She stood at the edge of the bricked embankment staring down hard at the brown water of the canal. He waited beside her, but she forgot his presence, even though he held her arm, and forced her eyes to penetrate the opaque water through the quiet lapping of its surface, through the dull brown, until she could be certain the faces were truly there. Hundreds of faces at the bottom of the canal, heaped like a pile of scattered pennies, the miserable eyes pleading back up at her, the lips drawn tight over the blackened teeth, the tongues bloated. With a sudden recognition she brought her fingers up to her mouth They were all the faces of children.
Bicycles
Everywhere she looked there were bicycles, long rows of them on both sides of the street, swerving in front of cars, bumping across the tram tracks, ridden by laborers, secretaries, students, housewives, dignified old men in tweed suits, backs erect, trousers clipped to their thin ankles, feet pushing pedals around and around. Then the bicycles of the children appeared, hundreds of them, so many they glutted the street. She looked only at the wheels, the glittering spokes, afraid to move her eyes until a strange voice now commanded her to look. The children were headless.
Tram
They sat at the back of the tram next to the ticket machines. He was watching a girl midway up the car in a denim miniskirt, her hair short and Dutch-blonde, her soft breasts loose beneath a sleeveless cotton shirt.
The girl was signaling him. She was sure of it. She edged closer, into the empty seat across from the girl, and glared down at the golden fuzz on her long naked legs, at the dirty toes in flapping sandals. The girl gave no hint that she noticed his looking. It was all part of the plan.
Then the girl crossed her legs, rubbed her kneecap, and quickly uncrossed them. That was it. The signal to him. They were going to do something horrible to her, worse than they had done to the children.
When he moved up the aisle and touched her shoulder just before their stop, her cheeks glistened with desperate tears.
Hotel
In the darkness, while he slept amidst the puffed covers of the hotel bed, she smoked cigarette after cigarette and listened to the sound of marching boots that seemed to be continually turning the corner outside the hotel. She sat on the rug, cowering against the wall, expecting the footsteps to mount the stairs, to kick violently at the door.
The new voice ordered her to stand and move into the center of the room. She covered her eyes with her hands, until the shouting demanded that she look through the open window. As her head flopped from side to side, the night shadows began to sway, at first slowly, then faster and faster until the whole street was vibrating, the pounding of the boots louder and louder, a rumbling as if all the buildings were about to collapse. She squeezed her eyes shut and, when she had to open them again, saw the rows of small heads hanging from the hooks of the buildings, all the faces ripped away in smears of blood.
Rijksmuseum
She only glanced at the art works, hardly knew what building she was in, wrestled with a thousand thoughts spoken by a dozen familiar voices before her new voice broke through with a startling clarity and spoke the name of the city. Why had they sent her here?
She moved in the footsteps of his orderly walking, following arrows from room to numbered room, until, in an alcove, a painting leaped off the wall and seared her mind: the tortured face, the piercing crown of thorns, the rivulets of blood and sweat. A great open wound marred the side, the flesh parted in a precise triangle, a dark flowing about to burst from within.
First she felt a dampness along her own side, then recoiled from the pain staggered and almost fell to her knees. She thought she would have to scream out, fill that alcove and the huge room beyond with her agony. But a voice told her to touch her side. Trembling, terrified, she brought her hand to the top of her rib cage and stroked downward. The pain vanished. She trembled with joy. She believed her new voice was the voice of God.
Churches
In an afternoon of walking he led her from church to church. Oude Kerk, Nieuwe Kerk, Zuider Kerk, Wester Kerk. Tall spires and grey stones, crumbling, blackened by time. Windows segmented into tiny sooted panes, no stained glass, no color.
She prayed all the time, inwardly, barely moving her lips, even when the other voices, the old voices, tried to drown out the words of her prayers. God had spoken once. She prayed to know the sound of him again. In his voice she could find release from the babble of enemies. She would be a prisoner no longer. She would be free of suffering, of the pain that burned through her head. She longed for the hand of God to touch her head, to drive out all the horrors, to save the children.
