My Enemy's Cradle

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2008 by Sara Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young, Sara, 1951–

  My enemy's cradle / Sara Young.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Netherlands—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. 2. World War,

  1939–1945—Netherlands—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Children—Fiction.

  4. Pregnant women—Fiction. 5. Cousins—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3625.O973M9 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2007012508

  ISBN 978-0-15-101537-5

  Text set in Baskerville MT

  Designed by April Ward

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  To the mothers and children who were lost to each other

  ONE

  SEPTEMBER 1941

  "Not here, too! Nee!"

  From the doorway, I saw soup splash from my aunt's ladle onto the tablecloth. These days, there was no fat in the broth to set a stain; still, my heart dropped when she made no move to blot the spill. Since the Germans had come, she had retreated further into herself, fading away in front of me so that sometimes it was like losing my mother all over again.

  "Of course here, Mies," my uncle scoffed. His pale face pinked with the easy flush of red-haired men, and he leaned back and took off his glasses to polish them on his napkin. "Did you think the Germans would annex us as a refuge for Jews? The question is only why it took so long."

  I brought the bread to the table and took my seat. "What's happened?"

  "They posted a set of restrictions for Jews today," my uncle said. "They'll scarcely be able to leave their homes." He inspected his glasses, put them back on. And then he turned to look at me directly.

  I froze, my fingertips whitening around my spoon, suddenly reminded of something I'd witnessed in childhood.

  Walking home from school, a group of us had come upon a man beating his dog. All of us shouted at him to stop—our numbers made us brave—and some of the bigger boys even tried to pull him off the poor animal. A boy beside me caught my attention; this boy, I knew, was himself often beaten by the older boys. He was crying, "Stop! Stop it!" along with the rest of us. But something in his expression chilled me: satisfaction. When my uncle turned to look at me, I saw that boy's face again.

  "Things will be different now, Cyrla."

  I dropped my gaze to my plate, but I felt my heart begin to pound. Was he weighing the risk of having me in his home?

  His home. I stared down at the white tablecloth. Beneath it, a table rug was edged with gold silk fringe. When I had first arrived it had seemed strange to cover a table this way, but now I knew every color and pattern of its design. I lifted my eyes to take in the room I had come to love: the tall windows painted crisp white overlooking our small courtyard; the three watercolors of the Rijksmuseum hanging in a column on their braided cord; the glimpse into the parlor beyond the burgundy velvet drapes, where the piano stood in the corner, necklaced with framed photographs of our family. My heart began to beat even faster—where did I belong if not here?

  I glanced at my cousin—Anneke was my safe passage through the treacherous landscape of my uncle's world. But she had been distracted all day, drifting away whenever I'd tried to talk to her, as if she was harboring a secret. She hadn't even heard her father's threat.

  "What?" I kept my voice calm. "What will be different here?"

  He was cutting the bread. He didn't stop, but I saw the warning look he gave my aunt. "Everything." He cut three slices from the loaf and then laid the knife down carefully. "Everything will be different."

  I drew the loaf toward me, picked up the knife as deliberately as a chess piece, and cut a fourth slice. I laid the knife back on the board, then placed my hands on my lap so he wouldn't see them trembling. I lifted my chin and leveled my eyes at him. "You counted wrong, Uncle," I said. He looked away, but his face was dark as a bruise.

  At last the meal was over. My uncle returned to his shop to take care of his bookkeeping, and my aunt and Anneke and I cleared the table and went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. We worked in silence; I in my fear, my aunt in her sadness, Anneke deep in her secret.

  Suddenly Anneke cried out. The bread knife clattered to the floor and she held up her hand; blood streamed into the basin of suds, tingeing the bubbles pink. I grabbed a dishcloth and pressed it around Anneke's hand, then led her to the window seat. She sank down and stared at the blood seeping through the dishcloth as though it was a curiosity. I grew afraid, then. Anneke was vain about her hands, would go without her ration of milk sometimes to soak them in it instead, and she could still find nail polish when it seemed no one in Holland had such a luxury. If she didn't carry on about a cut deep enough to scar, then her secret was very big.

  My aunt knelt to examine the wound, chiding her for her carelessness. Anneke closed her eyes and tipped her head back; with her free hand she stroked the hollow at the base of her throat with a contented smile. It was the look she wore when she crept back into our room in the middle of the night ... flushed and deepened, rearranged.

  I did not like Karl.

  And then I knew.

  "What have you done?" I whispered to her when my aunt left to fetch the disinfectant and muslin.

 
"Later," she whispered back. "When everyone is asleep."

