by Monica Hesse
Saturday
When I wake up the next morning, my jaw aches like I spent the night clenching it, grinding my teeth together. I know I dreamed of Judith and Mirjam Roodveldt. “Why weren’t you a better friend?” Judith asked me, but when I tried to answer her, she was really Elsbeth. “Why don’t you come and find me?” Mirjam asked, but when I told her I was looking for her, she was really Bas. I woke up again and again in the night, never sure of where I was, or when it was, or who was alive and who was dead.
When I stumble out of my bedroom, still in my nightclothes, a whacking sound alerts me that Mama is on a cleaning tear. It happens a few times a year. This morning, Mama stands on our balcony, beating the rug with a broom. Papa sits at the table with a rag, polishing all of our silver, which lies in neat piles around him. “She’s denying me food until I finish,” he whispers. “Me—an invalid. I need to go into hiding.”
I try not to let my face register as I pick up a rag and sit beside him. Hiding. Judith. My father is smiling, and the air is filled with the tangy smell of silver, and Judith and Mina have been folded into the Amsterdam underground. Gone.
Papa waits for me to respond. I try to remember what I would usually say to him, but our normal banter doesn’t come easily to me. “Cruel woman,” I manage finally, rubbing one of the candlesticks. “Mistreating you that way.”
It’s nine o’clock in the morning. Later than I’m usually allowed to sleep on Saturdays. Still more than three hours to waste before I have to leave for my appointment with Dr. Zimmer. And who knows how many hours to waste before I can find out whether Judith made it to her hiding spot. It’s going to be a long, horrible morning.
I’ve finished only two candlesticks when Mama lugs the rug back inside and sees what I’m doing. “Good, Hannie, you’re awake. I have another job for you.”
I pause, the rag in my hand. “I don’t have to clean?”
“Your closet,” Mama says. “So many papers, you can’t still need them all. Sort through them to figure out which can be used for kindling.”
It’s an odd relief to be in my bedroom, sorting papers, while my parents do chores in the next room. It’s familiar and mundane, and requires just enough concentration to distract me from what happened last night. After a few minutes, Mama knocks on the door, bringing bread and jam. “See? I’m not such a cruel woman.” She pretends to be stern, but her eyes aren’t angry.
Mama kneels next to me and picks up the item I’ve just set aside, a birthday card from when I turned sixteen. “Do you remember this birthday? We all went ice-skating. Elsbeth wore that short skating skirt, and Bas challenged me to a race because he thought it would be funny, him against your forty-year-old mama—”
“But then you beat him. He wouldn’t stop claiming you tripped him when no one was looking.”
She reads the card again, and for a minute there are no sounds but the fluttering of papers as I sort them in stacks. “You must think I’m truly cruel sometimes now,” she says quietly. “I must drive you crazy with my worrying.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. The ways I frustrate you. The way you look to your father for reassurance when you can’t stand my questions.”
She’s right; I think these things at least three times a day. I say them to her at least once a day. But not now, while her face looks so lost and vulnerable.
“It’s just that I’ve seen wars, Hanneke,” she continues. “I know what can happen in them. I know what can happen to young girls in them. I try to protect you so you can grow up and not have to worry as much as I do. There is nothing in the world I care about more than you. Do you understand?”
I nod, flustered, but before I can figure out how to respond, Mama puts the birthday card down again, rising to her feet and brushing the dust off her skirt. She kisses the top of my head, perfunctorily. “Enough of a break. Back to the rugs.” Moments later, the whacking on the balcony starts up again.
Mama’s right that this closet had become a mess; some of these papers are years old. Papa and I are both packrats: he because of sentimentality and me because I never want to throw away anything that could be worth something. These days we find uses for things two or three times again. Mama will keep some of these papers to light fires; others will be used to wash windows or line our shoes.
“Mama, where are your sewing scissors?” I call into the hallway, thinking of the way my feet got so cold when I was trapped in the rain the other day. “I was going to make some liners.”
Once I have the scissors, I place my shoes on top of a sheet of newspaper. Before making the first tracing, though, I see the newspaper I’m about to ruin is from Mama’s birthday. Papa won’t want me to use that one; he saves the newspapers from our birthdays every year. The one underneath is an issue of Het Parool, one that I vaguely remember being given by a customer several weeks ago, one that I should have destroyed long before now rather than store in my house. I’ll use it to make liners. I like the idea of that small rebellion, carrying a paper piece of the resistance in my shoes.
Mama’s shears have been freshly sharpened, and they cut through newsprint like nothing. I’m halfway through cutting the second liner. The scissors slip through my hands to the ground.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
I bring the shredded newspaper closer. Am I imagining things? But no: There it is, inadvertently circled by the tracing I’d made. I read the newsprint again, the words swimming in front of me.
“Hannie, what was that noise?”
Mama’s voice comes like I’m hearing it from underwater, far away and muted. “What?” I ask finally, unable to drag my eyes away from the paper.
“What happened to my floor?” She sighs, coming into the room. I look down dully. The shears are sticking out of the floor, gouging a hole in Mama’s maple. “Oh, Hannie. I’ll get the floor polish; we’ll see if we can—”
“I need to go.” I scramble to my feet, riffling through my closet for a clean skirt and pulling off my nightgown without even asking for the privacy I usually demand while changing.
