The last time I saw Bas:
He was seventeen, I was sixteen.
It was getting late. My parents had come to his going-away party, too, but they had already left. Mama said I could stay an extra hour, as long as Elsbeth and I walked home together. Bas and I kissed again and again in a dark corner of his dining room until my hour was up. I’ll never forget his hand, pressed against the window as he watched me—
That’s not what really happened.
I’m not ready to think about the last time I saw Bas.
SEVEN
Wednesday
I just don’t understand.” Mrs. de Vries bows her head, as if she can’t even look at me because she’s so disappointed. “I asked for Amateurs.”
I stare at the green-and-white cigarette pack in my hand, trying to arrange my face into an appropriate expression of understanding, when what I really want to do is slap her. I have found her two packs of cigarettes. In 1943, in this absurd country of ours, I have managed to find her two packs of cigarettes—not just cigarette paper and tobacco to roll, which are hard enough to get ahold of, but actual cigarettes—and she’s upset because these don’t have the right label on them?
“I couldn’t get that brand, Mrs. de Vries. I’m sorry. I tried.”
“Honestly, you would think I’d asked for the moon. I don’t understand what makes it so difficult. I wrote down for you exactly what I was looking for.”
She did ask for the moon, very nearly. I had to try four different contacts; eventually I got these cigarettes from a woman who gets them from a German soldier. She says he’s her boyfriend and he gives them to her; I think she might steal them. I also think he’s not her boyfriend but someone paying her for what she does in the bedroom, but I don’t ask questions. And I only go to her when I don’t have any other options.
Now my temples are pounding. I don’t know whether to yell or laugh at Mrs. de Vries. Her worries are so pedestrian, so soothing in an absurd way, like a holiday from all the things that real people have to care about. One of the twins tugs desperately on Mrs. de Vries’s skirt while the other, the one who always looks naughty, like he has something to hide, tries to poke his head into my bag to see what else I may have brought.
“Stop that,” Mrs. de Vries chastises the skirt-puller. “We’ll have tea as soon as Hanneke leaves.”
“Mrs. de Vries.” I try a new approach to keep her on track. “If you don’t want these, I won’t have a problem finding someone else who does.” The minute hand on her grandfather clock ticks another notch toward the top of the hour. I have somewhere to be.
“No!” She grabs the cigarettes, clutching them to her chest, only now realizing I don’t have to give them to her, that she could be left with no cigarettes at all. “I’ll take them. I just thought… if there were any others.”
What does she think, that I’ll slap my hand to my forehead and say, “But of course! I forgot that I actually did have the brand you wanted. I’ve just been hiding them from you”?
“Mama, it’s crowded in here,” the naughty twin says, staring at me and poking his tongue between his lips. “I’m tired of it being so crowded.”
“I’m leaving soon,” I assure him. Horrid child.
The Municipal University of Amsterdam is where I might have gone, if the war hadn’t started. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously. It just would have been a way to pass time until Bas’s mother thought he was old enough to inherit his grandmother’s wedding ring. Bas would have gone here, too. What would he have studied? He never talked about his career dreams; he wasn’t the type to look more than a few months in advance, and I can’t picture an adult Bas. It both bothers and reassures me that, in my mind, he’ll always be seventeen.
The university doesn’t have a central location; its buildings are scattered through the city. But everyone knows the Agnietenkapel. It’s one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam, a convent from the fifteenth century, and the address Ollie gave me is on the same street.