  There was ironing and darning to do, and that night it seemed to take forever. We listened to Hugo Wolf's music on the phonograph while we did these chores, and I wished for silence again because for the first time I could hear how the tragedy of Wolf's life flowed through his music. The beauty itself was doomed. When my aunt said good night, Anneke and I exchanged looks and went upstairs as well.

  We washed quickly and put on our nightclothes. I couldn't wait another moment. "Tell me now."

  My cousin turned to me, and I'd never seen her smile so beautifully.

  "A wonderful thing, Cyrla," she said, reaching down to stroke her belly.

  The cut on her finger had begun to bleed again; the bandage was soaked through. As she stood in front of me smiling and caressing her belly, a smear of blood bloomed across the pale blue cotton of her nightgown.

  TWO

  "I'm leaving. I'm leaving here!" Now Anneke could hardly stop talking. "We'll get married here, at the town hall I suppose. Karl's family lives outside Hamburg—maybe we'll get a place there when the war is over, with a garden for children, near a park, maybe....Hamburg, Cyrla!"

  "Shhhhhh!" I quieted her. "She'll hear." It wasn't my aunt we were careful of, but Mrs. Bakker in the next house, which shared a wall with ours. She was old and had nothing better to do with her days than spy on people and gossip about what she'd learned. She sat in her front parlor all morning long and watched the goings-on of Tielman Oemstraat through the two mirrors attached to her windows. We knew from her coughing that her bedroom was next to ours, and we didn't think it would be beneath her to hold a glass to the wall. But I didn't really care about Mrs. Bakker at all. I wanted to stop Anneke's words.

  I unwrapped her finger and cleaned it with water from the wash pitcher. "Change your nightgown. I'll go downstairs for more bandages." Out in the hall, I made myself breathe calmly again. I gathered the muslin strips, and also a cup of milk and a plate of spekulaas—Anneke had hardly eaten at supper, but she loved the little spice cookies she smuggled home from the bakery. If I distracted her, I wouldn't have to hear her plans. And if she saw how much she needed me, she might understand that it was a mistake to leave. It was always a mistake to leave.

  We sat on her bed and I dressed her finger; I couldn't look into her face although I felt her studying mine. "Are you sure? And how did this even ... weren't you careful...?"

  Anneke looked away. "These things happen." Then she broke into her brilliant smile, the one that always disarmed me. "A baby ... think of it!"

  I wrapped my arms around her and laid my head on her chest, breathing in the scent she brought home to us from the bakery each day—baked sugar, sweet and warm, so perfectly suited to her. What scent clung to me, I wondered. Vinegar from the pickling I'd been doing all week? Lye from the upholstery shop?

  Anneke stroked the tears from my cheeks. "I'm sorry, Cyrla," she said. "I'll miss you so much. More than anyone else."

  That was my cousin's way. Sometimes she was careless with my feelings—not in cruelty, but in the innocent way that beautiful girls sometimes have, as if being thoughtful were a skill they had never needed to learn. But when she did think of me, her sweetness, completely unmeasured, would fill me with shame.

  "But I'm so happy!" she cried, as if her face weren't already telling me this. "And he's so handsome!" She fell back onto the bed, clutching her heart. "He looks just like Rhett Butler, don't you think?"

  I sighed in mock exasperation. "He looks nothing like Rhett Butler, for heaven's sakes. For one thing, he's blond."

  Anneke waved this detail away with her bandaged hand.

  "And he has blue eyes. And no mustache." I rose and brought the glass of milk from the dresser over to her night table. "All right. He's handsome. But frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

  Anneke laughed and sat up. "You'll be an aunt! And the war will be over soon, and then you can visit."

  I knew she believed it would be that easy. Everything in An-neke's life was easy; her very name meant grace, and sometimes it seemed as if grace poured over her from the skies, so abundantly she could scoop it up in her pretty hands and let it sluice through her fingers.

  She never acknowledged that my situation was different. When I had first come, she seemed to have decided that I had simply left my Jewish half in Poland, exactly as I had left my childhood there. Oh, yes, she might have thought if she ever questioned it, Cyrla was a little girl in Poland, and she was Jewish, but look: She's not a little girl anymore! Here in Holland, I lived as everyone around me did, and since I looked enough like her that we were often mistaken for sisters, she viewed me as just that.

  In Poland, I had lived with my father, his second wife, and my two little half-brothers. With his remarriage, my father had become more observant, and we began to celebrate Jewish traditions. After a while, I seemed to bear nothing of my Dutch mother except her blond hair.

