Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

  The right half of his body, all the way down his leg and partway up his face, has been paralyzed ever since, so he has a twisted and slow way of speaking. It embarrassed me when I was a child, but now I barely notice.

  Papa gently pulls me closer to whisper in my ear. “Your mother is anxious because they came looking for Mr. Bierman. Be nice to her.”

  Mr. Bierman runs the greengrocer across the street. Jews haven’t been able to own businesses for months now, but his wife is a Christian and he transferred the papers to her name. They have no children, just a flirtatious white cat named Snow.

  “Who came?” I ask. “The NSB filth?”

  Papa puts one finger to his lips and then points to the ceiling. “Shhhh.” Our neighbor upstairs is a member of the NSB. His wife used to braid my hair and make me spice cookies on Sinterklaas Day. Behind me, Mama rattles the lunch tray, setting food down on our small table, so I kiss Papa’s other cheek and take my place.

  “Why were you late, Hannie?” Mama asks.

  “To teach you not to panic when it’s only four minutes after the time I usually get home.”

  “But you’re never late.”

  I’m never asked to find missing girls, either, I think. Without meaning to, I’m picturing Mrs. Janssen again, worrying over an empty pantry.

  Mama ladles me a spoonful of parsnips. We eat better than a lot of people. If Papa and Mama left the house more, they would probably start to question what exactly it is that I do to bring home so much food.

  “It was nothing.” The peppery sausage warms my mouth. “A German policeman stopped me.” That’s true, of course. I just don’t mention that it happened early this morning, before I learned about Mirjam.

  “I hope you didn’t provoke him,” Mama says sharply. I’m not the only one in the family who has been changed by the war. She used to teach music lessons from our apartment, and Chopin would stream out the windows. Nobody has the money for music anymore, or the translating work Papa used to do.

  “He spoke Dutch,” I say, as a way of responding without answering. “He sounded fluent.”

  Papa snorts. “We fattened him up after the last war so he could come back now and starve us during this one.” Germany was so poor after the Great War that lots of families sent their children to Holland, to grow strong on Dutch cheeses and milk. They would have died without us. Now some of the boys have grown up and returned here again.

  “When do you need to go back to work?” my mother asks me.

  “I have another twenty minutes.”

  Officially, I work as a receptionist for an undertaker. It wasn’t my ideal position, but I didn’t have many options. No one wanted to hire a young girl without work experience or typing skills. Mr. Kreuk wouldn’t have, either, but I didn’t give him a choice. I’d already been turned away from seven other shops when I saw the HELP WANTED sign in his window, and I refused to leave until he gave me a job.

  Mr. Kreuk is a good man. He pays me fairly. He gave me my other, secret job, which pays even more.

  In Holland, and probably everywhere else in Europe, the Germans have issued us monthly ration cards with coupons for food, clothing, kerosene, rubber. The newspapers tell you what you can purchase: five hundred grams of sugar, two liters of milk, two kilograms of potatoes. That’s where Mr. Kreuk comes in. Mr. Kreuk uses the ration allowances of the dead to stock up on supplies, then resells them at higher prices. At least this is how I think it works. I don’t ask questions. All I know for sure is that several months ago, Mr. Kreuk came to me with a stack of cards and asked if I would do some shopping.

  It was terrifying the first time, but I was even more scared to lose my job, and after a while, I became good at it, and after a longer while, it began to feel noble, even. Because the Nazis were the ones who made us have rations to begin with, and if I flout their system, then I am also flouting them. High-priced ham: the only revenge I have been able to get on the people who killed Bas, but I’ll cling to even that small satisfaction.

  What we’re doing is technically illegal. War-profiteering, it would be called. But Mr. Kreuk isn’t wealthy, and I’m certainly not, either. It seems to me like what we’re really doing is trying to reorganize a system that has come to make no sense in a country that has come to make no sense.

  “Hannie.” Mama has obviously been trying to get my attention. “I asked what you said to the Green Police.”

