I glanced round the table; no one was smiling. Tante Jans’s preoccupation with death might have been funny, but it wasn’t. Young as I was, I knew that fear is never funny.
“And yet, Jans,” Father remonstrated gently, “medicine has prolonged many a life.”
“It didn’t help Zusje! And she had the finest doctors in Rotterdam. It was this very day when she was taken—and she was no older than I am now, and got up and dressed for breakfast that day, just as I have.”
She was launching into a minute-by-minute account of Zusje’s final day when her eyes lit on the peg from which dangled Nollie’s new hat.
“A fur muff?” she demanded, each word bristling with suspicion.
“At this time of year!”
“It isn’t a muff, Tante Jans,” said Nollie in a small voice.
“And is it possible to learn what it is?”
“It’s a hat, Tante Jans,” Betsie answered for her, “a surprise from Mrs. van Dyver. Wasn’t it nice of—”
“Oh no. Nollie’s hat has a brim, as a well-brought-up girl’s should. I know. I bought—and paid—for it myself.”
There were flames in Tante Jans’s eyes, tears in Nollie’s when Mama came to the rescue. “I’m not at all sure this cheese is fresh!” She sniffed at the big pot of yellow cheese in the center of the table and pushed it across to Father. “What do you think, Casper?”
Father, who was incapable of practicing deceit or even recognizing it, took a long and earnest sniff. “I’m sure it’s perfectly fine, my dear! Fresh as the day it came. Mr. Steerwijk’s cheese is always—”
A busy watch-shop workroom in 1913.
Catching Mama’s look he stared from her to Jans in confusion. “Oh—er—ah, Jans—ah, what do you think?”
Tante Jans seized the pot and glared into it with righteous zeal. If there was one subject which engaged her energies even more completely than modern clothing it was spoiled food. At last, almost reluctantly it seemed to me, she approved the cheese, but the hat was forgotten. She had plunged into the sad story of an acquaintance “my very age” who had died after eating a questionable fish, when the shop people arrived and Father took down the heavy Bible from its shelf.
There were only two employees in the watch shop in 1898, the clock man and Father’s young apprentice-errand boy. When Mama had poured their coffee, Father put on his rimless spectacles and began to read: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. . . . Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word. . . .”
What kind of hiding place? I wondered idly as I watched Father’s brown beard rise and fall with the words. What was there to hide from?
It was a long, long psalm; beside me Nollie began to squirm. When at last Father closed the big volume, she, Willem, and Betsie were on their feet in an instant and snatching up their hats. Next minute they had raced down the last five stairs and out the alley door.
More slowly the two shopworkers got up and followed them down the stairs to the shop’s rear entrance. Only then did the five adults notice me still seated at the table.
“Corrie!” cried Mama. “Have you forgotten you’re a big girl now?
Today you go to school too! Hurry, or you must cross the street alone!”
“I’m not going.”
There was a short, startled silence, broken by everybody at once.
“When I was a girl—” Tante Jans began.
“Mrs. Waller’s children—” from Tante Bep.
But Father’s deep voice drowned them out. “Of course she’s not going alone! Nollie was excited today and forgot to wait, that’s all. Corrie is going with me.”
And with that he took my hat from its peg, wrapped my hand in his, and led me from the room. My hand in Father’s! That meant the windmill on the Spaarne, or swans on the canal. But this time he was taking me where I didn’t want to go! There was a railing along the bottom five steps: I grabbed it with my free hand and held on. Skilled watchmaker’s fingers closed over mine and gently unwound them. Howling and struggling, I was led away from the world I knew into a bigger, stranger, harder one. . . .
MONDAYS, FATHER TOOK the train to Amsterdam to get the time from the Naval Observatory. Now that I had started school it was only in the summer that I could go with him. I would race downstairs to the shop, scrubbed, buttoned, and pronounced passable by Betsie. Father would be giving last-minute instructions to the apprentice. “Mrs. Staal will be in this morning to pick up her watch. This clock goes to the Bakker’s in Bloemendaal.”
And then we would be off to the station, hand in hand, I lengthening my strides and he shortening his to keep in step. The train trip to Amsterdam took only half an hour, but it was a wonderful ride. First the close-wedged buildings of old Haarlem gave way to separate houses with little plots of land around them. The spaces between houses grew wider. And then we were in the country, the flat Dutch farmland stretching to the horizon, ruler-straight canals sweeping past the window. At last, Amsterdam, even bigger than Haarlem, with its bewilderment of strange streets and canals.
Father always arrived a couple of hours before the time signal in order to visit the wholesalers who supplied him with watches and parts. Many of these were Jews, and these were the visits we both liked best. After the briefest possible discussion of business, Father would draw a small Bible from his traveling case; the wholesaler, whose beard would be even longer and fuller than Father’s, would snatch a book or a scroll out of a drawer, clap a prayer cap onto his head; and the two of them would be off, arguing, comparing, interrupting, contradicting—reveling in each other’s company.
