Girl in the Blue Coat(28)
“I’ll only be a minute. My mother said you’d never let me in,” I improvise, “because she thinks it’s not in your power, and you’d have to ask your boss.”
They exchange glances with each other; one of them is about to refuse me—I can see it in his body language—so I lean in conspiratorially and lower my voice. “It’s just that her rash was really disgusting. I saw it myself.” I can only hope these two particular guards subscribe to the antigerm fanaticism that the Nazis are well known for. I put my hand to my stomach, as if even thinking about the rash makes me queasy. Finally one of the soldiers stands aside. “Thank you so much,” I tell him.
“Be quick,” he says, and I do my best to look purposeful while stifling my pride over talking my way past them. I’d never used that tactic before, and I’ll have to remember it.
The smell hits me first.
It’s sweat and urine and excrement and some other undefinable odor. It feels like a wall, extending to either side of me and over my head, and there’s no way to climb over it.
What has happened to this theater? The seats have been wrenched from the floor and they’re piled in stacks. The stage has no curtains, but the ropes that used to open them still hang from their pulleys, swaying and ghostlike in the middle of the stage. It’s dark, except for the emergency bulbs that glow like red eyes along the border of the theater. And people. Old women on thin straw mattresses that line the walls, which they must sleep on, because I don’t see anything else that could be used. Young women huddling next to suitcases. It’s unbearably hot.
On the other side of the door, just a few feet away, the door guards are talking about nothing in particular in cool, clean air while my stomach clenches and heaves as I struggle not to vomit right here in what used to be the lobby. Is this what my neighbors have been brought into? Where Mr. Bierman was taken, and everyone else who has disappeared?
“Please.”
I turn to face the older man speaking in a soft voice behind me. “Please,” he says again. “We’re not allowed to talk to the guards, but I saw you just come in, and—do you know, can I be sent to Westerbork? My wife and children were sent there yesterday. They say I’m supposed to be sent to Vught, but—I’ll do anything, I’ll give anything, if I can be sent to Westerbork instead.”
Before I can answer, another hand tugs on my sleeve, a woman who has overheard the conversation.
“Can you get a letter out?” she asks. “I need to send a note to my sister. I came with our mother, and she died in the room they’re using for sick people, and I just want my sister to know. Just a letter, please.”
“I can’t,” I begin, but I feel more people pressing in, more voices asking for help; it’s confusing and disorienting and everyone’s faces are dark and shadowed. “I can’t,” I start to say again, when another arm grabs me, this one roughly, and pulls me backward.
“What are you doing in here?” a voice hisses. Someone is holding my coat; I try to wrench myself away, but the hands don’t let go.
“Stop,” I start to scream. Before I can finish the word, a palm clamps over my mouth. “Hel—” I try again, when the hand slips.
“Shut up, Hanneke! It’s me.”
Judith. It’s just Judith. My brain registers the voice before my body does; my arms keep flailing, and it takes a moment before they stop. She half drags me back toward the door, flashing her identification card to the guards and depositing me outside in front of the theater. While she stands with her arms folded across her middle, I gag in the street, trying to rid my lungs of the stench inside, and my brain from the memory of all those people. A white square of cloth appears in front of me.
“Here.” Judith hands me her handkerchief. “Don’t vomit on the street.”
Already behind her, the two guards who let me in are peering around Judith to see what’s happened to the girl with the medicine. The handkerchief scratches against my lips. I wipe my mouth, forcing myself to stand. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t expect it to be like that,” I say finally.
“What did you expect it to be like? A hotel? A teahouse? Hordes of people are kept in there for days with almost no working toilets. Did you think some actors would come on the stage and do a pantomime?”
I don’t bother to answer. Anything I say will make me sound naive. I was naive. I knew it was a deportation center, but those words were abstract until I saw what they meant. All I can think about now is the sea of faces swimming in front of me, waiting and waiting in what used to be a beautiful theater.
I can believe all the rumors Ollie told me, about what might happen to the people who are taken from that place and never returned. I can believe there are postcards written by prisoners at work camps, who think they will be fine until they are dead. I can picture Mirjam Roodveldt’s girlish handwriting, being forced to compose one of those postcards.
“Hanneke?” Judith’s voice has lost a little of its harshness. “Are you okay?”
“I was only going in to find you and your cousin.” I cough out the words, choking on my disgust. “You told me to meet you here.”
“I told you to meet us outside the theater.” Judith jerks her head toward the ornate stone building across the street. “The theater’s nursery is on the other side of the road. Can you walk now?”