by Monica Hesse
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For my sister Paige,
and her sister Piper
A long time before Bas died, we had a pretend argument about whose fault it was that he’d fallen in love with me. It’s your fault, he told me. Because you’re lovable. I told him he was wrong. That it was lazy to blame his falling in love on me. Irresponsible, really.
I remember everything about this conversation. It was in his parents’ sitting room, and we were listening to the family’s new radio while I quizzed him for a geometry exam neither of us thought was important. The American singer Judy Garland was singing “You Made Me Love You.” That was how the conversation began. Bas said I’d made him love me. I made fun of him because I didn’t want him to know how fast my heart was pounding to hear him say the words love and you in the same sentence.
Then he said it was my fault, also, that he wanted to kiss me. Then I said it was his fault if I let him. Then his older brother walked in the room and said it was both of our faults if he got sick to his stomach listening to us.
It was only later that day, when I was walking home—back when I could walk home without worrying about being stopped by soldiers or missing curfew or being arrested—that I realized I’d never said it back. The first time he said he loved me, and I forgot to say it back.
I should have. If I’d known what would happen and what I would find out about love and war, I would have made sure to say it then.
That’s my fault.
JANUARY 1943
ONE
Tuesday
Hallo, sweetheart. What do you have there? Something for me?”
I stop because the soldier’s face is young and pretty, and because his voice has a wink in it, and because I bet he would make me laugh during an afternoon at the movies.
That’s a lie.
I stop because the soldier might be a good contact, because he might be able to get the things that we can’t get anymore, because his dresser drawers are probably filled with row after row of chocolate bars and socks that don’t have holes in the toes.
That’s also not really the truth.
But sometimes I ignore the whole truth, because it’s easier to pretend I’m making decisions for rational reasons. It’s easier to pretend I have a choice.
I stop because the soldier’s uniform is green. That’s the only reason I stop. Because his uniform is green, and that means I have no choice at all.
“That’s a lot of packages for a pretty girl.”
His Dutch is slightly accented, but I’m surprised he speaks it so well. Some Green Police don’t speak it at all, and they’re annoyed when we’re not fluent in German, as if we should have been preparing our entire lives for the day when they invaded our country.
I park my bicycle but don’t dismount. “It’s exactly the right number of packages, I think.”
“What have you got in them?” He leans over my handlebars, one hand grazing into the basket attached to the front.
“Wouldn’t you like to see? Wouldn’t you like to open all my packages?” I giggle, and then lower my eyelashes so he won’t see how practiced this line is. With the way I’m standing, my dress has risen above my knee, and the soldier notices. It’s navy, already tighter than it should be, frayed at the hem and several years old, from before the war. I shift my weight a little so the hemline rides even higher, now halfway up my goose-bumped thigh.
This interaction would feel worse if he were older, if he were wrinkled, if he had stained teeth or a sagging belly. It would be worse, but I would flirt the same anyway. I have a dozen times before.
He leans in closer. The Herengracht is murky and fish-stinking behind him, and I could push him into this canal and ride halfway home on my disgrace of a secondhand bicycle before he paddled himself out. It’s a game I like to play with every Green Police who stops me. How could I punish you, and how far would I get before you caught me?
“This is a book I’m bringing home to my mother.” I point to the first parcel wrapped in paper. “And these are the potatoes for our supper. And this is the sweater I’ve just picked up from mending.”
“Hoe heet je?” he asks. He wants to know my name, and he’s asked it in the informal, casual way, how a confident boy would ask a bucktoothed girl her name at a party, and this is good news because I’d much rather he be interested in me than the packages in my basket.
“Hanneke Bakker.” I would lie, but there’s no point now that we all carry mandatory identification papers. “What’s your name, soldier?”
He puffs out his chest when I call him soldier. The young ones are still in love with their uniforms. When he moves, I see a flash of gold around his neck. “And what’s in your locket?” I ask.
His grin falters as his hand flies to the pendant now dangling just below his collar. The locket is gold, shaped like a heart, probably containing a photograph of an apple-faced German girl who has promised to remain faithful back in Berlin. It was a gamble to ask about it, but one that always turns out well if I’m right.
“Is it a photograph of your mother? She must love you a lot to give you such a pretty necklace.”
His face flushes pink as he tucks the chain back under his starched collar.
“Is it of your sister?” I press on. “Your little pet dog?” It’s a difficult balance, to sound the right amount of naive. My words need to have enough innocence in them that he can’t justify getting angry with me, but enough sharpness that he’d rather get rid of me than keep me here and interrogate me about what I’m carrying. “I haven’t seen you before,” I say. “Are you stationed on this street every day?”
“I don’t have time for silly girls like you. Go home, Hanneke.”
