Annelies

by David R. Gillham

  4

  THE HOUSE BEHIND

  The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland.

  . . . Up to now our bedroom, with its blank walls, was very bare. Thanks to Father—who brought my entire postcard and movie-star collection here beforehand—and to a brush and a pot of glue, I was able to plaster the walls with pictures. It looks much more cheerful.

  —Anne Frank, from her diary, 11 July 1942

  1944

  The Achterhuis

  Prinsengracht 263

  Rear Annex

  OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS

  No one would ever suspect there were so many rooms behind that plain gray door. There’s just one small step in front of the door, and then you’re inside. Straight ahead of you is a steep flight of stairs. To the left is a narrow hallway opening onto a room that serves as the Frank family’s living room and bedroom.

  She is sitting on the steps, alone. Thankful to be alone to write. Knees together with her diary on her lap. Her eyes lift from the page in thought. She gazes at the door that separates her from the remainder of the world.

  If you go up the stairs and open the door at the top, you’re surprised to see such a large, light and spacious room in an old canalside house like this. It contains a stove (thanks to the fact that it used to be Mr. Kugler’s laboratory) and a sink. This will be the kitchen and bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. van Pels, as well as the general living room, dining room and study for us all. A tiny side room is to be Peter van Pels’s bedroom. Then, just as in the front part of the building, there’s an attic and a loft. So there you are. Now I’ve introduced you to the whole of our lovely Annex!

  Yours, Anne

  There are eight of them in hiding now, fifteen months after the Frank family slipped off the map. Anne and her family have been joined by the spice expert Hermann van Pels, also known as Putti; his wife, Kerli; and their son, Peter; plus Miep’s dentist, the lofty Mr. Pfeffer, who makes it a crowd in more ways than one. In Anne’s opinion. In fact, most everybody is driving her crazy in one manner or another. She scribbles in her diary when she manages a few moments to herself.

  Mrs. van Pels is always saying the most ridiculous things, and her Putti is often exasperated. But that’s not surprising, because one day Kerli announces, “When this is all over, I’m going to have myself baptized” and the next, “As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to go to Jerusalem. I only feel at home with other Jews!”

  Time is measured in increments of fifteen minutes, punctuated by the Westerkerk’s bell tower. Fifteen minutes, followed by another fifteen minutes, followed by another, until hours pass into days and then weeks and months of dull routine, peeling bad potatoes, shelling peas, enduring the murky stink of confinement, the airless rooms, the plumbing problems, and, sometimes worst of all, enduring the burden of one another’s company. She’s often so very bored, even with herself. She apologizes to Kitty for all the “dreary chitchat” as her pen scratches across the page of her diary.

  Mr. Pfeffer makes up everything as he goes along, and anyone wishing to contradict His Majesty had better think twice. In Fritz Pfeffer’s home his word is law, but that doesn’t suit Anne Frank in the least.

  Meanwhile the war is heavily pitched around them. Allied bombers roar above their heads almost nightly, accompanied by the drumbeat of Boche flak guns. Last week the RAF dropped three hundred tons of bombs on Ijmuiden. Three hundred tons! British planes droned above them for an hour or more on their way to their target. But this Sunday there’s a break in the war’s thunder. It’s a quiet afternoon, and Anne and Margot have escaped the confines of their onderduikers’ hideaway and slipped down to their father’s private office to address the mounds of uncompleted office paperwork. There are no workmen in the building to hear them on a Sunday, so they can chat as they sort through the piles of business ephemera.

  “It’s a way to keep busy,” Pim explains, “only a bit of clerical labor. I think it’s the very least we can do for our helpers, don’t you? Give Miep and Bep a head start on their work? Without them where would we be?”

  Well, how can the girls possibly complain once Pim puts it like that? It is the women in her father’s office who’ve taken on the role of daily helpers. Miep and Bep. Of course, Pim’s good Dutch business partners, Mr. Kugler and Mr. Kleiman, manage the affairs of commerce to keep money in the coffers. But as far as managing the shopping, finessing the ration coupons, negotiating transactions with reliable grocers and butchers, and then lugging it all through the streets and up the steep, ankle-twisting Dutch steps, that is the women. It is the women who find a sweater or a skirt for Margot and Anne as they outgrow their clothes. It is the women who scrounge bits of soap or a container of tooth powder, who order correspondence courses to relieve boredom, who remember flowers on birthdays, who raise spirits and dispense hope.

  So to help them out, these women who risk their lives daily caring for those in hiding? How could Anne argue? She can’t. And even though she’d suffered through another bad headache in the morning, she joins Margot filing sales receipts from Pectacon. Boring. She’d rather be studying her French or her English. She’d rather be reading that biography of Catherine the Great. She’d rather be playing cards or teasing Peter, who maybe isn’t quite the dunderhead she’d first thought him to be and who actually has a very sweet smile. But this morning none of that is available to her. Only clerical drudgery, though at least it’s a break from the bickering of the adults. Mummy and Mrs. van Pels are at war again, this time over whose dishes are being chipped by whose careless handling.

  “Do you think Peter is handsome?” Anne asks. She has decided on a tone of idle curiosity for this question, as she has nothing at all invested in the answer. Do you think the moon might be made of green cheese, she might be asking, or do you think Peter van Pels might be handsome?

  “Handsome?” Margot gives her head a slight toss. “I suppose he’s not so bad-looking. He’s certainly strong,” she says.

