The Bookbinder's Secret

Chapter One: The Thrush

Amsterdam, September 1944

There were seven steps down to the bindery, and Mieke Meijer knew every one of them in the dark.

The first was loose at its left edge. The third had a dip worn into the middle by sixty years of coal deliveries. The fifth creaked unless you kept close to the wall, and the seventh was hardly a step at all, only a lip of brick that had caught her ankle twice during her first month at the reading room. She took them now with a pan of soup held against her chest and a dish towel folded over the lid, and she did not spill a drop.

At the bottom she stopped and listened. Overhead, through the floorboards, came the scrape of a chair and the slow tread of Mr. Vink making his last round of the shelves before closing. Ahead of her, past the paper store and the drying racks, a lamp burned low over the binder's bench. Herman Wouters sat beneath it with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, sewing the spine of a ledger with a curved needle. He didn't look up, but he lifted his free hand, and the needle caught the light.

"Carrots," he said.

"Mostly carrots. There's an onion in there somewhere if you look hard."

"I'll take your word for it." Now he did look up. He had a long, serious face that changed completely when he smiled, and there was a smear of black ink along one cheekbone that had probably been there since morning. "The baker's wife came in again. She asked if we had anything new by the Thrush. I told her I was only a binder and had never heard of any thrush, and she winked at me. A woman of sixty, winking."

"You should be flattered."

"I was terrified."

Mieke laughed and walked past him to the back wall of the bindery. It was shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were full of bound newspaper volumes, forty years of the *Algemeen Handelsblad* in fat brown books with cracked leather spines. Nobody had asked to see one since before the war. They smelled of mildew and old glue, and they were heavy enough that two of them dropped together could break a man's foot.

She set the pan on the floor, reached up to the third shelf and knocked on the spine of the volume for 1903. Two knocks, a pause, a third.

Something stirred behind the wall. Mieke put her shoulder against the end of the shelving and pushed, and a whole section of it swung inward on hinges that Mr. Vink oiled every Sunday, so that they made no sound at all.

Behind it was a space no bigger than a pantry. It had once been the coal room, before the reading room put in a new stove upstairs and bricked up the old chute to the alley, all but an iron grating at the top for air. Now it held a cot, a wooden crate for a table, a bucket with a lid, a jam jar with a candle stub in it, and Sara Polak, sitting cross-legged on the blanket with a shoebox of catalogue cards on her knees.

"You're late," Sara said. "Four minutes. I counted."

"You did not count."

"I counted to two hundred and forty. Twice, because I lost my place the first time." Sara set the shoebox aside and held out both hands for the pan. Her wrists were as thin as broom handles. Her dark hair was cut short and ragged, because Mieke had cut it with the bindery shears in the spring, and her face had the gray, careful pallor of someone who had not stood in daylight for two years. But her eyes were the same as they had always been, quick and amused and missing nothing. "Tell me everything. Sit. Tell me while I eat."

Mieke pulled the shelving almost closed behind her, leaving a gap the width of a hand so that she would hear Herman if he whistled. She sat on the end of the cot.

"The trains have stopped," she said.

Sara's spoon paused halfway to her mouth.

"All of them. The railwaymen walked off yesterday because the government in London told them to, on the radio. They want the Germans to have no way to move soldiers to the fighting. The British have come down by parachute at Arnhem. Everyone in the bread queue this morning said we'll be free in a week."

"A week," Sara said slowly.

"Mrs. Timmer downstairs says by Sunday. Mr. Vink says by Christmas, and he says it in the voice he uses when he thinks people are being foolish."

Sara ate a spoonful of soup, and then another, and Mieke watched her try not to hope. It was a thing she had seen her do many times. In the summer of 1942, when the call-up letters came for Sara's parents and her younger brother, Daniel, and the Polaks packed one suitcase each, Sara had hidden in the linen cupboard of a neighbor's flat while her family walked to the assembly point. She had not heard from them since. Every rumor that came down the coal stairs, she held for a moment in her face, the way you might hold a coin up to the light to see whether it was real, and then she put it away.

"Then I suppose I'll be eating carrot soup at a café table by Christmas," Sara said. "I'll order two bowls and send one back because it isn't as good as yours."

"It's my mother's soup."

"Then I'll send it back because it isn't as good as your mother's." She finished the bowl and wiped it clean with her finger. Then she reached into the shoebox and drew out three cards held together with a pin.

The catalogue cards were the reading room's own, printed in pale brown ink with lines for Author, Title, Shelf Mark and Notes. Sara had been the children's librarian here until the spring of 1941, when the order came that Jews could no longer be employed in public libraries. Mr. Vink had read the letter aloud to the staff in a flat voice and then gone into his office and shut the door, and when he came out his eyes were red. That had been the end of Sara's job. It had not been the end of Sara at the reading room. A year later, when the letters came for her family, Mr. Vink had built this wall over a single weekend, carrying the newspaper volumes down himself, and Sara had come to live inside it.

She wrote across the printed lines in a small, slanting hand, ignoring them completely. Mieke read the first card by the candle.

*The trains are holding their breath.*
*Somewhere a signalman has set down his lamp*
*and walked home to his kitchen,*
*and the whole iron country waits*
*to see what we will do with the quiet.*

She read the rest. It was about the stopped trains and the families who had been carried east on them before they stopped, and about a station clock that went on ticking with no one left to obey it. When she reached the end she found that she was holding her breath, too.

"Is it all right?" Sara asked. She always asked. She always looked, for a second, like the girl who had read stories aloud to the children on Saturday mornings and glanced up at the end of every page to see if they were still listening.

