God's Callgirl Read Online Free Page A

There wasn’t enough room in our narrow cobbled street to properly accommodate it, so he used the vehicle to topple a couple of the myrtle trees in the way.
    After lunch one day, he invited all the neighbourhood children for a ride in the back of the khaki-covered truck. This was an experience that nobody passed over and the truck was full with children. I was holding on to the wooden half-door at the back. Deciding to make the most of the fame that was rubbing off on me from my father’s tremendous popularity, I took out a cigar I had recently bought and lit it, to the huge delight of all onlookers, who, of course, all wanted a puff.
    My father drove us out of town and into the countryside as far as the little forest where we would often go for a walk and gather wood. When the road dwindled into a path through the trees, he had to stop and turn around. He needed to make a three-point turn to do so, leaning the back of the truck way over a culvert. My face went pale, paler than when I’d felt sick from the cigar, as the truck rumbled slowly away from solid ground and seemed about to plunge into the deep channel. But my father did not let himself or any of us down; he manoeuvred that truck flawlessly and delivered the noisy mob safely home to their parents, who were waiting in the street like a guard of honour.
    My father took me on his knee later that day because my mother had heard of the cigar business and told him that I should be reprimanded. Unbelievably, he wasn’t furious. For that one time, at least, he recognised something of his own enterprising self in me, and I became my father’s daughter,not just the little person who crossed him in ways that he called sinfully disobedient. Perhaps the war had made him a bit softer.
    It was my father’s gruesome job to retrieve dead bodies from the fields and trenches. That was what the truck was for. He had to identify the bodies if he could. Sometimes they were decomposing, and the copper identity disc on its metal chain had sunk into the dead man’s rotting chest. It was enough to shake any man.
    TO ME, THE German soldiers were an enigma—for a long time I could not understand why people hated them. I was not frightened by them, because my father spoke to them when he met them in the street and made them laugh. His fluency in German saved him on several occasions.
    Two German soldiers probably saved my life one day when I accompanied my father on one of his wood-collecting trips to the forest. My father had loaded me onto the cart which he had borrowed from a neighbour. It had two bicycle wheels and handles like a wheelbarrow’s for pushing when you weren’t pulling. He lifted me onto some potato sacks to ease the bumpiness of the ride. Later, the sacks would cover our firewood, so as not to attract the attention of any German soldiers who might commandeer the wood for themselves.
    The forest was just in sight when the sound of sirens filled the air, warning people to take shelter. The Allies frequently flew over Holland to bomb the Germans out of their complacency. The sound of planes came nearer: there we were, in the open, far away from any shelter, and the bombs would fall at any moment! I was five, old enough to associate panic with these sirens, but still felt calm: my big,strong, wise papa would surely know how to protect us both. He was not about to turn tail on account of a siren.
    My father walked doggedly on for a while, then made a decision. ‘You wait here for me,’ he said, as he lifted me off the cart and deposited me at the side of the track. ‘I’ll be back soon with the wood.’
    My papa was going to leave me there by myself? I might be bombed to death and my papa was leaving me? Oh, no, Papa, no, no, no! I sank to my knees and stretched my arms out to him, screaming with absolute terror, refusing to grasp that he could leave me there. My father, the daredevil, laughed and threw me a few potato bags. ‘Cover yourself with these!’ he