Descendant

The Night People

I went downstairs again and knocked on the old widow’s door. The two children were kneeling on the window seat looking down at the street below. A ray of sunlight was shining through the boy’s ears, so that they glowed scarlet.

The old widow lifted her head to see me through the lower half of her bifocals, and made a kind of silent snarl as she did so.

“Did you see anything?” I asked her, in Flemish.

“No. But I heard it. Bumping, and loud talking, and footsteps. They were Germans.”

“The Germans aren’t here any more. The Germans have been driven back to the other side of the Albert Canal.”

“These were Germans. No question.”

I looked at the children. I guessed that the girl was about six and the boy wasn’t much older than four. In those days, though, European children were much smaller and thinner than American children, after years of rationing.

“Do you think they saw anything?”

“I pray to God that they didn’t. It was three o’clock in the morning and it was very dark.”

“You want a cigarette?” I asked her.

She sniffed and nodded. I shook out a Camel for her, and lit it. She breathed in so deeply that I thought that she was never going to breathe out again. While I waited, I lit a cigarette for myself, too.

“You mentioned the night people,” I told her. Mensen van de nacht. I hadn’t told Captain Kosherick about that.

“That’s what they were, weren’t they? You know that. That’s why you’re here.”

I blew out smoke and pointed to the ceiling. “What was her name? Had she been living here long?”

“Ann. Ann De Wouters. She came here last April, I think it was. She was very quiet, and her children were very quiet, too. But I saw her once talking to Leo Coopman and I know they weren’t discussing the price of sausages.”

“Leo Coopman?”

“From the White Brigade.”

The White Brigade were the Belgian resistance. Even now they were helping the British and the Canadians to keep their hold on the Antwerp docks. Antwerp was a weird place in the fall of ’44. The whole city was filled with liberation fever, almost a hysteria, even though the Germans were still occupying many of the northern suburbs. Some Belgians were even cycling from the Allied part of the city into the German part of the city to go to work, and then cycling back again in the evening.

I gave the old woman my last five cigarettes. “Do you mind if I talk to the children?”

“Do what you like. You can’t make things any worse for them than they already are.”

I went over to the window seat. The boy was peering down at three Canadian Jeeps in the street below, while the girl was picking the thread from one of the old brown seat cushions. The boy glanced at me, but said nothing, while the girl didn’t look up at all.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl. My cigarette smoke drifted across the window and the boy furiously waved it away.

“Agnes,” the girl told me, in a whisper.

“And your brother?”

“Martin.”

“Mrs. Toeput says that Mommy was sick so she’s gone to Hummel,” Martin announced, brightly. The Flemish word for “heaven” is “hemel” so he must have misunderstood what the old woman had told him. The girl looked up at me then, and the appeal in her eyes was almost physically painful. He doesn’t know his mommy’s been killed. Don’t tell him, please.

“Our uncle Pieter lives in Hummel,” she whispered.

I nodded, and turned my head so that I wouldn’t blow smoke in her face.

“Did you see anything?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “It was dark. But they came into the room and pulled Mommy out of bed. I heard her say, ‘Please don’t — what’s going to happen to my children?’ Then I heard lots of horrible noises and Mommy was kicking on the floor.”

Her eyes filled up with tears. “I was too frightened to help her.”

“It’s good for you that you didn’t try. They would have done the same to you. How many of them were there?”

“I think three.”

Three. That would figure. They always came in threes.

The little girl wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her frayed red cardigan. “I saw something shining. It was like a necklace thing.”

“A necklace?”

“Like a cross only it wasn’t a cross.”

“Those are the good men,” interrupted the little boy, pointing down at the Canadians. “They came and chased all the Germans away.”

“You’re right, hombre,” I told him. Then I turned back to the little girl and said, “This cross thing. Do you think you could draw it?”

She thought for a moment and then she nodded. I took a pencil out of my jacket pocket and handed her my notebook. Very carefully, she drew a symbol that looked like a wheel with four spokes. She gave it back to me with a very serious look on her face. “It was shining, like silver.”

I gave her a roll of fruit-flavored Life Savers, and touched the top of her dry, unwashed hair. Not much compensation for losing her mother, but there was nothing else I could offer her. I still think about them, even now, those two little children, and wonder what happened to them. They’d be in their sixties now.

The old widow said, “You see? I was right, wasn’t I? It was the night people.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody what my specific duties were, not even my fellow officers in the 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.

Captain Kosherick came back in. “You done here?” he asked me. “I got two corpsmen downstairs ready to take the body away.”

The little boy frowned at him. You don’t know how glad I was that he couldn’t understand English.