“Please, I’m just trying to understand what happened. You have no idea how badly people wanted to find you. Mrs. Janssen would have given anything to know what happened.”
She wants to tell me. I can tell that she wants this to be done with as much as I do, so that we can all start over.
“Mirjam. You said Amalia was already crying when she ran into you. Why would she already be crying? Why was she out that night to begin with?”
Tell me. Tell me and let us be done with this.
Slowly, deliberately, Mirjam reaches into a pocket on her dress. She pulls out something shaped like a star. “In Amalia’s coat pocket, when we traded. In the pocket was the money to come here. And also this.”
I take it from her and unfold the flaps. Mirjam rises from her chair and goes to stand by the window, looking out into the sea.
Dearest Elizabeth,
Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me even though I have done something you shouldn’t forgive me for.
I’m writing this on the tram, and if I get to you in time, I won’t have to give this to you at all. This is just in case. A just-in-case letter.
T and I have become close while you’re away. He listens when I talk. He laughs at my jokes. It’s like he really sees me, for the first time, and I know you wouldn’t mind, because you never loved him like I did, because you always said that you wished he felt about me the way he felt about you. And I thought he was starting to love me back. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t, because this afternoon he looked at me and said, “You should wear your hair like Mirjam’s. Hers is so pretty. When the war is over, maybe she’ll show you.” And I could see in his face that he was never going to love me, not ever.
I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that I was heartbroken. Even though it’s not an excuse, I want you to understand that I was heartbroken when I got home and my uncle was visiting and he asked me why I was looking so blue. I want you to understand that I wasn’t thinking when I told him that I was blue because the boy I loved would rather pine after a girl who had to hide in a furniture shop until the war was over than be with me. My uncle laughed. He told me the boy was dumb. He asked me to tell him more about this girl. I did. I told him all about you. I forgot he’d joined the NSB.
Or did I? Dearest Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking about this from the moment I realized what he’d done, from the moment I ran for the tram. Did I really forget that he joined the NSB? Or did part of me remember and know exactly what I was doing? I’m going to try to stop this. I’m going to fix it if I can. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
“She turned you in,” I say. “She was the reason the Nazis raided your hiding space.”
Mirjam turns to face me. “Didn’t you see? She regretted it almost as soon as she realized what had happened. That was why she was out that night in the street. She was running to warn us all that she’d told. She was hoping there would still be time for us to run.”
“But it was too late.”
Mirjam’s eyes are webbed with tears. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like that night. Two best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I’m sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.
“You’ll want to hate her.” Mirjam stares down at her folded hands. “I did. More than I ever hated anybody. But she didn’t know. I have to believe that now. When she told her uncle, I think she did it without realizing what could happen. She didn’t mean to.” She looks up at me with enormous eyes. “Do you believe me when I say that?”
“I believe that if you believe that,” I say.
I don’t know why Mirjam should care, if I think well of Amalia or not. She doesn’t even know me.
Except that, it occurs to me, I would care if it were me or my friends. All of us—Bas, Elsbeth, Ollie, me—I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.
Mirjam goes to the bed and sits, and I sit beside her, and neither of us says anything. We just stare out the window as waves batter the barricaded shore.
THIRTY-FOUR