Another person who saw her. Another person who knew she existed. Christoffel’s face has a touch of wonder to it, as he remembers that moment. How strange it must have been for him, to be standing in the kitchen and have a girl emerge from the pantry. “She recognized my voice,” Christoffel continues. “She said she’d just been waiting for an opportunity when Mrs. Janssen wasn’t around.”
She recognized. It’s like my brain can’t take in everything Christoffel is saying at once, so it latches on to loose phrases, here or there. Recognize is an interesting word. It would have made more sense for Christoffel to say “heard.” We recognize the things that are already familiar to us.
“You knew her,” I say, and as I’m formulating the words, I decide who “her” really was. “You knew Amalia.”
“How did you know her name?”
“How did you?”
“We went to school together. The three of us, we grew up together. Me, Amalia, and—” Christoffel leaves a space where the name should go, one that I can’t resist filling.
“And Mirjam.”
“And Mirjam,” he whispers. Then Christoffel does something I didn’t expect at all and hadn’t been prepared for. He sinks to the floor, sliding down along the wall. He balls his fists in front of his eyes, and he begins to cry. Not just silent tears: fat, noisy tears like a little boy.
I drop to my knees next to him. This is pain I recognize. “Christoffel, did you—did you love Mirjam?”
His throat is hoarse; he’s barely whispering. “She didn’t seem to notice me that way; she treated me like a brother. I assumed she didn’t like me. Last year she told me it wasn’t that she didn’t like me, it was that Amalia did. She said Amalia liked me first, and Mirjam didn’t want to betray her. I knew deep down, all along, I guess. Amalia started getting nervous around me. She got this laugh—a giggle, sort of. But I never thought of her as more than a friend.”
“You’re T. Not Tobias. You.” Christoffel looks up at me, confused. “I found a letter,” I explain. “It mentioned a boy whose name she abbreviated as T. It was a boy she liked.”
Those stupid English princesses. The letter wasn’t from Mirjam to Amalia, something she never got a chance to send. The letter was from Amalia to Mirjam, something Mirjam was rereading in class.
“My nickname,” Christoffel says. “It’s dumb. I don’t even remember when I got it. I guess that I must have been T.”
Earlier, I thought Christoffel’s friends at the ferry were all calling him Mr. Great. That’s what Tof means: “Great.” “Cool.” But they weren’t calling him that—they were calling him Tof, his nickname, from the middle of Christoffel.
“How many times did you see Amalia in the pantry?”
“Just twice. The second time I came, she waited until Mrs. Janssen was gone again, and then she said there had been a notice in the newspaper and that she needed my help to escape.”
Het Parool. The three-line notice in the classifieds: Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.
The first day I came here, Mrs. Janssen told me she brought Mirjam a newspaper, and then told her to stay quiet because the delivery boy was coming. Mrs. Janssen never mentioned to me that she had left Christoffel alone in the kitchen. She wouldn’t have thought she needed to. Why would Mirjam announce her presence to the boy who came to deliver groceries?
“You helped her escape?”
“I did.”
“But I don’t understand. She must have told you that Mrs. Janssen thought she was Mirjam. Why would she leave without telling Mrs. Janssen that she was going? And how was Amalia carrying Mirjam’s papers on the night of the raid?”
He kneads the palm of his hand into his eye, clumsily wiping away tears. I don’t have a handkerchief, and I don’t know if I would offer him one if I did. Am I comforting him? Interrogating him? This boy in front of me has the answer to every question I’ve been chasing for a week. He helped launch a series of events that caused pain and anguish, and I still don’t understand why.
“She—she told me that the night the Roodveldts’ hiding space was ransacked, she ran into Mirjam on the street,” he says. “Mirjam was running for her life and she thought she would be caught soon. Amalia made her switch coats and identification papers. Amalia said that if Mirjam had non-Jewish papers, she would be able to escape, and Amalia could just go to the authorities later and be issued new ones. But the soldiers were too close. She didn’t have time to run home, and she worried that with Mirjam’s clothes and papers, she would be shot on sight. So she came to Mrs. Janssen’s. Mirjam told her the address.”
“But when she got here, why didn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen who she really was? Why didn’t she ask Mrs. Janssen to help her get new papers?”
He shrugs morosely. “I don’t know. She just said she didn’t want Mrs. Janssen to know.”
Because she wanted to make sure Mirjam was safe before she told anyone the truth? Because she didn’t want anyone to know the real Mirjam Roodveldt was still out there, escaped, living under a different name? Because there are some parts of this story that are never going to make sense, no matter how many questions I ask?