“Where did she go?” I ask. “After you got her out of the house?”
“She stayed with me for a while. Papa travels so often he didn’t suspect someone was in the basement.”
In his basement. Until just a few days ago, the girl I was looking for was living at the home of a boy I’d seen multiple times.
“What made her leave?” I ask. I can understand why Amalia never went to the authorities and said her own papers were lost or stolen: Since she was under eighteen, the authorities might have demanded her parents’ signatures, and they were already out of the city. I can understand why she might have wanted to stay with Christoffel instead of Mrs. Janssen—an old friend rather than a stranger who didn’t even know who she really was. What I can’t understand is why, after she’d gone through all that trouble, she would then leave his house. “Why did she keep running from the places she was safest, Christoffel? I just need some of these pieces to make sense.” He’s still crying, tears flowing faster as I demand answers. “Why did Amalia leave your house that night?”
“I told her to,” he finally yelps. “She told me a secret and I made her leave. I never meant for her to die. I swear I never meant it. I was so mad at her. I told her the Nazis would treat her better than I would if I ever saw her again. I chased her to the street. She was running away from me; I saw her run face-on into a soldier. When she was caught in the roundup, she was running away from me.” His voice is high and keening.
“What was the secret? What was it that made you refuse to let her stay in your house?”
“I can’t. I can’t.” He’s become hysterical; if I had a paper bag, I would make him breathe into it. Instead, I pat the back of his sweater, damp with sweat and heaving as he gulps in air. He’s just a few years younger than me, but he’s a small boy right now. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he gasps out in between deep breaths. “Please don’t make me.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay,” I repeat, because pushing him right now is only going to send him further over the edge.
Just one thing more. Not even a thing that matters, in the large scheme of things, but something I have to have settled, for my own peace.
“You said Amalia asked you to help her escape on the day she saw the notice in the newspaper. But you couldn’t have helped her right then. Mrs. Janssen saw her later in the evening. Did you find a way to sneak back in the house while Mrs. Janssen was across the street at her neighbor’s? Were you the one who figured out how to close the back door from the outside?”
“No. She hid in the house while Mrs. Janssen was at the neighbor’s. I came back the next day.”
His timeline must be off. The next day, I was here. The next day, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to Mrs. Janssen tell me Mirjam had already disappeared. “You’re misremembering. I was here that day. I saw you come in. You were picking up some furniture to sell for Mrs. Janssen.”
“I did do that. I did pick up the furniture.”
Christoffel is silent. I am silent.
He’s allowing me this, this one kindness, the ability to put the final pieces together myself. If I don’t want to, I can tell Mrs. Janssen that it was Amalia in the pantry and now she’s dead, and it will be true, and how she escaped won’t matter. Or I can put the pieces together and everything will hurt more.
I have to put them together. Because without even meaning to, I’m remembering the way Mina cheerfully handed me a baby’s bag filled with firewood and I carried it on my shoulder for more than a kilometer without realizing that I was transporting an important part of their ruse. I’m remembering the fact that the carriage was really a camera. I’m remembering the fact that Ollie didn’t love me or Judith; he loved Willem. I’m remembering the fact that nothing in this war is what it seems, and I have spent too much of it not seeing what’s in front of my own face.
Amalia was folded up in the opklapbed. Christoffel rolled it out of the house on his pushcart. While I was trying to figure out whether I should help Mrs. Janssen find her missing onderduiker, she wasn’t missing at all. She was just a few feet away.
“She was waiting in the opklapbed for you to sneak her away. That was the plan all along.”
I am weary. He is weary. We both want this to be over, finally, completely. “She waited for hours,” he said. “She let herself sit in the office while Mrs. Janssen slept, but once she heard Mrs. Janssen wake up, she climbed back in. I told her I would come as early as I could in the morning.”
“And then you left. With her. While I sat here. Did you know I had been hired to find her?”
“A friend asked me for help,” he says finally. “That’s what I was thinking about.”