never hit me? Is that clear?’ As she said this, she gave Ide a slap on his cheek. Not hard, but hard enough to leave a red mark.
‘I don’t wear jewellery.’
Ide tossed the ring in her lap and stood up. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’ll be dark soon.’
The landlord raised his eyebrows doubtfully when the couple entered the inn. They were still youngsters, and such an amusing sight that it made him chuckle. The blond, blue-eyed giant was at least three heads taller than the girl. They didn’t even bargain over the high price.
He gave them coffee, and bacon with potatoes, which they attacked with relish. They were starving. Sophia abandoned her good table manners and imitated Ide, who shovelled the food in with his spoon.
‘Delicious potatoes,’ said Ide, smacking his lips.
‘Dune spuds,’ replied the landlord. ‘We pamper our potatoes as if they were eggs. That’s why they taste so good.’
Standing behind the counter he sized up the young guests and felt embarrassed about the high rate he had charged them.
‘You come here to work on the polder?’ the landlord asked as he served them a stack of syrup waffles and a pot of coffee.
Ide and Sophia nodded, chewing busily.
‘Then I don’t envy you.’
‘I’m strong,’ said Ide, and he made a muscle.
‘He’s as strong as a draft horse.’ Sophia pinched his upper arm and kissed it unashamedly. She realised how fine it was not to have to hide her love for Ide and kissed the muscle once again.
It was the first time they had ever slept in a box bed together. At home they had explored each other furtively in the dark corners of the doctor’s house. Although the box bed was stuffy and cramped, to them the space seemed endless. Sophia climbed on top of Ide and brushed her breasts over his face until his cheeks glowed. She plunged her tongue into Ide’s mouth and ran it around till both of them were breathless. Ide could taste the jenever, and he felt intoxicated without having had a drop to drink. The straw on the dilapidated plank bed poked him in the back, but he couldn’t feel it. She pulled on his lip with her teeth and thrust her tongue into his ears and nostrils.
With a face wet from sweat and saliva, Sophia got down on her hands and knees and offered Ide her backside. Ide pulled himself up and bumped his head against the wooden ceiling. He gazed at her sloping back with admiration, while a feeling of perfect happiness came over him. He had no hunger, thirst or pain. All he had was Sophia. He needed nothing else.
Ide languidly stroked her bottom, sticky with sand. Sophia responded to his caresses by impatiently pressing against his erection. ‘Hey, what are you waiting for?’ she said hoarsely, looking over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go for a ride!’
The next day, 20 May 1840, Ide Warrens reported to the foreman behind the Treslong farmstead. They weren’t the only ones. The yard was swarming with hundreds of men, women and children, and all of them looked impoverished. Sophia gazed with astonishment at the sallow mothers and their even sallower children. She was on an adventure. For her none of this was real. She could always go back to another life, a luxurious existence filled with clean fingernails, tea services and pastries, poetry evenings, her mother’s smell of lavender and school books. But these people had absolutely nothing to do with her world. Everything on two legs here was filthy and penniless. Generations of poverty had preceded them. You could see it in their crooked backs, dull hair, drab skin, hobbling legs, sickly eyes, toothless maws.
Sophia knew she was no beauty, but her imperfections paled in comparison with so much physical infirmity.
She found a tree and sat down beneath it to give her feet a rest. Some of the men were busy building shanties from reeds and straw. Others just hung around, bored. Drinking, chewing tobacco, shouting, drifting.
Sophia tried to understand what they were saying, but it was all a cacophony of dialects. Leaning against one of the shanties was a little girl. She couldn’t have been more than four years old and she was crying long strings of snot. Sophia thought for a moment that she was wearing black pants, but her legs were dark from the filth. The only thing the little girl had on was a torn shirt.
‘Is that sack of shit yours?’ someone yelled. ‘I hope not!’ came the bellowing response. With her eyes narrowed to slits, Sophia peered at a bunch of young male specimens. Suddenly one of them turned and ran up to the crying child. He was a wiry guy with a birthmark on his face. The mark was shaped like a star. The man picked up the crying girl by the back of her shirt so her head hung down. He ran a finger between her buttocks as if he were about to take a lick from a pot of syrup, then smelled his finger.
‘Nope, this rag ain’t mine!’ he shouted, letting the child drop where he found her.
Sophia glared at the men with rage. She jumped up and ran to the little girl, who was lying on the ground, crying. Carefully she picked up the child, surprised at how light she was. She weighed practically nothing. Then Sophia strode back to the men and spat at them. But they were only interested in their drink. The people here paid no attention to each other.
It wasn’t until she returned to the tree that she realised how much the little girl stank: it was the smell of decay. She took a nightgown from her suitcase and on it she placed the child who promptly fell asleep, lying on her side, her little knees drawn up to her chin. Sophia studied the stinking child with a mixture of tenderness and disgust. Lice and nits were tumbling all through her mass of tangled hair. Her shirt and legs were caked with crusts of dried shit. Sophia swallowed hard. She had gone with her father sometimes when he made house calls and had seen a thing or two: women on the edge of death after childbirth and men who had turned blue from cholera. But this little girl was by far the foulest creature she had ever seen in her life.
Ide stood in line to present himself to the foreman. He turned his head away when the child was dumped on the ground like a sack of garbage. It wasn’t that it left him cold, but he wanted to stay focused on the good things, not the bad. He looked around intently for something to cheer him up. The people near him all looked so miserable. Sophia was sitting behind the trunk of a tree, and all he could see of her was a bit of her back. So Ide turned his gaze to the horizon. He didn’t believe in God. His parents had raised him to be so God-fearing that he had lost his faith altogether. But he did trust in nature. There was little about nature that frightened him.
The land he was standing in was gentle and green. There were canals and pastures alternating with poplars that were arranged around the farms in perfectly straight rows. When he looked north he could see the edges of a forest. The sweeping expanse of the landscape eased his mind. Ide understood how life was lived here without having any knowledge of the area. Orderly and consistent. They didn’t like extravagance here, you could see that.
Ide stared into the distance and saw the sails of a passing ship against a clear blue sky. In only a couple of years the lake would be filled in.
‘Name?’ a voice barked.
Ide looked up and saw a head of frizzy flaxen hair sitting behind a table. It looked like the sea foam that washed up on the beach, the kind he used to kick at when he was a boy. Unlike all the others, this man did not wear a hat.
‘Name!’ he repeated impatiently.
Ide blurted out his name. His thick Zeeland accent sounded impenetrable.
‘What?’
