The Blackberry Bush Read Online Free PDF

drenching me, but it feels good.
    I’ve been strolling around a cemetery in Hillegersberg—an upscale suburb of Rotterdam, Holland—killing time, waiting for the big encounter.
    I’m on top of a hill, if you can call it that. More of a mound, here in the middle of the cemetery. Holland is pretty flat, so it stands out. And the old, imposing, dirty-brick Protestant town church, with this suburb grown up around it, commands the view from all directions. I have a hunch that people have been meeting on this hill for centuries—perhaps millennia. Maybe it’s an ancient burial mound of some kind. The church itself has its own mythic-sounding name: Hillegonda.
    To the right is the side entrance to the church through the ornate, open black-iron gate. Bright light from the chandeliers is streaming through the clear church windows into the soggy night.
    The Meere organ is leading the congregation in singing the Psalms of Zion. Dutch people are psalm singers by nature. Many of them learn the psalms by heart without even trying, and Psalm 42 is their favorite: “As the hart panteth for the water....”
    Over to the left, emerging out of the dark into a streetlamp-lit halo, is Walter, a German. It is the heart of World War II, and Germany is occupying Holland. Rotterdam has been especially hard-hit, and much of the city lies in shambled ruins after the iron fist of the German Luftwaffe bombed Amsterdam’s twin town back into the Stone Age.

 
     
    The summer of 1943
World War II
Hillegersberg, outside Rotterdam
German-occupied Holland
    W ALTER WALKS TOWARD THE GATE , checking his elite Ziffer à Grande Complication 1924 Swiss watch. It is his special treasure, given to him by his proud father right before Walter left for his military assignment in Rotterdam. His particularly emotionless face seems drawn in by the music and the light from the nearby church.
    An officer in the German army, Walter is from an aristocratic Rheinland family that used to do business here at the downstream North Sea port of Rotterdam. Tonight he is off duty and going for a walk in civilian clothing to clear his head. He misses his wife and young son, Harald, back in Germany, and it seems strange for him to be the “enemy” in this city so familiar to him. His father’s company has had an office for years, on and off, in this vital seaport.
    Walter’s father is an elder in the little Protestant church back home in Oberwinter. Deeply patriotic, the Dornbusch family has supplied high-end officers to army after army, war after war. His great-great-grandfather led the premier Prussian division into the pivotal Battle of Sedan. Walter’s father was decorated with the Iron Cross. But it isn’t likely that Walter will follow in those heroic footsteps. He’s stuck here in occupation duty in Holland, in charge of the rebuilding of the Rotterdam infrastructure that his own nation’s air force destroyed. Nothing like pouring concrete in the middle of rubble.
    The foolishness, futility, and irony of it all have led him out to get some fresh air. His current project, the pedestrian/bicycle/auto tunnel under the river not far from the elegant port terminus of the Holland-Amerika steamship line, is meant to be an Autobahn link in the network of Greater Germany, into which Holland will eventually be absorbed.
    His colleagues are readying plans to move half the Dutch population out of Holland to the steppes of partially conquered Russia to homestead new farms side by side with Germans, after the final victory.
    Walter is the first in a long line of officers who will have no thrilling battle stories to tell his son. He’s authorized to carry a sidearm but doubts he’ll ever fire it. He’s a bureaucrat in a military uniform.
    But Walter’s life is about to take a turn he’d never expect.
    How pathetic , he thinks as he walks through the gate toward the side door of the church. Any glory is gone from my life .
    He pauses at the door of the church. I can pass for