And at the sound of her name on his lips, she seizes him with a kiss. Diving deeply as he combs his fingers through the thickness of her hair and clutches the back of her neck, she gripping him tightly until a scold from a passing policeman on his bicycle separates them. “Hey, boy! Let’s see some daylight between you two!”
Their lips part. “See now, you got me in trouble with the law.” Raaf half grins.
She leans her forehead against his chin and breathes in the intimacy. “Of course. Blame the virgin.”
Raaf picks up a stick, breaking it in two before tossing the pieces aside. Anne lolls her head against his shoulder and absently measures the size of her hand against his just for the sake of touch. That’s when she notices that his finger is bent. The third finger on his left hand. Well, not
Raaf flexes his hand in and out of a fist, as if he’s trying to muscle out a cramp. At first he says nothing, but then he tells her, “It was my pap.”
Anne blinks. “Your father bent your finger?”
Raaf shrugs. Picks up another twig from the grass to snap. “He was always kind of a canker, my pap,” he says. “Always looking for a fight with somebody. But after Mam died, he got even worse. He did this,” the boy says, flexing his hand again, “’cause I waved to a neighbor he didn’t like.”
Anne goes silent. She has learned about violence and plenty of it. She is not shocked by it, as she once was as a child, but it still saddens her.
“Pretty loopy, right?” Raaf grins painfully. “He’s gone now. Dead. Got drunk and fell down the stairs last winter. Snapped his neck,” says Raaf, snapping the twig absently.
“I’m sorry,” Anne says, and means it. She’s sorry because she can recognize the pain in the boy’s face. The boy gives a glance at nothing and a shrug. “Did he beat you often?”
“Usually only when he was loaded. After I got bigger—quicker—I used to punch him back when my mam was around. To try to keep him off her. But then she died. Also, he was getting old, and his punching arm wasn’t what it used to be. So when he started swinging, I’d just hit the street.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know. I hated his guts most of the time, the old pox.”
Anne swallows quietly. “You have no brothers, no sisters?”
“Nope. After me, something happened to my mam. She couldn’t give birth again. That pissed Pap off, too. He always said it was my fault there’d be no daughter to take care of him when he was old. Mam never seemed to mind so much, though.” Tossing away the broken twig, he tugs out his tobacco pouch. “You want to share a smoke?”
“Sure.” She watches him roll the shag. She’s hesitant to probe further but then does so anyway. “May I ask you something else?”
“I guess.” The boy seals the end of the smoke with a lick.
“How—” Anne starts to say, then stops and starts again. “How did your mother die?”
Raaf swallows. He lights up with a match. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he says. Then he says, “There’s a place I want to take you today.”
“A place?”
“Yeah. A place the rest of the world has forgotten.”
The Transvaal
Oost-Watergraafsmeer
Amsterdam-Oost
During the Hunger Winter, when all of Amsterdam was crazy for wood to burn to keep from freezing to death, people started with the trees. The parks had trees, so why not chop them all down? Also, the wooden blocks in the tram tracks could be ripped out, so that’s something, too. Furniture! Old Auntie’s chipped Frisian cupboard! She won’t mind if we burn it—she’s in heaven anyway. And how about the empty homes of the Jews? Now,
That was the thinking. In fact, it was so much the thinking that with all the wood stripped out, the walls of Jewish houses began to collapse for lack of support. Buildings crumbled wearily into brick piles. It was a mess. But so what? It wasn’t as if the Jews were ever coming back. Everybody knew that.
They have crossed the Berlagebrug. Anne walks her bicycle through the streets, feeling a gritty disquiet grinding her belly.