him they’re as old as shrivelled up dog balls,’ the cook would whisper.
And Sophia would giggle and say, ‘The potatoes are old, sir.’
‘Tell him we feel so sorry for the poor dog balls that we’ll take three kilos for two cents.’
The cook’s lessons in bargaining served Sophia well. At the market stalls in Hillegom she did her utmost to spend as little money as possible on food. Except this was no longer an amusing game. Now bargaining was a matter of necessity. Sophia’s mouth began to water. She smelled sausages and eels. She smelled freshly baked bread, artichokes and spices. She smelled the sweet flesh of partridges and oxen. She sniffed the gentle fragrance of sugar and butter. She let her hands glide over the skins of apples. But she couldn’t buy any of those delicacies. She looked at them, stored the fragrances in her memory and went back to the shanty to make pancakes for Ide and the shanty’s eight new inhabitants.
The men they were forced to share the shanty with came from every corner of the country. They slept on straw with rags as blankets, far enough from Sophia to keep from touching her yet close enough to make every inhale and exhale audible. At night she counted all the different sounds she heard until she fell asleep. Crying babies. Coughing children. Snoring, farting men, scratching and rubbing themselves in their sleep, anesthetised by alcohol to keep the cold away. Quarrelling couples. Scurrying rats and mice. Screaming, babbling, moaning, groaning, panting, hawking, scolding, wailing, puking, bawling. And Ide’s heavy breathing on her forehead.
In the shantytown it was never silent. It amazed her that people were capable of producing so many noises. At home, in the doctor’s brick residence with its spout gable, all she could hear was the refined tick of the Frisian grandfather clock.
Three a.m. brought an end to the nightly clamour. The men got up to go to work. Ide released himself from her arms. He lay on his back and she stretched half her body across his to keep from feeling the damp earth. He carefully slid out from under her and left. It was quieter without the men. The oxygen returned. During the few hours that followed Sophia got her deepest sleep.
The division of labour was unequivocal. Sophia took care of the housekeeping, the men brought in a bit of money. Sophia didn’t see much of Ide. He easily worked sixteen hours a day. The men worked as long as there was daylight. Sophia didn’t complain, although the adventure was sometimes unpleasant and harsh. The wedding ring was stolen from her suitcase, as were a pair of socks and a pair of underpants. She was also bothered by the filth that the polder people wallowed in. Their skin was even dirtier than the rags they wore. They had no idea what they were doing. They shat where they ate, put out smouldering fires with urine and drank the ditchwater they shat in. The authorities had brought in a filter to purify the drinking water but no one knew how to use it.
Sophia tried to instil in Akkie an awareness of hygiene, but to no avail.
‘You must wash your hands,’ Sophia admonished. Akkie peeled potatoes with blackened fingers. She left black smudges on the white vegetables. ‘You’ll never get rid of the runs that way.’
‘These,’ said Akkie, holding her hands in front of her, ‘are working hands. They’re supposed to look like this. You don’t have working hands.’
Unperturbed, she kept on peeling.
They sat outside on stools in the shadow of the shanty. It was a hot day.
Sophia had no idea how old the woman was. She looked as if most of her life was behind her, even though a child was growing in her belly. One corner of Akkie’s mouth was torn. Unbalanced diet, would have been her father’s diagnosis. Sophia resolved to ‘borrow’ some apples from the local farmers, and perhaps a chicken.
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ Akkie asked, looking at Sophia pointedly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, just what I said. You’re not like us. Look at your hair, your hands, your face. Nothing on you is broken. Your face is crooked, but that’s all.’
‘I don’t have a crooked face,’ said Sophia defensively.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Akkie, and she rolled up her sleeve. ‘Look, that’s a burn.’ She pointed to a wrinkled spot on the inside of her forearm. ‘And this dent was once a whopper of a festering sore. It’s deep enough to drink out of now.’ Akkie pushed back some hair on the side of her head. ‘Smacked with a rake.’
‘How horrible,’ whispered Sophia. ‘Who would do such a thing?’
‘My brother,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He did such a thing.’
As if that weren’t enough, she kicked off her old shoe and turned her foot toward Sophia. Two toes were missing.
‘When I was eight, my toes froze. My pa twisted the dead stumps off my feet with a pair of pliers.’
Sophia said nothing, while Akkie kept on peeling and put her foot back in her shoe.
‘I wanted to be with Ide,’ said Sophia after a while. ‘That’s why I went with him. His mother was our housekeeper.’
‘Housekeeper?’ cried Akkie. ‘What was your pa then? Mayor? Minister? King? Ha! Get out of here!’
The Frisian woman’s voice was hard. ‘Honey, find somebody else’s leg to pull. If you had a housekeeper, you wouldn’t be sitting here now with your ass in the mud.’
Akkie stood up, shaking her head. She walked into the shanty and came back with a bottle of jenever.
‘I gotta do me some dancing,’ she said, taking a long pull from the bottle. ‘At home I danced my legs off. But here there’s not a damn thing to do.’
‘You and Hayo,’ asked Sophia, hoping that Akkie’s cynicism would disappear. ‘Was it love at first sight?’
‘Love?’ she said contemptuously. ‘Of course not. We were just drunk. And that’s where this came from.’ She thrust her belly forward and put the bottle to her mouth. ‘Here, take a swig. It kills the vexation.’
Sophia became skilled in stealing food. Her greatest asset was her normal appearance. In no time at all, the grubby people of the polder began to develop a bad name. They stank, pilfered, drank, fought, screamed and begged. The local population avoided them like an outbreak of typhus.
But not Sophia. She could go anywhere in the market without being shunned. She knew the art of keeping up a conversation while stashing a piece of bacon under her brocade shawl, a shawl that had offered shelter to eggs, beans, peas, pig’s trotters, buckwheat and parsnips.
One day, as she was slipping in a piece of cheese, she looked out of the corner of her eye and saw the little girl whom the men had dumped on the ground like a gob of spit. Sophia recognised her own nightgown. Half of it had been torn away and the rest was encrusted with dirt. The child was rummaging around the stalls in bare feet and begging for food, her filthy little hand held aloft. Everyone looked at her with contempt and disgust. The little girl was the very image of misfortune that the populace hoped to keep outside their door. Poverty and disease were lurking everywhere and ready to pounce. Cholera, holy fire, scabies, syphilis, smallpox: the people were scared to death of them.
Sophia followed the little girl through the market. When the child got to the fish stalls she was chased away with hisses. The pork seller tried
