Dead Man's Tale Read Online Free PDF

Joost liked: the windmill sails creakily turning as the wind moved them, music to the ears of a man who had spent most of his life in darkness; or the ringing hiss of milk in the metal pails as Katrina emptied the cows’ udders, and their contented lowing afterward. But most of all, Katrina’s voice as she sang to him after dinner in the farmhouse.
    Now Katrina was asleep and there was the sound of the rainwater dripping from the eaves and the faint bubbling in the bowl of his big briar pipe as Old Joost smoked away. The pipe was forbidden, and Old Joost smiled. Heer Doctor Brinker had told Old Joost after the last attack, there would be no more tobacco or he, Brinker, would not be responsible for what happened. So the old man allowed himself one stolen pipeful at night, after Katrina was asleep.
    Joost was an angular giant with a leathery face and very large hands which had been once formidable. But now the hands shook; the strength had slipped away. He marvelled at his trembling fingers. It hardly seemed possible that with these hands, not too many years ago, he had killed a man.
    The man had had a name, but Old Joost no longer remembered it. An Englishman with a wry, clipped accent. His Dutch had been atrocious. He had come to Oosterdijk looking for Milo Hacha. He had not found Hacha, but he was a man of cunning. Because Hacha had once lived with Old Joost at the farmhouse, he had come here. When he had seen Katrina, the Englishman’s shrewd mind had gone to work.
    Old Joost had been able to tell; the Englishman’s voice had changed at the sight of Katrina’s dark, kinky hair and her widely-spaced Slavic cheekbones. The blind man had always known what Katrina looked like, all but the colouring; his fingertips had told him.
    The Englishman had wanted to take Katrina away. So on a night like this night, with rainwater dripping from the eaves and gusts of wind snapping in the sails of the windmill, Old Joost had killed the Englishman with his hands.
    The Englishman had not wanted to die, but Old Joost had not wanted him to take Katrina away, either. The old man remembered the blows the Englishman had rained on his chest and face, but he also remembered the terrible strength in his fingers as they strangled the life out of the stranger. Katrina had been very young then. Had she been in the room? Old Joost just couldn’t remember.
    He had buried the Englishman behind the windmill. Coming back to the farmhouse, he had stumbled over the dead man’s bicycle. So he had dug another hole and buried the bicycle, too, and a few days later Vander Poel, the policeman, had come asking Old Joost about the Englishman, but Old Joost knew nothing.
    Joost sighed, wishing he might see—with eyes, not fingers—Katrina’s dark, Slavic beauty. But even before she had come to him the Gestapo had destroyed his sight. They had also killed his daughter and his son-in-law because they had been part of the underground that had helped British and American airmen reach the coast and the submarines which took them back to England.
    He did not know what had happened to the real Katrina, their child. At first he had accepted the Katrina brought to him by Milo Hacha as his granddaughter. Later, when he realized that the child of his own blood had died with her mother and father in the Gestapo butchery, it no longer mattered. There was only one Katrina.
    Until Katrina’s seventh birthday a succession of hired girls came to live at the farm, to help in rearing “Joost’s granddaughter.” There had been frequent visits by the mayor’s wife, Johanna, bearing gifts. And for the first three years of Katrina’s life Milo Hacha had also come frequently.
    It was during those three years that Hilversum had been plotting in secret against the Czech, manufacturing evidence, Joost was certain, to prove that Milo Hacha had been a Nazi criminal. For how could that be? Of all the fighters in the underground the