Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

  As Mr. Kreuk promised, Mirjam is dressed except for her feet and lower legs, which lie bare below the calf-length dress. I pick up one white sock and begin to ease it over her toes and heel. Her feet are so cold. Her feet are so cold, and just hours ago they were running over the stoned streets, and suddenly there are tears falling down my face. All the games I used to play, to try to convince myself that Bas didn’t die alone. But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.

  The shoes I brought for her are my nicest ones. My party shoes for the parties I don’t go to anymore, with satin bows at the toe. My feet are a little bigger than hers, so the shoes don’t fit exactly, but she’ll never know the difference. When I’m finished with the dressing, I pick up one of Mirjam’s hands and fold it over the top of the other, smooth a few stray hairs away from her face, and adjust the hem of her dress, which rose high on her legs as I struggled with a sock. My tears start to flow at the oddest of things. The way her lips are chapped, like all our lips get chapped in the winter. Or her knees. Her perfect white knees, exposed and vulnerable until I brushed the dress back over them.

  I tell Mr. Kreuk I’m sick and I need to go home. He knows I’m lying but doesn’t say anything other than that he hopes I feel better soon, and that it would be helpful to know how many people will attend Mirjam’s burial.

  “Just me,” I say. “As soon as possible.”

  He says he has a cemetery plot already and should be able to arrange for a grave to be dug by tomorrow morning. He gives me a time to come to the cemetery. I don’t know how he’s found a plot so quickly, unless it belonged to someone else, and that someone else no longer has a place to be buried.

  Before I leave the office, Mr. Kreuk takes my hand and presses something into it. I look down. A large bar of Belgian chocolate, a name brand, better than any I’ve seen since the war started. He could sell it for twenty times its value on the black market, and that’s how I know he cares. Giving away black market goods is any smuggler’s greatest sacrifice.

  I start for home. I should have thought to pick up my bicycle from Mrs. de Vries’s when I was there, but I didn’t. I’ve walked to every location I’ve been to this morning, miles and miles, and somehow barely noticed it. The cold seeping through my coat, and the brick punishing my feet: These feel like welcome pains, much easier to deal with than the empty ache in my heart. When I finally do get home, after forty minutes of trudging, my bicycle is waiting for me outside my building, and so is Ollie. His tired voice makes strained and banal conversation with my parents.

  “I was just going to drop your bicycle off,” he explains. “But your mother happened to see me out the window. I was just telling her how you let me borrow it to go to the hospital with my mother and father. Pia is so grateful you were able to come and stay with her.”

  “It was nice to see her again. And I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.”

  It seems strange to me that I will get through all this and Mama and Papa will never know what happened. These lies I told them, about where I was and who was sick and which hospital Ollie’s mother was at—they all feel foolish now. I sit down next to Ollie while my mother brings lunch. His hand finds mine under the table. It’s warm and comforting, and when I squeeze it, he squeezes back.

  “Mr. Kreuk has arranged everything for the burial,” I whisper to Ollie when Mama is busy in the kitchen and Papa reads in the front room. “Thank you for picking up my bicycle.”

  “When is the burial? I’ll come.”

  I tell him he doesn’t need to, that he never knew Mirjam. It’s a silly thing to say, when I didn’t know her, either, though I felt like I did in ways that aren’t worth explaining now. Ollie insists on coming and says he’ll meet me at the cemetery tomorrow morning.

  In the end, Ollie and Willem both come, and so does Mrs. Janssen. It’s the first time I’ve seen her out of her house. She’s walking heavily on her cane, and Christoffel has come with her in a taxi, helping her, offering his arm as she picks her way slowly over the bumpy grass and rocks.

  Mr. Kreuk found a plain pine casket for Mirjam and brought it here in the hearse. It’s the most basic option we sell, but still worth a week of my wages.

  We stand around the empty grave while the casket is lowered into the ground. We don’t have a minister or a rabbi. It’s just the six of us and two gravediggers, who stand a few meters away under a cluster of trees, their hands resting on their shovels.

