by Monica Hesse
“No, no,” Mina tells her. “You’re right on time.”
“I didn’t bring anything. Was I supposed to bring something? I think someone told me—”
“You didn’t need to bring anything. I was happy to help you out. Are you ready?”
The woman nods and then holds out her arms. I scan the surrounding crowd to make sure no one is watching, then unsling the bag and begin to pass it to Mina to remove whatever she needs for the lady. Mina ignores my outstretched arm, bending over the baby carriage and scooping up Regina in one practiced, fluid motion.
“Her name is Regina,” Mina says. And instead of taking the bag from me, Mina kisses Regina on her forehead, whispers something I can’t hear, and hands the blond woman the baby.
“Oh!” The woman pulls back the blanket, touching the tip of Regina’s nose. “Such a pretty name. Do I keep it? My husband always said if we had a daughter, he wanted to name her after his mother.”
Mina swallows. “You have a daughter now,” she says finally. “So you’ll take care of her the best way you see fit. Do you have a car waiting?”
“Around the corner.”
“So you’re all set.”
The woman looks like she wants to ask more questions, but instead she walks back into the milling crowd. Mina watches until she disappears.
ELEVEN
That was the delivery?” I whisper. “That was the delivery you had to make?” Mina nods, and starts to walk away, back in the direction we’ve come. “Wait. That was—Mina, what just happened?”
She stops, looking uncertain as she takes the bag from my shoulder and sets it in the carriage. “We never do it unless we have permission from the parents. Some of them refuse to be separated. We only hide the ones whose families believe they’ll be safer away. I thought you knew.”
That was the dialogue I overheard earlier, between Judith and Mina. It wasn’t a code, and had nothing to do with people receiving false papers containing names different from the ones they were born with. Mina was warning Judith that parents who gave up their children might not be able to find them again, after the war.
“How many?” Mina is only fifteen, and her head barely reaches my shoulder. The idea that she does this regularly, in broad daylight… “How many children have you placed?”
“Just me? More than a hundred. Judith works on the inside of the Schouwburg, tracking down families and getting permission. It’s easier to hide a baby than an adult, since people don’t need papers until they’re fourteen. We have an inside person in the theater who alters the records to make it look like the children never arrived at the crèche.”
Baby Regina wasn’t a foil, hiding the illicit delivery. Baby Regina was the illicit delivery.
Mina has done this more than a hundred times. A hundred shootable offenses, and then she gets up the next day and does it again, and still she talks about school and boyfriends and what she wants to do after the war. One time, out of that hundred, I helped her.
Mina gives me a sidelong glance. “I thought you knew,” she says again. “Judith didn’t tell you?”
“Judith didn’t tell me.”
“Are you mad?”
I don’t know what I am. This delivery is just one in the long line of involvements I didn’t mean to have. But that theater was so dark, and Regina was so young, and we can do so little, all of us. What am I supposed to say? That I wish we had left Regina in the nursery to be deported? What am I supposed to believe—that Mirjam alone is worth taking risks to save, just because she was the one I was asked to find? That now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen in the deportation center, I’ll be able to forget it?
“I don’t know what I feel,” I begin. “I feel—”
“Let me see the baby!”
The voice belongs to a man, speaking in giddy Dutch with a heavy German accent.
“Good afternoon, young ladies! It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful city!”
I know this soldier. Not him in particular, but this type. This is the type of soldier who tries to learn Dutch and gives children pieces of candy. Who is kind, which is the most dangerous trait of all. The kind ones recognize, somewhere deep inside their starched uniforms, that there is something perverse about what they’re doing. First they try befriending us. Then the guilt creeps up on them, and they work twice as hard to convince themselves that we’re scum.
“Keep walking,” I mutter to Mina. He doesn’t know for sure that we’ve seen him; he might not even be talking to us.
“Ladies!” he calls out again. “Let me see the baby! I just learned that my wife had our daughter! Let me see what I’m getting myself into!”
He walks excitedly toward us. He can’t be allowed to see that there’s no baby in the carriage. He’ll ask to see our papers. He’ll take us both away. Mina will lead back to baby Regina. The whole crèche will be investigated. I usually have to worry only about myself, but when you work in a system, you are responsible for everyone’s safety.
Over to my left, Mina smoothly adjusts her scarf. It looks like she’s simply tightening it against the chill, but I can see she’s really shifting it so it covers the Star of David on her coat. I mentally piece together a story: The baby is sick, and the soldier mustn’t get too close or he’ll catch the illness. That’s what I’ll say. Something repugnant, something with vomit.
Beside me, Mina is, improbably, smiling. “Congratulations!” she calls in German as he approaches. She has to realize how disastrous it would be, to call attention to workers from the crèche pushing around empty baby carriages. But when the soldier approaches, she reaches in the carriage and begins to open the bag. What does she have in there? A gun? False papers? Why haven’t I run yet?
Instead, the bag is full of—I look twice to make sure I’m not imagining things—wood. Stubby tree branches, splintery scrap boards, even pieces of wadded-up paper that look like garbage.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a baby for you to hold,” Mina apologizes. “Only kindling. We didn’t have enough in rations; we’ve just come from scavenging. But congratulations.”
