Girl in the Blue Coat(17)

“You’re bringing Pia into this?” His pale eyes are flashing. Let him be angry. I’ve said worse things to get what I want. I’ll probably say worse things yet before this war is over. What I said worked, from the way he’s clenching and unclenching his jaw.

“Ten minutes,” I say. “I only need to talk to Judith for ten minutes. I can go back to the school to find her if I need to, but I don’t think she wants that. It’s a good thing I’m doing, Ollie. I promise.”

He turns away and rakes his hand through his thick strawberry-blond hair. When he turns back and speaks again, his voice is a little louder, almost normal. “It’s too bad you didn’t come to university, Hanneke. You meet very nice people. I joined the student supper club. That’s where I met Judith; we get together a couple of times a week.”

“When?”

“The next meeting is tomorrow.”

“Where?”

Before he can answer, a loud, throaty chuckle interrupts. German soldiers, two of them. I catch enough of the conversation to realize that, bizarrely, they’re talking about Rembrandt. One of them is telling the others that his favorite painting is The Night Watch. Too bad for the soldier that when the war broke out, curators removed The Night Watch from Het Rijksmuseum, rolling up the canvas and trucking it to a castle in the country somewhere.

“Rembrandt.” The art fan points at the statue and then at us. “A good painter,” he continues in mangled Dutch. “Rembrandt.”

This soldier is older. Around him, I should behave like a daughter, not a girlfriend. I’m preparing to compliment his taste, but Ollie answers before I need to. “Rembrandt! One of our best painters,” he responds in German. He sounds calm, his accent is impeccable. “Do you know Van Gogh?”

The soldier holds his nose and waves away an imaginary smell, making it clear he doesn’t think much of Van Gogh. His friend laughs, and Ollie laughs, too. “No Van Gogh!” he jokes.

It’s nice to have someone else do the talking for once, to not have to summon the energy for another false conversation. After a few minutes, Ollie places his hand on the small of my back and steers me away from the statue. “Good night,” he tells the soldiers, who wave back cheerfully.

Once we’ve left the square, he doesn’t speak again the rest of the walk, and neither do I.

My life now is filled with guilt, often; anger, frequently; fear, usually. But it’s not normally filled with self-doubt. I’ve constructed this new life carefully enough to feel that I’m protecting myself and my family as best I can. But in the past twelve hours, I’ve accepted a dangerous assignment. I’ve lost my composure in front of a stranger, and ripped open the sutures of my Bas-shaped wound, all over again, because they never seem to heal. And now I’m filled with nothing but doubt. Am I doing the right thing?

It’s only after Ollie leaves me at home, after finishing the hot chocolate at Mama’s insistence, that I realize he never told me where it was, this meeting of his student group. But that night, when I’m getting ready for bed, I find Ollie’s hot chocolate napkin in my coat pocket, scrawled with an address near the campus of the Municipal University of Amsterdam.





The first time I met Bas:

He was fifteen, I was fourteen. I’d seen him at school and I liked his curious kitten eyes and the way one curl fell over his forehead no matter how many times he pushed it back. Elsbeth was a year older than me, so she was in the same class as him already. She knew his two friends, and one day we walked out of the building and his brown-haired friend called out to Elsbeth and asked her if she could settle something. “Which do girls prefer?” he asked. “Blonds or brunets?” Elsbeth laughed, and because she didn’t want to give up her opportunity to flirt with either boy, she told them she liked both equally well.

“Ask my friend,” she said, because she was always doing that, making sure I got equal attention, pushing me to the center in ways that made me annoyed and then grateful. “Ask Hanneke.”

“What about you? Which do you prefer?” the blond friend asked me, and I still don’t know how I was so bold, because I looked past both of them to where Bas was sitting on a ledge, and his auburn hair caught in the sunlight.

“I like redheads,” I said, and then I blushed.




The first time I kissed Bas:

He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It was after our first trip to the cinema, our first real trip, when I didn’t feel the need to make Elsbeth chaperone. I suggested a street early that we get off our bicycles and walk. I said it was because the weather was nice, but really I wanted to be alone with him before my parents could see us outside the window.

“You have something in your hair,” he said, and I let him brush it out even though I knew there was nothing in my hair, and when he kissed me, he dropped his bicycle and it clattered to the ground, and we both laughed.



The last time I saw Bas:

He was seventeen, I was sixteen.

It was getting late. My parents had come to his going-away party, too, but they had already left. Mama said I could stay an extra hour, as long as Elsbeth and I walked home together. Bas and I kissed again and again in a dark corner of his dining room until my hour was up. I’ll never forget his hand, pressed against the window as he watched me—