Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

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, always with a coquettish undertone, was a ritual Sophia enjoyed immensely. Sometimes the cook let her give it a try.

      ‘Tell 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,