Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

  “No,” I cry out, but my words are muffled by another gunshot.

  Mirjam’s knees buckle under her as her hands fly up to her neck, but I know she’s dead even before she hits the ground. It’s the way she doesn’t bother to break her own fall, the way she crumples to the ground with her head and shoulders hitting the cobblestones.

  The prisoners stare, gaping, at the body in the middle of the bridge, some of them letting out shocked screams, some of them clasping their hands in silent horror. The boy who called out to his mother earlier is crying, and she still has her hand over his mouth so the tears and the muffled sobs squeeze through her fingers.

  The young guard, the one who shot her, comes back to his post. “A warning,” he calls. His voice wavers; he wasn’t expecting this to happen, and he doesn’t know what to do now.

  “Let’s go,” he calls out. “Quickly.” He’s not even going to move her. He’s going to make the other prisoners walk right around her, leaving her in the middle of the bridge for the milkmen and street cleaners to find in the morning.

  Ollie pulls me along, away from the bridge, one arm wrapped around my waist and the other holding the camera.

  “Walk, Hanneke,” he instructs me. “You have to walk.”

  I can’t see where he’s leading me, because I’m crying. Sobs wrack my body, the first tears I’ve cried since Bas died. They blind me and taste salty and unfamiliar on my lips.

  I’m crying for Mirjam, the girl I was supposed to save but couldn’t, and didn’t even know. And for the mother who was shushing her son, and the man who begged me to stop talking. I’m crying for Mrs. Janssen, who has no one and who I told I would help and who trusted me and who I failed. I’m crying for Bas. I’m crying for Elsbeth and the German soldier she chose over her best friend, and for Ollie, who can’t be with Willem, and for all the people in my whole country who saw the tanks roll in at the start of the occupation and have yet to see them roll out again.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ollie leads me down back alleys and dark streets. I can’t even tell if the path he’s choosing is safe, if we’re making our way toward Willem. I don’t know if anyone else knows what happened, or if everyone is still waiting for us to return, thinking the plan has worked as it should. My feet move mechanically beside his. Finally he leads me down a short flight of stairs, and I realize we’re in what must be his and Willem’s apartment.

  “Tea?” he says shortly.

  It’s the first phrase he’s spoken. His hands shake as he opens cupboard doors and bangs them shut, forgetting where he keeps the cups. He looks toward the door, again and again. Willem is out there. Willem and Mirjam.

  “Willem is still—” I start to say.

  “I know,” Ollie cuts me off, and from the way his eyes flash, I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it. Finally, he stops going through the cupboards, leaning against the counter and gripping its edges so tightly his knuckles turn white. “You’re okay?” he asks, his back still to me.

  I don’t answer. How am I supposed to answer? Ollie slams his hands against the counter; I jolt at the noise. “Dammit. Dammit.”

  “What are you doing?” I ask as he starts to head back to the door.

  “I have to make sure Willem is okay.”

  “Ollie, you don’t know where he is.”

  He pulls on his coat, buttoning it up to cover the Gestapo uniform. “I’m not just going to stay here. I’m not going to leave him. I have to go find Willem.”

  “I’ll come with you.” I stand clumsily. “I can’t leave Mirjam, either. I can’t leave her body.”

  “No.” His hand is already on the doorknob. “You can’t go back. You were just spotted being escorted away by a member of the Gestapo.”

  “But I promised I would find her. She’s out there all alone. I can bring her to Mr. Kreuk’s. I have a key. I’ll take her there.” My voice is loose and out of control and doesn’t even sound like me.

  Ollie leans his forehead against the door, his back to me. His shoulders move up and down. “I’ll get her,” he says quietly. “Willem and I will.”

  “But why would you do that?” My eyes again fill with tears. “I was reckless and selfish. Why would you ever do this for me?”

  He puts his hand beside his head on the door. “Because when she fell on the bridge—we never got to see Bas after he died. We never got to see him at all.”

  There is no possible way for me to respond to such kindness. “Be careful,” I say. “Be safe.”

