by Monica Hesse
And.
He doesn’t even realize what he’s said. He doesn’t realize it at all. It was just a sentence to him. A string of words, a helpful comment. He’s putting on his cap. The door is open.
Slowly, like I’m watching my own actions in a dream, I close the door again, and it shuts with a whisper of a click.
“Hanneke?”
The shelf always squeaks when the latch is open. I replay the sentence again in my mind, searching for a way that it could mean something different from what I know it means. Shelf. He didn’t say “pantry door.” He specifically said “shelf.” He would have to know that the shelf swung open with a latch. Always. As in, multiple times. As in, he knows the workings of that hidden, rusty shelf.
“Hanneke, I thought you said I should leave.” He’s looking at me, confused.
“You know about the hiding space.” My voice comes out in an uneven whisper. “Christoffel?” He starts to shake his head, but it’s too late. A light has flickered in his eyes. “What do you know about it, Christoffel?” I ask softly.
“I don’t know anything. Please let’s not talk about this. Please just let me go.”
He reaches for the doorknob again, but I move in front of it. “I can’t let you go. You know that.”
“Hanneke, please leave this.” His voice is so quiet I can barely make it out.
Outside I hear someone selling an evening newspaper, and the gritty, swishing sound of a broom over cobblestones. Life is going on and on, and I’m in here with a soft-faced boy who is drained of all color. “Christoffel, it’s just the two of us in here. No matter what you tell me, good or bad, I can’t ever call the police or talk to anybody but Mrs. Janssen about it. But please, please, just tell me: How did you know there was a space behind the pantry?”
Outside the sweeper has landed on something metal, maybe a coin. Christoffel stares at his thumb, at a vicious hangnail rubbed red from repeated worrying. He’s an inch or two taller than me, but it’s gangly height, the height of a recent growth spurt.
“I didn’t know about—about her,” he says. “Not at first. I swear, I didn’t know at first. Usually when I’m here, Mrs. Janssen is in the room with me, and we’re talking or making noise that would cover up sounds from the pantry.”
“But not all the time?”
“One time I was delivering some things. Mrs. Janssen couldn’t find her pocketbook. She went upstairs to look for it, and she was gone for a long time, and down here it was quiet. And I heard something. A squeak.”
“Did you go to see what it was?” That would be so like helpful Christoffel, to hear a rusty hinge and decide to investigate it, repair it.
“I didn’t have to. I heard the squeak, and then she came out of the cupboard.”
Another person who saw her. Another person who knew she existed. Christoffel’s face has a touch of wonder to it, as he remembers that moment. How strange it must have been for him, to be standing in the kitchen and have a girl emerge from the pantry. “She recognized my voice,” Christoffel continues. “She said she’d just been waiting for an opportunity when Mrs. Janssen wasn’t around.”
She recognized. It’s like my brain can’t take in everything Christoffel is saying at once, so it latches on to loose phrases, here or there. Recognize is an interesting word. It would have made more sense for Christoffel to say “heard.” We recognize the things that are already familiar to us.
“You knew her,” I say, and as I’m formulating the words, I decide who “her” really was. “You knew Amalia.”
“How did you know her name?”
“How did you?”
“We went to school together. The three of us, we grew up together. Me, Amalia, and—” Christoffel leaves a space where the name should go, one that I can’t resist filling.
“And Mirjam.”
“And Mirjam,” he whispers. Then Christoffel does something I didn’t expect at all and hadn’t been prepared for. He sinks to the floor, sliding down along the wall. He balls his fists in front of his eyes, and he begins to cry. Not just silent tears: fat, noisy tears like a little boy.
I drop to my knees next to him. This is pain I recognize. “Christoffel, did you—did you love Mirjam?”
