Free Falling

Lotte sits on the edge of the bed in an ivory vest and pants, made from the same silk as her wedding dress. Her auburn hair is still pinned. It took almost half an hour to get right this morning and maybe she rolled it too tight because she’s had a headache all day that won’t quite shift. She splays her fingers, pushes them through the taut strands at the nape of her neck. There’s a little relief. Her husband – they were married six hours ago – is in the bathroom down the hall. She strokes the silk across her breasts, over her hips. Her figure is a little fuller a year after liberation. He seems a good man. He has good hair and good teeth. A good job. Abroad. Which means they’ll be leaving, leaving all this rubble and dust and utter devastation. Lotte gets up from the bed, walks around the small hotel room. Enjoys the feel of the carpet under her feet. Enjoys the feel of silk against her body. Such luxury. Such decadence. The ceremony was small: her aunt, her female cousins, her friend who introduced them. His mother, his two sisters, their three faces pale and pinched. Lotte used all her clothing coupons to buy the silk. When she unwrapped it, she found several grass stains and a streak of mud which she loosened delicately with soap and then hung the material in the warm spring sunshine to dry. Today, there was no sun. She made the dress herself. She measured and cut and spliced, sewed the pieces back together on her aunt’s sewing machine. Henk wore a silt-brown suit made of wool. She thought he’d had it made for the wedding but overheard his mother tell his sisters it was one of two he’d had made for the new job. In a single movement, their three heads turned and caught her eye, defiant. She almost laughed. They think she’s hurt, think she cares. Lotte knows as well as they do that he wouldn’t have been offered the ten-year contract abroad as an unmarried man. But she doesn’t care what Henk was wearing or which occasion it was made for. She doesn’t even particularly care why he married her, only that he did, and that as a married couple, they can leave this hellhole and start again. She hears footsteps, a gentle knock. He’s very polite. Respectful. Handsome, too. Wasn’t she pretty once? Didn’t Mama tell her that when she was a little girl? Henk could’ve married anyone, though. Unlike her. The door opens, closes. At twenty-seven she was old for a single woman. The war had gobbled six years of her life, spat her back out again after. And there were hardly any eligible men. What became of the man in the parachute? Dropped with little more than a balloon of silk to guide him. Is he now safely back in England? ‘Hello,’ her husband says. ‘Hello,’ she replies. He stands by the door, arms behind his back, clutching the door handle. She takes a step towards him and he takes a step towards her. He’s been a gentleman throughout their courtship. Not once has he overstepped the line. But they’re married now. He’ll have expectations. She knows a little of what awaits her, from before, but that’s not something she ever thinks about. Her friend and female cousins are unmarried. Only her aunt could’ve told her, but she said nothing. Now they are close enough to feel each other’s body warmth. He presses his thumb against her bottom lip. She wills herself not to flinch. Then, he kisses her. Gently, tentatively, but soon with a thirst and a hunger she’s certain she’ll never be able to sate. His hands grasp her hips, maneuvered her backwards, and he is falling onto her, they are falling together onto the bed and for a brief moment, in between standing and lying down, in between reality and dreaming, she allows herself to fall too. And it’s glorious. As they become a tangle of limbs and sheets, she forgets everything. But then she moves and there is the tug of the pins at her scalp and her headache rushes back. Henk’s body feels too heavy now, too urgent, too everything. She reaches over and turns out the light. In the morning, when she wakes there is a smear of red on her vest. A bullet wound? But how? Was the Englishman shot from the sky in Arnhem or Nijmegen or Eindhoven? Did he bleed onto the silk parachute? She thought she’d checked it so thoroughly. Then she remembers the lipstick. Henk’s thumb on her lips last night. He is still sleeping, his handsome face turned towards the light seeping through the thin curtains. Within the month, Lotte will be aboard a ship sailing to the Dutch East Indies, the vest in her trunk. Before she packed it, she tried to remove the red mark – with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, soaking it in hot water and cold – but nothing worked. After a four-week journey at sea, she docks in Indonesia. The amahs unpack and it is months before she finds the vest again. By that point, she is too swollen with child to wear it. As she runs her hands over the silk, over the faint stain, she recalls her wedding day, her wedding night, but more so, the following morning when she woke before her husband and eased open the curtains; when she sat alone on the edge of the bed, on the edge of her future; and a fat slice of sunshine fell into the room, and filled it with light.