Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

  Mirjam. Where did you go?

  TEN

  It’s lucky, for Judith and her cousin to have an uncle who could help them get a place at the Schouwburg. Jews are hardly allowed to work anywhere anymore. Positions at the theater must be prized like the jobs at the Jewish hospital. I heard that those come with a special stamp on identification cards that allows Jews to be out past curfew, to not be deported. Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.

  The theater is white, with tall columns. When I was here last, with Bas’s family, a colorful banner hung from its face, advertising the holiday pantomime. Now when I bicycle up to it, the front of the theater is naked. Posted outside are two guards who halt me at the door and ask for my identification card. I don’t know if telling them that I’m here to meet Judith will get her into trouble, so instead I tell one that I’ve brought medicine for my neighbor, who was taken in last night’s roundup. I hold up my own bag as if there’s something important inside.

  “I’ll only be a minute. My mother said you’d never let me in,” I improvise, “because she thinks it’s not in your power, and you’d have to ask your boss.”

  They exchange glances with each other; one of them is about to refuse me—I can see it in his body language—so I lean in conspiratorially and lower my voice. “It’s just that her rash was really disgusting. I saw it myself.” I can only hope these two particular guards subscribe to the antigerm fanaticism that the Nazis are well known for. I put my hand to my stomach, as if even thinking about the rash makes me queasy. Finally one of the soldiers stands aside. “Thank you so much,” I tell him.

  “Be quick,” he says, and I do my best to look purposeful while stifling my pride over talking my way past them. I’d never used that tactic before, and I’ll have to remember it.

  The smell hits me first.

  It’s sweat and urine and excrement and some other undefinable odor. It feels like a wall, extending to either side of me and over my head, and there’s no way to climb over it.

  What has happened to this theater? The seats have been wrenched from the floor and they’re piled in stacks. The stage has no curtains, but the ropes that used to open them still hang from their pulleys, swaying and ghostlike in the middle of the stage. It’s dark, except for the emergency bulbs that glow like red eyes along the border of the theater. And people. Old women on thin straw mattresses that line the walls, which they must sleep on, because I don’t see anything else that could be used. Young women huddling next to suitcases. It’s unbearably hot.

  On the other side of the door, just a few feet away, the door guards are talking about nothing in particular in cool, clean air while my stomach clenches and heaves as I struggle not to vomit right here in what used to be the lobby. Is this what my neighbors have been brought into? Where Mr. Bierman was taken, and everyone else who has disappeared?

  “Please.”

  I turn to face the older man speaking in a soft voice behind me. “Please,” he says again. “We’re not allowed to talk to the guards, but I saw you just come in, and—do you know, can I be sent to Westerbork? My wife and children were sent there yesterday. They say I’m supposed to be sent to Vught, but—I’ll do anything, I’ll give anything, if I can be sent to Westerbork instead.”

  Before I can answer, another hand tugs on my sleeve, a woman who has overheard the conversation.

  “Can you get a letter out?” she asks. “I need to send a note to my sister. I came with our mother, and she died in the room they’re using for sick people, and I just want my sister to know. Just a letter, please.”

  “I can’t,” I begin, but I feel more people pressing in, more voices asking for help; it’s confusing and disorienting and everyone’s faces are dark and shadowed. “I can’t,” I start to say again, when another arm grabs me, this one roughly, and pulls me backward.

  “What are you doing in here?” a voice hisses. Someone is holding my coat; I try to wrench myself away, but the hands don’t let go.

  “Stop,” I start to scream. Before I can finish the word, a palm clamps over my mouth. “Hel—” I try again, when the hand slips.

  “Shut up, Hanneke! It’s me.”

  Judith. It’s just Judith. My brain registers the voice before my body does; my arms keep flailing, and it takes a moment before they stop. She half drags me back toward the door, flashing her identification card to the guards and depositing me outside in front of the theater. While she stands with her arms folded across her middle, I gag in the street, trying to rid my lungs of the stench inside, and my brain from the memory of all those people. A white square of cloth appears in front of me.

