The Orphan's Tale(10)

The end came without warning on a spring day warmer than most. Morning sun bathed our seaside village of Scheveningen and gulls called to one another above the inlet. Lying in my bed, it had almost been possible to forget about the war for a few minutes.

Then my bedroom door swung open and the knowledge of the truth raged in my father’s bulging eyes. “Out!”

I stared at him in disbelief. How could he possibly have known? I had told no one. I had not expected to be able to keep it a secret forever, but surely for another month or so, long enough to figure out what to do. Mama, who had walked in while I was dressing a few days earlier, must have seen the slight curve of my stomach. The rest, the timing of when the German had been with us, would not have been so very hard to figure out.

Papa was proud and staunchly Dutch, with a limp from the Great War to prove it. My affair with the German was the greatest betrayal. Surely, though, he did not mean for me, his only daughter and just sixteen, to leave. But the same man who had once laced my boots and carried me on his shoulders now unrelentingly held the door open for me to walk through a final time.

I braced for him to strike me or berate me further, but he simply pointed to the door. “Go.” His eyes did not meet mine.

“No!” Mama cried as I went. There was no strength behind her voice, though. As she ran after me, my heart lifted. Perhaps just this once she would stand up to him and fight for me. Instead she just pressed the money she had tucked away into my palm. I waited for her to embrace me.

She did not.

A horn whistles long and low in the distance. I duck behind a tree as a train appears from the same direction we’d come, snaking a path through the field of white. Though I can’t be sure, from a far distance there is a train car that looks exactly like the one from which I pulled the baby. Headed east, like the other trains of Jews. Babies taken, as my own had been, but from families with two parents who loved, wanted them. Stifling a cry, I step from the trees, wanting to run after it and take other children as I had this one. But the baby’s body sinks warm and heavy in my arms, the lone life I have saved.

Saved—at least for now. Behind the receding train, the sky is lightening to gray in the east. It will be dawn soon and we are still too close to the station. The police could come at any moment. Snow falls heavy, soaking my thin coat and reaching the child beneath it. We must keep going. I push deeper into the woods, out of sight. The air is still with that silence that only snow can bring. My feet are icy bricks now, legs weary. I am weak from the little I’ve eaten in my months at the station and my mouth is dry with thirst. There is nothing beyond the trees but endless white. I try to remember from my journey to the girls’ home months earlier how far it is to the next village. But even if we make it there, no one will risk his own life to shelter us.

I switch the baby to my other hip, brushing the snow from his forehead. How long has it been since he last ate? He has not moved or cried since we left the station and I wonder if he is still breathing. Hurriedly I pull aside into a thick cluster of trees and unwrap him a bit more, keeping him close for warmth. His eyes are closed and he is sleeping—or so I hope. His lips are cracked and bleeding from dehydration, but his chest rises and falls evenly. His bare feet are like tiny bricks of ice.

I scan the forest desperately, remembering the other babies on the train, most already gone. I should have taken some of their clothes for the child. I am repulsed at the thought. I unbutton my coat and blouse, grimacing at the blast of ice and snow against my skin. I hold the baby to my breast, willing some of the thin gray liquid that I’d squeezed out to relieve my discomfort nearly four months earlier to appear in tiny dots. But my movements are clumsy—no one had taught me how to nurse, and the child is too weak to latch on. My breasts ache with longing but nothing comes. My milk is gone, dried up. After I’d given birth, the nurse had told me there were women who would pay for my milk. I’d shaken my head, unwilling no matter how much I needed the money to have that taken from me, too. With my child gone, I was desperate to be done with the whole thing as quickly as possible.

My child. Part of me wishes I had not held my baby that once, that my arms had not memorized the shape of his body and head. Maybe then my arms would not ache every second. Once I had considered what I would have called him. But as names appeared in my mind, a knife of pain shot through me and I had clamped down on the thought. I wonder what he is called now, praying he had reached people who cared enough to give him a really good, strong name.

Pushing thoughts of my own child aside, I study the baby in my arms. His face is squared off a bit around the full cheeks and perfectly pointed at the chin. The shape is distinct and I just know there is a whole family out there—please let them still be out there—with faces exactly that same shape.

Something crackles behind me in the distance beyond the trees. I turn back, squinting to see through the falling snow, but the way we’ve come is obscured by the tangle of branches and brush. My heartbeat quickens. It might be a car engine. Though we are well-hidden by the trees now, there is a road not far from the edge of the woods. If the police followed us, my footprints in the snow would easily lead them here. I hold my breath, feeling like a hunted animal as I strain to listen through the stillness for voices or other sounds. Nothing—at least for now.

Closing my coat, I press forward through the trees. I hold the baby clumsily in one arm, using the other to clear a low branch in front of us. Snow shakes from it and falls down the collar of my coat, icy and wet. My feet, soaked through the patchy secondhand boots, begin to ache.