His throat is hoarse; he’s barely whispering. “She didn’t seem to notice me that way; she treated me like a brother. I assumed she didn’t like me. Last year she told me it wasn’t that she didn’t like me, it was that Amalia did. She said Amalia liked me first, and Mirjam didn’t want to betray her. I knew deep down, all along, I guess. Amalia started getting nervous around me. She got this laugh—a giggle, sort of. But I never thought of her as more than a friend.”
“You’re T. Not Tobias. You.” Christoffel looks up at me, confused. “I found a letter,” I explain. “It mentioned a boy whose name she abbreviated as T. It was a boy she liked.”
Those stupid English princesses. The letter wasn’t from Mirjam to Amalia, something she never got a chance to send. The letter was from Amalia to Mirjam, something Mirjam was rereading in class.
“My nickname,” Christoffel says. “It’s dumb. I don’t even remember when I got it. I guess that I must have been T.”
Earlier, I thought Christoffel’s friends at the ferry were all calling him Mr. Great. That’s what Tof means: “Great.” “Cool.” But they weren’t calling him that—they were calling him Tof, his nickname, from the middle of Christoffel.
“How many times did you see Amalia in the pantry?”
“Just twice. The second time I came, she waited until Mrs. Janssen was gone again, and then she said there had been a notice in the newspaper and that she needed my help to escape.”
Het Parool. The three-line notice in the classifieds: Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.
The first day I came here, Mrs. Janssen told me she brought Mirjam a newspaper, and then told her to stay quiet because the delivery boy was coming. Mrs. Janssen never mentioned to me that she had left Christoffel alone in the kitchen. She wouldn’t have thought she needed to. Why would Mirjam announce her presence to the boy who came to deliver groceries?
“You helped her escape?”
“I did.”
“But I don’t understand. She must have told you that Mrs. Janssen thought she was Mirjam. Why would she leave without telling Mrs. Janssen that she was going? And how was Amalia carrying Mirjam’s papers on the night of the raid?”
He kneads the palm of his hand into his eye, clumsily wiping away tears. I don’t have a handkerchief, and I don’t know if I would offer him one if I did. Am I comforting him? Interrogating him? This boy in front of me has the answer to every question I’ve been chasing for a week. He helped launch a series of events that caused pain and anguish, and I still don’t understand why.
“She—she told me that the night the Roodveldts’ hiding space was ransacked, she ran into Mirjam on the street,” he says. “Mirjam was running for her life and she thought she would be caught soon. Amalia made her switch coats and identification papers. Amalia said that if Mirjam had non-Jewish papers, she would be able to escape, and Amalia could just go to the authorities later and be issued new ones. But the soldiers were too close. She didn’t have time to run home, and she worried that with Mirjam’s clothes and papers, she would be shot on sight. So she came to Mrs. Janssen’s. Mirjam told her the address.”
“But when she got here, why didn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen who she really was? Why didn’t she ask Mrs. Janssen to help her get new papers?”
He shrugs morosely. “I don’t know. She just said she didn’t want Mrs. Janssen to know.”
Because she wanted to make sure Mirjam was safe before she told anyone the truth? Because she didn’t want anyone to know the real Mirjam Roodveldt was still out there, escaped, living under a different name? Because there are some parts of this story that are never going to make sense, no matter how many questions I ask?
“Where did she go?” I ask. “After you got her out of
the house?”
“She stayed with me for a while. Papa travels so often he didn’t suspect someone was in the basement.”
In his basement. Until just a few days ago, the girl I was looking for was living at the home of a boy I’d seen multiple times.
“What made her leave?” I ask. I can understand why Amalia never went to the authorities and said her own papers were lost or stolen: Since she was under eighteen, the authorities might have demanded her parents’ signatures, and they were already out of the city. I can understand why she might have wanted to stay with Christoffel instead of Mrs. Janssen—an old friend rather than a stranger who didn’t even know who she really was. What I can’t understand is why, after she’d gone through all that trouble, she would then leave his house. “Why did she keep running from the places she was safest, Christoffel? I just need some of these pieces to make sense.” He’s still crying, tears flowing faster as I demand answers. “Why did Amalia leave your house that night?”