  “Give me your key,” he says, and then once he has it: “Wait here. Don’t leave.”

  “I won’t,” I say.

  I wait a long time.

  Tuesday

  I wake up, and I’m not on Ollie’s sofa, which is the last place I remember sitting. Instead, I’m in a bed, and sun is streaming in through the windows, and Ollie sits across the room in an armchair. I jolt upright. I don’t recall falling asleep, and I hate my body for letting it happen. I must have shut down, from worry, sadness, and exhaustion, while Ollie was stealing back into the night.

  “Ollie,” I whisper. My throat burns from all the crying last night.

  “Good morning.”

  “What happened? Where’s Willem?”

  My panic clears when Willem appears in the doorway.

  “I’m here; I’m safe.”

  Safe. No more deaths last night except for Mirjam. She’s not safe and never will be. “Did you get—” I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Did you manage to get Mirjam off the bridge?

  “It’s done,” Ollie says. “It wasn’t easy. But it’s done.”

  “She’s at Mr. Kreuk’s?”

  “Yes. And Mrs. de Vries knows what happened. And all the Nazis know, we think, is that two girls tried to run, and they shot one and caught the other.”

  I look around at the room I’m lying in, with two bureaus, one of which has a picture of Ollie’s parents. “You gave me your bed.”

  “Willem carried you in,” Ollie says. “We slept on the floor.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you had to get Mirjam. I’m sorry for not running when I should have. I’m—” There’s so much more I should apologize for: my thoughtlessness, the way I lost my mind and tried to drag everyone with me.

  “We got the camera. At least,” Willem says, too kindly.

  “What are you going to do with it? Give it back to Mina or destroy the film?”

  They look at each other. “We haven’t decided,” Ollie says. He hands me a mug that had been sitting on his armrest. “Drink.” I lift the cup by rote, but when the liquid slides down my throat, it doesn’t even register to me what it is. In the past twelve hours, I’ve felt everything I could possibly feel. Now I’m numb.

  “I should go.” I’m wearing my clothes from last night, though someone has removed my shoes. I’m wrinkled and soiled. There’s a run in my stockings, my last pair. When I try to stand, my head spins.

  Willem looks worriedly at Ollie. “She should have some breakfast. Shouldn’t she, Ollie?”

  “I have to go to Mrs. Janssen’s. I have to tell her what happened.”

  Nothing in my body wants to make that visit, but prolonging it will only be worse. Sometimes hope can be poisonous. I need to put Mrs. Janssen out of her misery as soon as I can.

  Willem brings me my shoes, telling me over and over again that I don’t need to leave yet. Eventually he realizes he won’t change my mind, and wraps some bread and an apple in a napkin for me to take along. I can’t imagine eating right now, but I don’t want to tell him that. I’ll put the food in my bag as soon as I leave the apartment.

  My bicycle is—I don’t even know where my bicycle is. Still in the lobby of Mrs. de Vries’s apartment, I assume, where I left it before Ollie and I took our positions at the butcher’s. In a happier version of the story, I would have ridden it home this morning after leaving Mirjam there, safe and sound.

  Without a bicycle, I have to walk to Mrs. Janssen’s, which takes ne
arly an hour. I have a few coins in my pocket and I could catch a tram, but I think I deserve the pain. I worry along the way about how I’ll tell her. Whether it’s better to just come out and say it—“She’s dead, Mrs. Janssen”—or whether I should start from the beginning, explaining what happened and where the plan failed.

  It turns out that I don’t have to say anything. Mrs. Janssen can tell, from my slumping shoulders or my rumpled clothes, or maybe just from the way I’m walking. She was waiting by the front window of her home, and when she sees me walk up the street alone, she drops her head to her chest.

  “How did it happen?” she asks when she opens the door. It feels wrong to deliver the news on the steps. But then, all of this feels wrong.

  Each word hurts my throat as I force it out. “She ran. I tried to get her to follow me and she ran. They caught her. She’s dead.” I add the last sentence because caught could mean she was merely captured. I don’t want to have to explain twice that Mirjam is never coming back to this house.