And then, just when I had decided that this time I had really been forgotten, the wholesaler would look up, catch sight of me as though for the first time, and strike his forehead with the heel of his hand.
“A guest! A guest in my gates and I have offered her no refreshment!” And springing up he would rummage under shelves and into cupboards and before long I would be holding on my lap a plate of the most delicious treats in the world—honey cakes and date cakes and a kind of confection of nuts, fruits, and sugar. Desserts were rare in the Beje, sticky delights like these unknown.
By five minutes before noon we were always back at the train station, standing at a point on the platform from which we had a good view of the tower of the Naval Observatory. On the top of the tower where it could be seen by all the ships in the harbor was a tall shaft with two movable arms. At the stroke of 12:00 noon each day the arms dropped. Father would stand at his vantage point on the platform almost on tiptoe with the joy of precision, holding his pocket watch and a pad and pencil. There! Four seconds fast. Within an hour the “astronomical clock” in the shop in Haarlem would be accurate to the second.
On the train trip home we no longer gazed out the window. Instead we talked—about different things as the years passed. Betsie’s graduation from secondary school in spite of the months missed with illness. Whether Willem, when he graduated, would get the scholarship that would let him go on to the university. Betsie starting work as Father’s bookkeeper in the shop.
Oftentimes I would use the trip home to bring up things that were troubling me, since anything I asked at home was promptly answered by the aunts. Once—I must have been ten or eleven—I asked Father about a poem we had read at school the winter before. One line had described “a young man whose face was not shadowed by sexsin.” I had been far too shy to ask the teacher what it meant, and Mama had blushed scarlet when I consulted her. In those days just after the turn of the century, sex was never discussed, even at home.
So the line had stuck in my head. “Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or a girl, and “sin” made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up,
lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
“It’s too heavy,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
And I was satisfied. More than satisfied—wonderfully at peace.
There were answers to this and all my hard questions—for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.
EVENINGS AT THE Beje there was always company and music. Guests would bring their flutes or violins and, as each member of the family sang or played an instrument, we made quite an orchestra gathered around the upright piano in Tante Jans’s front room.
The only evenings when we did not make our own music was when there was a concert in town. We could not afford tickets but there was a stage door at the side of the concert hall through which sounds came clearly. There in the alley outside this door, we and scores of other Haarlem music lovers followed every note. Mama and Betsie were not strong enough to stand so many hours, but some of us from the Beje would be there, in rain and snow and frost, and while from inside we would hear coughs and stirrings, there was never a rustle in the listeners at the door.
Best of all was when there were concerts at the cathedral, because a relative was sexton there. Just inside his small private entrance a wooden bench ran along the wall. Here we sat, our backs chilled by the ancient stone, our ears and hearts warmed by the music.
Cornelia ten Boom surrounded by her children in 1900: Nollie, Willem, Corrie, and Betsie.
The great golden organ was one that Mozart had played, and some of its notes seemed to come from heaven itself. Indeed, I was sure that heaven was like St. Bavo’s, and probably about the same size. Hell, I knew, was a hot place, so heaven must be like this cold, dank, holy building, where smoke rose like incense from the footwarmers of the paying customers. In heaven, I fervently believed, everybody had footwarmers. Even in the summer the chill never left the marble grave slabs on the floor. But when the organist touched the keys, we scarcely noticed—and when he played Bach, not at all.
I WAS FOLLOWING Mama and Nollie up a dark, straight flight of stairs where cobwebs clutched at our hair and mice scuttled away ahead of us. The building was less than a block from the Beje, and probably a century newer, but there was no Tante Anna to wax and scrub.
We were going to see one of the many poor families in the neighborhood whom Mama had adopted. It never occurred to any of us children that we ourselves were poor; “the poor” were people you took baskets to. Mama was always cooking up nourishing broths and porridges for forgotten old men and pale young mothers—on days, that is, when she herself was strong enough to stand at the stove.
The night before, a baby had died, and with a basket of her own fresh bread Mama was making the prescribed call on the family. She toiled painfully up the railless stairs, stopping often for breath. At the top a door opened into a single room that was obviously cooking, eating, and sleeping quarters all at once. There were already many visitors, most of them standing for lack of chairs. Mama went at once to the young mother, but I stood frozen on the threshold. Just to the right of the door, so still in the homemade crib, was the baby.
It was strange that a society which hid the facts of sex from children made no effort to shield them from death. I stood staring at the tiny unmoving form with my heart thudding strangely against my ribs. Nollie, always braver than I, stretched out her hand and touched the ivory-white cheek. I longed to do it too, but hung back, afraid. For a while curiosity and terror struggled in me. At last I put one finger on the small curled hand.
It was cold.