  “Here.” Judith hands me her handkerchief. “Don’t vomit on the street.”

  Already behind her, the two guards who let me in are peering around Judith to see what’s happened to the girl with the medicine. The handkerchief scratches against my lips. I wipe my mouth, forcing myself to stand. “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t expect it to be like that,” I say finally.

  “What did you expect it to be like? A hotel? A teahouse? Hordes of people are kept in there for days with almost no working toilets. Did you think some actors would come on the stage and do a pantomime?”

  I don’t bother to answer. Anything I say will make me sound naive. I was naive. I knew it was a deportation center, but those words were abstract until I saw what they meant. All I can think about now is the sea of faces swimming in front of me, waiting and waiting in what used to be a beautiful theater.

  I can believe all the rumors Ollie told me, about what might happen to the people who are taken from that place and never returned. I can believe there are postcards written by prisoners at work camps, who think they will be fine until they are dead. I can picture Mirjam Roodveldt’s girlish handwriting, being forced to compose one of those postcards.

  “Hanneke?” Judith’s voice has lost a little of its harshness. “Are you okay?”

  “I was only going in to find you and your cousin.” I cough out the words, choking on my disgust. “You told me to meet you here.”

  “I told you to meet us outside the theater.” Judith jerks her head toward the ornate stone building across the street. “The theater’s nursery is on the other side of the road. Can you walk now?”

  My senses are still swimming as I follow her across the street into the building. I try to banish everything I’ve just seen from my mind; it’s the only thing that will let me focus on the task at hand. My brain gobbles up the new information around me, as if each new thing it sees will help me forget an old thing in the theater.

  No guards are posted in front of this building. It looks like a regular nursery. Indoors, too: When we walk into the foyer, a young girl in a white nurse’s cap paces back and forth with a sobbing toddler, trying to calm him. She gives me a funny glance; I don’t know if they’re used to getting strangers in here, and I must still be pale and sick-looking. But she smiles in recognition when she sees Judith behind me.

  “Are you working here today? I didn’t think it was your shift.”

  “I’m just visiting Mina. My friend is, too.”

  Judith leads us to a room that looks like a traditional hospital nursery, bassinets filled with sleeping or fussing babies. One girl with her back to us is bent over a crib, but she stands when Judith calls her name. Mina is short and compact to Judith’s willowy height, but they have the same teeth and the same brilliant eyes. “Cousin.” She greets Judith with a kiss on the cheek. “I was just wondering where you were. Did you get—”

  “Permission. Yes. They only ask for a name and address, for after.”

  “We always do. But they have to understand that names might change, and we can’t promise to keep track.”

  Judith nods, obviously understanding this code, which I assume is related to the fake ration cards they’re creating for Jewish families. She touche
s me on the shoulder. “I have things to do,” she says. “I’ll leave you with Mina and be back for you in an hour? If I can, I’ll see if my uncle can look at the records, to tell you if Mirjam has been brought through.”

  Once she’s gone, Mina smiles. “I have work, too. I have to take baby Regina out for some fresh air. If you don’t mind coming with me, then I can answer questions while we walk. It would be nice to have some company. I never get company anymore, and I love the babies, but sometimes it would be nice to talk to people who can speak in syllables. Judith says you want to know about Mirjam?”

  Mina has a way of talking so that sentences come out in a ripple, without pausing to take breaths. I have to adjust myself to get used to her bubbliness. How can she manage it, working across from the building she does?

  “I knew Mirjam a little,” Mina continues. “I had a few classes with her. Here, could you get me one of those for Regina?” She nods toward a pile of washed blankets and gestures for me to help her wrap one of the sleeping babies in a pink flannel.

  Eventually I manage to parcel Regina into a lumpy bundle, while Mina picks up a bag, presumably filled with diapers and supplies. “Would you carry this?” she asks. The strap digs into my shoulder. Who would have thought babies require so many accessories?

