Girl in the Blue Coat(27)

Dear Elizabeth,

I’m sitting in math, and the teacher has this loose sole on his shoe, and every time he takes a step it makes the rudest noise you ever heard. It’s practically indecent, and everyone is laughing at it. I wish you were in this class. I think T noticed me today, a proper noticing, not just accidentally stepping on my foot, or handing me my pencil after I drop it next to his desk, or saying “Excuse me” when I run into him in the hallway. (Have I mentioned I’ve tried all these things, Elizabeth? Have I mentioned I have become so pathetic that I have resorted to standing near doors when I know he’s going to walk through them? Yes, darling, it is true. I am literally throwing myself in harm’s way so he will talk to me. I can’t believe that when we were little, he used to come and eat toast at my house after school and now I can’t even say two words to him.) But! Today was different. Today in literature class I stood up to give my presentation and I made a little joke, and T laughed, a genuine chuckle, and afterward he told me it was a funny joke. A funny joke! So I’m not as pathetic as I feared. (Or am I?)


I miss you, dearest duckie, and write back soon, sooner, soonest!

Love and Adoration,

Margaret





I read the letter again, and then once more, the familiar rhythms of friendship sparking out from the page.

Didn’t I tell Elsbeth about the first time I made Bas laugh in a note just like this one? How many notes did I once write, full of secrets and stories and folded into a perfect star? How many did I receive? Elsbeth gave me a box for them once, for the dozens of folded star-letters. It was an old cigar box that had been pasted over with colorful papers, and then shellacked with varnish: a just-because present. I asked her if she made it herself, and she laughed. “God, no. I’m not going to get my hands dirty like that. I just saw it and thought you’d like it, silly. To put notes in.” That was Elsbeth. Generous and careless, giving presents that never made you feel indebted for receiving them, because they were done so casually. “You should tell Bas that another boy gave it to you,” she said. “Make him jealous.”

Do I still have that box somewhere? Would I still recognize myself in those letters?

Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out. My grief over Bas is the darkness. It’s the thing that’s most immediately wrong in the house. It’s the thing that you notice straight off. It covers everything else up. But if you could turn the lights back on, you would see there are lots of other things still wrong in the room. The dishes are dirty. There is mold in the sink. The rug is askew.

Elsbeth is my askew rug. Elsbeth is my messy room. Elsbeth is the grief I would allow myself to feel, if my emotions weren’t so covered in darkness.

Because Elsbeth isn’t dead. Elsbeth is living twenty minutes away, with a German soldier. She says she loves him. She probably does. I met him once. Rolf. He was handsome and tall; he had a friendly smile. He even said the right things, like how he knew all the boys wanted Elsbeth and he felt lucky to have her, how he worked for someone high up in the Gestapo and if I ever needed anything, I should let him know because a friend of Elsbeth’s was a friend of his. I shook his hand and wanted to throw up.

So right now, when I’m looking at these schoolgirl notes, it’s like the light in my messy room has been flicked on, just for a moment. I’m not distracted by Bas. I can see Elsbeth again.

This note is such an optimistic one, exactly like the ones we would have written long before the war, as we puzzled through who might love us and who didn’t, who ignored us and who didn’t.

Who are Elizabeth and Margaret? Did another student’s papers somehow get mixed in with Mirjam’s? The girls sound like good friends, placed in different homerooms, maybe in different grades like me and Elsbeth. I add it to the mental list of things I need to ask Mrs. Janssen and Judith’s cousin. What more have I learned about Mirjam since I first drew the imaginary picture of her almost forty-eight hours ago at Mrs. Janssen’s? She was popular with boys. She was a good student, a little hard on herself, competitive enough with her classmates to bother keeping track of their grades. She was spoiled, maybe? After all, her parents gave her a new blue coat when her old one ripped, and lots of families now would insist the old coat just be repaired, even if they were able to find such a nice new one. She is… dead? She’s alive?

She left a house that could not be left, where the back exit was sealed and the front door was monitored.

Mirjam. Where did you go?





TEN




It’s lucky, for Judith and her cousin to have an uncle who could help them get a place at the Schouwburg. Jews are hardly allowed to work anywhere anymore. Positions at the theater must be prized like the jobs at the Jewish hospital. I heard that those come with a special stamp on identification cards that allows Jews to be out past curfew, to not be deported. Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.

The theater is white, with tall columns. When I was here last, with Bas’s family, a colorful banner hung from its face, advertising the holiday pantomime. Now when I bicycle up to it, the front of the theater is naked. Posted outside are two guards who halt me at the door and ask for my identification card. I don’t know if telling them that I’m here to meet Judith will get her into trouble, so instead I tell one that I’ve brought medicine for my neighbor, who was taken in last night’s roundup. I hold up my own bag as if there’s something important inside.