When I pedal away, my handlebars only barely shake. I was mostly telling him the truth about the packages. The first three do hold a book, a sweater, and a few potatoes. But underneath the potatoes are four coupons’ worth of sausages, bought with a dead man’s rations, and underneath those are lipsticks and lotions, bought with another dead man’s rations, and underneath those are cigarettes and alcohol, bought with money that Mr. Kreuk, my boss, handed me this morning for just that purpose. None of it belongs to me.
Most people would say I trade in the black market, the illicit underground exchange of goods. I prefer to think of myself as a finder. I find things. I find extra potatoes, meat, and lard. In the beginning I could find sugar and chocolate, but those things have been harder recently, and I can only get them sometimes. I find tea. I find bacon. The wealthy people of Amsterdam stay plump because of me. I find the things we have been made to do without, unless you know where to look.
My last question to the soldier, about whether this street is his new post—I wish he’d answered that one. Because if he’s stationed on the corner every day now, I’ll have to either consider being friendly to him or change my route.
My first delivery this morning is Miss Akkerman, who lives with her grandparents in one of the old buildings down by the museums. Miss Akkerman is the lotions and lipstick. Last week it was perfume. She’s one of the few women I’ve met who still care so much about these things, but she told me once that she’s hoping her boyfriend will propose before her next birthday, and people have spent money for str
anger reasons.
She answers the door with her wet hair in pins. She must have a date with Theo tonight.
“Hanneke! Come in while I get my purse.” She always finds an excuse to invite me in. I think she gets bored here during the day, alone with her grandparents, who talk too loudly and smell like cabbage.
Inside the house is stuffy and dim. Miss Akkerman’s grandfather sits at the breakfast table through the kitchen doorway. “Who’s at the door?” he yells.
“It’s a delivery, Grandpa,” Miss Akkerman calls over her shoulder.
“It’s who?”
“It’s for me.” She turns back to me and lowers her voice. “Hanneke, you have to help me. Theo is coming over tonight to ask my grandparents if I can move into his apartment. I need to figure out what to wear. Stay right here; I’ll show you my options.”
I can’t think of any dress that would make her grandparents approve of her living with her boyfriend before marriage, though I know this wouldn’t be the first time this war made a young couple reject tradition.
When Miss Akkerman comes back to the foyer, I pretend to consider the two dresses she’s brought, but really I’m watching the wall clock. I don’t have time for socializing. After telling her to wear the gray one, I motion for her to take the packages I’ve been holding since I arrived. “These are yours. Would you like to make sure everything’s all right?”
“I’m sure they’re fine. Stay for coffee?”
I don’t bother to ask if it’s real. The only way she would have real coffee is if I’d brought it to her, and I hadn’t, so when she says she has coffee, she means she has ground acorns or twigs. Ersatz coffee.
The other reason I don’t stay is the same reason why I don’t accept Miss Akkerman’s repeated offer to call her Irene. Because I don’t want her to confuse this relationship with friendship. Because I don’t want her to think that if one day she can’t pay, it doesn’t matter.
“I can’t. I still have another delivery before lunch.”
“Are you sure? You could have lunch here—I’m already going to make it—and then we could figure out just what to do with my hair for tonight.”
It’s a strange relationship I have with my clients. They think we’re comrades. They think we’re bound by the secret that we’re doing something illegal together. “I always have lunch at home with my parents,” I say.
“Of course, Hanneke.” She’s embarrassed for having pushed too far. “I’ll see you later, then.”
Outside, it’s cloudy and overcast, Amsterdam winter, as I ride my bicycle down our narrow, haphazard streets. Amsterdam was built on canals. The country of Holland is low, lower even than the ocean, and the farmers who mucked it out centuries ago created an elaborate system of waterways, just to keep citizens from drowning in the North Sea. An old history teacher of mine used to accompany that piece of our past with a popular saying: “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” He said it like a point of pride, but to me, the saying was also a warning: “Don’t rely on anything coming to save us. We’re all alone down here.”
Seventy-five kilometers to the south, at the start of the occupation two and a half years ago, the German planes bombed Rotterdam, killing nine hundred civilians and much of the city’s architecture. Two days later, the Germans arrived in Amsterdam by foot. We now have to put up with their presence, but we got to keep our buildings. It’s a bad trade-off. It’s all bad trade-offs these days, unless, like me, you know how to mostly end up on the profitable side of things.
My next customer, Mrs. Janssen, is just a short ride away in a large blue house where she used to live with her husband and three sons, until one son moved to London, one son moved to America, and one son, the baby of the family, moved to the Dutch front lines, where two thousand Dutch servicemen were killed when they tried but failed to protect our borders as the country fell in five days’ time. We don’t speak much of Jan anymore.
I wonder if he was near Bas, though, during the invasion.
I wonder this about everything now, trying to piece together the last minutes of the boy I loved. Was he with Bas, or did Bas die alone?
