Rudi van Dantzig: For a Lost Soldier

The morning I pick up the piece of paper with the letters V.B.S. – C.B. on it, I hear my father, who is listening to the radio, suddenly curse softly ‘God help us all…’ I try to catch the announcer’s words. He is saying something about ‘Japan’, ‘American air force’, ‘an unknown number of victims’, but the meaning of it all escapes me. My father is listening attentively. I ask him no questions.

The expeditions into town have begun to exhaust me and I continue them without any real faith. My conviction that I shall find Walt again has worn thin; sometimes I have to jolt my memory to remind myself why I am in the part of town where I happen to be and for what purpose. I walk, I trudge along, I sit on benches, stare at passers-by, look into shops, long to be back home, anything so as not to think about him.

On the Ceintuurbaan I recognise the cinema I went to with my mother a few years back, when the war was still going on.

Dearest children in this hall, Let us sing then, one and all: Tom Puss and Ollie B. Bommel!

I had sung along obediently but my illusions had been shattered. Ollie B. Bommel, I told my mother, was much too thin, his brown suit hanging like a loose skin about his body. And Tom Puss (Tom Puss, Tom Puss, what a darling you are’ – but by then I had stopped singing along) had turned out to be a little creature with a woman’s voice prancing coquettishly about the stage.

I stop on a bridge to watch the fully-laden boats moving towards me down the broad channel and then disappearing beneath me. A boy comes and stands near me and spits into the water. He keeps edging closer to me. When he is right next to me, he says, ‘Want to come and get something to drink with me? There’s nothing much doing round here.’

I am afraid to say no, follow him towards an ice-cream parlour on the other side of the bridge and answer his questions: don’t I have to go to school yet, do I live around here and when do I have to be back home? He is wearing threadbare gym shoes and his hair has been clipped like a soldier’s, short and bristly.

I am flattered that an older boy is bothering with me and paying me so much attention, but the sound of his voice and also the way he keeps scratching the back of his neck as he asks me questions put me off. When I realise that his arm is touching my shoulder I quickly move a bit further away from him.

‘What do you want, an ice-cream or something to drink?’ he asks when we are inside the small ice-cream parlour. ‘I can ask if they have lemonade.’ He looks at my legs which I have stuck awkwardly under my chair, smiles at me conspiratorially and whistles softly through his teeth.

When he is standing at the counter I race out of the shop and run on to the next bridge. A tram labouring up the incline just misses me, clusters of people hanging from the footboards. When the second carriage draws level I run beside it and grab a held-out hand. I balance on the extreme edge of the footboard and clutch the handle, dizzy with fear; I am going to fall, I’ll be lying in the street, Mummy won’t know where I am… My hands hurt and I am afraid they will slip off. Houses pass by at breakneck speed, the man next to me leans more and more heavily against me, but after a little while it begins to get exciting, there is a friendly atmosphere among that tangle of bodies, people joke with each other, shove up obligingly and call out to passers-by. When I finally dare to look out sideways I can see where we are: Kinkerstraat, that was quick, and it didn’t cost anything either!

They have organised a childrens’ party by the canal near our house. I can hear the singing in the distance already. My little neighbours are lined up in long rows at the edge of the pavement, dancing and cheering at the command of a determined young woman. I go and sit on a low wall until a girl runs up to me and puts out her hand.

At first, surly and shamefaced, I refuse to take it, but the woman beckons. ‘Everyone has to join in, this is a party for everyone, no exceptions allowed!’

I join the big circle and see Jan and the boy with the cigarette holding hands with the milkman’s daughter. We hop about singing, changing places, passing from hand to sweaty hand, skip, bow deeply and clap in time with the music.

Mothers are standing on the balconies, looking down on their singing children, mine too, in her yellow dress, my brother on her arm. I wave.

We are twirling about, inside, outside, first to the left, then to the right. I feel the touch of hands, sweep past hot, happy faces, catch girls and boys around their waists and skip about in a circle with them.

In the evening my father sits at the table with a grim expression reading the paper. When he unfolds it I can see the front page: The Truth, it says, and a little further down: ‘Atom Bomb on Hiroshima. Catastrophic Results of U.S. Air Force Raid on Japan.’ I walk into the kitchen. ‘What’s that, Mum, an atom bomb?’

‘Ah, darling,’ she says, ‘I don’t rightly know myself. But it’s nothing for children to bother themselves with. Best not think about it, you’re too small for things like that.’

I have tied my arm to the edge of the bed with a piece of ribbon so that I can’t get up and sleep-walk around the house any more. A gentle breeze billows the curtain, wafting in scents from the garden. I can hear a monotone voice on the radio in another house sending news through the still summer night: ‘According to the latest reports the entire city has been laid waste. Estimates put the number of dead at tens of thousands. A second raid by the U.S. Air Force

What if he is over there, what if he is having to fight in Japan? Where is that, how would I get there? He is lying in his tent with bombs exploding all round him…

The voice on the radio is still reading the news, but I have stopped trying to make out the words.

He is washing at the basin. His strong, supple body, the water running down his legs to the floor. He pulls me towards him and reassures me.

The expedition to the Ceintuubaan is my last.

‘Your new school is near the centre, quite a long way from home,’ says my father. ‘If it’s too far I can give you the tram fare now and then.’

He is shaving in the kitchen, his head held stiffly backwards and his eyes fixed on his image in the mirror. His arm moves steadily, surely and unhesitatingly as he strokes the finely-honed cut-throat razor up and down. If he had any idea how much walking I had done this summer, my criss-crossing of the city, my certainty that sooner or later I would rediscover those eyes, that smell, that breath. The razor scrapes across his face collecting thick blobs of soap as the naked skin over his jaw is laid bare strip by strip.

‘It won’t be too bad,’ I tell him, ‘the school in Friesland was a long way, too, probably a bit further.’

It’s still early. I eat my sandwich and listen to the rustling of the trees in the garden. My little brother starts to bawl in the living-room, his screams disturbing our relaxed mood. A moment later my mother comes into the kitchen looking harassed, holding out a plate with a sandwich cut into four cubes.

‘He’s driving me mad, he won’t eat a bite. I can’t get anything down him.’ I look at her desperate and tired face. She runs her hands nervously over her temples and puts a kettle on the gas stove.

‘Don’t always let it get you down so.’ My father’s voice is distorted by the strange way he has to twist his head round. ‘He’ll eat soon enough when he gets hungry. Just leave him be.’