She stops searching through her pocketbook and folds it closed, embarrassed. Once Christoffel leaves, she sinks back to her chair. She looks tired and old. “Will you help me?” she asks.
I drain the rest of my cold coffee. What outcome does she think I can deliver? I wouldn’t know where to start. Even if Mirjam managed to escape, how far could a fifteen-year-old girl with a yellow Jodenster on her clothing get? I don’t need to take Mrs. Janssen’s money to know what will happen to a girl like Mirjam, if it hasn’t happened already: She’ll be captured, and she’ll be relocated to a labor camp in Germany or Poland, the type from which nobody has yet to return. But how did she get out in the first place?
There has to be a rational explanation, I tell myself again. People don’t disappear into thin air.
But that’s a lie, actually. People disappear into thin air every day during this occupation. Hundreds of people, taken from their homes.
How can she expect me to find just one?
THREE
Mama’s lips are a thin, tight line when I get home. “You’re late.” She accosts me at the door; she must have been watching through the window.
“It’s twelve fifteen.”
“It’s twelve nineteen.”
“Four minutes, Mama?”
Our apartment smells like frying parsnips and sausages, which I brought home yesterday. It’s a small space: just a front room, a kitchen, a toilet, and two tiny bedrooms, all on the second floor of a five-story building. Cozy.
Papa reads a book in his armchair, using the page holder he made to keep the book flat as he turns the pages with his good left arm. His shriveled right arm is tucked into his lap.
“Hannie.” He calls me by my pet name as I lean over to kiss him.
The injury happened before I was born, during the Great War. He lived on the Flanders side of the Dodendraad electric fence that had been built to separate occupied Belgium from Holland. My mother lived on the Dutch side. He wanted to vault over to impress her. He’d done it once before. I didn’t believe that part of the story when he first told it, but then he showed me a book: People had managed to cross the Wire of Death in all kinds of ingeniously idiotic ways, using tall ladders or padding their clothes with porcelain to deflect the shock. This time when he tried to cross, his shoe grazed the wire and he plummeted to the ground, and that was how my father immigrated to Holland.
The right half of his body, all the way down his leg and partway up his face, has been paralyzed ever since, so he has a twisted and slow way of speaking. It embarrassed me when I was a child, but now I barely notice.
Papa gently pulls me closer to whisper in my ear. “Your mother is anxious because they came looking for Mr. Bierman. Be nice to her.”
Mr. Bierman runs the greengrocer across the street. Jews haven’t been able to own businesses for months now, but his wife is a Christian and he transferred the papers to her name. They have no children, just a flirtatious white cat named Snow.
“Who came?” I ask. “The NSB filth?”
Papa puts one finger to his lips and then points to the ceiling. “Shhhh.” Our neighbor upstairs is a member of the NSB. His wife used to braid my hair and make me spice cookies on Sinterklaas Day. Behind me, Mama rattles the lunch tray, setting food down on our small table, so I kiss Papa’s other cheek and take my place.
“Why were you late, Hannie?” Mama asks.
“To teach you not to panic when it’s only four minutes after the time I usually get home.”
“But you’re never late.”
I’m never asked to find missing girls, either, I think. Without meaning to, I’m picturing Mrs. Janssen again, worrying over an empty pantry.
Mama ladles me a spoonful of parsnips. We eat better than a lot of people. If Papa and Mama left the house more, they would probably start to question what exactly it is that I do to bring home so much food.
“It was nothing.” The peppery sausage warms my mouth. “A German policeman stopped me.” That’s true, of course. I just don’t mention that it happened early this morning, before I learned about Mirjam.
“I hope you didn’t provoke him,” Mama says sharply. I’m not the only one in the family who has been changed by the war. She used to teach music lessons from our apartment, and Chopin would stream out the windows. Nobody has the money for music anymore, or the translating work Papa used to do.
“He spoke Dutch,” I say, as a way of responding without answering. “He sounded fluent.”
Papa snorts. “We fattened him up after the last war so he could come back now and starve us during this one.” Germany was so poor after the Great War that lots of families sent their children to Holland, to grow strong on Dutch cheeses and milk. They would have died without us. Now some of the boys have grown up and returned here again.
“When do you need to go back to work?” my mother asks me.