by Mal Peet
I looked at the identity booklet again. If this was Grandad’s wartime identity card — and why would it have been in the box if it wasn’t? — he’d once been called Christiaan Boogart. It gave me a creepy feeling. It felt like opening the door to a dark cellar and not being able to see the stairs. But if Grandad wanted to tell me who he really was, why wait until he was dead? And what did it have to do with the other stuff in the box? I started feeling angry again. I put everything back in the box and stuck it in my wardrobe again. I spent the evening trying to concentrate on The Catcher in the Rye for my English exam.
On Monday I came home knackered, and slumped on the sofa with a bag of crisps and gazed at the TV without really taking in what was on. I waited until six o’clock, then I went to the phone and called Yoyo.
Yoyo is my Dutch cousin. Actually, he’s not really called Yoyo, and he isn’t really my cousin. His proper name is Johannes, pronounced Yohannes in Dutch, and he’s been called Yoyo since he was little. He’s my gran’s cousin’s grandson or nephew, something like that. I can never remember. Mum once said that he was “a distant twig on the family tree.” He showed up out of the blue just a couple of months before Grandad died. Then he came to the funeral, wearing a borrowed suit that was too short in the leg. The funeral was awful, one of those quick in-and-out crematorium jobs, with another hearse and two carloads of mourners queuing up behind for their turn. If Yoyo hadn’t come, Mum and I and my other grandparents (who’d come down from Leicester) would have been the only family members there. He came back to the house afterwards for drinks. I had a few glasses of wine, which I wasn’t used to, and ended up babbling and snivelling to Yoyo about Grandad and then Dad. Embarrassing. He was great, though. He just listened and said nice, intelligent things. It was a pity I couldn’t remember them the next day. We’d talked on the phone after that and met up a couple of times. Once he took me to see some electronic Dutch band who were playing in London. He thought they were tremendous and I thought they were crap, but we didn’t fall out over it. One of the most important things about Yoyo, at least as far as I was concerned, was that he never talked down to me. He completely ignored the difference in our ages. Plus, he was very bright, and he made me laugh.
Yoyo is four years older than me, so he was nineteen, nearly twenty, when I called him that June evening in 1995. He lived in Amsterdam, studying English, but he’d got some sort of grant to spend a year at the University of London. He shared a flat down in Greenwich somewhere. It was one of his flatmates who answered the phone. When he put it down to fetch Yoyo, I could hear heavy metal music in the background. Just before Yoyo picked up the phone, I heard a mumble of voices and a door slam, and the heavy metal went dead.
“Aha,” he said, “the most beautiful of my cousins!”
“Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, I keep telling you that you’re not really my cousin.”
“Yes, that’s good. It means we can get married.”
“Yoyo, have you been smoking weed?”
“What, on a Monday? No, of course not.” He managed to sound quite indignant. “Anyway, I have this very, very difficult thing to write about Sonnet 94 by Shakespeare. You know it?”
“Not that particular one,” I said.
“Ah. That’s too bad. I could use some help. I can’t make either head or tail of it.”
“It’s funny you should say that,” I said, “because I’ve got a mystery on my hands too, and I can’t make head or tail of that either. I could use some help. Your help.”
“Really? A mystery? What is it?”
“I can’t really explain. Not over the phone, anyway. Listen, Yoyo, do you have any spare time next week?”
“Yes, I think so. What, to see you? That would be nice.”
“Could you come here?”
“Er, okay. What evening?”
“Not evening. Daytime. One afternoon. Morning, even.”
I could hear him thinking. “You mean when Sonia is not there? Oh, Tamar!”
“Shut up, you idiot. How about Monday? A week today. Lunchtime would be good. I’ll make you a sandwich.”
“Cool,” he said. “How could I resist this offer? It’s just a shame you live so far out.”
“I don’t live far out,” I said. “You do.”
He arrived just after half past twelve. I opened the door and he swooped down at me, kissing me on both cheeks, European style. The first thing you notice about Yoyo is how tall and thin he is. His clothes always look too big for him, as though they’re suspended from coat hangers, not shoulders and hips. His hair is the colour of wet straw, and it sticks out from his head in all directions like the fur on a guinea pig. It’s not deliberate, not a style statement or anything like that. It just grows that way. There’s something slightly oriental about his face. He has wide cheekbones and narrow, dark, very shiny eyes.
“Okay,” he said as we walked down the hall. “I’ve come for a mystery and a sandwich. Which is first?”
We ate sandwiches and drank Coke. He listened to what I told him without making any comment or asking any questions, just glancing now and then at the shoe box on my side of the kitchen table.
I cleared the plates away. Yoyo sat up straight and rubbed his hands together. “So, okay. Let me see what’s in this mysterious box.”
I slid it over to him. He opened it in a melodramatically cautious way as if he expected it to contain an angry rat.
The first item he took out was the roll of money. He weighed it in his hand and whistled. “Wow,” he said, “little rich girl!” He slipped the band off and fanned the notes like a hand of cards. “How much?”
“Nearly two thousand pounds. One thousand, nine hundred and forty-five, to be precise.”
