Girl in the Blue Coat(49)

In the second frame, everyone from the tram stands near the rear entrance of the theater. A soldier has his arm outstretched, obviously organizing them into rows. In the foreground, I can make out a teenage boy in a chocolate-brown coat sticking his tongue out at the soldier, in an unseen act of defiance.

We spend several minutes examining each frame. The story continues to unfold: A disorganized crowd of people become neat lines; couples cling to each other’s hands for support.

Peach and red. Green and black.

It’s not until the fourth-to-last frame that I see what I’m looking for. The picture is of the same scene as the others: scared people carrying suitcases. There are the captured prisoners, three or four abreast, filing into the theater.

There, in the bottom corner, is Mirjam.





TWENTY-ONE




Once there was a mouse caught in our walls. It only seemed to make noise when I was in the room alone; Papa and Mama never heard it, and if I brought it up, they would look over my head and say, “Right. Your mouse.” I was nine, maybe, and eventually even I began to think the mouse wasn’t real. It was a pretend playmate I must have invented for company. Then one day Elsbeth came over to play, the mouse appeared by her chair, and she screamed bloody murder. That was the moment when the mouse became real, really real. When someone else saw it. When I wasn’t alone.

“That’s her.” I point to the slide.

“What?” Mina asks. “Where?”

“The corner. In the right.”

She crowds in, shoving her shoulder against mine. “Are you sure? It’s so blurry and small.”

Nearly out of frame is a girl with curly hair wearing a coat the color of the sky. The face is blurry, not that seeing it would help me anyway, this girl I’ve only met in description. What’s not blurry is the bright blue coat, and, if I squint hard enough, a row of minuscule double-breasted silver buttons marching down the front. There she is, the girl who ran from a safe hiding space, the girl who was slightly spoiled, who loved a boy and had a best friend, who did well in school only to please her parents. Maybe her face is blurry because she’s doing exactly what I like to think I would be doing: looking for an escape route rather than following the rules.

“Do you think Mrs. de Vries has a magnifying glass?” Ollie suggests. “Is there any way to see it a little closer?”

Mina finds an old-fashioned one with a carved wooden handle in Mr. de Vries’s desk drawer. I press my nose as close as I can, going over the photograph millimeter by millimeter for anything else that might be useful, but find nothing more.

“It’s still so hard to see,” Mina says.

“It’s her,” I say definitively. It’s her because I feel a pang in my heart when I look at this photograph. All the other people being herded into the theater seem to be with others—families or neighbors. She’s alone.

“She’s right there, Ollie,” I say. From the window of the room I’m sitting in, I could see the building where she’s being held, less than one hundred meters away.

“It’s her,” Ollie says evenly. He’s watching me, wondering what I’ll do next. “It’s what we thought it would be.”

“We have to get her out.”

He’s shaking his head even before I finish the sentence. He expected this.

“Yes, Ollie,” I continue. “Look at her. She must be so terrified.”

“Hanneke, nothing has changed since I told you that we couldn’t help you.”

“It has changed. We have a safe place for her, right here, across the street. Mina and Judith know the theater. Why won’t you help me, Ollie?”

“I don’t understand you, Hanneke,” he snaps. “We’ve all been hoping, for the past four days, that you would help us with the resistance, with things that can actually matter for not just one person, but hundreds of people. And now here you are, telling me I have to risk the lives of all my other friends to help you? You really are—”

“What am I?” I challenge him, furious but keeping my voice down. “Crazy? Damaged?”

“I felt bad for you, Hanneke. For the fact that you had to grieve for Bas on your own. I felt so sorry for you, and I also thought you would be useful to us in the resistance. But if I had realized how bullheaded you would be, I wouldn’t have brought you to the first meeting at all.”

“Bas would help me.” It’s cruel, to compare Ollie to his brother right now, but I can’t help it. It’s true. “He would. He would wonder why we’re even still having this conversation when we know right where she is. He would say we should go and get her right now. Do you remember his party that one summer when my parents wouldn’t let me come because I was sick? He sneaked up the drainpipe just to bring me cake afterward. Bas wouldn’t be able to stand that someone had specifically asked for help with finding her, and we were ignoring it.”

“And he would be dead.”

I reel backward, staring at Ollie. “What did you just say?”

“Hanneke. Bas was a thousand good things. A million good things. But he was brash, and reckless, and he never thought before acting. That night of the party when he brought you the cake? You were happy, but he was punished. My parents were furious at how late he’d stayed out. And now? Now Bas would try to help save this girl, and the Nazis would catch him, and he would die.”