  “There we go.” Mina tucks Regina into a baby carriage. “Nice and cozy, aren’t we?” She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. “I have three brothers. All younger. I was changing diapers when I was still in diapers. Should we walk?”

  Mina leads me through the back exit, which leads to a small courtyard, and then through a gate belonging to a neighboring building. “Shortcut.” Mina winks, and finally we’re on a cobblestoned street.

  A pair of older women smile when they see the baby carriage, and Mina smiles back. “Can we peek?” one woman asks, and Mina stops so they can coo at the sleeping baby. As soon as the woman tries to reach into the carriage, though, Mina swiftly starts walking again.

  “I need to keep her moving,” she calls over her shoulder. “She didn’t sleep at all last night; she’ll wake up again unless I keep walking.”

  “So,” she says to me after we’ve reached the end of the block, “tell me about yourself. How do you know Judith? Are you in university? What are you studying? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I pick through her questions and decide to start by answering the middle one. “I’m not in university. I have a job.”

  Her face lights up at this news. “I want to have a job! I want to be a photographer and travel all over the world. I’ve already taken classes.”

  She’s so… I search for the right word. Exuberant. Earnest and exuberant, like the world is full of possibilities.

  “Can we talk about—” I cut myself off while Mina stops to adjust Regina’s blankets, and start talking again once we’re moving. “Can we talk about Mirjam?”

  “What do you already know about her?”

  I hesitate. “That she was smart. Top of the class. Maybe a little competitive.”

  “Now, that’s an understatement. She was completely preoccupied with grades. I think it was her parents, though. They gave her rewards for good grades. On her own, I didn’t get the impression she would have cared.”

  I suppress a smile. It shifts the perspective I have of the studious missing girl, but it sounds like me—like Mama and Papa telling me that if I only applied myself, they knew I was smarter than the middling grades I brought home. Somehow, the Roodveldts actually managed to get Mirjam to perform, though, while my parents eventually gave up.

  “What did she care about?” I ask.

  Mina purses her lips. “Domestic things, I guess? She would actually talk about things like china patterns, or about how many children she wanted to have, or how she would dress them. Things like that.”

  She says this incredulously, like there’s something strange about domestic ambitions, but the description only makes me ache for Mirjam. I know what it’s like, to have modest, simple wishes, and then have even those taken away from you.

  “Were you friends?”

  Mina pauses. “The school wasn’t big, so you knew everyone in it. I invited her to my birthday last year because my parents made me invite all the girls. I can’t even remember if she came. I don’t think I’d say we were really friends. She was more popular than me.”

  “Are there pictures from your party?”

  “My camera was broken then. I got a brand-new one for my birthday, but the film I asked for was special and it hadn’t arrived yet. Ursie knew Mirjam better. Ursie and Zef, those were her better friends at school.”

  “Where can I find Ursie and Zef?”

  Mina looks at me curiously. “Gone. Ursie left school right before Mirjam, and Zef right after. I saw Ursie here at the Schouwburg, before her family’s transport.”

  Mirjam’s entire class, disappeared one by one, all of them in hiding or taken through that theater. This is all completely insane, and every new piece of information only compounds the insanity. I’m trying to find a girl who vanished from a closed house. Who cannot be reported missing, because if the police found her, it would be worse for her than if they’d never gone looking at all. In which the last people to see her before she appeared at Mrs. Janssen’s are all dead. And in which her friends, the only living people who might be able to guess where she might have been likely to go, are now gone themselves.

  “Was there a girl in your class named Elizabeth? Or Margaret? Even not in your year, but anywhere in the school?”

  Mina frowns. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s just—” I shift aside the heavy bag Mina has given me, pulling the paper from my pocket. “In Mirjam’s things, I found this. It’s a letter to an Elizabeth from a Margaret. I’m trying to figure out who it belongs to or how it got there.”