  Is she still fixated on that? If only she realized how many soldiers I encounter every week. “I told him to get out of our country and never come back. I suggested he do rude things with tulip bulbs.”

  She covers her mouth in horror. “Hannie!”

  I sigh. “I did what I always do, Mama. I got away, as quickly as I could.”

  But Mama’s attention is no longer on me. “Johan.” Her voice drops to a whisper and she clutches my father’s good arm. “Johan, they’re back. Listen.”

  I hear it, too. There’s shouting across the street, and I run to the window to look from behind the curtain. “Hannie,” Mama warns me, but when I don’t come back, she gives up. Three NSB officers in their beetle-black uniforms pound on the Biermans’ door, ordering Mr. Bierman to come out.

  His wife answers, her hands shaking so intensely that it’s obvious even from a distance.

  “Your husband was supposed to present himself for deportation last week,” the oldest-looking officer says. Our street is narrow, and he’s not being quiet. I can hear almost everything he says.

  “He—he’s not here,” Mrs. Bierman says. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in days.”

  “Mrs. Bierman.”

  “I swear. I haven’t seen him. I came home from shopping, and he was gone. I searched the whole house myself.”

  “Step aside,” the officer instructs, and when she doesn’t, he shoves past. Mama has come up beside me. She grabs my arm so tightly I can feel her fingernails through my sweater. Please, let Mr. Bierman really be gone, I beg. Please let him have escaped while Mrs. Bierman was shopping.

  Mama is moving her lips, praying, I think, although we don’t do that anymore. The soldiers reappear in the doorway, this time dragging another man. It’s Mr. Bierman, bleeding from the nose, his right eye split and swollen.

  “Good news, Mrs. Bierman,” the soldier says. “We found your husband after all.”

  “Lotte!” Mr. Bierman calls as they force him toward a waiting truck.

  “Pieter,” she says.

  “I should bring you, too, to keep him company,” the soldier offers. “But I feel bad punishing a good Christian woman who is too stupid to know where her husband was.” His back is mostly to me, so I can’t see his face, but I can hear the taunt in his voice.

  “Lotte, it’s all right,” Mr. Bierman calls from the truck. “I’ll be home soon.”

  Still she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t do anything but watch and shake her head back and forth as if to say, No. No, you won’t be home soon.

  The truck drives away, and Mrs. Bierman still stands in her doorway. It’s an intrusion to watch her, but I can’t avert my eyes. Mrs. Bierman used to give me presents for Sinterklaas Day, too. And when I visited their shop, she would let me taste the strawberries, even if we weren’t buying any.

  Mama yanks me away from the window, grabbing my sweater and pulling me to the table. “Finish eating,” she says stiffly. “It’s not our business; there’s nothing we can do.”

  I shake her hand loose, ready to protest, to remind her about the Biermans and their strawberries. But she’s right. There is nothing I can do that will repair what just happened.

  We finish eating mostly in silence. Mama makes a few attempts at conversation, but they crumble. The food doesn’t taste like food. When I can’t manage any more, I excuse myself, saying I have a few things to do before going back to work.

  “Don’t be late. It’s a good job you have,” Mama reminds me. She loves my job. She knows mine is the only steady paycheck in the house. “You don’t want Mr
. Kreuk to question whether he made the right decision in hiring you.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  I just want a minute away from my parents, my work—a minute to close out the rest of the world. In my bedroom, I pull the window shades closed and open the bottom drawer of the bureau, feeling around in the back until I find it: a faded diary, from a birthday when I was nine. For a week I wrote faithfully, describing friends I liked and teachers who were mean to me. Then I abandoned it for five years and didn’t pick it up again until I met Bas, when I transformed it into a scrapbook.

  Here is the school photograph he gave me, casually asking for one of mine in return. Here is the note he slipped in my books, telling me that my green sweater matched my eyes. He signed it B, and that was the first time I realized he preferred Bas instead of Sebastiaan. A nickname from the middle of the name, like a lot of Dutch boys do, rather than the beginning.