“You need to go? Where?”
My blouse and skirt hideously clash; I’ve put on the first clothing my hands touched. “You’re wearing that?” Mama frowns. “Why are you getting dressed now?”
“I have to go.”
“But we’ve barely started the chores! Hanneke, that blouse really doesn’t match.”
I brush past her and collect my coat from the closet. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Hannie!” Mama is still calling after me as I run downstairs, take my bicycle, and start down the street.
I pedal furiously through my neighborhood, taking the potholed roads I usually avoid because I know today they’ll be faster. Is it just a coincidence? What I saw in the paper, was it just a coincidence? It wasn’t, though. I know it wasn’t.
Across the street, an old classmate of mine is shopping at Mrs. Bierman’s store. She waves her hand in greeting, but I don’t stop. I don’t stop, either, for the customer of Mr. Kreuk’s who calls out my name, wanting to place an order for next week’s delivery.
When I get to Mrs. Janssen’s house, I leave my bicycle leaning against it, more exposed than I would usually, pushing past her as soon as she answers the door.
“Is something wrong?” She doesn’t have her cane, and she grasps the armrest to balance herself against the sofa.
“I need to get in the hiding place again.”
“Why? What have you found?”
In the kitchen, I open the pantry, shoving canned goods aside. Mrs. Janssen limps behind me. “Do you think there’s something we missed?” She watches me as I unlatch the secret door, pushing into the small room. “Hanneke, what did we miss?”
We didn’t miss anything. We looked at every square inch of that barren, sterile room, Mrs. Janssen with her bad eyes and me with my good ones. We saw everything in the room. We just didn’t see everything the r
ight way.
I’m worried for a second that Mrs. Janssen will have thrown away what I’m looking for. But it’s still there, the old issue of Het Parool that Mirjam was reading on the day she disappeared, already growing a little yellow around the edges.
Quickly, I unfold the paper I’ve brought with me from home. Just as I thought, it’s the same one—a back issue from last month. Even though I know both newspapers will be identical on every page, I take Mirjam’s copy back into the kitchen where it’s light, and flip to the same section I’d inadvertently circled while I was making the shoe liners.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh, I’m trying to think.” I hold up a finger to silence her. Mrs. Janssen had always been so specific about the timeline of Mirjam’s disappearance: Shortly before Mirjam disappeared, Mrs. Janssen brought her this edition of Het Parool. Before, I’d thought of the two events—the newspaper delivery and the disappearance—as completely unrelated to each other. But what if they were a chain reaction, in which one caused the other? What if Mirjam saw something in the paper that caused her to run?
On the first day, when Mrs. Janssen told me about Mirjam’s disappearance, she told me that Mirjam loved to read every line of Het Parool, even the classified advertisements.
My eyes find the item I’d circled back home in my own newspaper copy: a simple three-line notice in the middle of the page.
Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.
It can’t be a coincidence. This whole time, I thought I should get in touch with Amalia because she might have a guess about where her friend might have run to. I never suspected that Mirjam would try to run to her. Did Mirjam get on a train bound for Kijkduin?
“Hanneke, tell me,” Mrs. Janssen says. I’d almost forgotten that I was still sitting in her kitchen. “You’ve been staring into space. Tell me! What is going on?”
“I think I know. I think I know what happened.”
The first time I met Elsbeth:
She was seven, I was six. I was crying because it was my first day of school and I didn’t know anyone except a boy who lived in the apartment below me and liked to pull my hair.
She said, “What’s your name?”
I said, “Hanneke.”
She said, “My name is Elsbeth.”
She had a pretty ribbon in her hair, and she took it off and tied it to my braid instead. “You should keep this. It looks better with blond hair anyway,” she said. “And you don’t have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”
SEVENTEEN
Stupid. I am stupid. I let my memories of Bas dictate what I thought happened to Mirjam. I’m the one who assumed that if Mirjam ran from a hiding space, it would be because she wanted to be with Tobias. Why didn’t I realize that she could have been running to someone she loved just as much, in a different way?
The wind bites at my neck, down my blouse to my collarbone. I must not have buttoned my coat; it’s flapping wildly behind me as I pedal. I try to gather it around my throat with one hand, but only succeed in veering into the path of an old man. He darts to the side of the road and curses after me.
What happened? Amalia’s parents were going to send her to live with her aunt. That much, Mina had told me. But then what? At some point, once she was already with her aunt, she placed a greeting for her friend in the paper. Did Amalia know Mirjam was hiding at the furniture store? Were they in some sort of communication? Did they plan it out ahead of time, a secret message in the classified section of an underground newspaper? Was that the signal for Mirjam to run—or did she just see this greeting from her old friend, become overwhelmed by emotion, and decide to leave at the last minute?
Either way, why wouldn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen? She must have known how terrifying her disappearance would be.
