Lotte was waiting for us in the front garden.

‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ she said. ‘The doctor came by. He doesn’t want you to leave now that you’ve barely recovered. He said you need to be careful. He’s left you a medical certificate.’

‘That settles it,’ I said. ‘None of us are going.’

‘True,’ said Dave, ‘even though we’ve already bought camping mugs. Look.’ He unwrapped them and set them on top of the gate of the front garden.

‘What shall we do with them?’ he asked.

Sealed

As it turned out, we didn’t have to go to the man Mr Zaagmeier knew because Dave also received a medical certificate. Now there were two beds in the living room, and my brother and I walked around in our pyjamas all day so that we could leap into bed the moment the doorbell rang. Lotte was allowed to stay in order to take care of us but my parents were ordered to relocate to Amsterdam because they were over fifty.

It was a new regulation. They were permitted to take only one suitcase full of clothes and, before they left, both this suitcase and the room in which they’d been living had to be sealed.

‘Have you forgotten anything?’ asked my father.

‘No, not a thing,’ said my mother. She walked up and down the room, as if searching for something else to take. My father kept looking out the window.

‘They were supposed to come before three,’ he said. He checked his watch. ‘It’s already five minutes past three.’

‘Do you think the suitcase will have to be opened again?’ asked my mother.

‘Of course not,’ said my father. ‘They won’t have time to do all that. They’ll just stick a seal on it, that’s all. There they are.’

Two men in black leather jackets opened the gate and rang the bell. Dave and I were already in bed. Lotte answered the door and the two men came in without a word.

‘Will that suitcase need to be opened?’ I heard my mother say.

‘That’s what we’ve come for,’ said one of the men.

I’d seen how carefully my mother had packed everything. Now they would turn it all upside down, as if they had lost something that was on the bottom. It reminded me of a trip to Belgium that we had taken shortly before the war. On the way home my mother had become very agitated. Every five minutes she asked my father if he thought the suitcase would have to be opened. At first I didn’t understand what she was so worked up about. Only later, when the customs officer searched her suitcase, did I realise what the problem was. She had bought two large bottles of cologne and now had to pay import duties on them. So she might just as well have bought them in Holland.

When the men had gone, we examined the seals. ‘It’s child’s play to loosen the seals and to slip more things into the suitcase,’ I said. ‘You could always glue them back on.’ I picked at a corner. The seal did indeed come loose easily.