Page 113 of Winter’s End

Zoe nodded, slowly. “Thanks to your kindness, Kurt and I made it to Middleburg in your mother’s barge,” she said. “I could swear, Evi, that I caught a flash of your bright blue cap that day as we prepared to move out into the Spaarne…”

Evi’s hands flew to her face.

“In any case,” said Zoe, “My Resistance contacts were able to move us safely across the border to Belgium. We stayed in Antwerp until after the liberation. Then we returned to Haarlem. Kurt had been a construction engineer in in Germany, and he was eager to help rebuild the broken city. “

She leaned across the table to take Evi’s hand. “Your shoulder,” she looked around at the sea of rapt faces.

“Your Oma,” she said, “took a Nazi bullet in order to rescue my father from the Germans. Evi, tell me,behagen, that your shoulder healed properly.”

Evi shrugged. “For the most part. It hurts a bit when I reach over my head. But I told you then and I tell you now, I would do it again if I needed to…”

She leaned forward. “And Mila, Zoe? Do you know what happened to Mila?”

Zoe sighed. “She telephoned me after she and Pieter safely reached Brussels, shortly before Kurt and I left Haarlem. They were preparing to make a life in Belgium, she told me…”

A pause. “But not long afterward, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She died in August of 1948. She was not yet thirty.”

Evi heard the collective intake of breath.

“Pieter endowed a scholarship in her name at the University of Amsterdam,” Zoe said. “The Mila Brouwer Woman of Bravery Scholarship…”

Evi nodded, deep in the grip of memory.

But by that time, Thomas had brought out a bottle of Jenever, the Dutch brew made from juniper berries, and they drank to the millions who died in Hitler’s war and toasted those who had survived, and the noise level increased, and Alette, her youngest great-granddaughter, named for the woman who had come to Evi’s aid on that terrible day off the coast of Rotterdam, asked to try on Oma’s blue cap.

...

It was after eleven, and she was bone tired, by the time Evi finally closed the door of her bedroom. Zoe had been installed in Hannah’s old room, Anton Jacob Rood Kuyper in Thomas’s. In the morning, they would breakfast at Hannah’s, then pay a visit the Holocaust memorial museum in New York City before seeing a musical on Broadway.

But for now, she needed to rest. She creamed her face, as hopeless a gesture as that was, she thought wryly, given the map of her astonishing life in her ninety-year-old wrinkles. She ran a brush through her silvery hair, changed into a nightgown and climbed into her bed.

She lay there for a moment, re-living every moment of the impossible, incredible evening, then sighed and turned onto her good right shoulder.

She leaned across the bed to touch the pillow where Jacob had rested next to her for more than forty years.

She closed her eyes and swore she could hear his voice, as clearly as if he were in the room.

“Good job,” she could hear him whisper in her ear. “Good job, Itty-Bitty…I love you.”