“I told her to,” he finally yelps. “She told me a secret and I made her leave. I never meant for her to die. I swear I never meant it. I was so mad at her. I told her the Nazis would treat her better than I would if I ever saw her again. I chased her to the street. She was running away from me; I saw her run face-on into a soldier. When she was caught in the roundup, she was running away from me.” His voice is high and keening.
“What was the secret? What was it that made you refuse to let her stay in your house?”
“I can’t. I can’t.” He’s become hysterical; if I had a paper bag, I would make him breathe into it. Instead, I pat the back of his sweater, damp with sweat and heaving as he gulps in air. He’s just a few years younger than me, but he’s a small boy right now. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he gasps out in between deep breaths. “Please don’t make me.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay,” I repeat, because pushing him right now is only going to send him further over the edge.
Just one thing more. Not even a thing that matters, in the large scheme of things, but something I have to have settled, for my own peace.
“You said Amalia asked you to help her escape on the day she saw the notice in the newspaper. But you couldn’t have helped her right then. Mrs. Janssen saw her later in the evening. Did you find a way to sneak back in the house while Mrs. Janssen was across the street at her neighbor’s? Were you the one who figured out how to close the back door from the outside?”
“No. She hid in the house while Mrs. Janssen was at the neighbor’s. I came back the next day.”
His timeline must be off. The next day, I was here. The next day, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to Mrs. Janssen tell me Mirjam had already disappeared. “You’re misremembering. I was here that day. I saw you come in. You were picking up some furniture to sell for Mrs. Janssen.”
“I did do that. I did pick up the furniture.”
Christoffel is silent. I am silent.
He’s allowing me this, this one kindness, the ability to put the final pieces together myself. If I don’t want to, I can tell Mrs. Janssen that it was Amalia in the pantry and now she’s dead, and it will be true, and how she escaped won’t matter. Or I can put the pieces together and everything will hurt more.
I have to put them together. Because without even meaning to, I’m remembering the way Mina cheerfully handed me a baby’s bag filled with firewood and I carried it on my shoulder for more than a kilometer without realizing that I was transporting an important part of their ruse. I’m remembering the fact that the carriage was really a camera. I’m remembering the fact that Ollie didn’t love me or Judith; he loved Willem. I’m remembering the fact that nothing in this war is what it seems, and I have spent too much of it not seeing what’s in front of my own face.
Amalia was folded up in the opklapbed. Christoffel rolled it out of the house on his pushcart. While I was trying to figure out whether I should help Mrs. Janssen find her missing onderduiker, she wasn’t missing at all. She was just a few feet away.
“She was waiting in the opklapbed for you to sneak her away. That was the plan all along.”
I am weary. He is weary. We both want this to be over, finally, completely. “She waited for hours,” he said. “She let herself sit in the office while Mrs. Janssen slept, but once she heard Mrs. Janssen wake up, she climbed back in. I told her I would come as early as I could in the morning.”
“And then you left. With her. While I sat here. Did you know I had been hired to find her?”
“A friend asked me for help,” he says finally. “That’s what I was thinking about.”
I try to figure out how to respond. Should I tell him about Mrs. Janssen’s desperation when she first learned the girl in the pantry was gone? Should I tell him about what it looked like when Amalia’s knees buckled and she crashed to the ground?
In the silence, he’s crying again.
“Shhhhh,” I say to him. “Shhhhh,” because it’s what people said to me when I cried about Bas and because, at this moment, there aren’t any other words.
THIRTY-THREE
Saturday
When things come to an end in a way you don’t expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don’t keep you up at night? Or does it mean it’s time to make peace?
It takes me two days to find a space on a train to Kijkduin.