Mrs. Janssen’s husband disappeared last month, just before she became a customer, and I’ve never asked any more about that. He could have been an illegal worker with the resistance, or he could have just been in the wrong place at a bad time, or he could be not dead after all and instead having high tea in England with his oldest son, but in any case it’s none of my business. I’ve only delivered a few things to Mrs. Janssen. I knew her son Jan a little bit. He was a surprise baby, born two decades after his brothers, when the Janssens were already stooped and gray. Jan was a nice boy.
Here, today, I decide Jan might have been near Bas when the Germans stormed our country. Here, today, I’ll believe that Bas didn’t die alone. It’s a more optimistic thought than I usually allow myself to have.
Mrs. Janssen is waiting at the door for me, which makes me irritated because if you were a German soldier assigned to look for suspicious things, what would you think of an old woman waiting for a strange girl on a bicycle?
“Good morning, Mrs. Janssen. You didn’t have to stand out here for me. How are you?”
“I’m fine!” she shouts, like she’s reading lines in a play, nervously touching the white curls escaping from her bun. Her hair is always in a bun, and her glasses are always slipping down her nose; her clothes always remind me of a curtain or a sofa. “Won’t you come in?”
“I couldn’t get as much sausage as you wanted, but I do have some,” I tell her once I’ve parked my bicycle and the door is closed behind us. She moves slowly; she walks with a cane now and rarely leaves the house anymore. She told me she got the cane when Jan died. I don’t know if there’s something physically wrong with her or if grief just broke her and made her lame.
Inside, her front room looks more spacious than normal, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Normally, between the china cabinet and the armchair, there is an opklapbed, a small bed that looks like a bookcase but can be folded out for sleeping when guests visit. I assume Mr. Janssen made it, like he made all the things in their house. Mama and I used to walk past his furniture store to admire the window displays, but we never could have afforded anything in it. I can’t imagine where the opklapbed has gone. If Mrs. Janssen sold it so soon after her husband’s disappearance, she must already be struggling with money, which I won’t allow to be my concern unless it means she can’t pay me.
“Coffee, Hanneke?” In front of me, Mrs. Janssen disappears into the kitchen, so I follow. I plan to decline her coffee offer, but she’s laid out two cups and her good china, blue and white, the famous style from the city of Delft. The table is heavy and maple.
“I have the sausage here if you want to—”
“Later,” she interrupts. “Later. First, we’ll have coffee, and a stroopwafel, and we’ll talk.”
Next to her sits a dust-covered canister that smells like the earth. Real coffee beans. I wonder how long she’s been saving them. The stroopwafels, too. People don’t use their bakery rations for fancy pastries; they use them for bread. Then again, they don’t use them to feed black market delivery girls, either, but here is Mrs. Janssen, pouring my coffee into a porcelain cup and placing a stroopwafel on top so that the waffle sandwich softens in the steam and the sugary syrup inside oozes around the edges.
“Sit, Hanneke.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say, even as my stomach betrays me with a growl.
I am hungry, but something makes me nervous with these stroopwafels, and with how eager Mrs. Janssen is to have me sit, and with the irregularity of the whole situation. Has she called the Green Police and promised to deliver them a black market worker? A woman desperate enough to sell her husband’s opklapbed might do such a thing.
“Just for a minute?”
“I’m sorry, but I have a million other things to do today.”
She stares down at her beautifully set table
. “My youngest. Jan. These were his favorite. I used to have them waiting when he came home from school. You were his friend?” She smiles at me hopefully.
I sigh. She’s not dangerous; she’s just lonely. She misses her son, and she wants to feed one of his old classmates his after-school snack. This goes against all my rules, and the pleading in her voice makes me uncomfortable. But it’s cold outside, and the coffee is real, and despite what I just told Mrs. Janssen about my millions of tasks, I actually have an hour before my parents expect me for lunch. So I set the parcel with sausage on the table, smooth down my hair, and try to remember how to be a polite guest on a social call. I knew how to do this once. Bas’s mother used to pour me hot chocolate in her kitchen while Bas and I studied, and then she would find excuses to keep checking in to make sure we weren’t kissing.
“I haven’t had a stroopwafel in a while,” I say finally, trying out my rusted conversational skills. “My favorites were always banketstaaf.”
“With the almond paste?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Mrs. Janssen’s coffee is scalding and strong, a soothing anesthetic. It burns my throat, so I keep drinking it and don’t even realize how much I’ve had until the cup is back on its saucer and it’s half empty. Mrs. Janssen immediately fills it to the top.
“The coffee’s good,” I tell her.
“I need your help.”
Ah.
So the purpose of the coffee becomes clear. She’s given me a present. Now she wants a favor. Too bad she didn’t realize I don’t need to be buttered up. I work for money, not kindness.
“I need your help finding something,” she says.
“What do you need? More meat? Kerosene?”
“I need your help finding a person.”
The cup freezes halfway to my lips, and for a second I can’t remember whether I was picking it up or putting it down.
“I need your help finding a person,” she says again, because I still haven’t responded.