Girl in Hyacinth Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

downstairs.
    It was awful they couldn't just be freed. That would be fitting to do on Passover, but they'd be bewildered by freedom, she thought, frightened of the prospects of finding a speck of food in South Amsterdam. They'd only peck around the gable of the house to get back into the coop. It would make it obvious that this was the house where they be longed.
    The next morning at breakfast, she asked, "Will it be today?"
    "Soon." Father gently placed his big palm on the back of her head for a moment.
    The whole house waited, breathless, while Passover approached, the night different from all other nights. Mother and Grandmother Hilde had been cleaning kitchen cabinets, the pantry, the oven, the icebox, and now were cleaning shelves in the sideboard and putting away the silver tea set in order to make room on the top for the Passover china. Hannah sat looking at the painting above the sideboard. It was of a girl her own age looking out a window while sewing. The way she leaned forward, intent on something, and the longing in her eyes cast a spell over her every time she looked. The girl wasn't working, at least not at that mo ment. Her hands were lax, the buttons on the table like flat pearls yet to be sewn on, because what was going on in her mind was more important. Hannah understood that.
    It was on an excursion with Father, just the two of them, a couple years earlier that he bought the painting—1940, just before her eleventh birthday. He'd been going to meetings of the Comite voor Joodsche Vluchtelingen, Jewish refugees from Ger many, in the Rotterdam Cafe next to the Diamond Exchange and had taken her to an auction where families had donated paintings, vases, jewelry and Oriental rugs to be bid on by other families as a means to raise money for refugee support. It was es sential, he'd said, that the government not bear the expense of the Jewish poor. When this painting came up for bid, she gasped. The face of the girl in the painting almost glowed, her blue eyes, cheeks, the corners of her mouth all bright and glossy, the light coming right at her across the space between them. She seemed more real than the people in the room.
    When Father cast a bid, Hannah sucked in her breath, astonished. He bid again. He grasped her hand when the bidding got above two hundred guilders; she squeezed his back when it passed three hundred. The higher the bids, the tighter she squeezed until, when he cast the bid that bought it, she cried, "Papa!" and didn't let go of his hand all the way home. Father buying it seemed to honor her in a way that made her feel worthy.
    The moment they walked in with the painting, while it was still wrapped, Mother straightened up and looked from her to Father as if she could tell something significant had happened. Hannah re membered feeling light-headed as she walked through the rooms choosing a place, until she set tled on the dining room above the sideboard. She unwrapped it and held it up. "See Mamela, how lovely?" Sitting bolt upright across from it at the dining table, just where she was sitting now, she was the last to go to bed that night.
    Tobias came in through the front vestibule. "Hannah, isn't this interesting?" He had in his hand a new spring leaf. "On this edge there are twenty-four spikes but only twenty-two on this," he said. "Why?"
    At nine years old, Tobias was full of questions. He loved spider webs and the sound of crickets, kept moth and beetle collections, a small green tur tle, a rabbit named Elijah, a notebook where he drew his observations from nature. In his mind, the four years between them made her ultimately knowledgeable, but she never knew what to say. She couldn't answer his passion with hers. "I don't know, Toby. Some things are different, I suppose."
    Just then Mother asked him to clean the coop of hametz, which meant all barley, peas, lentils, any grain that would leaven when moist. Ridding the house of leavening was an act of remembrance, for Passover. Mother gave