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 disappeared?”
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.”
“Where did Mirjam go to school?”
“The Jewish Lyceum, since Jewish students were segregated. I don’t know where it is.”
I do. It’s right along the Amstel River in a redbrick building with tall windows. I pass by it all the time and now add it to my mental file on Mirjam. I have a location in which I can place the girl I’ve created in my head.
“What happens next?” Mrs. Janssen asks. “Are you going to speak with your friends about this?”
“Friends?”
“Who are going to help you? Who know about these things?”
Now I’m beginning to understand why Mrs. Janssen came to me. Because she has no idea how illicit activities work. The resistance, the black market—she thinks we’re all one network, sharing information, plotting against the Germans. But what I do for Mr. Kreuk works only because my link in the chain is so small. If I were to be caught and questioned about Mr. Kreuk’s operation, I could say that I didn’t know if he’d involved anyone else, and that would be telling the truth.
I don’t have a resistance network. My profiteering shopkeepers will be useless for this task. I don’t have anything, really, except an imaginary picture of a girl I’ve never seen, who I still haven’t fully promised Mrs. Janssen I’ll find.
“I need to see the hiding space again,” I tell Mrs. Janssen.
She lets me in by unlatching the hidden hook, and then calls after me. “I already looked in here. Before you came, I went through everything yesterday.”
I wait for my eyes to adjust. The space is maybe four feet wide. All but a few inches are taken up by the unfolded opklapbed. I pull back the quilt, examining the sheet below, doing the same for the mattress and pillow. On the narrow shelf, the magazine I’d noticed earlier, an old issue, from before the war. Mrs. Janssen probably had it among Jan’s old things and gave it to Mirjam as something to read.
None of the magazine’s pages have notes or markings on them, but tucked underneath is the latest issue of Het Parool, the paper Mrs. Janssen mentioned giving Mirjam yesterday. People read the resistance papers voraciously, then passed them along. Mrs. Janssen’s neighbor or delivery boy must have given this one to her.
I fold up the opklapbed to look at the floor underneath, peeling back the thin rug.
But what did I expect to find? A letter from Mirjam explaining where she went? A trapdoor, where a Nazi could have sneaked in and carried Mirjam away? When I emerge into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes against the brightness, Mrs. Janssen starts to set out coffee again.
“Is your neighbor across the street home?” I ask her. “Mrs. Veenstra? The one whose son got waylaid?”
“I don’t think so.” She frowns. “Did you want to interview her? She doesn’t know about Mirjam.”
I shake my head. “Stay at your door. And sometime in the next five minutes, open it and come out. Anytime in the next five minutes. Just don’t give me warning when.”
Wrapping my arms around my waist against the cold, I cross the street to the house belonging to Mrs. Veenstra and stand on the steps, my back facing Mrs. Janssen’s home. After a minute it comes: an audible click, followed immediately by a yapping dog. When I turn around, Mrs. Janssen stares at me, confused.
“I don’t understand,” she says when we’re back in the house. “What were you doing?”
“I noticed it earlier when Christoffel left with the opklapbed. Your door is so old and heavy; it can’t be opened without making a sound. And as soon as that dog next door—”
“Fritzi,” Mrs. Janssen supplies. “The neighbor boy’s schnauzer.”
“As soon as that dog hears the door, it starts barking. Even if you were looking in completely the other direction, you would have heard the dog and noticed Mirjam leaving through the front door.”
“That’s what I said.” She’s cross at my conclusion. “I already told you that. She couldn’t have left through that door. And I already looked through Mirjam’s hiding place. You’re wasting time doing things I already did.”
“Did you already find her?” My voice is sharper than it needs to be; I’m covering my inexperience with false confidence. “You keep telling me I’m doing things you already tried, but unless you already found her, I need to see everything with my own eyes. Now, take me to the back door.”
She opens her mouth, probably to tell me again that Mirjam couldn’t have escaped through there because of the inside latch, but then thinks better.
The rear door is a heavy oak, and it’s immediately apparent what she meant by it not closing. Age and the settling of the house have warped the door completely, so that the top half of the door bulges away from the jamb. That’s why Mrs. Janssen has added the latch. It’s heavy, made of iron, and when engaged, it holds the door properly shut. When it’s not engaged, a thin stream of air seeps in through the top.
She’s right. I can’t think of any way that a person could leave through this door and lock the latch behind herself.
Mrs. Janssen is staring at me. I haven’t told her that I’ll help, not officially. And yet I haven’t walked away. It’s so immensely dangerous, much more than anything I’ve allowed myself to do.
But Mrs. Janssen came to me, the way Mr. Kreuk had come to me, and I’m very good at finding things.
I can feel myself getting sucked into this mystery. Maybe because Bas would. Maybe because it’s another way to flout the rules. But maybe because, in a country that has come to make no sense, in a world I cannot solve, this is a small piece that I can. I need to get to Mirjam’s school, the place that might have a picture, the place that might explain who this girl is. Because assuming that Mrs. Janssen is correct in her timeline, assuming the dog always barks when someone leaves, assuming Mirjam couldn’t have gone through the back door, assuming all that is true, it seems this girl is a ghost.