Cold as we walked back to the Beje, cold as I washed for supper, cold even in the snug gas-lit dining room. Between me and each familiar face around the table crept those small icy fingers. For all Tante Jans’s talk about it, death had been only a word. Now I knew that it could really happen—if to the baby, then to Mama, to Father, to Betsie!
Still shivering with that cold, I followed Nollie up to our room and crept into bed beside her. At last we heard Father’s footsteps winding up the stairs. It was the best moment in every day, when he came up to tuck us in. We never fell asleep until he had arranged the blankets in his special way and laid his hand for a moment on each head. Then we tried not to move even a toe.
But that night as he stepped through the door, I burst into tears. “I need you!” I sobbed. “You can’t die! You can’t!”
Beside me on the bed Nollie sat up. “We went to see Mrs. Hoog,” she explained. “Corrie didn’t eat her supper or anything.”
Father sat down on the edge of the narrow bed. “Corrie,” he began gently, “when you and I go to Amsterdam—when do I give you your ticket?”
I sniffed a few times, considering this.
“Why, just before we get on the train.”
“Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we’re going to need things, too. Don’t run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need—just in time.”
3
Karel
I first met Karel at one of the “occasions” for which Mama was famous. Afterward I never could remember whether it was a birthday, a wedding anniversary, a new baby—Mama could make a party out of anything. Willem introduced him as a friend from Leiden and he shook hands with us one by one. I took that long strong hand, looked up into those deep brown eyes, and fell irretrievably in love.
As soon as everyone had coffee, I sat down just to gaze at him. He seemed quite unaware of me, but that was only natural. I was a child of fourteen, while he and Willem were already university men, sprouting straggly beards and breathing out cigar smoke with their conversation.
It was enough, I felt, to be in the same room with Karel. As for being unnoticed, I was thoroughly used to that. Nollie was the one boys noticed, though like so many pretty girls, she seemed not to care. When a boy asked for a lock of her hair—the standard method in those days of declaring passion—she would pull a few strands from the ancient gray carpet in our bedroom, tie them with a sentimental blue ribbon, and make me the messenger. The carpet was quite threadbare by now, the school full of broken hearts. We sat on the edge of Willem’s bed gulping down the precious bun; I suspected that to buy it Willem had had to go without lunch.
I, on the other hand, fell in love with each boy in my class in turn, in a kind of hopeless, regular rhythm. But since I was not pretty, and far too bashful to express my feelings, a whole generation of boys was growing up unaware of the girl in seat 32.
Karel, though, I thought as I watched him spooning sugar into his cup, was different. I was going to love Karel forever.
It was two years before I saw Karel again. That was the winter, 1908, that Nollie and I made a trip to the university at Leiden to pay Willem a visit. Willem’s sparsely furnished room was on the fourth floor of a private home. He gathered both Nollie and me into a bearhug and then ran to the window.
“Here,” he said, taking in from the sill a cream bun he had been keeping cold there. “I bought this for you. You’d better eat it quick before my starving friends arrive.”
We sat on the edge of Willem’s bed gulping down the precious bun; I suspected that to buy it Willem had had to go without lunch. A second later the door slammed open and in burst four of his friends—tall, deep-voiced young men in coats with twice-turned collars and threadbare cuffs. Among them was Karel.
I swallowed the last bit of cream bun, wiped my hands on the back of my skirt, and stood up. Willem introduced Nollie and me around. But when he came to Kare
l, Karel interrupted.
“We know each other already.” He bowed ever so slightly. “Do you remember? We met at a party at your home.” I glanced from Karel to Nollie—but no, he was looking straight at me. My heart poured out a rapturous reply, but my mouth was still filled with the sticky remains of bun and it never reached my lips. Soon the young men were seated at our feet on the floor, all talking eagerly and at once.
Perched beside me on the bed, Nollie joined in as naturally as though visiting a university was an everyday event for us. For one thing, she looked the part: at eighteen she was already in long skirts, while I was acutely conscious of the six inches of thick black school-girl stockings between the hem of my dress and the top of my shoes.
Corrie with her cats.
Also, Nollie had things to talk about: the year before she had started Normal School. She didn’t really want to be a teacher, but in those days universities did not offer scholarships to girls and Normal Schools were inexpensive. And so she chattered easily and knowledgeably about things of interest to students—this new theory of relativity by a man called Einstein, and whether Admiral Peary would really reach the North Pole.
“And you, Corrie. Will you go on to be a teacher, too?”
Sitting on the floor at my feet, Karel was smiling at me. I felt a blush rise beneath my high collar.
“Next year, I mean,” he persisted. “This is your final year in secondary school, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I mean—no. I’ll stay home with Mama and Tante Anna.”
It came out so short and flat. Why did I say so little when I wanted to say so very much?
THAT SPRING I finished school and took over the work of the household. It had always been planned that I would do this, but now there was an added reason. Tante Bep had tuberculosis.