As Mr. Kreuk promised, Mirjam is dressed except for her feet and lower legs, which lie bare below the calf-length dress. I pick up one white sock and begin to ease it over her toes and heel. Her feet are so cold. Her feet are so cold, and just hours ago they were running over the stoned streets, and suddenly there are tears falling down my face. All the games I used to play, to try to convince myself that Bas didn’t die alone. But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.
The shoes I brought for her are my nicest ones. My party shoes for the parties I don’t go to anymore, with satin bows at the toe. My feet are a little bigger than hers, so the shoes don’t fit exactly, but she’ll never know the difference. When I’m finished with the dressing, I pick up one of Mirjam’s hands and fold it over the top of the other, smooth a few stray hairs away from her face, and adjust the hem of her dress, which rose high on her legs as I struggled with a sock. My tears start to flow at the oddest of things. The way her lips are chapped, like all our lips get chapped in the winter. Or her knees. Her perfect white knees, exposed and vulnerable until I brushed the dress back over them.
I tell Mr. Kreuk I’m sick and I need to go home. He knows I’m lying but doesn’t say anything other than that he hopes I feel better soon, and that it would be helpful to know how many people will attend Mirjam’s burial.
“Just me,” I say. “As soon as possible.”
He says he has a cemetery plot already and should be able to arrange for a grave to be dug by tomorrow morning. He gives me a time to come to the cemetery. I don’t know how he’s found a plot so quickly, unless it belonged to someone else, and that someone else no longer has a place to be buried.
Before I leave the office, Mr. Kreuk takes my hand and presses something into it. I look down. A large bar of Belgian chocolate, a name brand, better than any I’ve seen since the war started. He could sell it for twenty times its value on the black market, and that’s how I know he cares. Giving away black market goods is any smuggler’s greatest sacrifice.
I start for home. I should have thought to pick up my bicycle from Mrs. de Vries’s when I was there, but I didn’t. I’ve walked to every location I’ve been to this morning, miles and miles, and somehow barely noticed it. The cold seeping through my coat, and the brick punishing my feet: These feel like welcome pains, much easier to deal with than the empty ache in my heart. When I finally do get home, after forty minutes of trudging, my bicycle is waiting for me outside my building, and so is Ollie. His tired voice makes strained and banal conversation with my parents.
“I was just going to drop your bicycle off,” he explains. “But your mother happened to see me out the window. I was just telling her how you let me borrow it to go to the hospital with my mother and father. Pia is so grateful you were able to come and stay with her.”
“It was nice to see her again. And I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.”
It seems strange to me that I will get through all this and Mama and Papa will never know what happened. These lies I told them, about where I was and who was sick and which hospital Ollie’s mother was at—they all feel foolish now. I sit down next to Ollie while my mother brings lunch. His hand finds mine under the table. It’s warm and comforting, and when I squeeze it, he squeezes back.
“Mr. Kreuk has arranged everything for the burial,” I whisper to Ollie when Mama is busy in the kitchen and Papa reads in the front room. “Thank you for picking up my bicycle.”
“When is the burial? I’ll come.”
I tell him he doesn’t need to, that he never knew Mirjam. It’s a silly thing to say, when I didn’t know her, either, though I felt like I did in ways that aren’t worth explaining now. Ollie insists on coming and says he’ll meet me at the cemetery tomorrow morning.
In the end, Ollie and Willem both come, and so does Mrs. Janssen. It’s the first time I’ve seen her out of her house. She’s walking heavily on her cane, and Christoffel has come with her in a taxi, helping her, offering his arm as she picks her way slowly over the bumpy grass and rocks.
Mr. Kreuk found a plain pine casket for Mirjam and brought it here in the hearse. It’s the most basic option we sell, but still worth a week of my wages.
We stand around the empty grave while the casket is lowered into the ground. We don’t have a minister or a rabbi. It’s just the six of us and two gravediggers, who stand a few meters away under a cluster of trees, their hands resting on their shovels.
Mrs. Janssen mouths a prayer to herself, and I think Willem’s lips move as well. Ollie and I don’t say anything. We just stand while the casket is lowered into the ground, and after ten minutes of respectful silence, the gravediggers move up from behind us to begin filling the open hole with dirt.
TWENTY-NINE
Wednesday