  Mina leans over, scans the letter, and laughs.

  “What?”

  “It’s Amalia,” she says.

  “Who is?”

  “Mirjam’s best friend. Mirjam knew her from her other school, before all the Jews were forced to come to the Lyceum. She was always writing her notes in class. A few times she got in trouble and had to read them out loud.”

  “But her name was Amalia? Not Elizabeth?”

  “Mirjam said they liked to joke that they were like sisters. And royalty. To be honest—and I feel badly saying this—she was a little irritating about it.”

  “Margaret and Elizabeth. The English princesses.” The letter makes sense now. Mirjam must have written it to Amalia in class one day, but was forced into hiding before she could send it.

  “Do you know where Amalia lives? Or her last name? Do you know how I can find her?”

  Mina bends over to adjust the baby’s blankets again. “I don’t know her last name,” Mina says. “And I don’t think she lives in Amsterdam anymore. She wasn’t Jewish. Mirjam said Amalia’s parents were going to send her out of the city.”

  “Where?” I ask.

  Mina shrugs. “Somewhere near Den Haag? Not Scheveningen, where the prison is, but what’s the littler beach?”

  “Kijkduin?” I guess.

  “That’s right. Mirjam showed us a postcard once of Amalia’s aunt’s hotel—some sea-green monstrosity she owned in Kijkduin. Let me see the letter again.”

  She strains her neck to read the tiny writing as we bump along the sidewalk. “Hmm. T might be—” She breaks off, bending over to dislodge a pebble from the wheel.

  “You know who T is? A boy Mirjam might have liked?”

  “It might be Tobias?”

  Tobias. Tobias. “Was he Mirjam’s boyfriend?”

  “Tobias Rosen was everyone’s boyfriend, in our dreams. The handsomest boy in school. Last week he smiled at me, and I’m still half blind from the glow.”

  “Last week?” My ears prick up. “He’s still around, then?”

  “Or was until a few days ago, at least. He’s been out, but I heard he was just sick. His father is a dentist; that’s ab
out all I know about him personally. He was also too popular.”

  “Do you think he liked Mirjam back?”

  “Someone did send Mirjam flowers on her birthday. The florist brought them to the school yard before class, and Mirjam had to carry them into the building. She was the deepest shade of pink. The flowers didn’t have a card on them, but all of us were teasing her about them except for Tobias. He was staring straight at his desk. If he comes back to school, do you want me to ask him for you?”

  “Ask him if he’ll meet with me. That would be even better.”

  “All right. Maybe I could talk to other classmates, too. It would be nice if you could come back and visit sometime. I don’t have very many friends left.” She peers at me through dark lashes. “Do you think you could? Oh wait!”

  She stops the carriage so abruptly I nearly trip over it.

  “We’re here,” she says. I haven’t been paying attention to our route, but we’ve walked a good distance, and now we’re near Amsterdam Centraal, the main train station.

  “We’re here?” I repeat. “What are we here for? I thought we were just going for a walk.”

  “My delivery.”

  Oh. Damn. I should have paid more attention to her conversation with Judith. Mina has brought me along to one of her own exchanges. That’s why the bag she gave me is so heavy. The blankets must be covering what she’s really transporting: documents, ration cards, maybe even a pile of money to pay off an inside man. I must be carrying a modest fortune in illegal papers. I force myself to stay calm.

  “Well, not quite here.” Mina cranes her head to the sky, orienting herself. “We’re supposed to meet by the weather vane.” There are two clock towers on Amsterdam Centraal. One of them is a real clock; the other looks like a clock but is really a weather vane, and the hands swing in the wind. Mina pushes the baby carriage to the vane, scanning the crowd. “There she is.” She raises her hand to someone halfway across the plaza.

  The woman approaching is well dressed, neat blond hair and an expensive-looking suit. Mina’s contact. She reminds me a little of Mrs. de Vries. “Am I late?” she asks.