  Mrs. Janssen mouths a prayer to herself, and I think Willem’s lips move as well. Ollie and I don’t say anything. We just stand while the casket is lowered into the ground, and after ten minutes of respectful silence, the gravediggers move up from behind us to begin filling the open hole with dirt.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Wednesday

  When the burial is over, Mr. Kreuk pulls away in the hearse after telling me to take a few days off, to come back to work when I feel better. Mrs. Janssen leaves next, leaning on Christoffel for support as she folds herself back into the taxi. She asks me to come and visit her soon, and I promise I will, though right now doing so is difficult to imagine.

  Ollie and Willem are both looking at me as we stand together in front of the cemetery’s gates. “Should we ride you home?” Willem suggests. “Neither of us has class this afternoon.”

  “I don’t really want to go home at all.” My parents don’t know today is anything other than a regular day. The idea of making up an excuse for why I’m home early and sitting with them in hidden mourning is unbearable. I should go back to work, but I don’t want to do that, either. I’ve had enough death for today. “Could we do something else?”

  “What did you have in mind?” Ollie asks.

  “Anything. Anything besides go home or stay here. Something normal.”

  He looks blankly at Willem. None of us knows what a normal afternoon even looks like anymore, one in which we’re not ferrying children from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, or trying to find places for onderduikers, or trading on the black market. If there were no war, and if we were normal young adults, what would we be doing today?

  “How about…” Willem bites his lip. “How about we go for a bicycle ride?”

  “A bicycle ride?” Ollie’s mouth twitches. It’s one of the coldest days of winter. We all ride our bicycles all the time anyway, just to get around, but it’s hardly the weather for a pleasure ride. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes to me. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”

  The suggestion appeals to me, though, for the same reason that walking in the cold appealed earlier. There’s a level of drudgery and unpleasantness involved. It won’t be a purely joyful ride. It will be numbing, which seems pleasing.

  “Yes.” Willem is gathering steam now. “We’ll go to Ransdorp. We’ll ride through the countryside. We’ll have a picnic.”

  Now he’s deliberately being silly. Ransdorp is a village on the other side of the river, with farmhouses and a few little shops lining wide gravel streets. The idea of going to a quaint tourist destination now is especially absurd.

  But we do it anyway, taking the ferry across the river, to the same point where I met Christoffel a few days ago and asked him to deliver a letter. We stop and find bread on the way, Willem and Ollie sticking loaves into their deep coat pockets while I tuck the bottom of my dress up enough that it won’t get caught in my bicycle spokes.

  It’s cold, as cold as I expected it to be, but the sun makes it bearable, and when we get off the ferry, the pedaling keeps us warm. We must look strange: Ollie and Willem in dark suits and me in the only black dress that I own, cycling in a single line along the road next to a creek. I get a stitch in my side from the exertion. It feels good, so I pedal faster until I overtake the boys, first by a little and then by a lot.

  “What are you pedaling away from?” Willem calls after me. His tone is light, but it doesn’t feel like a joking question. I’m pedaling away from these past few days. From the sight of Mirjam on the bridge, and the sound of a gunshot in the still
night, and the look on Mrs. Janssen’s face, brittle and resigned, in her doorway. Gravel sprays off the back of my tires.

  “Slow down!” Ollie calls behind me. He says something else I can’t hear.

  “What?”

  “Slow down, there’s—”

  My bicycle slides over a patch of black ice, the wheels spinning out of control. I try the brakes, but there’s no traction. I can’t stop myself, and the bicycle goes careening into the ditch as I fly toward the frozen ground. My hands scrape along the dirt when I put them down to break my fall. They hurt, but my left knee is worse—I feel it crash against the handlebars when I fly over them, and then land on something sharp and painful.

  “Hanneke!” Ollie calls.

  The wind has been knocked out of me; I retch on the ground, trying to suck in enough air to answer. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” I manage, holding up a dirty palm to let him know I can take care of myself. Slowly I ease myself onto all fours, but standing seems like too much, and finally I let Ollie help me sit back down on a patch of frozen grass. Tentatively, I pull up my skirt. My left knee is a bloody mess: one large rock jutting out of the center, with small gravel particles surrounding it.

