When the burial is over, Mr. Kreuk pulls away in the hearse after telling me to take a few days off, to come back to work when I feel better. Mrs. Janssen leaves next, leaning on Christoffel for support as she folds herself back into the taxi. She asks me to come and visit her soon, and I promise I will, though right now doing so is difficult to imagine.
Ollie and Willem are both looking at me as we stand together in front of the cemetery’s gates. “Should we ride you home?” Willem suggests. “Neither of us has class this afternoon.”
“I don’t really want to go home at all.” My parents don’t know today is anything other than a regular day. The idea of making up an excuse for why I’m home early and sitting with them in hidden mourning is unbearable. I should go back to work, but I don’t want to do that, either. I’ve had enough death for today. “Could we do something else?”
“What did you have in mind?” Ollie asks.
“Anything. Anything besides go home or stay here. Something normal.”
He looks blankly at Willem. None of us knows what a normal afternoon even looks like anymore, one in which we’re not ferrying children from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, or trying to find places for onderduikers, or trading on the black market. If there were no war, and if we were normal young adults, what would we be doing today?
“How about…” Willem bites his lip. “How about we go for a bicycle ride?”
“A bicycle ride?” Ollie’s mouth twitches. It’s one of the coldest days of winter. We all ride our bicycles all the time anyway, just to get around, but it’s hardly the weather for a pleasure ride. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes to me. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”
The suggestion appeals to me, though, for the same reason that walking in the cold appealed earlier. There’s a level of drudgery and unpleasantness involved. It won’t be a purely joyful ride. It will be numbing, which seems pleasing.
“Yes.” Willem is gathering steam now. “We’ll go to Ransdorp. We’ll ride through the countryside. We’ll have a picnic.”
Now he’s deliberately being silly. Ransdorp is a village on the other side of the river, with farmhouses and a few little shops lining wide gravel streets. The idea of going to a quaint tourist destination now is especially absurd.
But we do it anyway, taking the ferry across the river, to the same point where I met Christoffel a few days ago and asked him to deliver a letter. We stop and find bread on the way, Willem and Ollie sticking loaves into their deep coat pockets while I tuck the bottom of my dress up enough that it won’t get caught in my bicycle spokes.
It’s cold, as cold as I expected it to be, but the sun makes it bearable, and when we get off the ferry, the pedaling keeps us warm. We must look strange: Ollie and Willem in dark suits and me in the only black dress that I own, cycling in a single line along the road next to a creek. I get a stitch in my side from the exertion. It feels good, so I pedal faster until I overtake the boys, first by a little and then by a lot.
“What are you pedaling away from?” Willem calls after me. His tone is light, but it doesn’t feel like a joking question. I’m pedaling away from these past few days. From the sight of Mirjam on the bridge, and the sound of a gunshot in the still night, and the look on Mrs. Janssen’s face, brittle and resigned, in her doorway. Gravel sprays off the back of my tires.
“Slow down!” Ollie calls behind me. He says something else I can’t hear.
“What?”
“Slow down, there’s—”
My bicycle slides over a patch of black ice, the wheels spinning out of control. I try the brakes, but there’s no traction. I can’t stop myself, and the bicycle goes careening into the ditch as I fly toward the frozen ground. My hands scrape along the dirt when I put them down to break my fall. They hurt, but my left knee is worse—I feel it crash against the handlebars when I fly over them, and then land on something sharp and painful.
“Hanneke!” Ollie calls.
The wind has been knocked out of me; I retch on the ground, trying to suck in enough air to answer. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” I manage, holding up a dirty palm to let him know I can take care of myself. Slowly I ease myself onto all fours, but standing seems like too much, and finally I let Ollie help me sit back down on a patch of frozen grass. Tentatively, I pull up my skirt. My left knee is a bloody mess: one large rock jutting out of the center, with small gravel particles surrounding it.
Willem crouches to look at the wound. “We need to clean that out,” he says. “I can’t tell how bad it is.” He runs to the creek, soaking his handkerchief and squeezing it out on top of my knee, rinsing away rivulets of dirt. The three of us examine the damage. The big rock isn’t in as deeply as I feared, but when Willem pulls it out, a fresh stream of blood rolls down my shin.
“Did that hurt?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, and then, inappropriately, I giggle, because it seems so pedestrian after everything that’s happened to have a scraped knee from a bicycle accident, and to have that be what hurts.
He gives me a funny look. “Are you all right?”