wrote the man without a hat. Silently he turned the notebook around so Ide could read it. ‘Correct,’ Ide guessed. He couldn’t even read his own name. Without knowing it he had become untraceable on paper.
‘Work starts at three-thirty. You get seventy cents a day and you sleep in that shanty.’ He waved a brown finger off to the side.
‘You mean that shack without a roof?’ Ide asked the yellow top of the man’s head. This was a man who only cared about his papers.
‘Sophia, my … my wife, is with me, too.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘But there’s no … uh … it’s a shack without any …’
‘Something wrong with your legs?’ the man shouted, pounding his fist on the table. ‘Next!’
Ide walked over to Sophia. Her eyes were still dark with anger. She told him about the brutal way the little girl had been treated and pointed to her dirty sleeping body. Ide didn’t want to look at her. He wanted to build a roof on the shanty so he could protect his beloved from the elements.
‘We’re taking her with us,’ said Sophia maternally.
‘Out of the question.’ He gave the child a quick glance. ‘Her pa and ma are around here somewhere. You can’t just pick someone up and carry them away.’
‘She has no one!’ cried Sophia. ‘What kind of mother lets her child walk around like that! The lice have made her sick. They’ve sucked all the blood out of her!’
‘Sophia, all the children here are skinny and sick. Just look!’
She crossed her arms angrily. She knew he was right, but she refused to look at the other children.
The next day Sophia was awakened by screaming. She would have to get used to it, although she did not find it unpleasant. Her parents seldom raised their voices let alone scream, even when Sophia drove them to their wits’ end with her tempestuous disposition.
She beat the straw out of her clammy clothes and hair. Standing up was barely possible, the shanty being no more than a metre and a half high. Yawning, she went outside. The air was still hazy with morning dew. She wondered where Ide was now. He had left that night after having made a thatched roof. A neighbour man had helped him in exchange for the half-filled bottle of jenever.
She looked around and saw only women and children walking between the shanties. They were all hard at work, but Sophia had no idea what they were doing. She kicked absently at a stone and ground her heel into the dirt. She tried to find the filthy child she had dressed in her nightgown. The nightgown had been much too long.
‘Hey! Carrot Top!’ shouted two little boys who were running around in bare feet.
‘Fuck off!’ Sophia shouted back, cupping her hands around her mouth like a trumpet. ‘I’ll get you yet!’
‘Lay off with that shouting,’ snarled a passing woman.
‘Then I won’t do it again!’ Sophia screamed in a kind of snort.
The woman looked at her with surprise and pulled the corners of her mouth into an awkward grimace. Her face was friendly but dog-tired, framed by two braids.
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘My mother? I’m here with Ide, my husband. We’re from Zeeland.’
Sophia spoke the words as genteelly as she could, without an accent.
The woman looked suspicious. ‘Then you must have married very young. How old are you anyway?’
‘Old enough.’ She held up her thumb with the ring on it. ‘Say, do you know where the men are working?’
‘Just follow the canal straight out in the direction of the lake.’
Sophia skipped past the shanties. Once she reached the pasture and began walking through it she forgot the steaming, stinking shantytown. She filled her lungs with the May air and walked along the canal. When the shanties were far enough behind her she had a drink of water. No people meant clean running water, her father always said. She washed her hands and feet and splashed some water between her legs. She wiped her bottom with plantain leaves and used a twig to scrape the dirt from under her fingernails. Hungry, she peered at the farm that lay beyond a row of trees. She wouldn’t ask for food; that was beneath her station. She would borrow something from the land, and one day she would return it.
She crept through the grass until she reached the field. Quickly sizing up the white-flowered plants that were growing there, she pulled one from the ground. A stalk broke off. Looking to one side she saw two women lying on their bellies further on. They were digging up the plants with their hands. Sophia followed their example and took as many plants as she could carry. Back at the canal she removed the leaves from the potatoes and rinsed them off. They weren’t full grown but they tasted all right. Whatever she couldn’t eat she wrapped up in her shawl to save for Ide.
On her way to the lake she passed the two women. Her greeting was met with looks of suspicion. Back home in Zeeland everyone said hello to her. Sophia turned around and stuck her tongue out at their backs. ‘Stupid cows,’ she said, and laughed heartily at her own behaviour, which her parents would absolutely not have tolerated.
She heard them before they came into view. It was a mixture of raw voices and scraping shovels. The sound they produced was lively, as if it held some secret promise. Then she saw them, the polder boys. They were lined up in long rows, digging a trench. The earth they shovelled up formed a small dike between them and the lake. For the first time she was standing face to face with the most notorious lake in the whole country: the Water Wolf, which kept devouring more and more land and therefore had to be tamed. Thousands of polder boys would overpower it and bury it in its own watery bed.
Sophia was shocked by the size of the lake. This was no modest puddle, no damp pit. She realised for the first time that it would be years before the men were finished digging a canal around the lake. And then they would have to pump all that water away. How much time would this venture take?
She would fall terribly behind in school, the costly private lessons that her mother insisted were so good for her development.
‘You live up to your name,’ her teacher had said.
‘Sophia’ meant ‘wisdom.’
But what good was a name like that if she wasn’t allowed to study at the university? What was the point of learning Latin if she could never become a doctor? And what was development, anyway? Marrying a rich merchant from Tholen? Bearing children?
Sophia had always felt like an observer. She saw how her father made a name for himself as a doctor, and how he proudly called himself the first hygienist in Zeeland. In the evenings he would share his knowledge with her, but she knew that her thirst for learning would never be rewarded. Sophia would have to gaze out the window as life passed her by. Year in and year out. Until her face had attained the same dull colour as the needlework on her lap.
Ide Warrens was Sophia’s ticket to freedom, but her parents would never allow her to marry him. They liked him well enough, but marrying Ide was not advancement. It wasn’t even stagnation. It was a decline, to be measured in light years.
Suddenly