  Willem crouches to look at the wound. “We need to clean that out,” he says. “I can’t tell how bad it is.” He runs to the creek, soaking his handkerchief and squeezing it out on top of my knee, rinsing away rivulets of dirt. The three of us examine the damage. The big rock isn’t in as deeply as I feared, but when Willem pulls it out, a fresh stream of blood rolls down my shin.

  “Did that hurt?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, and then, inappropriately, I giggle, because it seems so pedestrian after everything that’s happened to have a scraped knee from a bicycle accident, and to have that be what hurts.

  He gives me a funny look. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I say, stifling another laugh.

  “Well, press this down,” he instructs me, handing me the handkerchief. “It doesn’t look too deep. Except for that rock, the rest is just scratches. You’ll probably have a little scar. If we tie up your leg with the handkerchief, do you think you’ll still be able to pedal home?”

  Once I’m bandaged up, I accept Willem’s and Ollie’s outstretched hands, rising to my feet, and watch as Ollie drags my bicycle back up to the road. He hops onto it himself, riding in a few circles to make sure everything functions like it’s supposed to. I look down at my now-expertly bandaged knee. Bending it sends shots of pain down to my ankle, but it’s manageable pain.

  “You’re sure everything’s okay?”

  “Yes.” But as I climb back on the bicycle, I realize I’m not sure. And it’s not the pain. It’s that something is bothering me, and I can’t put my finger on it.

  “We don’t have to go fast,” Ollie says. “If you want, one of us could ride ahead and try to find someone with a car to take you.”

  What is it that’s bothering me? I pedal slowly, a rotating dull pain and sharp pain depending on which of my knees is bent. What’s bothering me? It’s right on the tip of my brain.

  “Or you could ride on the back of one of ours, and we could come back later for your bicycle,” Willem offers.

  “I can ride.”

  My knee. My newly scraped, soon-to-be-scarred knee.

  Mirjam’s knees. The bare white legs I saw while putting on her shoes and socks.

  “Hanneke?” Willem asks. “I asked if you wanted to go first or last? Hanneke?”

  Judith remembered when Mirjam got her beautiful blue coat. It wasn’t just a present, but a present she received because she’d torn her other coat beyond repair, mangling her knee, leaving a permanent scar.

  Those knees in Mr. Kreuk’s basement room had no scars; they were smooth and white and knobby.

  Ollie cycles in front of me, weaving side to side and looking back to make sure I haven’t fallen again. “Ollie,” I ask. “Were you going to check in on Judith today?”

  He slows to a stop. “Why?”

  “If you do, could you ask her to tell you about the birthmark on Mirjam’s chin? Ask her… No, that’s all. Just ask her to tell you about it.”

  Now he and Willem are looking at each other. “Hanneke, maybe you should wait here with Willem while I ride ahead and find a doctor,” Ollie suggests.

  I shake my head. Something is wrong, but it’s not what Ollie thinks it is.

  “I need to get back, right now. If you talk to her, come and find me. I’ll be—” I think, trying to plot out where I’ll be, and where it will be safe for him to find me. “Call me at Mrs. de Vries’s; she still has a phone.”

  “What are you talking about? Hanneke, stop.”

  My legs burn, but I force them to pedal, harder, until I pass Ollie and head back down the gravel road toward the ferry. Ollie and Willem stand astride their bicycles, trying to decide whether to follow me. I can’t waste the time to explain any more.

  I know what I saw. I know everything I saw, when I dressed Mirjam on the table yesterday. I know her knees were smooth.

  It’s getting hard to breathe, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with how hard I’m pedaling, or with the cold air, or with my fall.

  The ferry is in sight now. Passengers are trickling off. My knee stings, but I can’t focus on the pain at all. Right now, in this world crumbling before my eyes, there’s only one thing I can really focus on: the body I dressed yesterday. The body I cried over. I can only think of it like that now: the body. Because whomever I dressed—whoever that person was, it wasn’t Mirjam Roodveldt.