Vondelpark
To her the crowd of young people was only a human blur, their noise a background hum. She saw only, with an absolute clarity, one young man with matted shoulder-length hair, barefoot, wearing black leotards and a ruffled white shirt. His face was pallid, painted even whiter with smears of makeup, black circles in the hollows of his eyes. In one hand he held a lighted candle in a brass holder. On a thick chain he wore a pendant circle of black velvet against his chest, a huge silver cross fixed to it, upsidedown. He moved on his toes, stepping slowly backward, then swinging ahead, from group to group, as if to the rhythm of a waltz, holding out the candle mime-like, silently imploring people to follow.
She knew she was the one he sought, that he had been sent only for her. He had a message, the most important me message she would ever receive: the name of her voice. But it was forbidden to call to him.
When he crossed a bridge over a pond and disappeared behind a growth of bushes, she wanted to run after him, but her husband held her arm.
“That man,” she said, struggling with the words.
He shrugged. “Acid.”
When he led her away from the bridge, in the opposite direction, away from the young man, she knew she would never forgive him.
Bed
In bed, her legs drawn away from him so their bodies would not touch, the sheet littered with the ashes of her cigarettes she had smoked through the night, she relaxed with a sigh and felt the hands of a lover on her flesh. They caressed her throat, the back of her knees, ran teasingly over the softness of her middle, over all her most sensitive places. Secret places no man had ever discovered, not even he in all their years together. She touched herself after the hands, unable to stop, as if to rub away an ecstasy that was more than she could endure.
The voice began murmuring, so softly she could not make out the words. The hands covered her from without, the voice filled her from within. She begged that it be the voice of God. But when the hands tore at her center and made her gasp aloud, when the voice commanded her helplessness, when the fingers dug at the shame of her body, she knew she was lost.
The Anne Frank House
He told her it was the place he had wanted to see most of all. Where are we? she wanted to ask him. What is this house? But she dared not speak.
They stood in a queue, mounted a steep stairway, stooped to pass behind a hinged bookcase that was a secret door “Secret,”she heard him say. Secret, secret, secret echoed through her head, spoken by all the voices.
It was old, the rooms empty, the wallpaper faded; yet other people were here too, hushed in their looking. She expected him to leave her, slowly pull his hand from her sleeve, walk away with deliberate strides as if he never knew her, to abandon her in these empty rooms forever.
Then, as if shocked by an electric charge, she understood. This was the house of a child eaten alive by evil. The thought made her heart thump. She had to sit down, but there was no furniture. Sucking air through her nose, afraid to open her mouth, her hand pressed flat on her pounding chest like a schoolgirl in salute, with a knife twist of recognition she realized that she had seen this child in the canal. All the faces had been the face of this child.
Of course! of course! of course! the new voice shouted, shrill, impatient, on the edge of raving. Her face is your face! She is you!
Hysterical laughter rocked her head. She tugged both fists at her hair to shake it loose. He nudged her side, but she would not stop.
Her legs weakened-she thought she would faint. She heard herself screaming, but no one looked, not even he. He just stared at the yellowed pictures on the wall. Was he, were they all, pretending not to hear the screams in this house?
Bootsteps thumped up the stairway, fists pounded the doors. The voice shouted its name like an explosion. Hitler! Hitler!
Canal
He slept in foolish innocence and the commands were sharp. She obeyed: slipped out the door, snapped the lock behind her, tiptoed down the carpeted stairway out to the street, returned to the canal where she had found the faces. A presence seemed to be guiding her through the darkness, a hand forcing at her back.
The lights of the city rippled reflection on the water. “I can't see them,” she said aloud. But then they suddenly appeared, hundreds of that same face, burning like fire from the bottom of the canal.
Her chest heaved with sobbing.
You should be with them, the voice spoke, strangely gentle, a tone she had never heard before. Then there was silence, for the first time in longer than she could remember not a single voice.
Had it been Hitler or God who spoke? She dared not ask. But she knew the voice spoke truth. She should be with them, beneath the brown water; her face should lie smothered by the faces of all the suffering children.
She sank off the embankment even before the voice commanded, and the cold water closed over her.
Fiction from Web del Sol