Salt Marsh

Chapter 1: The Observatory

The wind came off the Waddenzee carrying the smell of brine and mud and the distant, metallic tang of something burning far to the south. Johanna Visser stood at the window of the observatory's upper room, binoculars pressed to her eyes, watching a flock of brent geese wheel above the salt marsh in a ragged chevron. She counted them automatically—forty-three, forty-four, forty-five—her lips moving without sound, the way they had moved every morning for the past eleven years, ever since she and Willem had first come to this place.

The observatory sat on a low rise of sandy ground at the edge of the Frisian marshes, a sturdy brick building with a slate roof and a wooden observation tower that leaned slightly eastward, pushed by decades of North Sea gales. Around it, the landscape stretched flat and vast in every direction: salt marsh giving way to mudflats, mudflats giving way to tidal channels, and beyond them the gray expanse of the Waddenzee, shallow and treacherous, studded with sandbars that appeared and vanished with the tides. To the south, a narrow causeway of packed earth connected the observatory to the nearest village, Moddergat, three kilometers away. In winter, the causeway flooded twice a day. In summer, it was merely sodden.

It was not a place that invited visitors.

Johanna lowered the binoculars and recorded the count in her logbook, the same leather-bound volume she had used since 1939. Her handwriting had grown smaller over the years, as if the war had compressed even her letters. She noted the date—April 3, 1944—the wind direction, the cloud cover, the temperature. Then she turned the page and began the day's banding records, though there was nothing yet to record. The mist nets hung empty in the reed beds below, their fine mesh beaded with dew.

She was thirty-six years old, though the mirror in the washroom told her she looked older. Her dark hair, once worn loose to her shoulders, was pulled back in a practical knot. Her hands were red and rough from salt water and wind. She wore a man's wool sweater—Willem's sweater, in fact—over a cotton dress that had been patched so many times it was more thread than original fabric. Her boots were good, though. You could not live on the marsh without good boots.

The observatory had been Willem's dream. He was the ornithologist, the man with the university degree and the published papers and the quiet, burning passion for the birds of the Frisian coast. Johanna had been his student first, then his assistant, then his wife, and somewhere along the way she had absorbed enough knowledge to become a competent field naturalist in her own right, though she never would have described herself that way. She described herself as the person who kept the records, maintained the equipment, cooked the meals, and made sure the observatory didn't fall into the sea.

Willem had been arrested in September of 1943.

The memory of it still came to her in fragments, sharp-edged and disordered, like pieces of a broken plate. The sound of boots on the causeway at dawn. The German voices, clipped and efficient. Willem standing in the doorway in his nightshirt, his thin face very calm, telling her in Dutch that she should continue the migration counts, that the data must not be interrupted. The way he had looked back at her once as they led him away, and the expression on his face—not fear, exactly, but a kind of focused attention, as if he were memorizing her.

He had been taken to Westerbork, the transit camp in Drenthe. She had received one letter from him, written on a scrap of paper so thin she could see through it. The letter spoke of the camp's bird life—a pair of kestrels nesting in the watchtower, a flock of starlings that roosted in the barbed wire at dusk. He did not speak of conditions. He did not speak of what came next. The letter was dated October 12, 1943, and she had heard nothing since.

The Germans who had arrested him—a pair of Sicherheitsdienst officers from Leeuwarden—had searched the observatory thoroughly and found nothing incriminating. Willem's resistance connections had been careful. Whatever he had done—and Johanna knew only fragments of it, messages carried, maps drawn, a radio hidden somewhere she had never been told about—the evidence had been erased or moved before the arrest. The officers had questioned Johanna for two hours, but she had answered truthfully when she said she knew nothing, and they had believed her, because what could a woman who counted birds possibly know about resistance networks?

They had left her alone after that. The observatory was too remote, too useless, too wet to bother with. A coastal garrison had been established at Moddergat, a dozen soldiers under a sergeant named Voss—no, she corrected herself, the sergeant had been transferred in February, and a new one had replaced him, a man whose name she had not bothered to learn. The garrison's primary concern was watching for Allied aircraft and maintaining the coastal defenses, such as they were. The salt marsh was not strategically important. It was not important at all, except to the birds.

And to Johanna.

She finished her morning notes and went downstairs to the kitchen, where she boiled water for ersatz coffee—roasted barley and chicory, a bitter brew that bore no resemblance to actual coffee but provided the ritual of a hot drink, which was what mattered. She ate a slice of dark bread with a thin scraping of margarine, standing at the counter, looking out the kitchen window at the marsh.

The tide was going out. The mudflats were emerging from the retreating water, gray-brown and glistening, crisscrossed with the silver threads of drainage channels. A pair of oystercatchers worked the edge of the nearest channel, their orange bills probing the mud with mechanical precision. Beyond them, a heron stood motionless in the shallows, a gray sentinel.

Johanna washed her cup, dried it, placed it on the shelf. She put on her oilskin coat and her boots and went out to check the mist nets.

The morning was cold and damp, the sky a uniform gray that seemed to press down on the landscape like a lid. The wind had dropped, and the marsh was unusually quiet—just the distant piping of the oystercatchers and the soft, rhythmic slap of water against mud. Johanna walked the narrow path through the reed beds, her boots squelching in the wet ground, checking each net in turn. The first three were empty. In the fourth, she found a reed warbler, tangled in the mesh, its tiny body vibrating with panic.

