Annelies полностью

At least, Anne, you will have some kind of mother again, she points out. Isn’t that better than none at all?

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Anne is due at Pim’s office after classes and dreading it. She spoke no more than two words to Pim this morning before stealing out the door for school and now feels the covert shame and anger from the night before pressing on her chest. When she arrives at the warehouse and stows her bike, she spots the foreman, Mr. Groot, stepping out to the edge of the street to roll a smoke. So instead of heading up the steps, she slips the strap of her book satchel over her shoulder and approaches him.

“Excuse me. Mr. Groot? Can I ask you something?” Groot looks a little undecided about that question, but Anne doesn’t wait for him to say no. “That boy. Raaf Hoekstra, who worked here. You said he didn’t have a good name.”

“Did I say that?” Groot wonders.

“Does that mean he was NSB?”

“The boy? No. Not so much as I know.”

“But the father, then. He was?”

Groot tends to his shag closely, glancing out at the canal.

“I know there were party men working here, Mr. Groot,” Anne assures him. “I know it was my father who said they must be hired. It’s not a secret, if you’re worried that you’ll be spilling the beans.”

The man shrugs. Then nods his head. “Sure, old Hoekstra had a party number, all right. But it wasn’t just that.”

Another blockage.

“No?”

The man smokes.

“Mr. Groot?”

A glance in her direction, as if he’s calculating odds. “Maybe you ought to ask your papa about this, miss.”

“He doesn’t like to talk about any of it. All that happened during the war,” Anne says. “He thinks it’s too painful. But I think it’s important to know the truth.”

“Maybe,” Groot is willing to allow. “I just don’t like spreading stories.”

“Please. I won’t say a word to anyone. I just want to know.”

Groot puffs out an elongated breath. “We had a problem with thievery,” he says heavily. “This was back when van Maaren was still running things. Somebody was stealing from the spice inventory. To tell the truth, I always wondered if it wasn’t van Maaren himself—but he said he had his eye on this other fellow we had. Dreeson was the name. Not the worst sort, Dreeson, when he was sober, but a boozer like Hoekstra. And Hoekstra and he had some kind of falling-out on the floor of the shop, over what I’ve got no idea. I think Dreeson had sneaked a few shots of kopstoot on his lunch break, and he said something that got Hoekstra angry. It came to blows, until I separated them and sent ’em both home. Then, the next day, Hoekstra showed, but Dreeson didn’t. Not that day or the day after. It took a while for us to get the news, but it turned out Dreeson and his wife’d been hiding their boy from the Huns to keep him out of the labor conscription. Until the Grüne Polizei paid them a late-night call, and that was that. The whole family got hauled away.”

Anne feels her throat thicken. “And you think . . . you think it was Hoekstra who betrayed them?”

“I don’t think anything,” Groot assures her. “But the truth is, Hoekstra liked to brag about his connections. He flashed around a pass he said he got from some Gestapo man in the Euterpestraat.” A shrug. “Who knows if it was real? Who knows if any of it was real? He was a drunkard. It could’ve all been nothing more than big talk. But I do remember that fracas he had with Dreeson. And that Hoekstra could have the devil’s own temper if you riled him.”

“And what happened to him?” Anne wants to know. “To Hoekstra. After liberation?”

“Can’t say. It was the last winter of the war. He started coming in for his shift drunk as a badger, so van Maaren finally gave him the boot.”

“Still, you hired his son in his place.”

“I didn’t think it was fair to condemn the boy just because his father was a pox,” says Mr. Groot. “So when he showed up looking for work, I gave him a chance.” He tells her this, then yells over to one of the other workers and then turns back to Anne and stamps out the butt of his cigarette. “Excuse me, miss. Back to the job.”

•   •   •

She has a difficult time forcing herself up the steps to the office. Halfway up, she stops, feeling herself teeter on the edge of a cliff. Panic swells inside her. She tries to focus on something, a crack in the wood of one of the steps. Counting backward from a hundred, she pinches her wrist, monitoring the surge of her pulse. Margot is there in her death rags. So it’s true, she points out. His father was a Quisling. A collaborator.

The Transvaal

Oost-Watergraafsmeer

Amsterdam-Oost