‘Come here, take a look at that. Closer.’ The pale shadow sank back onto the bed, the voice sounding hesitant, almost embarrassed.

I went up to him, my heart beginning to thump rapidly and chaotically, the blood throbbing violently against my throat. ‘I can’t see anything, it’s much too dark.’ I could hear how toneless and laboured my voice sounded. Jan stood up, his feet creaked across the floor. I peered at the movements of his white arms and suddenly a softly surging light flared up, casting a path in the darkness. ‘Bother it.’ The match went out. More creaking sounds and a moment later an oil lamp flickered.

From the dark Jan pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. ‘Look,’ he pointed to his leg, ‘look at that cut.’ I saw a gash, a dark line running almost all the way from his knee to the top of his leg. ‘My knife slipped. Really stupid.’ He gave a muffled chuckle. ‘And it’s deep, too. I ought to be sitting with my leg up all the time.’

I crouched on the floor beside Jan and looked at the elongated, scabby wound and at the smooth, clean line of the legs in the knitted underwear that flopped loosely about his body. Jan sat bent forward, peering closely at the wound as if he were short-sighted. His fingers pushed and pressed along the dark stripe. Suddenly he placed his hand over it protectively, as if he were afraid that I might hurt him. ‘It’s red-hot, just like I’m boiling. It’s full of pus which has to come out. Have a feel, see how much it’s throbbing.’

I didn’t move. The wound was like a thin snake that might suddenly wriggle away at great speed.

‘Would you mind squeezing it out for me? Otherwise I’ll have to go to the doctor’s.’ He looked at me anxiously, I had never seen him so uncertain and afraid before. ‘Just have a go, I don’t care if it hurts.’ I edged a little closer and laid my hand warily on the white leg. I could feel the throb of the feverish skin under my awkward fingertips. I was unable to talk, to breathe, to swallow, frightened to death lest I made the wrong move and caused him pain.

‘Get on with it, then.’

Carefully I slid my hand across a soft, smooth surface until it came up against the crusty, rough, injury. ‘Ouch, careful.’ The leg moved and pushed into my chest. ‘Watch it, you hear?’ He pointed to a whitish little swelling at the edge of the scab. ‘Feel that? The pus is under there, that’s where you have to squeeze.’ He pushed one of his hands under his thigh so that I could have a better look.

A wild sensation shot up inside me, something I could not control, like a flame spreading with lightning speed. I wanted to press my face between those two white legs, push my hands up inside the loose underwear so that I could feel his body, breathe upon it, exorcise it. I wanted to absorb it, greedily and hungrily, to kiss it and caress it.

Dizzy with fear I gripped his knee tightly and bent my head, my tongue moving spasmodically in a dry mouth. My body was jerky and stiff. Horror-struck I felt it happen: like an insect breaking out of its tight cocoon with strange, compulsive thrusts and then freeing its wings. Something had burst within me. I stood up awkwardly and shifted my clothes, in a panic lest Jan noticed.

It roared inside me: I had it, too, I was having it too, just like [an. It was like a sickness you could hide from nobody. Everyone could see it and would talk about it. I was betrayed, lost.

I pinched the skin on Jan’s leg between my fingers, that mouse-soft, butterfly-wing, tender warm skin. I kept pinching wildly and despairingly until I heard Jan say ‘Ow’, and tell me to squeeze with my fingers closer together.

I felt the wound break open as you might feel a gooseberry pop under your shoe with a sudden snap. Jan bent forward with his eyes screwed half-shut and wiped the wound with the sleeve of his overalls. I straightened up in the little room .and tried to control my panting. ‘Bloody hell,’ I heard Jan say, ‘that hurt all right.’

I was already by the stairs, the doorknob in my hand. I have to go.’ A moment later I had stumbled outside through the dark living-room, and was tearing home without stopping, to a house full of busy, warm and familiar people.

Chapter 11

The days crawl by on hand and knees, drab and without prospect. Bewildered I sometimes look at the calendar and see how many days have gone by. Those mysterious rows of figures only make me despondent; one long day compressed into one little number, and there have been so many little numbers, and there are so many freshly mustered columns still waiting, drawn up in serried ranks.

I feel locked up in time. It’s been more than five months, too long to remember my home properly – sometimes I think with a shock, What did they really look like? How did Mummy laugh? – and too brief to feel properly at home in my new surroundings. I wander about in an illusive no-man’s-land, a kaleidoscope of chill, fluctuating forms. Sometimes the little figures jell and I can make out my mother’s face, but they fall apart at the slightest movement, shockingly, into everyday, tangible objects.