“Too bad.” He looks genuinely disappointed.
We both watch the soldier walk away, hearing the congratulations of other passersby who overheard the exchange. I don’t speak until I’m sure he’s out of earshot.
“I carried that bag the entire time,” I say to Mina.
“You did.”
“Do you know how heavy it was?”
“I’ve carried it myself, a dozen times. I’ve been carrying around the same kindling for months. But it works. If I’m ever stopped, I just look like any other Dutch citizen, collecting firewood. It’s not illegal to scavenge for wood scraps.”
“Why?”
“Why do we do it? So I have an excuse to be pushing around an empty buggy with no baby in it.”
“But then why bring the carriage at all?” I ask. “Why not just carry the baby to the station?”
“Because.”
“Because?”
Mina’s eyes flit down to the carriage and then immediately back up again, like she didn’t want me to notice the movement. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get back,” she says.
“Mina, is something else in that carriage?” I ask.
“No. Why would you think that?”
I don’t believe her. I keep thinking of how many times she stopped to adjust Regina’s blanket on the walk here. How much could the blanket have moved? Is that really what she was doing?
Before she can stop me, I lean into the carriage, feeling under the firewood bag with my hands. At the front, nestled along one of the sides, I feel something hard and rectangular beneath a patch of fabric. The patch seems to be some kind of pocket, but I can’t immediately figure out how to open it. I start to pull.
“Don’t!” Mina begs me. Her cheerfulness has finally disappeared.
“What is it?”
“Please don’t. I’ll tell you everything, but if you take it out here, you could get us killed.
”
I stop. Get us killed? This, coming from a girl who just smuggled a Jewish baby through the occupied streets of Amsterdam? “What is ‘everything’? Tell me now. What’s inside the carriage? Weapons? Explosives?”
She looks miserable. “A camera.”
“A camera?”
Mina lowers her voice. “I read about some photographers in an underground paper. They take pictures of the occupation. They document it, so when the war is over, the Germans can’t lie about what they did here.”
“It’s a group? And you’re part of it?”
Mina blushes. “No, they’re all professionals. But a lot of the photographers are women. They can hide cameras in their handbags or grocery bags and take pictures without anyone realizing what they’re doing. That’s what gave me the idea.”
“Instead of a handbag, you used a baby carriage,” I say. “The lens?”
“I cut a tiny hole for the lens in the front. You can’t see it unless you’re really looking. Now every time I take a baby for a walk, I can take secret photos. I have the whole war on my camera, and on rolls of film.”
“What kinds of secret pictures?”
“Razzias. Soldiers. People being herded into the theater. People being taken from their homes while their neighbors do nothing to help them.
“But I have good things, too,” she continues. “Photographs of the resistance, so people will know that some of us fought back. Photographs of crawl spaces where onderduikers are hiding. And every child from the theater—I take photographs of them, to help them reunite with their families after the war.”
“How many photographs do you have?” This is a whole section of the resistance that I’d never even heard of. The Nazis have forbidden us from photographing them, and even if most of us wanted to, film is hard to come by. It’s one of the harder things for me to track down on the black market.
“Hundreds,” Mina says. “Camera film is all I’ve wanted for every birthday since I was eight. I had a lot saved up.”
“What does Judith think of what you’re doing?”
Mina’s face darkens. “She doesn’t know. And don’t tell her, please. She and Ollie and everyone, they wouldn’t understand. Because it’s taking risks without actively saving as many lives as possible. But I still think it’s important. Even if it doesn’t make sense. It just feels like it’s the way I’m supposed to be helping.”
I don’t respond. I understand something being important to you even when it doesn’t fully make sense, even when others would think you were crazy. That’s been every moment for me since I agreed to help Mrs. Janssen. Even though I understand what she’s feeling, is a collection of photographs the same as what I’m doing? Those photographs would threaten everyone’s safety. “I’ll think about it,” I say finally. “I won’t tell her yet.”
I wouldn’t even know what to say. I watched a whole afternoon unfold under my nose, and I misread everything that was happening, from start to finish. All the clues were in front of me, but I still didn’t see them.
Judith is waiting for us back at the crèche.
“Did everything go all right?”
“It was fine,” Mina assures her. “The host family are good people.”
“Good enough, at least.” Judith sighs. She rolls her head and rubs the back of her neck with one hand. She must be exhausted, working at the school from the early morning and then coming here when she’s finished. She looks at me.
“I have news for you.” She waits until Mina has gone back in the nursery and checks to make sure the other attendants are not within hearing distance. “I talked to my contact. He went through the records for the past three days. According to the files, nobody named Mirjam Roodveldt has passed through the theater.”
“Is your contact sure?”
She grimaces. “Nazis insist on excellent records. Everybody who comes through has papers.”
“Thank you. Thank you for checking.”
“You don’t have to thank me. And, Hanneke, I said she hadn’t come through yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”
TWELVE
When I get home, Ollie is waiting on the doorstep of my building. We haven’t spoken since last night, the night with the drunk soldiers. This is what I’m going to call it in my mind. “The night with the drunk soldiers” is a much easier way to remember it than as “the night with the desperate kiss.”