“Really? You know, I don’t think I have had so much cash in my hand before.” He put the band back around the roll and wagged a finger at me like a teacher. “I hope you are not going to spend it all on sweets.”
I gave him a Look.
The second thing he took out was the identity booklet. He pulled a face when he saw it.
“That’s the main thing I need your help with,” I said. “I want you to tell me what it says. You speak German, don’t you?”
“Some,” he said. “But this is Dutch.”
“Is it?”
“Of course. You don’t know the difference?”
I shook my head, and he tutted at me.
“But it’s got a German swastika on the front,” I said in self-defence.
“That’s because this is an identity book from the war. I have seen such things before. Made by the Germans, yes, of course, but for a Dutch person, this Christiaan Boogart.” He looked at the photograph. “Who is he, do you know?”
“I think he’s Grandad.”
Yoyo looked at me, frowning. “Your grandfather? William? Why do you think that?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” I reached across and pointed to the handwritten entries down the right-hand side of the page. “Tell me what these say.”
“Okay . . . His name is Christiaan Boogart; his profession, verklaring, is farmer. No, not farmer exactly. Land worker.”
“Farm labourer?”
“Yes, farm labourer, correct. Then his birth date; and the place he was born, Zutphen.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in Gelderland. In the middle of the Netherlands, then a bit east. Nice place. Then next his father’s name, Jakob; and his mother’s name, Christiana.” His finger moved down the page. “This next part is what you call, like, er . . . physical description details. So here is his height: one metre seventy-nine.”
“What’s that in English?”
“Oh, shit,” Yoyo said, “your crazy feet and inches? I can never work this out. It’s something like six feet, a bit less. I am one metre eighty-eight.”
“Okay.”
“Then it says his hair colour is dark, which means nothing; he has no moustache; his eyes are brown; his face is smal. But this does not mean small; it i
s . . .” He mimed stretching his face longer and thinner.
“Long?” I guessed. “Narrow?”
“Yes, narrow, that’s it. It also says his nose is straight.” Yoyo smiled slightly. “The Nazis were very interested in the shapes of noses.”
He pointed to the rubber stamp print at the bottom of the page. “This is the mark of the, ah . . . employment office in Apeldoorn, not so far from Zutphen.”
He turned the page and studied the stuck-in sheet of paper. “Hmm . . . This is more difficult. Ausweis is a German word, meaning something like passport, but not exactly. Permit, perhaps. Then more of the same information about Christiaan Boogart. But this written here, see, is hard to read. It’s all in German. Something about a hospital, but . . . No. I cannot read the rest of it. But look, this mark here? It says Essen. Essen is a place in Germany. So the plot thickens. Boogart seems to have been in Germany during the war.”
He looked up; I looked blank.
“Why do you think this Christiaan Boogart is your grandfather, Tamar?”
“Grandad was Dutch, wasn’t he? So he must have had another name before he was William Hyde.”
“And you don’t know what it was?”
“No,” I said, and the look on his face made me feel stupid and lost and young. “I never asked. Why would I? And no one ever told me. He was just Grandad, right?”
Yoyo nodded slowly. “And so you think he was really this man, this Boogart, because he left you this thing in a box with your name on it, yes?”
“Yes, because it belonged to him. And because of this.”
I reached over and took out the photo of the two smiling soldiers and put it down next to the booklet.
Half an hour later Yoyo lolled back in his chair and surveyed the contents of the box laid out on the table and the maps spread out on the floor. I waited.
Eventually he said, “Tamar, have you not thought of asking your grandmother about these things?”
“What would be the point? She’s forgotten how to speak English. I told you that.”
“Okay, so maybe I could go with you to translate.”
“She doesn’t make sense in Dutch either.”
“But —”
“No, Yoyo. Forget it. Honestly. It would be a waste of time.”
He looked at me with his eyebrows hoisted up, but all he said was, “Okay, cool.”
I didn’t want to show the contents of the box to Gran; that was the truth. And Yoyo knew it, of course. I just thought it would be . . . dangerous. I didn’t know what I meant by that. And I didn’t want to talk about it, either.
So after a second or two, Yoyo let out a long breath and said, “Well, if it was just the identity papers and the photo and the crossword, I would say these are only what you could call souvenirs, yes? But the silk thing and the maps and the money, these make it very complicated. They take us to what my friend Luke calls ‘headache territory.’ Worse than Shakespeare’s Sonnet bloody 94.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
“Yes, please. By the way, you look incredibly sexy when you are being serious like this.”
“Shut up. Listen, I think he put the stuff in this box very carefully. He wanted to make sure the first thing I saw was the crossword.”
“Why?”
“Because we couldn’t finish it. It’s like saying we have unfinished business. Know what I mean? It’s like saying that this, all of this, is a puzzle I’m supposed to solve.”
“I had this thought also.”
“Especially because of the Treasure Island thing,” I said, hurrying now. “And the maps.”
“You must go slow a little bit,” Yoyo said. “I haven’t read Treasure Island.”
I took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. But in the story there’s a map showing where treasure is buried, and —”
“And these maps tell us where the treasure is? But there are lots of little crosses on them, not one. Maybe the money is the treasure.”