Who can say how much longer the war will go on – for months, for years or perhaps for the rest of my life, so that I shall never see my parents again, my friends, our street. Everything is too confused for me even to cry about, I just take things as they come, day after day, week after week.

‘Be a brave boy, now my father had said to me that time when we packed my case. I had been kneeling to one side, looking on enthralled at the way all the bits and pieces for my journey were being fitted together: face-cloth, towel, a set of underwear, toothbrush, my last pair of scuffed shoes, the pyjamas Mummy had patched together from a discarded pair of my father’s…

‘Be a big boy, then you’ll please your Mummy a very great deal.’ My father had lifted my face by the chin and smoothed my hair. A big boy? I had certainly grown taller and sturdier. Mem sometimes seized me between her strong hands and Have me a satisfied squeeze. ‘Soon they won’t believe their eyes, your father and mother! They’ll hardly recognise you any more!’

I had acknowledged her approval with a feeble smile. Soon? I thought. How soon? I certainly have grown, she is quite right there. I can’t get into most of the clothes I brought with me from Amsterdam, and instead have to wear Meint’s tilings  quite a lot of the time, while he wears Popke’s castoffs. But really big? I still cry a lot, when no one is looking, and I "Hon think of home, and of my mother. Mother’s darling, they always used to call me at school.

Sometimes I look over my old clothes, so many folded away memories. All stored away in the suitcase: the check shirts, the blue linen shorts, the plus fours ‘for best’ (‘Oh, no, you can’t possibly walk about in those here,’ Mem had laughed uproariously, and I had never worn them once), and the woollen cable-stitch sweater that my mother had made herself, just like the shirts.

‘Had made herself.’ I take the folded garments carefully in my hands and feel how smooth, how fine they are. I sniff at them because in the early days the smell used to take me straight back to the bedroom at home, to the wardrobe where our clothes used to hang and to the sweetish scent of Mummy’s slip and stockings. But even the smell of my clothes has faded or changed. Or can it be that I have forgotten what it smelled like at home?

The lorry near the Royal Palace, the nocturnal drive over the big dam, and above all the bicycle ride with my father through the deserted Rozengracht – all have been etched into my memory and are at the same time irretrievably dim and far away. Wiped out, it would seem, the way the master with a peremptory gesture passes a cloth over my slate at school: ‘That sum is wrong. Do it again.’ I have accepted the loss, I have never been brave enough to protest. All I have done is mourn.

I have buckled down, I have conformed. On Sundays I go to church twice, on Saturdays I learn the psalm for Sunday school and on Sundays the Bible text for school on Monday. Early in the morning I help Jantsje and Meint clean the sheep droppings from the meadow, I churn milk in bottles into butter, listen outwardly unmoved to the praying at school, help Hait sometimes to mend his nets and trudge about in clogs like a real country boy.

In short, I have become one of them, outwardly that is, because when no one is looking, when I feel I am not being watched, I often sit at the far end of the stone seawall and look out over the capricious sea, the driving, moving masses of rebellious grey. Then I hope that, some bright day, I might suddenly be able to see over to the other side, there, far away, on that clear, sharp line between sea and sky. Let all go well with them, dear God, I pray, please keep them alive. Make them think of me and please let them come soon, to take me away from here.

The winter months are overwhelmingly bleak, and we spend most of the time inside the small house. We are like animals in our lair, crowded together and taking shelter in the warmth.

A razor-sharp wind blows straight across the bare land and the stripped dykes. Rain lashes the hedges and ditches, snow piles up in spotless layers – it all forces us to live a futile, cramped existence. When we step shivering outside in the mornings the grass is like a crackling sheet underfoot and every step taken sends silvery needles of ice splintering apart with delicate little sounds. Winter crickets. Faces around steaming pans of food, climbing early to bed and the smoke of the blown-out oil lamp: Mem, regularly the last, sighing as she gets undressed.

Sometimes I blow a hole in the ice of the frozen window-pane and stare across the white fields to the dark smudge which I know is where Jan lives. In the spring we shall roll down the Cliff again, our bodies close and warm together. And then I shall ask him straight out – something I have wanted to ask him hundreds of times, rehearsed in every combination of phrase and tone, but never allowed to cross my lips – if I may see his belly again, if the two of us may get undressed together. He will pull down his trousers and I will be able to touch and hold him there. I feel a compulsive and inescapable longing to lay my head against his body and look at that stiff, painful swelling.