would educate him single-handedly.
Full of high spirits, Sophia ran up to him. When she got to the edge of the boggy trench she stopped and called his name. He walked up to her, shovel in hand. She kissed his dirty mouth and gave him the potatoes wrapped in the shawl. His neck was gleaming with sweat.
The pit boss was standing behind him. ‘Tell her she has to leave. The last thing we need around here are dames.’
‘She’s already going,’ Ide said, and gave the shawl back to her.
‘What am I supposed to do there?’ asked Sophia angrily.
‘Well, housework. That kind of thing.’ Ide glanced back at the boss nervously. He couldn’t let himself be fired. His father would break his legs.
‘But we don’t have a house! We have a stinking hovel without windows or furniture.’
‘Please, just go home.’ Ide gently pushed her away from the trench. ‘I’ll be back this afternoon and I’ll be good and ready for those spuds.’
Sullenly, Sophia walked back to the shantytown.
At one of the first shanties she saw the woman with the braids and the dog-tired face. Sophia followed her through the narrow doorway.
‘Hi,’ she said when they got inside.
‘You again,’ the woman noted. She knelt down on the hard dirt floor and tried to start a fire in a pit. Lying along the edges of the shanty were piles of straw and blankets.
‘How many people sleep here?’ asked Sophia with surprise when her eyes got used to the dim light.
‘Ten men and me.’
‘That’s a lot! Ide and I have the whole shanty to ourselves.’
‘That’s what you think.’ The woman looked at her with contempt. ‘One of these days you’ll end up with ten others in that shack, just like us. And if you’re not careful, you’ll be sharing every hole in your body with them, too.’
Sophia’s eyes widened. She was too overcome to say another word. She’d never heard anything so lewd before.
The woman lit a branch and laughed. Her mouth was a dark cavern.
‘Don’t worry. You’re married, aren’t you?’
Sophia nodded and coughed. The room was already blue with smoke. There was no chimney; the only way for the smoke to get out was through the hole that served as a doorway.
‘Are you married, too?’ asked Sophia hopefully.
‘Over the broomstick, with Hayo. It’s not official.’
She rose with difficulty. ‘But it’s just enough to keep the other fellows away from me. And this helps, too.’ She tapped her bulging dress. Only now could Sophia see that she was pregnant.
Sophia wished she could shake off the grim feeling that had taken possession of her. ‘You’re having a baby!’ she cried through her coughing, and stuck her head outside to get some fresh air.
The woman shrugged her shoulders laconically. She picked up a frying pan and put it on the smouldering fire. Then she poured some batter from a bowl into the pan. The stuffy shanty was filled with the smell of pancakes. It made Sophia’s mouth water. She tried to hold them back, but the tears suddenly began streaming down her cheeks.
‘Jesus, girl,’ said the woman with irritation. ‘What have you got to cry about?’
‘Nothing,’ bawled Sophia.
‘Listen,’ said the woman, ‘when you’ve reached the end of your tether, there’s always jenever. Jenever washes everything away.’ She picked up an earthenware jug, took a long swig and wiped her mouth off with the back of her hand.
‘It’s not that,’ wailed Sophia. ‘The problem is that I can’t cook. I can’t do anything.’
Sophia learned quickly. She struck up a peculiar sort of friendship with the pregnant Akkie from Friesland, from whom she learned all the unwritten codes. The norms and values in the shantytown could be counted on two fingers. Rape and murder were frowned upon. Otherwise it was every man for himself, Akkie instructed, except when your own people were being attacked from the outside. Then you had no choice but to form a community. No one was to be trusted, especially the contractors, the police and the Belgian polder workers. The Belgians, Akkie informed her, snapped up all the work and earned more than their husbands did. She believed it was perfectly permissible to kick a Belgian to death or set him on fire.
In addition to these survival lessons, Akkie showed Sophia how to cook. It was simple. The food was so monotonous that it allowed for little experimentation. Pancakes with bacon, bread with bacon and potatoes with bacon were the daily fare. And when there wasn’t any bacon for the bread, they spread potatoes on it.
In Sophia’s parents’ home there was always butter, fish, meat, cheese and pastries on the table. The food was prepared by their cook, a tall woman with hips like hams big enough to feed the entire village. Sophia often watched the cook as she stood over a pan and slowly stirred while her body swayed along. Never in a hurry. Always cheerful.
‘Take it easy,’ she would say to Ide’s mother, who plodded and sighed her way through the housecleaning in the doctor’s home.
Then the cook would conduct Ide’s fragile mother to a chair and make her eat a bowl of cinnamon pudding.
In the meantime the cook would scrub the mussels clean, humming as she went. Sophia’s father believed that shellfish cleansed the kidneys and activated the bladder. The kitchen smelled like a harbour as the screeching mussels opened in the pan.
‘White, tender and plump. And right to the brim. That’s what men like.’ The cook winked. Ide’s mother blushed and bowed her head and quickly took another bite, while Sophia’s eyes flashed with pleasure. Sophia loved the cook’s risqué talk.
They could have stolen her food at home for all she cared. She never had an appetite. She was certainly never hungry. She lived her life indoors for the most part, staggering from one meal to the next until she could no longer taste the difference between lamb stew and pork roast.
There was nothing indoors that interested her. Sophia loved being outside, in the street. She loved the smells, the sounds, the bright colours in the market, the hollering vendors trying to sell their wares. Sometimes she was allowed to go to the market with the cook, a visit that took hours because the cook moved so slowly. Every step was a supreme effort. If Sophia listened closely she could hear the cook’s flesh quiver.
Sophia soaked up the market in every detail. Wrangling women. Chickens in cages. Flies on a fish head. The smell of roasted coffee and wine. The cook holding up a skinned rabbit with disapproval and shouting ‘this isn’t fresh!’
And then the offended market vendor: ‘Not fresh? That rabbit is so fresh that the grass is still green in its mouth! It doesn’t get any fresher than that.’
‘An men urehul!’ she’d exclaim in her thick Zeeland dialect. ‘If that beast is fresh then I’m as skinny as a scallion!’
The cook’s haggling,
