Our Narrow Hiding Places by Kristopher Jansma

Author:Kristopher Jansma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2024-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

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The whole world has gone dark. The streetlamps unlit, the city bathed in grayness, blackness. No power coursing in the electrical lines. No coal in the hearths. No food in the stores. Mieke and Rob huddle on the side of the road before sunrise, each with a long, sharpened stick in hand, watching for the truck coming from the western farms. All they can hear is rain, rain. Every day, rain. Even before the nightly curfews begin, the streets are quiet. It feels like a thousand years since her father and the others went up to the attic, but it has been only six weeks, Mieke reminds herself. “Divers,” people are calling them; the city is filled with them now. Filled but emptied. Men quietly waiting in the walls, behind the wardrobes, under the floorboards. Onderduiken. Crammed into crawl spaces and closets. At night Mieke hears them in the ceiling. Creaking, whispering, ghosts.

“See something?” Rob asks. Mieke looks out into the dark, wet road, waiting, unsure.

The cars have been taken for scrap, and anyway they’d have no gas to run, so the roads have fallen quiet. It’s only the soldiers’ trucks going past now. Mid-October and nearly freezing already. Mieke and Rob are both soaked to the bone; they’ve been out there for almost an hour. Rob is shivering next to her, even wrapped up in his father’s old overcoat. She’s wearing the one he outgrew last winter. The shops are all closed. Inside, there are just bare shelves, and if you squint, you can see swarms of fleas, rendering the dust into still more dust.

Money is worth almost nothing now anyway. The other day she heard from Jopie Tideman, up the street, that his father paid eighty guilders for a half pound of dried beans on the black market. Good luck cooking them. It’s all been taken: pots and pans, drawer knobs and lamp bases. Then the fence posts, the street signs, the traffic lights, the lamp poles. They even took the little jacks that Broodje had bought with his birthday money last year. The bigger problem are shoes, both hers and his, which are wearing thin. If they’d imagined the soldiers would be back for the rubber, they’d have buried Rob’s boots in the backyard with her mother’s tea set. Too late now.

ROB NUDGES MIEKE in the hip; he sees the truck coming up the road. She can tell from the way the cargo in the back bounces around. This is the one they want. It’s coming in from the farms with food for the soldiers and for the soup kitchens. The two children flatten themselves behind the rosebushes outside of Mr. Neijmeijer’s—listening. Mieke sees the shriveled gray heads of the dead flowers, browning on the stems. No one’s been out to prune them. Mieke’s stomach growls. What will be in the truck? She prays for collards or parsnips. Potatoes would be incredible, but she hasn’t seen those in days.

They wait, and as the truck rolls past, the children leap to their feet.

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