"It's more than all right."

"Herman will say the third line is too long."

"Herman always says the third line is too long."

"Then tell him the Thrush says it stays." Sara smiled, but she held Mieke's wrist a moment longer than she needed to. "Go on. Go and help him. And then go home, or your mother will think you've been arrested."

---

Mr. Vink locked the front door at half past seven. He came down the coal stairs one last time, a stout, white-haired man in the bow tie he had worn every working day for thirty years, and stood at the bottom with his hat in his hand.

"No more than two hundred," he said. "And put the cover back on that thing before you leave. If anyone comes down here in the morning, they must see a bindery and nothing else."

"Yes, Mr. Vink," Herman said.

"Mieke. Go home by the canal path, not the street."

"Yes, Mr. Vink."

He looked at them both over his spectacles, the way a schoolmaster looks at two pupils he suspects of planning something, though he knew exactly what they were planning because he had helped them plan it. Then he climbed the stairs, and they heard the side door shut and the key turn.

Herman went to the corner where the big standing presses lived, three iron giants with wheels on top, used for pressing books flat while the glue dried. Between the second and the third, under a canvas sheet and a stack of millboard, stood a fourth, smaller machine. It was a tabletop hand press that had belonged to Herman's father, a typesetter in Haarlem. In the summer Herman had taken it apart in his father's shed and carried it across the city in pieces, a few at a time, in a handcart under sacks of potatoes. Mieke's younger brother Jan had helped him with the heaviest parts. She tried not to think about that.

The type lived in a wooden case labeled BRASS FINISHING TOOLS, DO NOT DISTURB. Herman lifted it onto the bench, propped Sara's cards against the lamp and began to set the poem letter by letter, backward and upside down, his fingers moving faster than Mieke could follow.

"The third line is too long," he said after a while.

"The Thrush says it stays."

"The Thrush is a tyrant." But he left it.

Mieke cut paper while he worked. They used whatever they could find: the blank endpapers of books too damaged to repair, ruled ledger sheets turned over, once a whole ream of pale green paper that Mr. Vink had found in the attic and never explained. Each booklet was a single sheet folded twice to make eight small pages, sewn through the fold with one stitch of linen thread. On the front, above the first line of the poem, Herman printed one word: LIJSTER. Thrush. There was no name inside, no date, no place. That was the whole point.

When the type was locked into its frame, Herman inked it with a roller, laid a sheet on top, pulled the lever and peeled the sheet away. He held it up to the lamp, and they both read the poem again, black and sharp and real.

"Every time," Herman said quietly. "Every time, I think it can't be as good on paper as it is on her card. And every time it's better."

They worked until nearly eleven. Herman printed, Mieke folded and sewed, and the stack of finished booklets grew between them. Sometimes he hummed. He hummed badly, and he knew he hummed badly, and when she told him so he hummed louder. Once, reaching for the same sheet, their hands met over the ink, and neither of them moved for a moment. Then he said, "Sorry," and she said, "No, I—" and neither of them finished.

She had known Herman Wouters for two years. He had come to the reading room in 1942, when the old binder retired, a tall young man from Haarlem with a stammer that came back when he was tired and a way of handling books as if they might bruise. For a long time she had thought of him as part of the bindery, like the presses and the glue pot. She could not have said when that changed. Perhaps it had been the first night they printed together, in July, when he showed her how to sew the fold and stood behind her guiding her hands, and she forgot for a whole minute that there was a war. Perhaps it was later. She only knew that now she listened for his step on the stairs each morning, and that when he laughed at something she said, she carried it home with her like a coin in her pocket.

At eleven he covered the press and swept the type back into its case. He counted the booklets into her satchel, a hundred and ninety-six of them, and slipped the last four into the inside pocket of his own jacket. He always kept a few. For proofs, he said. For the record.

"Tomorrow they go into the returns?"

"Tomorrow and the next day. A few at a time."

It was the simplest part of the whole business, and the part that frightened her most. When a regular borrower brought back a novel, Mieke stamped it in at the counter. When the same borrower came the next week, she recommended another book, and inside that book, between pages one hundred and one hundred and one, there would be a Thrush. The baker's wife. The retired tram conductor, Mr. Kok, who read nothing but sea stories. The two schoolteachers who shared a flat on the Pretoriusstraat. They passed the booklets to people they trusted, and those people passed them on again, and somewhere far out of sight the poems were copied out by hand and the copies were copied. In August a woman had come in from Utrecht and asked in a whisper whether this was where the Thrush lived, and Mieke had said she didn't know what the woman meant. Afterward she had gone down to the bindery and been sick into the slop bucket.

People pinned the lines inside their cupboard doors, the woman from Utrecht had said. So that when they opened the cupboard for a cup or a plate, there it was.

Herman walked her to the side door. The alley was black, the blackout curtains drawn in every window. The air smelled of the canal and coal smoke.

"I could walk with you," he said.

"Two people out after curfew is twice as suspicious as one."

"That isn't how arithmetic works."

"It's how Germans work." She hitched the satchel higher on her shoulder. "Good night, Herman."

He didn't let go of the door. "Mieke."

"Yes?"

He seemed to be deciding something. In the dark she could see only the outline of him, the angle of his shoulders, the pale shape of his face. Then he put out his hand and touched her cheek, very lightly, with his thumb, where she knew there was a smudge of ink.

"You've got the Thrush on your face," he said. "Go home. Come back tomorrow."

She went home by the canal path, as Mr. Vink had told her to, and she did not remember a single step of it.