‘The coast is clear,’ I said.

‘Well then, bye-bye,’ she said. She bounded out the gate and ran into the front garden of the house next door with the handbag dangling from her arm and the tail of the ceramic kitten sticking out of it.

Homecoming

‘Guess what I’m going to do?’ I said to my brother one afternoon. ‘I’m going to Amsterdam.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ said his wife. ‘It seems very foolish.’

‘I’m fed up,’ I said. ‘I’d like to wear regular clothes again.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Dave. ‘It might be best for you to be in Amsterdam. We should go there too.’

‘But how will you do it?’ asked Lotte.

‘I’ll just take the star off my coat and board the train. Very simple.’

‘As long as there isn’t a strict checkpoint,’ said Dave.

‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. ‘I’m going, no matter what.’

I wanted to visit my parents. They had written that they’d been lucky enough to find rooms in a large house with a garden on Sarphatistraat. ‘We’ve already met several people we know,’ wrote my father. ‘We all live in the same neighbourhood.’ Although I could tell from their letters that their lives were not unpleasant, I realised they would prefer one of their children to be with them. Especially now that they were so worried about Bettie. Nothing more had been heard from her after the one postcard.

I planned to leave as soon as it got dark. I was as excited as a child who is allowed to travel for the first time. Not because I’d soon see my parents, but because I could pretend, if only for a short while, that everything was normal. On the way to the station, however, I thought I saw a policeman checking people’s papers on every street corner. And in the dimly lit station I imagined that everyone was looking at me with suspicion.

In the train I sat huddled in a corner next to a woman rocking her child to sleep on her lap. The man across from me smoked a pipe and stared out the window, though there was nothing to see. As we rode through the dark landscape, I forgot my fear and began to enjoy myself. I couldn’t resist humming to the monotonous rhythm of the wheels. I remembered how Bettie and I used to spend our holidays in Amsterdam when we were small. Then in the train we’d try to outdo each other in coming up with a rhyme that matched the rhythm of the wheels. ‘To-ám-ster-dam-and-rótter-dam-with-búttered-bread-and-bér-ry-jam,’ we’d sometimes drone on for miles on end.

Amsterdam was dark and wet. There were still a fair number of people on the streets. They moved like shadows on the broad pavements of Damrak. No one looked at me. No one followed me. I had trouble finding the house on Sarphatistraat because it was so dark underneath the trees. I kept having to climb steep flights of steps to read the numbers on doors until I finally found the right house. It was set back a bit from the street. I already had my hand on the bell when I realised that I couldn’t ring it just like that. It would scare everyone in the house. So I tried whistling, but no one seemed to hear me. I had no choice but to ring the bell. I did it cautiously, three times in a row. The moment I heard someone in the hall, I shouted my name through the letter box.