  THIRTY

  How could the girl on the table not be Mirjam Roodveldt?

  Was there a different girl in a sky-blue coat leaving the Schouwburg, one I just didn’t see? Was I trying to help the wrong girl escape?

  By the time I get to Mrs. de Vries’s, I’ve run out of new questions to ask, and the same old ones keep cycling through my brain. Mrs. de Vries doesn’t answer, but I know Mina must be here. After three knocks, I finally call through the door softly that it’s me and I’m alone.

  “What’s wrong?” Mina asks from behind the door as she opens it just wide enough for me to get through. “You know I shouldn’t be answering the door—a neighbor could see me.”

  “Where’s Mrs. de Vries?”

  “At her mother’s with the boys.”

  “And the Cohens?”

  “Taking a nap, in the guest room. What’s wrong?”

  I keep my voice low, taking Mina’s arm and guiding her back toward Mr. de Vries’s study, where we sat together just a few nights ago. “I need to see your slides. The ones from last week. Please don’t ask me what’s wrong again,” I beg, anticipating what she’s going to say by the round, puckered O of her mouth.

  “You… what?”

  “From the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Did Mrs. de Vries’s friend ever bring his projector?”

  “He did,” she says uncertainly. “Just yesterday. We haven’t set it up yet.”

  “Let’s do that now.”

  The projector is in its traveling case by Mr. de Vries’s desk. While I turn off the light and close the door, Mina unloads it, black and heavy-looking, setting it on the desk so the lens faces an empty wall. When she plugs it in and presses a red switch, a white square of light appears.

  “You want to see the one with Mirjam in it?” she asks. I nod, and she sorts through the slides to find the right image and position it in the slide holder. The white square of light disappears.

  In the small slide, even with the magnifying glass, Mirjam was barely more than a smudge of sky blue toward the bottom of the frame. Now, on Mrs. de Vries’s wall, she’s several inches tall. I can see her more clearly, but it’s still hard to make out details. She’s still a blue coat, in profile, disappearing off the corner of the frame.

  “Mina.” I point to the girl in the corner of the frame. “Is this Mirjam?” I am controlled, almost emotionless. I don’t want to influence her answer with my tone.

/>   Mina barely looks at it before turning back to me. “What are you talking about? Of course it’s Mirjam. You said—”

  “Forget everything I said. I want you to look at this picture and tell me if it’s the girl you went to school with. Look closely.”

  Finally, Mina looks again, leaning on her elbows, studying the frame. The projector emits a low, warm hum. I stay where I am, trying to remain as still as possible. “Well?” I ask when I don’t feel like I can wait any longer.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure. That’s her coat. At least, that’s a coat exactly like the one Mirjam wore to school. But it’s from far away, and her head is in the middle of turning. It’s too blurry to tell. Why are you asking me this now?”

  “Mina, look more closely. Is that girl Mirjam, or isn’t it?”

  “I can’t tell, Hanneke.” She’s beginning to sound frustrated. “If someone showed me this picture and said, ‘Are any of your former classmates in this picture?’ I don’t know whether I would point to any of them. But if someone said, ‘Point to Mirjam Roodveldt in this picture,’ then the girl in the blue coat is who I would point to. Now can you tell me what this is about?”

  “I don’t know. Something’s not right, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Can you make it any less blurry? By moving the projector closer to the wall or something?”

  I examine the image from left to right like I am reading a book. There are the soldiers. There are the frightened people. There, a blur in the left, is a crèche worker. There, in the bottom right corner, is the girl who looks like Mirjam.

  The ring of the telephone pierces the air, making me jump. It could be Ollie. I told him to contact me here. “Are you going to answer the telephone?” I ask Mina.

  “I can’t answer it. I’m not supposed to exist here, remember?”

  I dash out of the room, toward the telephone extension near the front entrance, and manage to pick it up on the fourth ring. It is Ollie, calling from someplace with noise in the background.