So right now, when I’m looking at these schoolgirl notes, it’s like the light in my messy room has been flicked on, just for a moment. I’m not distracted by Bas. I can see Elsbeth again.
This note is such an optimistic one, exactly like the ones we would have written long before the war, as we puzzled through who might love us and who didn’t, who ignored us and who didn’t.
Who are Elizabeth and Margaret? Did another student’s papers somehow get mixed in with Mirjam’s? The girls sound like good friends, placed in different homerooms, maybe in different grades like me and Elsbeth. I add it to the mental list of things I need to ask Mrs. Janssen and Judith’s cousin. What more have I learned about Mirjam since I first drew the imaginary picture of her almost forty-eight hours ago at Mrs. Janssen’s? She was popular with boys. She was a good student, a little hard on herself, competitive enough with her classmates to bother keeping track of their grades. She was spoiled, maybe? After all, her parents gave her a new blue coat when her old one ripped, and lots of families now would insist the old coat just be repaired, even if they were able to find such a nice new one. She is… dead? She’s alive?
She left a house that could not be left, where the back exit was sealed and the front door was monitored.
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.