk?’

There was a crust of snot and blood on her upper lip.

‘Come on, I have food for you.’

The girl silently followed Sophia into the hollow tree. Sophia settled herself once again at eye level and motioned to the girl to come in through the opening in the bark. The girl obediently followed her instructions. She could easily stand up inside the tree. After looking all around her (prudence was in order), Sophie reached under her shawl, broke off a piece of cheese and put it in the little upraised hand.

The child didn’t eat, she devoured the food like a famished beast—slobbering, gulping and smacking her lips. Insatiable, she kept holding out her little black claw while uttering bestial cries. She bolted down the entire chunk of cheese and one piece of sausage. When everything was gone, she followed Sophia around like a bitch in heat. Any more stealing that day was out of the question; Sophia was far too conspicuous with the stinking child in her wake. Together they returned to the shantytown. On the way back, the little girl stopped on the sandy path and vomited her guts out.