  Mrs. Janssen leans heavily on her cane, and I feel like I’m watching another piece of her break. Numbly, I take her elbow and help her back inside her own house. We both sit on the ugly sofa in her living room. “What happened?” she asks. “Why did she run from you?” Her grief is quiet and dignified, and somehow this makes it worse. I think it would be easier if she had come completely undone, the way I did last night, when Ollie had to drag me home because I couldn’t even think straight. But Mrs. Janssen is grieving in a practiced way, the way of someone who is used to losing things.

  Why did Mirjam run from me? If she was willing to run to escape the Nazis, why wouldn’t she run with me, the person who had just told her I was there to help her?

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I was a stranger approaching her in the middle of the night, grabbing her hand, and telling her to follow me. Maybe she just got scared. The night was so confusing. We were all scared.”

  “Do you think she thought you were a plant, working for the soldiers? Or maybe that she wasn’t sure which direction you were telling her to run in?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “I should have come.” Her face is stricken. “She didn’t know you, but she knew me.”

  “You couldn’t have helped,” I say firmly. “Neither of us could have done anything.” I don’t know if that’s true, though. Should I have mentioned Mrs. Janssen’s name to Mirjam? Would that have helped? Why didn’t she follow me? Finally I offer the only comforting thing I have, as small as it is.

  “We have her body. My friends were able to rescue her body. It’s at Mr. Kreuk’s.”

  “Who is with her?”

  “Nobody, right now. Mr. Kreuk usually comes in at eight thirty. When he gets in, I’ll ask him to take care of her. I’ll ask him to find a burial plot.”

  “I’ll pay,” she says immediately.

  “I will pay,” I say. I’ll pay with the money Mrs. Janssen gave me to find her. It’s the only thing I can do. We should be able to afford a headstone with that money. A simple one, but nice.

  “You should go to the funeral home,” Mrs. Janssen says.

  “I can stay. I can keep you company.”

  “You should go, Hanneke,” she says. “I don’t want her to be alone.”

  I go to Mrs. de Vries’s first, though. They already know what happened last night.

  “Hanneke, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. de Vries says when she opens the door, sounding as sympathetic as I imagine she can. She must have seen me come in the building from outside, because none of the onderduikers are hiding. The Cohens sit on the sofa, holding hands. Mina runs from behind Mrs. de Vries and throws her arms around me.

  “We saw the transport leave the Schouwburg last night.” Her face is buried in my neck. “Then we didn’t see anything. We kept waiting and waiting for you to get here, but we only knew for sure something was wrong hours later, when Willem came to us, looking for you.”

  The children are awake, still in their pajamas, standing dumbfounded behind their mother, watching Mina and me and obviously trying to figure out what’s happening. Mrs. de Vries notices them and shoos them back toward their playroom, and the Cohens move to help her.

  Mina and I stand, hugging each other in the entryway for a long time. In the back of the apartment, the twins laugh. I close my eyes and try to drown out the sound, which seems so inappropriate now. I want to crawl into bed for days. I want to give up.

  Even Mina is crying. Brave, optimistic Mina who wanted to resist, even while she had to hide. And what good did it do? What good can any of us do against the monstrous machine that shoots young girls in the back as they run in fear?

  I feel a soft tap on my shoulder. It’s Mrs. Cohen holding what looks like a folded white tablecloth. She apologizes for disturbing me, and holds out the material for me to take. “For your friend,” she explains. “I didn’t know if you knew—people of our faith are often buried in traditional burial clothes. This is only a tablecloth; in these times we cannot keep all our traditions. But I thought that perhaps you would like something to wrap your friend in before she is buried. Only if you want it. I don’t mean to presume.”

  I dumbly take the tablecloth from her, the soft linen rippling through my fingers.

  “We would also have a watcher stand with the body, so the deceased would not have to be alone. We can’t be there for the burial, of course,” Mrs. Cohen says. “But if you tell us what time it is scheduled for, my husband will make sure to begin the prayer of mourning at that moment.”