“No, I think the money is the ship.”
“I am lost now,” Yoyo said, frowning. “What do you mean, the money is the ship?”
“I mean that the money is to . . . to make it possible to get there.” Then I sank a little bit, because I wasn’t at all sure what I meant.
Yoyo’s fingers drummed a complex little rhythm on the table top. Then he said, “The maps are in a certain order, yes?”
“Yes.”
We both looked down at them.
“They go from south to north, and what joins them together is this river that has the same name as you.”
“Right.”
Yoyo stood up straight and walked up and down the kitchen. “It’s fantastic,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“You think he wants you to go there? To make a journey up this river? Is that what you think he’s telling you?”
“I can’t think of anything else,” I said. “Can you?”
Yoyo chewed a thumbnail for a little while. Then he picked up the identity booklet. “Your grandfather was in the resistance, is that right? And you said he was dropped with a parachute into the Netherlands?”
“That’s what Mum said that Dad told her, yeah.”
“So, if this Christiaan Boogart person was your grandfather, and these were his identity papers, and he came from England in 1944, he must have had this with him when he arrived in Holland. But the date on the papers is 1942. There is a difference of two years.”
“Is that important?” I said, feeling lost.
“Oh yes, I think so. I think that this identity thing is false. I think it was made in England. It is obvious, really. The British would not send your grandfather to Holland with his real name.”
He squinted at the little snapshot again. “So yes, maybe one of these men is William Hyde, okay. But, I’m sorry, his real name was not Christiaan Boogart, I’m sure. That is not the answer to your mystery.”
I knew he was right. I must have looked very dejected because Yoyo sat and took both my hands in his.
He said, “You are right and wrong at the same time. I think that for some reason your grandfather has set you a puzzle to make a mess of your head. But I think he was perhaps a mad old bugger. Old people are weird, you know. Maybe you should take all this stuff down to the bottom of the garden and put fire to it. Not the money, of course.”
He tugged my hands. “Let’s do it. Burn it, and I will buy you dinner. No, you can buy me dinner, now that you are so rich.”
“No.”
“Why not? Then you can just remember him the way you knew him.”
“No,” I said again.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”
Yoyo studied me with great seriousness. “Okay. Good. So what do you want to do?”
“Do you still have your car?”
“The old Saab? Of course. I came here in it.”
“What are you doing in the last week of July?”
He sat back and massaged the blond stubble on his jaw, gazing at me. “Tamar, are you thinking what I think you are thinking?”
“Probably.”
“You want me — us — to go together to . . . where is it? Devon? Cornwall?”
I nodded. He kept his eyes on mine for several seconds, his expression very solemn. Then he slid forward off the chair and fell to his knees. He put his hands together in prayer and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
“Thank you, Grandad,” he said. “Thank you for making all my wild dreams come true.”
I leaned forward and slapped the back of his ridiculous head.
I made two cups of tea and we took them outside into the hot garden. Yoyo put on his sunglasses, which were small and circular and amber-tinted; they made him look like a back-combed owl. He perched on the garden table next to the barbecue that we hadn’t used since Dad left.
“You must remember two things,” he said. “First, we have no idea what we are looking for. This trip will perhaps be
not a treasure hunt, but a what-you-call-it — a wild goose hunt, is it?”
“I know. I’ve thought about that. Maybe there’s nothing to find. Maybe Grandad just wanted me to go and see this river I’m named after, and that’s what the money is for.”
“It’s a lot of money just to go to see a river.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is, isn’t it?”
“And it doesn’t explain the other stuff in the box.”
“No. What’s the second thing?”
He sighed and lifted his shoulders in a sad gesture. “The second thing is that your mother will not let you do it. With me.”
It’s not that I hadn’t thought of that, of course. I’d thought of it about three milliseconds after I’d decided to call Yoyo. I’d thought about that huge bloody obstacle almost as much as I’d thought about what was in the box. A lot more than I’d thought about biology or geography. I’d run a thousand different arguments through my head, rehearsed a thousand reasons why she should let me do it. None of them were good enough to convince me, let alone her. I was going to have to fall back on that old technique, the only technique that we can rely on in the battle with parents: nag and whinge. And when that doesn’t work, nag and whinge some more. Wear them down.
“She’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll sort it.”
Yoyo grinned at me. “She’ll go through the ceiling.”
“The roof,” I said.
“Yes. She’ll go through the ceiling and then the roof.”
That was something else he was right about.
On the morning of 5th January, Tamar sat at the kitchen table of Sanctuary Farm. A map was spread in front of him, and the deciphered signal that had come in from London the previous night was by his right hand. The first part was clear enough, unfortunately. His requested supply drop had been postponed because of bad weather and a shortage of aircraft. There were a number of inconsistencies and contradictions in the remainder of the message; now and again Tamar would mutter to himself and utter small sounds of frustration. It seemed unlikely that London had cocked up the coding, and he had checked his own deciphering twice and found nothing wrong. If Dart were with him, he’d probably see the problem in no time at all.
