Girl in the Blue Coat(73)
Het Parool. The three-line notice in the classifieds: Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.
The first day I came here, Mrs. Janssen told me she brought Mirjam a newspaper, and then told her to stay quiet because the delivery boy was coming. Mrs. Janssen never mentioned to me that she had left Christoffel alone in the kitchen. She wouldn’t have thought she needed to. Why would Mirjam announce her presence to the boy who came to deliver groceries?
“You helped her escape?”
“I did.”
“But I don’t understand. She must have told you that Mrs. Janssen thought she was Mirjam. Why would she leave without telling Mrs. Janssen that she was going? And how was Amalia carrying Mirjam’s papers on the night of the raid?”
He kneads the palm of his hand into his eye, clumsily wiping away tears. I don’t have a handkerchief, and I don’t know if I would offer him one if I did. Am I comforting him? Interrogating him? This boy in front of me has the answer to every question I’ve been chasing for a week. He helped launch a series of events that caused pain and anguish, and I still don’t understand why.
“She—she told me that the night the Roodveldts’ hiding space was ransacked, she ran into Mirjam on the street,” he says. “Mirjam was running for her life and she thought she would be caught soon. Amalia made her switch coats and identification papers. Amalia said that if Mirjam had non-Jewish papers, she would be able to escape, and Amalia could just go to the authorities later and be issued new ones. But the soldiers were too close. She didn’t have time to run home, and she worried that with Mirjam’s clothes and papers, she would be shot on sight. So she came to Mrs. Janssen’s. Mirjam told her the address.”
“But when she got here, why didn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen who she really was? Why didn’t she ask Mrs. Janssen to help her get new papers?”
He shrugs morosely. “I don’t know. She just said she didn’t want Mrs. Janssen to know.”
Because she wanted to make sure Mirjam was safe before she told anyone the truth? Because she didn’t want anyone to know the real Mirjam Roodveldt was still out there, escaped, living under a different name? Because there are some parts of this story that are never going to make sense, no matter how many questions I ask?
“Where did she go?” I ask. “After you got her out of the house?”
“She stayed with me for a while. Papa travels so often he didn’t suspect someone was in the basement.”
In his basement. Until just a few days ago, the girl I was looking for was living at the home of a boy I’d seen multiple times.
“What made her leave?” I ask. I can understand why Amalia never went to the authorities and said her own papers were lost or stolen: Since she was under eighteen, the authorities might have demanded her parents’ signatures, and they were already out of the city. I can understand why she might have wanted to stay with Christoffel instead of Mrs. Janssen—an old friend rather than a stranger who didn’t even know who she really was. What I can’t understand is why, after she’d gone through all that trouble, she would then leave his house. “Why did she keep running from the places she was safest, Christoffel? I just need some of these pieces to make sense.” He’s still crying, tears flowing faster as I demand answers. “Why did Amalia leave your house that night?”
“I told her to,” he finally yelps. “She told me a secret and I made her leave. I never meant for her to die. I swear I never meant it. I was so mad at her. I told her the Nazis would treat her better than I would if I ever saw her again. I chased her to the street. She was running away from me; I saw her run face-on into a soldier. When she was caught in the roundup, she was running away from me.” His voice is high and keening.
“What was the secret? What was it that made you refuse to let her stay in your house?”
“I can’t. I can’t.” He’s become hysterical; if I had a paper bag, I would make him breathe into it. Instead, I pat the back of his sweater, damp with sweat and heaving as he gulps in air. He’s just a few years younger than me, but he’s a small boy right now. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he gasps out in between deep breaths. “Please don’t make me.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay,” I repeat, because pushing him right now is only going to send him further over the edge.
Just one thing more. Not even a thing that matters, in the large scheme of things, but something I have to have settled, for my own peace.
“You said Amalia asked you to help her escape on the day she saw the notice in the newspaper. But you couldn’t have helped her right then. Mrs. Janssen saw her later in the evening. Did you find a way to sneak back in the house while Mrs. Janssen was across the street at her neighbor’s? Were you the one who figured out how to close the back door from the outside?”
“No. She hid in the house while Mrs. Janssen was at the neighbor’s. I came back the next day.”
His timeline must be off. The next day, I was here. The next day, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to Mrs. Janssen tell me Mirjam had already disappeared. “You’re misremembering. I was here that day. I saw you come in. You were picking up some furniture to sell for Mrs. Janssen.”
“I did do that. I did pick up the furniture.”
Christoffel is silent. I am silent.