  In fact, Anneke's view was the very argument my father had used when the idea of fleeing to Holland seemed to me a betrayal. "You are not denying half of yourself by accepting the other half. You are correcting something that has been unbalanced. Go to your mother's world. Learn to fit inside her life, and you will find how she fits in yours."

  The first Friday after I'd arrived in Holland, I'd stood in the center of the parlor as the sun went down, feeling lost without my stepmother lighting the candles to mark the beginning of the Sabbath. My aunt had noticed; she shook her head and then came over and held me tight. "No," she had whispered. Five years later, Friday evening was just another evening. I kept track of the holy days in my head, but I'd learned to sweep aside any feelings of guilt about not celebrating them. Any day now, I told myself, it will be safe again to go home. To become again who I used to be.

  Poland was a very long time ago.

  But Anneke should have known how devastating her choice of husband would be to me. Instead, she denied the other half of the issue as completely as she denied the Jewish half of me.

  "He's a boatbuilder," she argued in the beginning when my aunt and I tried to persuade her not to see Karl. "He's not a Nazi. He was conscripted. He didn't have a choice."

  No one else felt this way about the German soldiers. Anneke's friends sometimes bragged that they were going out with them and were going to get them drunk and push them into a canal, although I never heard of any dying that way. We all passed along jokes about the soldiers—ridiculing them made the Occupation more bearable. And everyone did their part to foil the Nazis when they could: switching road signs, pretending not to understand German when asked for directions, or painting OZP—Orange Will Conquer—wherever we could in our forbidden national color.

  Anneke was different though. I should have seen right away how she was with this one. I should have stopped it.

  Because I wouldn't have liked Karl any better if he had been a soldier in the Dutch army. I had met him only once, a week before. Anneke had arranged for us to meet at the bakery, when he picked her up, as though by accident, so I could get a look at him, see how handsome he was. And he was. Although the only way a man could be attractive to me was Isaak's way: dark, with serious, concerned eyes. Karl was fair and tall, and there was something closed about his face. When Anneke introduced us, his eyes slid past me. If he had been anxious to gaze at Anneke, I would have understood, would have liked him for that, but I remember instead he was scanning the shop, as if looking for an escape. I did not tell Anneke this.

  "Well, his eyes," I told her instead, "the clear blue of them against the white, remind me of hyacinths blooming against a late snowfall." This pleased her and in fact it was true. But now I wished I had told her what I had sensed—what kind of man he was.

  So much was wrong, but that first night all I could think of was that Anneke was leaving me. My throat was so swollen with all I wanted to say that I could say nothing at all. I turned out the light and rolled over to face away from her, but I couldn't sleep.


  Around midnight, I needed to use the toilet. I crept out into the hall quietly, so as not to wake anyone, and as I passed my aunt and uncle's room I heard their voices.

  "...if it means putting our family in danger," my uncle said.

  "She is our family, Pieter," my aunt replied, angry with him.

  "She's your family," my uncle corrected her. "Not our family, yours."

  In the morning, I watched Anneke as she got ready for work. I could tell by the care she took dressing that she was going to see Karl afterward.

  "When will you tell your parents?" I asked from my bed.

  "Well, I'll tell Mama tonight, I think." She chose a lipstick the color of ripe cherries and stained her mouth. "First I want to tell Karl."

  I sat up. "Anneke!"

  She laughed and flicked her fingers at me in the mirror in that way she always did—as if worries were merely little gnats she had to chase away. "He'll be happy; he wants a large family. He has a new niece he adores."

  "But all the plans?"

  "You're too serious, katje!" She hadn't called me Kitten for a long time. It was the name she'd given me when I had first arrived, when I was only fourteen and she was sixteen. She came over and sat beside me on the bed. "Give me your hand. I'll read your fortune."

  I held out my hand and she kissed it, leaving a heart-shaped lipstick stain on my palm. "Look at that," she said. "That's a very good sign—it means you're going to fall in love soon. And you'll get married, too, and you'll live happily ever after and we'll both have ten children and they'll all have ten children and you and I are going to grow old together and always be happy."

  I curled my fingers over the mark on my palm. "Are you sure about this, Anneke? Do you even love him?"

  Anneke went back to her bureau and pulled her clips from her hair and combed out her waves before she answered. "I'm in love with him. I want to get married ... and there aren't as many men around, now that they're diving under. Have you noticed that?" She sighed and turned from the mirror. "He loves me. I want to get out of here. And now I'm pregnant. I think that's enough." She came over to me and sat on the bed. "Here, let me brush your hair. You ought to let me cut it before I go. No one wears it this way anymore, and you'd be so beautiful."