She extracted it with practiced hands, cupping it gently, feeling the rapid heartbeat against her palm. She examined it—a first-year bird, probably on its way north from Africa, pausing to rest in the Frisian marshes before continuing to its breeding grounds in Scandinavia. She fitted a small aluminum band around its leg, recorded the band number, the species, the date, and the location in her notebook, then opened her hands and watched it fly.

This was the work. This was what she did, day after day, alone on the marsh. She banded birds. She counted them. She recorded their comings and goings with the same meticulous care that Willem had taught her, because the data mattered, because science did not stop for wars, because if she stopped doing this she would have to think about what had happened to her husband and what was happening to her country and what was happening to the world, and she could not afford to think about those things. Not yet. Not while there was work to do.

She checked the remaining nets—two more warblers, a sedge warbler, and a young dunlin that had somehow blundered into the mesh—banded them all, released them, and walked back to the observatory. The tide was still going out. The mudflats stretched toward the horizon, vast and featureless, a landscape that looked like the end of the world.

In the distance, she could see the dark line of the dike that protected the polder behind Moddergat, and beyond it, the church steeple of the village, small and sharp against the gray sky. Somewhere beyond that, the war continued—the armies and the camps and the trains and the bombs—but here, on the marsh, there was only the wind and the water and the birds.

Johanna went inside and sat down at her desk to transcribe her notes. The logbook was nearly full. She would need to start a new one soon. She had a stack of empty notebooks in the supply closet, purchased before the war, when such things were easy to obtain. She wondered how long they would last. She wondered how long the war would last. She wondered how long she would last.

The knock came at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Johanna was in the observation tower, scanning the mudflats with her telescope, counting a flock of knots that had settled on a distant sandbar. She heard the knock faintly, carried up through the building's wooden frame, and for a moment she did not move. Visitors were rare. German patrols occasionally came to the observatory, but they always announced themselves with engine noise—a motorcycle or a Kübelwagen grinding along the causeway. This knock was quiet, almost tentative.

She climbed down the ladder and crossed the ground floor to the front door. Through the small window beside it, she could see a man standing on the step, hunched against the wind. He was thin, with a sharp-boned face and dark, restless eyes. He wore a fisherman's coat and a wool cap pulled low over his forehead. She did not recognize him.

She opened the door.

"Mevrouw Visser?" the man said.

"Yes."

"My name is Hendrik Mulder. I'm a friend of your husband's."

Johanna's hand tightened on the door frame. "Willem doesn't receive visitors here."

"I know. I know he's been taken." The man glanced over his shoulder at the empty causeway. "May I come in? I have a matter of some urgency."

She studied him for a long moment. His clothes were damp, his boots caked with mud. He had come on foot, not by the causeway but across the marsh from the east—she could see the trail of footprints in the wet ground behind him, already filling with water. He knew enough to avoid the main path. That told her something.

She stepped back and let him in.

In the kitchen, she gave him the last of the ersatz coffee and watched him drink it. His hands were shaking, though whether from cold or nerves she could not tell. He was perhaps thirty, younger than she had first thought, with the drawn, hungry look that so many people wore now.

"How do you know Willem?" she asked.

"Through the work." He met her eyes. "The other work."

She said nothing.

"I was a courier," he continued. "I carried messages between cells in Friesland and Groningen. Willem was—" He stopped himself. "You know what Willem was."

"I know very little," Johanna said carefully. "Willem kept me separate from that part of his life. For my protection, he said."

Hendrik nodded. "He was wise to do so. But the situation has changed, Mevrouw Visser. I need your help."

"What kind of help?"

He set down his cup and looked at her with those dark, restless eyes. "I have three children. Jewish children. Their parents were taken in the roundups last autumn—deported east. The children were hidden with a family in Dokkum, but that family was arrested two weeks ago. I've been moving the children from place to place since then, but I'm running out of safe houses. Everyone is afraid. The Germans are tightening their grip."

Johanna felt something cold settle in her stomach. "You want to bring them here."

"The marshes are vast. The observatory is isolated. German patrols rarely come out this far. It's the safest place I know."

"Safe," she repeated, and the word tasted like ash.

"Safer than anywhere else," Hendrik said. "I wouldn't ask if I had another option. These children have no one left, Mevrouw Visser. No one."

Johanna stood and walked to the window. The tide had turned. The mudflats were disappearing under the advancing water, the channels filling, the landscape transforming from land to sea. In an hour, the marsh would be impassable. In two hours, the observatory would be an island.

"How old are they?" she asked, without turning around.

"The oldest is twelve. Two sisters—Esther and Thea Rosen. The boy, Ruben Lieberman, is eight."

Three children. Jewish children. In occupied Holland, where hiding Jews was punishable by deportation or death. Johanna thought of Willem, who had risked everything for the resistance and lost. She thought of the empty logbook pages waiting to be filled. She thought of the reed warbler she had held that morning, its heart beating against her palm.

"When?" she said.

"Tonight. I can bring them across the marsh after dark."

She turned from the window. "The eastern path floods at high tide. You'll need to come from the south, along the dike, and then cut across at the second drainage channel. There's a footbridge—just planks, really—that stays above water. Do you know it?"

Hendrik shook his head.

"I'll mark it for you. A white cloth on the post. Be here by ten o'clock. After that, the path will be underwater."

He stood, and she saw the relief in his face, raw and unguarded. "Thank you, Mevrouw Visser. Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," she said. "Thank me when they're safe."

After he left, Johanna sat at the kitchen table for a long time, her hands flat on the worn wood, staring at nothing. Then she got up and began preparing the spare room.