After the kiss, the soldier laughed, clapping both of us on the back in congratulations before moving along with his friend. Ollie and I remained trembling in place, watching their backs until they turned out of the alley. Then both of us, following the same, silent cue, started walking again, more cautiously this time, in case something else came around the corner.
We didn’t discuss any of it. It’s just something that happened, like things happen now, like things will probably happen again. When we reached the front stoop, the black curtains above us fluttered, meaning my parents were watching out our window, waiting to see if I got home.
Now Ollie rises from my steps to greet me. “I brought back your mother’s bicycle,” he says. She’d lent it to him last night so he could make it back to his apartment as quickly as possible; he swore he knew a route that soldiers didn’t often patrol. “And I saw Judith while you were out with Mina. I didn’t know they were going to take you along. I wish they hadn’t. It’s too soon, to involve you in a drop-off without your consent.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I forgot. You’re the only one who’s allowed to involve me in resistance activities without my consent?”
Pink spreads from his cheeks to his ears. “I’ve been thinking about that. How maybe I should have warned you. I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry. That was one thing Bas was never very good at. It wasn’t even that he hated to apologize. It was more that he hated to stop fighting. There was nothing he loved more than a debate, dragging me into silly arguments, pushing me to passionately defend positions I didn’t really care about.
“What did you think about all of it?” he asks.
“I’m still thinking about all of it.” For a minute I consider telling him more, but I don’t think I have the words yet, for everything going through my brain.
“I see,” Ollie says.
“Judith and Mina are very brave.”
“You could be brave, too. Just think about it. Come to our next meeting.”
I look away. “Did you only come by to return the bicycle, or did you want to come inside?”
He folds his arms in front of his chest and shifts his feet. I wonder if he feels as embarrassed about what happened last night as I do. “All right,” he agrees, surprising me. “I won’t stay long, though. It’s my turn to make dinner; I can’t leave Willem hungry.”
Upstairs he leaves his coat on until I gesture for him to take it off and hang it in the coat closet. He’s wearing his architect’s uniform of rolled-up shirtsleeves, smudged around the cuffs. My father has left a note on the table telling me that some neighbors took pity on him with Mama out of town, and invited him for dinner. I wish I’d known the house was empty before I asked Ollie up.
“Tea?” I quickly add, “It’s not real.”
“No, thank you.”
I was already heading to the kitchen when he declined, and now I pause, unsure, in the middle of the room. If he’s refusing tea, then what are we supposed to make forced conversation over?
Ollie paces around the apartment, looking at my father’s books, craning closer to see the titles but not removing any of them from the shelves. “I used to have this one.” He points to a collection of essays, mine, out of place among Papa’s foreign dictionaries. “I don’t know where my copy went.”
“I think that probably is your copy. Bas gave it to me.”
“Probably to impress you. I don’t think he read it himself.”
“I heard the German army isn’t doing well in Stalingrad,” I say, quietly so the neighbors won’t hear, my contribution to this awkward dialogue. “O
n the BBC.”
“You speak English?”
“Some. Papa’s teaching me.”
And then we’ve run out of conversation again, and it’s so strange the way an ill-timed kiss can make someone feel like a stranger. “Ollie. About last night.” He doesn’t say anything, and so I keep talking, as if I think he doesn’t remember when we kissed for the amusement of drunken soldiers in the street. “With the soldiers. What we did. When we…”
“When we were lucky,” he fills in quickly. “Lucky to think so quickly on our feet.”
“You did a good job with the soldiers. You hide from them better than I do.”
He shrugs. “It’s a skill with practical applications.”
“Do you get tired of the acting and pretending?” I ask.
“Not if it keeps me alive.”
I’m relieved by the matter-of-fact way he dismisses the incident, but also annoyed. It makes me feel like I’m a girl who made too much of a kiss that meant nothing.
“Did Mina help you with Mirjam?” Ollie asks, changing the subject like a gentleman.
“I need to find a boy named Tobias. His father is a dentist. I’m going to start visiting practices tomorrow.” Ollie nods but doesn’t say anything. “I feel like I’m racing against an alarm clock, but I don’t even know when it’s set for,” I confess. “For everything I figure out, there’s another problem to solve. I feel like I’m running out of time.”
“We all are,” Ollie says. “For us, for our little group, for the whole resistance—this war is a race against how many people we can save, and whether we can do it faster than the Nazis can take them.”
“If Mirjam ends up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, she’ll never get out. I just know it. It smells like—” I start to say uitwerpselen, but realize that excrement is not a strong-enough word.
“Like what?”
“Never mind.”
Ollie pauses in front of a family photograph tucked on one of the shelves: the three of us on vacation in the country, Mama and I on either side of Papa, each with a hand on his shoulder. You can’t see from the photograph how red my nose got that day from the sun, but I remember it. It burned, and the skin peeled for days afterward. “That dress looks so familiar,” he says, pointing to the photograph. “Why would I remember that dress?”