“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—”