  Here is a ticket stub from the first film we ever saw together, the one where I begged my best friend, Elsbeth, to come along, too, in case I got tongue-tied around Bas. This memento is doubly painful, because I don’t have Elsbeth anymore, either, because she is gone in a different way.

  Here is a ticket stub from the second.

  Here is the tissue that I used to blot my lipstick the night he first kissed me.

  Here is the tissue I used to blot my tears the night he told me he would be volunteering for the military when he turned seventeen. Here is the lock of hair he gave me the day before he left, at his going-away party. I gave him something, too. It was a locket with my picture in it. That was how I could guess what German girls would do. I was so stupid then.

  I close the book quickly, shoving it into the back of the drawer and covering it with clothes. I’m thinking of Bas. And without meaning to, I’m also thinking of Mirjam Roodveldt again. I’m annoyed with myself for it, for wasting time thinking about that missing girl from the pantry, who I know nothing about, who could only get me into trouble.

  Except that I do know one thing about her: The film magazine on the shelf in the pantry—I’m almost positive that the photograph it was opened to was a scene from The Wizard of Oz, a movie about a girl who gets caught in a tornado and wakes up in a fairyland. I so desperately wanted to see it, but it hadn’t yet come to Holland when the war broke out. So I never saw The Wizard of Oz, but now I’m thinking of Judy Garland singing in Bas’s parlor while Bas told me he loved me on the sofa, and we laughed and laughed and memorized the words to her song.

  Bas would have agreed to help Mrs. Janssen. I’m sure of that, without a doubt. Bas would have said that this was our chance to do something real and important. Bas would have said it like it was an adventure. Bas would have said, Obviously you’ll decide to help her, too; the girl I love would completely agree with everything I’m saying, because Bas wouldn’t know anything about the kind of girl I am now.

  And what would I say in return? I would say, You think I would agree with everything you’re saying? You’re awfully full of yourself. Or I would say, My parents depend on me to keep us all alive. Helping Mrs. Janssen means endangering my whole family. Or I would say, Things are different now, Bas. You don’t understand.

  I would give so much to be able to say anything to him. Anything at all.

  Finding this girl is not who I am anymore. That action is soft; I am practical. That action is hopeful; I am not. The world is crazy; I can’t change it.

  So why am I still thinking about Mirjam Roodveldt?

  So why do I know that this afternoon, unless I manage to talk myself out of it, I’ll go back to Mrs. Janssen’s?

  FOUR

  Things that have changed about my country in the past two years: everything and nothing.

  When I get on my bicycle after lunch, the Biermans’ shop assistant is selling vegetables to a customer, as though the store’s owner wasn’t just put into a truck and carted away, as though Mrs. Bierman’s world wasn’t just turned upside down.

  Back at work, Mr. Kreuk has actual work for me, the kind my official job entails. There’s a funeral tomorrow, and I need to write a notice for the newspaper and arrange things with the florist. But at half past one, Mr. Kreuk comes to my desk and shows me the draft of the notice: I’d written the wrong address for the church.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Mr. Kreuk is a round little man, with circular glasses that make him resemble a turtle. “You don’t usually make mistakes.” He blinks and stares at his shoes. We’ve known each other for almost a year, but he’s so awkward. Sometimes I think he became an undertaker because it was easier for him to spend time with the dead than the living.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little distracted.”

  He doesn’t pry. “Why don’t I handle the ad and the flowers? I have a few errands for you this afternoon: the butcher’s and then to Mrs. de Vries’s.” He winces while saying her name, and now I see why he’s given me a pass on the newspaper mistake. It’s an exchange for dealing with Mrs. de Vries.

  “Thank you,” I tell him, and grab my coat before he can change his mind. I’ll deal with Mrs. de Vries later. First I’ll go to Mrs. Janssen.

  Outside, something new: Long Live the Führer has been written on the building across the street in white paint, still wet, and now I’ll see it every time I leave work. Did the shop owner do it as a show of Nazi support? Or did the Nazis do it as propaganda? It’s always hard to tell.