  “Thank you.” I almost start crying again at this gesture. I barely know the Cohens; I’m not even sure how much they were told about what I’ve been doing or why. “Thank you,” I repeat, because I don’t know what else to say.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mr. Kreuk doesn’t ask me any questions, about who Mirjam was or why I want to take care of her body, and for this I’m grateful. It’s a repayment, I think, for all the questions I haven’t asked him in the time we’ve known each other. At the office, he just pats me on the shoulder, and then neatly folds up his shirtsleeves the way he always does before getting to work. A few hours later, he tells me that the body has been dressed, except for socks and shoes.

  After leaving Mrs. de Vries’s house, I’d gone home and sorted through my clothes to find something for Mirjam. Mama and Papa were gone at Papa’s regular doctor’s appointment. I chose a dress that they’d given me for my birthday a few years ago. It still fits—one of the rare nice things I own that does—but I folded it up anyway, and put my favorite patent leather shoes in a bag.

  “Can I?” I whisper to Mr. Kreuk. “Can I be the one to do that?”

  He looks startled. This is the first time I’ve ever asked to be in the same room with a body. Normally they’re brought in through the back entrance, cleaned, dressed, and then placed in their caskets. I don’t even go into that room.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. “It’s important to me.” Because I failed her. Because I found her too late. Because her blue coat is ruined, covered in blood.

  He takes me into the small white room. I carry the shoes and socks and the linen tablecloth Mrs. Cohen gave me. I should have asked her to explain what I was supposed to do with it. Is it meant to be wrapped around Mirjam, or just placed over her? Was I even supposed to bring the other clothes, or is she supposed to wear only burial shrouds? Or does it even matter? Mrs. Janssen said the Roodveldts weren’t observant.

  Mr. Kreuk stands a few feet behind me as I look at the body that used to be Mirjam, lying on the cold table. I’ve been with a dead person only twice before, at my grandparents’ funerals when I was eleven and twelve, and then there was dim lighting and music. Now there is just stillness, and Mirjam. She’s so small.

  Here she is, in person, the first real time I’ve seen her. Her face is heart-shaped, with her dark hair forming a widow’s peak at her forehead, and her chin comes to a little point, with a small birthmark to the lef
t of center. Her eyelashes are thick and long. Nobody told me that, when they described her, how velvety her eyelashes are. Her nose is blunted at the end, a bit too short for her face. Nobody told me that, either. Just below the collar of the satin dress, the edge of a white bandage covers up the exit wound of the bullet that killed her. I adjust the collar, cover it up.

  “You’ve done—you’ve done a beautiful job. Thank you. She looks almost—” I’m supposed to say that she looks almost as she did in life, which is what people say to Mr. Kreuk when they want to thank him with the highest compliment. I can’t say that, though, since I really have no idea what she looked like in life. “She looks peaceful.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you? Or your friend?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The burial arrangements. Will you be needing a traditional plot or… or a special one?”

  This might be his way of asking me if Mirjam needs to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. I know how difficult finding such a place would be for him.

  “Just somewhere pretty. There won’t be a funeral. Just a burial.”

  He hesitates, as if trying to decide whether to speak, and finally leaves without saying anything.

  I can’t bring myself to touch her yet. Instead I turn to where her blue coat sits folded neatly on a table. The collar and top buttons are drenched in dried blood, which spatters down the rest of the coat, rusty and brown. Mr. Kreuk has already checked the pockets and laid her personal effects on top of the coat. Her identification papers, shot through and now also rust-colored, and a letter, which must have been in her side pocket because the paper is clean and white.

  If I could go back and never meet T to begin with, I would do that, right now. It was such a stupid thing to come between us. I’m going to make it up to you when I see you again.

  Love, Margaret

  Mirjam’s last schoolgirl note about her last drama. Why did she write it? Was Amalia upset that Mirjam was spending too much time with Tobias? Had Amalia met Tobias and she disapproved of him? It’s amazing how little any of that matters now.