“A friend. He didn’t know our apartment number.” I start to pull on my coat. “I told him I’d be right down.”
“No, you won’t be right down. Not with a boy I’ve never met.”
“It’s Willem—he’s Ollie’s roommate.” The bowl of beets still sits on the floor where I finished peeling them. “Do you want me to put these on the stove?”
“No.” Mama slams the lid down on the piano, creating a sickening wooden crack. “I forbid it. You were out all last night.”
“I’m not going to be out all night this time,” I explain patiently. “I just want to go talk to Willem for a while.”
Her chin quivers and her eyes have a wild look to them. “I forbid you to leave this house again. You are still my child, Hannie.”
“Oh, Mama, I’m not your child.” It’s the sort of thing that I would usually scream in anger, only now when I say it, I just feel tired and sad. “I bring the money into the house. I buy the groceries, run all the errands. Mama, I’m the one who takes care of you.”
Mama’s face crumples, and all the goodwill we amassed during the breakfast and the piano playing disappears. “The daughter I know never would have spoken to me this way.”
It’s nothing she hasn’t said to me a dozen times, but this time it stings. I’m exhausted by these comparisons to the girl I was before the war. By replaying all the ways I was better and the things I will never get back.
“That daughter doesn’t exist anymore,” I say to Mama, and my voice is resigned. “She is gone, and she’s never coming back.”
TWENTY-THREE
Are you all right?”
Willem takes my arm as soon as I get outside. I wonder if he heard the fighting coming through the open window, or if he’s just reading my face.
“I’m fine.”
“This is how you look when you’re fine?” he asks lightly.
“No, this is how I look when I don’t want to talk about it.”
If I said that to Bas, he would have put his hands out in fake kitty claws, hissing and pretending to paw at the air until I laughed. If I said that to Ollie, he would say something equally sarcastic back to me, giving as good as he got. When I say it to Willem, he just nods, looking concerned.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t want to think about the stricken look on Mama’s face when I walked out the door. “Did Ollie send you?”
Ollie was going to come and see me himself, Willem explains, but he asked Willem to let him sleep for twenty minutes first. “I’m letting him sleep for a few hours instead,” he says. “He’ll be furious when he wakes up, but he was barely coherent. If I’d let him ride to your house, we’d be fishing him out of a canal this afternoon. He works too much. So it’s just me, and with your help, you and me.”
“You and me for what?”
“Sanne and Leo are bringing food to some of the children in hiding. When Ollie wakes up, he’ll go to Judith’s spot and find out anything she might know about the soldiers who usually lead the transport. You volunteered to get the uniform. And I’m hoping you’ll help me do my job as well.”
“What’s your job?”
“My job is to figure out the escape route.”
I don’t know Willem nearly as well as Ollie, but he has a reassuring kindness that immediately feels familiar. While we walk through my neighborhood, he keeps his head bent toward mine as though we’re having an intimate conversation, but what he’s really doing is explaining the Schouwburg.
Some of it I already know. The theater is only a stopping place—Jews are brought there for a few days or weeks. After the theater, the next destination is a transit camp elsewhere in the Netherlands. Prisoners don’t stay at those for long, either, Willem explains. They’re just way stations before the prisoners are taken out of the country, to other camps with foreign-sounding names, to places where healthy young men may die of mysterious illnesses.
But before any of that happens, Jews are packed onto trains at a station on the outskirts of the city. And to get to the railway station, soldiers sometimes put the prisoners on trams or trucks. But often, they simply force the prisoners to walk.
It’s not far, about two kilometers. They don’t block off the streets or make any special preparations for the transport. Sometimes they do it at night, while the rest of the city pretends to sleep behind its blackout curtains. Sometimes they do it in broad daylight.
So that’s our chance. Sometime in the space between the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the train station, we need to get the camera from the carriage—which will presumably have a child in it. And I need to spot Mirjam, distract the guards, and run with her to safety without anyone noticing. That’s all.
“But the soldiers?”
“That’s Ollie and Judith,” Willem says. “That’s their job today. You and me—our job today is just geography. We can do this. Everything is going to be okay.”