I pedal madly through the streets. Now that I have a lead, the gears in my brain begin to spin. I’ll need to find Christoffel, to find out whether his father made it to Kijkduin and returned with a response from Amalia. If Christoffel’s father didn’t get to the hotel, I’ll need to get there myself and search every room. Either way, I should go to the train station and see if I can find the regular conductor for that route. A fifteen-year-old girl in a bright blue coat traveling alone might have stood out. But how would she have gotten on the train? The station agent wouldn’t have been allowed to sell a ticket to someone whose papers were marked Jood. I need to ask Mr. Kreuk if I can have a few days off. I need to find out if there’s an underground transport, a way that Mirjam might have gotten to Kijkduin without riding on the train. I need to go back home first, to change clothes and come up with a story to tell Mama. I steer my bicycle in that direction and am so lost in my plans that, a block from my house, I almost run over Ollie, who is standing in the middle of the street and waving his arms to get me to stop.
Something’s wrong.
Obviously something’s wrong; he’s standing in the middle of the road, waving like a lunatic.
But he’s not waving like a lunatic. Ollie is waving his hands listlessly, like he almost wishes I wouldn’t see him and wouldn’t stop. When I screech to a halt in front of him, they drop to his sides.
“What are you doing here?” I demand. “I was just thinking about you. I have new information and need your help.”
He kneads his hand into his side; he’s been running and now he has a cramp. “I just looked for you at your house; your mother said you rode off in this direction. I need to talk to you.”
“Good. You’ve found me.”
“It’s serious.”
“I know it’s serious. I found something at Mrs. Janssen’s house. Actually, I found it at my house, but I didn’t realize what it meant until—” Something is propelling me to keep talking, because if I’m talking, then Ollie won’t be able to tell me what it is that’s making his mouth twist like a scar.
“I have some bad news,” he says. “I think we should find a place to sit.”
“I don’t want to find a place to sit. I discovered something today. We don’t have time to sit.” I force a laugh, like he’s being funny. “Ollie, catch your breath, and let’s go.”
“No, Hanneke. Something happened.”
“Something did happen. I know where Mirjam is. Let’s go.”
He doesn’t follow me. He doesn’t try to convince me again, either. He just stands there, letting me get all these protests out of my system, letting me feel how heavy the air around us has grown. “I can take you back to your parents, if you want. Or we can go to my house.”
“What is it, Ollie? Is it—” Even now, I pause, because until I say the words, they’re not true. “Is it Judith? Did something happen on the way to her hiding place?”
“Judith is still at my house. It’s not Judith.”
“Is it Willem?” I’ll rip their names off like a bandage, starting with the ones that would hurt the most. Let it be Leo, I think. Let it be the person I know least well of all. There’s something wrong with me for thinking like this, for wishing bad luck to Leo, but I know everything in life has to have a trade.
“Hanneke. Listen to me. I went to the theater to try to talk to Judith’s uncle. And it’s happened, Hanneke. Last night Mirjam was brought to the Hollandsche Schouwburg.”
EIGHTEEN
What?” I push Ollie away from me, repelling everything he just said. “You’re wrong.”
Of course he is wrong. Mirjam is not in the Schouwburg. My arms flail out at him, wanting to make him take it back.
“Hanneke, there was a big roundup late last night.” He catches my wrists in his and holds them against his chest. “They were looking for people whose names were on their list, but when they couldn’t fill their quotas, they started taking anyone they found who had Jewish papers. Dozens of people were brought in who weren’t scheduled to be deported yet. One of the names on the list is M. Roodveldt. Mirjam is at the theater and she’s scheduled to be transported in tw
o days.”
“But I know where she’s going now,” I insist. “She went to Den Haag. They couldn’t have caught her, because she wouldn’t still be in Amsterdam. She wouldn’t—”
“Maybe she got out of the city, but she was captured and brought back in. Or maybe her temporary hiding place was raided before she got out. A lot of things could have happened. All we know is that someone with her name is there.”
Roundup. Raided. Roodveldt. His words float above me, but none of them make sense. Ollie’s heart beats beneath my hands. “We’ll need to figure out what to do next, then,” I say finally. “To start, we have to go to the theater. You’ll distract the guards. We have to go and get her out right now.”
“Hanneke. Listen to yourself.”
“You’re right. First we’ll get Judith’s uncle to help us. He’ll—”
Ollie presses down on my hands. “No.”
“Let go. You don’t have to come with me, but you have to let me go.”
“No,” he says. “Hanneke, do you want people to be killed? You cannot risk the network that we have spent a year building, just to go back and ask questions about one girl. We don’t have anyone left on the inside now. Judith and Mina are out. Judith’s uncle won’t help us. He’s terrified for his own life; the Council doesn’t have any of the sway we thought it did. If you storm in now without knowing anything, you’re putting the whole operation at risk.”
“But—”
“No.”
He’s right. Even through my anger and frustration, I understand he’s right. It’s a logical argument that I might make myself if this were about any person other than the one I’ve been trying so hard to find. Why wasn’t I at the Schouwburg last night? I was congratulating myself for tracking down Tobias’s father, and I should have gone to the Schouwburg instead.
“Everything I’ve done is a waste. All of this—visiting dentists, talking to school friends—I should have just planted myself outside the theater the second you told me about it. Maybe I would have seen her go in and been able to help her.”
