‘Is that you?’ said my father, surprised. He opened the door a crack to let me in.

‘I’ve come to take a look,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Good heavens,’ said my mother. ‘I can’t believe you dared to come.’

‘Nothing to it,’ I said.

The other residents came in – after ascertaining that nothing serious was going on – to gawk at me.

‘Did you sit in the train, just like that?’ one of them asked.

‘Didn’t anyone ask for your identity card?’ asked another.

‘How did you ever dare to buy a ticket at the window?’

They looked at the blank spot on my coat where the star had been, as if it were a rare sight.

‘I can still see a few yellow threads,’ someone said.

‘You’d better sew it back on,’ said my mother.

‘Was it crowded in the train?’ asked my father.

They grilled me as if I’d made a long journey, as if I’d come from a foreign country.

‘You must be hungry,’ said my mother. She left the room and came back with a couple of sandwiches.

Though I wasn’t the least bit hungry, I dug into one so I wouldn’t disappoint my mother.

They all remained standing around the table, watching me with a look of such genuine satisfaction that I forced myself to polish off the sandwiches until not a single crumb was left.

In the basement

The house on Sarphatistraat was a gloomy place. The rooms were high-ceilinged, covered with dark wallpaper and furnished with decent but heavy furniture.

A week after my parents moved in, the family that owned the house suddenly disappeared. My parents sat waiting for them in vain at the breakfast table one morning. At first they thought that the owners had overslept, but when they failed to appear, they concluded that the family had decided it would be wiser to leave the troubled city. Together with the family that had likewise only recently come to live on the upper floor, my parents agreed that they would use the entire lower floor. By the time I arrived, my mother had adapted well to the new situation and arranged the rooms to suit her own taste, so that I was reminded of our house in Breda. And yet, with its narrow hallways, dark stairs, and brown doors, it was still a house typical of Amsterdam. A steep spiral staircase led to a basement filled with furniture, lampshades, bolts of silk, and boxes crammed with beads and trimmings.

After discovering that treasure trove, I spent hours in the basement, poking around the musty fabric, the gold-embroidered ribbons and the cold metal frameworks of the lampshades. As a child I had often rummaged through a chest filled with carnival costumes in the attic, trying them all on and spending entire afternoons walking around in them. In the same way I draped myself with strings of beads and strolled through the damp basement.