Girl in Hyacinth Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked what she'd been doing this winter and she said 'nothing.' Does she even think?"
    "Hilde, don't be cruel. We may never know what she's thinking, but surely she does."
    "You should get her to participate."
    "You think because I am her mother I can re make her? You're her grandmother. You have a try. She is what she is."
    "Lazy and apathetic."
    "I suppose when you were her age you never felt like you just wanted to sit and think? You think I don't already ask myself before sleep mercifully takes me what I did or didn't do that made her this way? What I failed to say to her at one unknown, privately crucial day? Tell me, Hilde, how haven't I loved enough? Tell me."
    Hannah couldn't breathe. She peeled paint off the woodwork around the inner door.
    "All I know, Edith, is that you've got to do something or she won't have the strength. Why do you let her be so sullen?"
    "Let her? You think I don't worry, every single night, that she doesn't want anything enough? You think I don't know what that means now?"
    Hannah turned to go and closed the outer door loud enough for them to hear. She didn't care.
    It wasn't true. She did want things. That is, she wanted to want things, even to love things, as much as Toby loved every living thing. Only she couldn't say what. It was too impossible now. Wanting anything seemed crazy.
    And she did have a friend. Marie.
    Marie passed notes to her in school all last year. The last note was that Marie could not go walking with her after school that day because she had to tend her baby brother, but the day after they didn't either, or ever did again. Now they were in differ ent schools, and once when she saw Marie on a street outside the River Quarter, Marie pretended she didn't recognize her. Now Hannah never left the River Quarter just so she wouldn't see her and have to repeat the moment. She did too care about some things.
    At least Mother stood up for her. A little. Ex cept when she said that about what made her this way. As if something wasn't right with her. What was missing?
    She let out a long, deep sigh. She needed to blow her nose but had no handkerchief with her so she just sniffed and wiped with her hand.
    The lime trees did have new leaves that were just unfurling. What for? she thought. She kicked a pebble on the sidewalk, and then saw two German officers coming the opposite way. For a moment the whole world stopped except the pebble that clattered on toward one tall black boot. Her heart turned to ice. A wetness moistened her underpants. Talking loudly, the men didn't seem to notice the pebble, or even her. They made no move to accom modate her on the narrow sidewalk. At the last sec ond she stepped off the curb to let them pass, and twisted her ankle.
    Things were happening. Bigger than prepara tions for Passover. Beyond the candle glow there were things. There were things. Nothing was the same. Hilde acted as if it was Great-grandmother Etty's time.
    But Father didn't. He knew. Maybe that was why he was softer with her. She knew she exasper ated him when she didn't do her lessons, but by Sabbath afternoon, he had forgotten. He took long walks with her, leaving Toby and his talkativeness at home, along the canals of the River Quarter, buy ing her a pickle from the wooden vat at the corner of Vrijheidslaan and Vechtstraat, or to Koco's ice cream parlor. Or he'd take her to Sunday concerts at Plantage Middenlaan, or to the Rijksmuseum. And, that one wonderful day, to the auction. Walk ing along, he would ask her about her schoolmates, her lessons, to try to get her to talk. She tried to tell him about Marie once, but she couldn't speak the words. He always seemed so tired afterward, letting his shoes fall to the floor in the bedroom, saying, she heard once, "Maybe a little progress, Edith."
    Now it became clear to her what made her love the girl in the painting. It was her quietness. A painting, after all, can't speak. Yet she felt this girl, sitting inside a room but looking out, was