“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.”