My Enemy's Cradle Read Online Free PDF Page A

about it, eh?
    She led me to the back door. "There they are; they take their exercises in the garden. Last week they stomped all over my jasmine. Go on out."
    Two soldiers. They had their backs to me but I could tell neither was Karl. My chest began to squeeze again, but I had no choice now. They turned at the sound of my footsteps, and I was shocked to see how young they were.
    I asked for Karl Getz.
    "He's gone," the taller one said. This boy had brown hair and a round face, and didn't even look as if he shaved yet. "When will he be back?"
    The soldier narrowed his eyes for a second, then seemed to decide I was no threat. "No, he's gone. Munich. You missed him by an hour."
    My German was good, but I was sure I had misunderstood. "Munich? He wasn't ordered back to Hamburg?"
    No, both of them assured me, Karl wasn't going to Hamburg. They exchanged looks, and then the other boy, the quieter one, whose hair was lighter and curly, took a step toward me and asked if I were Karl's girlfriend.
    I ignored the question. "What about his fiancée? Will they still be married?"
    The soldiers looked at each other again, smirked. "I guess he's been keeping a secret from us."
    And then I understood. "Never mind."
    "Wait," the shorter one said. "What's your name?"
    I saw he was nothing more than lonely, so eager to talk for a minute that I felt sorry for him. "No, I ... I'm sorry I bothered you." I turned to leave, but he tried again.
    "I just wondered if..." He stopped and looked away, then brushed at his hair as though it had fallen over his forehead. I heard him take a sharp breath and then he looked back at me. "I wondered if you wanted to do something tonight ... go to a café? It's only that you look very much like my sister, and I haven't seen her for so long."
    I mumbled an excuse about having to work at night, and fled.
    I pedaled over the cobbled streets as fast as I could. The world was cracking in two. One world held boy soldiers who missed their sisters and longed to sit in cafés with girls. The other held men who wrapped girls' heads in latrine filth, and sliced my family from me, and who would not let me pass into a park or a tram if they knew who I was.
    The world was cracking in two, and I was falling into the void.

FIVE
    All that day before my uncle arrived, we waited as if for a storm. Even the air was heavy. I phoned the bakery and said Anneke had sprained her ankle. We made ourselves busy; we washed windows, made apple dumplings and pea soup. We cleaned out the hearth and took blankets from chests and aired them in preparation for winter. We never once mentioned Anneke's condition or speculated on my uncle's reaction to it, but every time I stole a glance at my aunt's face, it was folded in worry. My cousin's face was blank, and this was worse. I wanted to smash something, or scream.
    Finally I couldn't bear it anymore. "Anneke and I are leaving now," I said, in the middle of the afternoon. We had planned to go out in the evening, just before my uncle's train was due, to eat our dinner at a café while my aunt was to eat with him at home. She had bought him his favorite pickled ham and would speak to him after the meal. This wouldn't have been my way. I would have simply said to him: Here's what's happened. Now accept it and support your daughter. I wouldn't have fed him delicacies to make the news more palatable.
    Anneke was content to follow my lead. We took the train into Scheveningen. The afternoon was warm, so we took off our shoes and stockings and strolled along the strand, and then walked out to the end of the pier, hanging out over the pilings to watch the fishing boats unload in the sunset. We hadn't seen a single German soldier since getting off the train, and miraculously there was nothing to remind us of the Occupation except some bunkers built on the dunes—the kind that always made us laugh, painted to look like Dutch houses with silly windows and geraniums. Did the Germans really hope they would fool