Each word hurts my throat as I force it out. “She ran. I tried to get her to follow me and she ran. They caught her. She’s dead.” I add the last sentence because caught could mean she was merely captured. I don’t want to have to explain twice that Mirjam is never coming back to this house.
Mrs. Janssen leans heavily on her cane, and I feel like I’m watching another piece of her break. Numbly, I take her elbow and help her back inside her own house. We both sit on the ugly sofa in her living room. “What happened?” she asks. “Why did she run from you?” Her grief is quiet and dignified, and somehow this makes it worse. I think it would be easier if she had come completely undone, the way I did last night, when Ollie had to drag me home because I couldn’t even think straight. But Mrs. Janssen is grieving in a practiced way, the way of someone who is used to losing things.
Why did Mirjam run from me? If she was willing to run to escape the Nazis, why wouldn’t she run with me, the person who had just told her I was there to help her?
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I was a stranger approaching her in the middle of the night, grabbing her hand, and telling her to follow me. Maybe she just got scared. The night was so confusing. We were all scared.”
“Do you think she thought you were a plant, working for the soldiers? Or maybe that she wasn’t sure which direction you were telling her to run in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I should have come.” Her face is stricken. “She didn’t know you, but she knew me.”
“You couldn’t have helped,” I say firmly. “Neither of us could have done anything.” I don’t know if that’s true, though. Should I have mentioned Mrs. Janssen’s name to Mirjam? Would that have helped? Why didn’t she follow me? Finally I offer the only comforting thing I have, as small as it is.
“We have her body. My friends were able to rescue her body. It’s at Mr. Kreuk’s.”
“Who is with her?”
“Nobody, right now. Mr. Kreuk usually comes in at eight thirty. When he gets in, I’ll ask him to take care of her. I’ll ask him to find a burial plot.”
“I’ll pay,” she says immediately.
“I will pay,” I say. I’ll pay with the money Mrs. Janssen gave me to find her. It’s the only thing I can do. We should be able to afford a headstone with that money. A simple one, but nice.
“You should go to the funeral home,” Mrs. Janssen says.
“I can stay. I can keep you company.”
“You should go, Hanneke,” she says. “I don’t want her to be alone.”
I go to Mrs. de Vries’s first, though. They already know what happened last night.
“Hanneke, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. de Vries says when she opens the door, sounding as sympathetic as I imagine she can. She must have seen me come in the building from outside, because none of the onderduikers are hiding. The Cohens sit on the sofa, holding hands. Mina runs from behind Mrs. de Vries and throws her arms around me.
“We saw the transport leave the Schouwburg last night.” Her face is buried in my neck. “Then we didn’t see anything. We kept waiting and waiting for you to get here, but we only knew for sure something was wrong hours later, when Willem came to us, looking for you.”
The children are awake, still in their pajamas, standing dumbfounded behind their mother, watching Mina and me and obviously trying to figure out what’s happening. Mrs. de Vries notices them and shoos them back toward their playroom, and the Cohens move to help her.
Mina and I stand, hugging each other in the entryway for a long time. In the back of the apartment, the twins laugh. I close my eyes and try to drown out the sound, which seems so inappropriate now. I want to crawl into bed for days. I want to give up.
Even Mina is crying. Brave, optimistic Mina who wanted to resist, even while she had to hide. And what good did it do? What good can any of us do against the monstrous machine that shoots young girls in the back as they run in fear?
I feel a soft tap on my shoulder. It’s Mrs. Cohen holding what looks like a folded white tablecloth. She apologizes for disturbing me, and holds out the material for me to take. “For your friend,” she explains. “I didn’t know if you knew—people of our faith are often buried in traditional burial clothes. This is only a tablecloth; in these times we cannot keep all our traditions. But I thought that perhaps you would like something to wrap your friend in before she is buried. Only if you want it. I don’t mean to presume.”
I dumbly take the tablecloth from her, the soft linen rippling through my fingers.
“We would also have a watcher stand with the body, so the deceased would not have to be alone. We can’t be there for the burial, of course,” Mrs. Cohen says. “But if you tell us what time it is scheduled for, my husband will make sure to begin the prayer of mourning at that moment.”
“Thank you.” I almost start crying again at this gesture. I barely know the Cohens; I’m not even sure how much they were told about what I’ve been doing or why. “Thank you,” I repeat, because I don’t know what else to say.
TWENTY-EIGHT