The girl turned. They looked at each other for a few seconds, astonished, and then ran toward each other, each of them needing to touch and hug her friend. The joy of their reunion made them laugh and cry at the same time. It was a while before they were able to talk.
“Milena! What on earth have you done to your hair?”
“Bart cut it for me.”
“Bart slaughtered it! He’s out of his mind!”
“No, not at all. I’ll explain everything. But what are you doing here? I can’t believe it.”
“I ran away from school with Milos. We followed you to the mountains.”
“The mountains? How far did you go?”
“To the mountain refuge.”
“The refuge — but why?”
Their words were tumbling over each other. There was just too much to say all at once.
“Milos wanted to rescue you both from the dog-men. It’s amazing how that haircut changes you! Only your eyes are the same!”
“Milos? Is he here too?”
“No. No, he has an injured leg. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I went to get help and meanwhile they caught him. The Phalangists . . . the police . . .”
Milena put a finger to her lips. “Hush, keep your voice down. You can tell me all about it somewhere else. What about Catharina?”
“Don’t worry — she’s not in the Sky anymore. Milos and I took her to her consoler, Emily — remember her? What about Bart? Where is he?”
“He’s here too, sleeping on the second floor. The men have the rooms down there.”
She had said men, not boys, as they would have said at school.
A door opened and a plump little woman appeared in the corridor, wearing a white apron like Milena’s.
“Hi, Kathleen!” she said in passing.
“Hi!” Milena replied. “This is my friend Helen. She’s just arrived.”
“Welcome to youth and beauty!” said the woman cheerfully, and she disappeared down the stairs.
“What did she call you?” asked the astonished Helen.
“She called me Kathleen, and you must do the same from now on.”
“I’ll never manage it! Where on earth did you fish that up for a first name?”
“It was a singer’s name, that’s why I chose it. I have to hide, you see — my face and hair, my name, everything. Are you working in the kitchens?”
“No, in the restaurant. Cleaning and waiting on tables.”
“Oh, what a pity. I’m in the kitchens. Mr. Jahn put me there specially so that people would see me as little as possible. Do you have an apron yet?”
“No.”
“Then get dressed quickly, and I’ll take you to the linen room to get one. It’s the first thing anyone does here, like getting our overcoats when we arrived at the school. Then we have breakfast down in the canteen.”
Less than ten minutes later, Helen, wearing a maid’s blue apron, was going downstairs with her friend. Milena, who already knew her way around, led her along the second-floor corridor and knocked softly three times at a door on the left.
“Surprise, Bart! Open up!”
The young man put his tousled head around the door and stared. “Helen! We’re all together again!”
“No, not quite,” said Milena, after a moment’s hesitation. “Milos ran away with her, but he was caught.”
Bart’s cheerfulness vanished at once. His face fell. “Caught . . . by the dogs?”
“No, by the Phalangist police.”
Bartolomeo closed his eyes for a second, and lowered his voice. “We mustn’t talk about it here. Let’s all three of us meet outside the cemetery tonight when the restaurant closes. Do you know where it is, Helen?”
“The cemetery? Yes, in fact it’s the only place I do know here.”
“See you this evening, then,” said Bart, ending the conversation as he closed the door of his room again.
Jahn’s Restaurant was really a vast canteen for the local factory workers. It was much larger than Helen had thought the evening before. The double doors didn’t open into the kitchens after all but into a second room full of tables, even larger than the first. Three boys were already busy putting back the chairs that had been perched upside down on wooden tables in this second room too.
“Do you know how many people can eat here at the same time?” Milena asked. “More than six hundred! You’ll see when mealtimes come — it’s like a huge party.”
“A lot of people must work in the restaurant, then?” guessed Helen.
“Three times too many!” said Milena, smiling. “Mr. Jahn hires everyone who’s ‘mashed potatoes for Napoleon,’ and there are a lot of us, I can tell you! But now we won’t talk anymore until this evening. Keeping quiet is the rule here.”
They went down to the basement in a service elevator that shook its passengers about like some kind of angry monster. Its heavy iron mechanism was visible through the glazed doors.
“The kitchens,” Milena said, when the lift reached the bottom of the shaft. They passed enormous cast-iron stoves and rows of copper saucepans hanging from the walls. “This is where I work, cleaning and preparing vegetables. Bart’s in the delivery area. He loads, unloads, and carries things, and he’s responsible for quite a lot of breakages. He’s really clumsy! And this is the staff canteen. We eat before the customers arrive every day. Come on in.”
She took Helen into an echoing room with a pleasant aroma of coffee and toast in the air. Over twenty people were eating breakfast already. Most of them were young, but some were older. There was much laughter and joking; baskets of bread were passed around, along with bowls of jam and steaming coffeepots.
“Sit here; you’ll be in good company.”
Helen let her friend move away and sat down beside a woman of about forty with dark, curly hair, wearing the maid’s blue apron. She had round cheeks and a slight squint in her left eye; Helen noticed it at once. The woman smiled at her kindly.
“Hello, my name’s Dora. Are you new?”
“Yes, I’m Helen. Do you work in the restaurants too, Miss . . . ?”
“I do, so I can show you the ropes. It’s not difficult. And please call me Dora.”
Later, Helen always remembered those first words they exchanged and the instant liking she felt for this woman: the sense of a secret affinity and the confidence she felt in her for no reason at all. And perhaps, she told herself, it wasn’t just chance that they met in a kitchen underground, a place where things were warm and went deep.
As they talked, she noticed that Dora had some difficulty in using her right hand. The fingers were oddly distorted and reddened at the joints, while her right thumb was permanently half bent.
Mr. Jahn put in a brief appearance. He said good morning to everyone with a sort of shy restraint, then drank some coffee standing up as his eyes wandered over his employees. When his glance met Helen’s, he made her a discreet sign that evidently meant, Everything all right? She replied in the same way: Yes, everything’s fine, and she did in fact feel hopeful.
The day passed at surprising speed. From eleven in the morning onward Helen felt as if she were caught up in a whirlwind. The two restaurant rooms filled up within minutes, and the noise went on until two in the afternoon. Luckily there was one set menu for everyone, so the customers didn’t have to choose what they ate. The waiters and waitresses, all wearing blue aprons, took what the kitchens sent up in dumbwaiters and shouted orders back down the megaphones fitted to the walls: “Ten starters! That’s right, ten!” or “Four main courses, please.”
Helen’s job was simple: she was responsible for a row of six tables. As soon as one of them was free again, she had to hurry to clear the dishes away and clean it. She often had to mop up a spilled jugfull of water, wash the floor, or sweep up the remains of a broken plate. Dora kept an eye on her all the time, helpfully showing her what to do.
As soon as her midday break came, Helen went to her room, fell on her bed, and slept like a log. She woke up just in time to go and eat in the canteen and begin the evening shift. When that was over, she had to help cleaning both restaurant rooms, and it was after eleven at night before she was finally able to hang her blue apron up behind the door of her room and leave Jahn’s Restaurant.