  There have been acts of protest since the start of the occupation—an organized worker strike that was squashed quickly and left dead bodies in the streets. Papa thinks there should be more. It’s easy for him to say, when his leg keeps him from participating. Mama thinks Nazis are beasts, but she wouldn’t care as much if they stayed in Germany. She just wants them out of her country. After the war, people will sit around and recall the brave ways they rebelled against the Nazis, and nobody will want to remember that their biggest “rebellion” was wearing a carnation in honor of our exiled royal family. Or maybe people will sit around and speak German, because the Germans will have won. There are those who would celebrate that, too. Who believe in the Nazis, or who’ve decided it’s smarter to support the invaders. Like Elsbeth. Elsbeth, who—

  Never mind.

  I almost turn around twice on my way to Mrs. Janssen’s. Once when I walk past a soldier interrogating a girl my age on the street, and once just before I ring the doorbell. When Mrs. Janssen sees me, her face breaks into such a relieved smile that I nearly turn around a third time, because I’m still not quite sure what I’m doing here.

  “You decided to help me.” She flings opens the door. “I knew you would. I knew I made the right decision to trust you. I could see in your face. Hendrik always said—”

  “You haven’t told anyone else, have you?” I interrupt. “Before or after me?”

  “No. But if you hadn’t come back, I don’t know what I would have done. I’ve been sitting here worrying about it.”

  “Mrs. Janssen. Stop. Inside.” I grab her elbow and guide her into her own sitting room, where we sit on her faded floral couch. “First, I haven’t agreed to help,” I tell her, because I want to be clear. “I’m here to talk to you about it. To consider it. For now we’ll just talk about Mirjam, and I’ll consider it. But I’m not a detective, and I’m not promising anything.”

  She nods. “I understand.”

  “All right. Then why don’t you tell me more?”

  “Anything. What would you like to know?”

  What would I like to know? I have no idea what the police would ask. But usually when I’m finding black market objects for people, I begin with a physical description. If they need shoes, I ask what size, what color. “Assuming I decide to help you, it would be nice to know what Mirjam looks like,” I say. “Do you have pictures? Did Mirjam bring any with her? Any family photographs?”

  “She didn’t have time to bring anything. Just the clothes on her back.”

  “What were those? What was she wearing when she disappea
red?”

  Mrs. Janssen closes her eyes and thinks. “A brown skirt. A cream-colored blouse. And her coat. The workroom in the furniture store got so drafty you had to wear a coat all the time back there. She was wearing that on top of her clothes. It was blue.”

  “Like this?” I point to the royal blue on Mrs. Janssen’s Delft saucers in the china cupboard.

  “More like the sky. On a sunny day. With two rows of silver buttons. I lent her other clothes while she was here, but when she disappeared, her original things were the only clothes missing.”

  I keep asking questions, about any physical detail I can think of, mentally drawing a girl in my head. Curly dark hair, falling to her shoulders. A slender nose. Bluish-gray eyes.

  “The Roodveldts’ neighbors might have a photograph,” Mrs. Janssen offers. “After the Roodveldts disappeared, the neighbors might have tried to save some things from the apartment.”

  “Do you know anything about the neighbors?”

  She shakes her head. That means I can’t go to the apartment and ask questions. Not when the Roodveldts’ unit is probably occupied by an NSB family already. Amsterdam is a crowded city, where even in normal times it’s difficult to find housing. Now, when a Jewish family disappears, a family of sympathizers reappears in its place, carrying on as if they’d always lived there. Besides, the war makes friends turn on each other. The neighbors might have been the ones to reveal the family’s secret hiding place.

  Where else could I find a photograph?

  “Have you been to the hiding place in the furniture workshop?” I ask.

  She nods. “The day after Hendrik was—the day after it happened. Completely ransacked. The Germans took almost everything, or maybe the Roodveldts didn’t bring much to begin with. Hendrik’s secretary might have tried to save something, but she left on her honeymoon the day after the raid. I can write to her, but I’m not sure when she gets back.”