The train goes to Den Haag first, a city that seems like it’s swarming with even more German soldiers than Amsterdam. I transfer to Kijkduin, a suburb on the sea, and as the train gets closer, the air becomes briny. Today I’m the only person to get off at this station, holding my small suitcase, looking like a mad vacationer who has elected to come to the sea in the middle of winter. My hair is whipped by the wind coming off the water, and my eyes burn in the salty cold. The town had been a resort destination, new and planned, for only a decade or so before the invasion. Now the beach has a fort near it, taken over by Germans and used for training.
I pass only a few people on my way into town, locals who live here year-round. The second, a young boy, tells me I’m a long walk yet to my destination and offers to give me a lift. I climb on his bicycle carrier while he pedals us into the small downtown.
“Here you are.” The bicyclist coasts to a stop, and he nods to a cluster of buildings across the street. The middle one is pale green.
I thank him and smooth down my skirt. Amalia’s aunt’s guesthouse has a painted porch and a cheerful sign hanging out front, assuring guests that they’re open for the winter. I know what’s behind this door, or I think I do, at least, but I still feel like an interloper. I didn’t send any word before I came. I’d dealt enough in speculation and fog this week; I wanted proof I could see. The black marketer in me, I guess, seeking reassurance and finding value in the tangible world.
When I knock on the door, a middle-aged woman answers eagerly. Off-season business can’t be easy to come by, especially not since the Germans have blocked so much of the coastline with barriers against the invading Allies.
“Are you interested in a room?” The woman I assume is Amalia’s aunt is already extending her hand to take my suitcase. “Come in. There’s a fire going in the parlor, and I’ll fix you something to eat.”
I follow her inside and think of what I should say and how much I should tell her. I didn’t come with any script today, either. What I’d come to do, after all I’d experienced, seemed too real for games.
In the end, this is what I told Mrs. Janssen, when she came home that day at her house: I told her that the girl she sent me to look for was dead, but the girl she wanted me to find might not be. I told her that I could never bring back the girl who she had grown to love over several weeks of hiding, but that I might be able to find the girl whose family was all gone, just like Mrs. Janssen’s son and husband were gone. I showed her the picture, and I told her that I knew it didn’t make sense. I told her I would try t
o find a way for it to make sense, but it maybe never could. I told her I was sorry.
Christoffel refused to tell her anything. He left before Mrs. Janssen returned. He said he couldn’t handle the guilt. I wanted to tell him a lot of things: How he’d caused destruction. How he’d been unthinking. How he needed to give me Amalia’s secret. But when he said he was crumbling under the guilt, I couldn’t bring myself to say any of that. Because I understood what that felt like. Because I’d spent more than two years and all of a war feeling that myself, certain that my actions had caused the death of someone important to me.
“A room, then?” The woman is still waiting for me to respond.
“I’m interested in—” I’m still not sure what to say. Should I ask for Amalia straightaway? Or should I wait until I have a room, and I’ve come down for dinner around a cozy fire? But it turns out I don’t have to worry about it, because all at once, there she is.
A girl a few years younger than me, petite, fine-featured, comes down the stairs carrying an armful of linens. On her right shin, visible even in the dimness of the indoor light, a thin pink scar jags down from her knee.
“Amalia,” the older woman instructs. “It looks like we’re going to have a guest tonight. Can you show her up to room three?” She turns to me and winks. “It’s the largest we have, with the most comfortable bed.”
She’s changed a little from her birthday picture. She’s older in the face, and her body has curves that the girl in the picture didn’t. I let her take my suitcase, this dream girl come to life in front of me, and follow her up to the second floor. Upstairs, room three is decorated in pale blues and seashells, and the window is opened a few inches so the sea air can come in, even in the cold.
“We serve dinner at six,” she says, the first time she’s spoken to me. Her voice is lower-pitched than I expected. “It’s not fancy, but there’s usually fresh fish.”
“I know.” This is what escapes from my mouth. Not a grand speech, but the simple declaration I’ve waited days to deliver.