  “But do you think he’s . . . I don’t know. Peculiar?”

  “I think he’s shy,” says Margot, stapling a stack of papers together. The ka-thunk of the stapler punctuates her reply. “But why are you asking my opinion?”

  A sideways glance. “Why? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who likes him.”

  Anne stiffens. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you like him.”

  “I never said any such thing.”

  “Oh, please. You don’t have to.”

  Anne swallows a breath of panic. Is it that obvious? “All I wanted to know—all I asked—is do you think he’s peculiar?”

  “Yes, a bit. But so are you.” Margot grins.

  “Ha, ha,” says Anne. “My sister is so humorous.”

  “And I do think he’s handsome. In a peculiar way.”

  Silence for a moment. Anne turns several of the invoices over in her hand. “So you’re not interested, are you?”

  “Interested in what?”

  “You know what.” She grabs the stapler and ka-thunks it down onto the corner of a stack. “In Peter,” she says.

  At this, Margot adjusts her glasses, pressing her fingers against the sides of the frames as she considers her options. “Well . . . now that you mention it. I suppose he is the only boy available. . . .”

  Anne’s voice drops. “Are you teasing me?”

  “Pfftt. Of course I’m teasing you. How could I possibly be interested in Peter van Pels? I’m a year older than him.”

  “So?”

  “So the girl can’t be older than the boy. It doesn’t work.”

  “But the girl can be younger than the boy. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Anne. Yes, that’
s what I’m saying. You have my permission.”

  “I didn’t ask for your permission. Your permission to do what?”

  “To pursue Peter if that’s what you want.”

  Anne pretends some small interest in the carbon copies of customer orders. “Mummy says it’s unladylike for a girl to pursue a boy.”

  Margot is frowning over her work. “And since when have you cared about what Mummy says? Since when have you cared about anybody and their opinions, other than yourself and your own?”

  Anne frowns, too. She keeps her faux attention glued to the pile of papers, but her eyes have gone damp. “That hurt my feelings,” she says.

  Margot looks up, distracted.

  “I do have feelings, you know, Margot. I know that everyone likes to think the opposite, but I do have feelings.”

  Margot’s face clears. “I’m sorry,” she tells Anne in a simple tone. “You’re right. That was a hurtful thing to say.”

  Anne shrugs and wipes her eyes. “Anyway. May we change the subject?”

  “Up to you,” Margot replies, getting up to address the filing cabinet.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s going to happen once the war’s over,” Anne announces. “And I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”

  Margot does not look up from her work at the filing cabinet. “Have you, now?”

  “Yes,” Anne confirms.

  “And?” Margot pauses to examine the paper in her hand before slotting it into place. “What’s the big surprise going to be?”

  “I’m going to be a famous writer.”

  Now a glance. “A famous writer?” her sister repeats.

  “You think I’m being ludicrous?”

  “No. I think you’re being you.” Silence. And then Margot closes the file drawer. “So what kind?”

  “What kind of what?”

  “What kind of famous writer?”

  “Oh, you know. The kind the world adores.”

  “Oh. That kind.”

  “Maybe a novelist,” Anne says with a more thoughtful tone. “Or a journalist. Who knows?”

  “An international success.”

  “That’s right. An international success, with flats in Paris, London, and New York, all three.”

  “Famous writers can’t live in the Netherlands?”

  “Not me. I intend to see some of the world.”

  “Mm-hm. Hand me that file folder, would you?”

  “Hand you?”

  “The file folder, Anne. You have the stapler on top of it.”

  “Oh,” says Anne. She removes the stapler and hands over the file.

  “Thank you.”

  A beat before Anne asks, “So what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “What are you going to do?” Anne doesn’t really expect her sister to answer this. Normally Margot is not one to pursue these what-if types of games. But to Anne’s surprise, Margot pauses in her work, at least long enough to give it a thought.

  “I think,” says Margot, “I think I would like to go to Palestine and study to become a maternity nurse.”

  Anne stops short. “Really?”

  “I haven’t said that before?”

  “If you have, I didn’t think you were serious. You want to go to the desert?”

  “Not all of Palestine is a desert, Anne.”

  “More of a desert than New York or London.”

  “So? Maybe I’m more interested in doing something for the good of our people.”

  Silence. Anne frowns at a stack of wrinkled invoices.

  “What?” says Margot.

  “Nothing,” Anne tells her. “It’s only, as usual, you’re the selfless one. Delivering babies in Zion for the good of the Jews.”

  “I’m not always the ‘selfless’ one.”

  “Compared to me you are.”

  “Well, maybe you can be a writer for the good of the Jews,” Margot suggests.

  Anne blinks, frowns slightly at the paperwork. A writer for the good of the Jews. To lift the Jews from the depth of their suffering and show them in the light that God has always intended them to be seen, as examples of goodness. Is that too grand a thing for a girl to imagine? “Maybe I can be,” is all she says.

  * * *

  • • •

  At supper she tests out her desires on the assembled onderduikers. That is, to live in a far-flung capital. To become a famous writer of some sort, adored by the world.

  “Oh, my,” Mrs. van Pels comments wryly. “Doubt she’ll be finding a husband anytime soon.”

  “Mother,” Peter complains. His hair is its usual tousled mess. But his face is growing thinner, more manly. His jaw hardening.

  “All I’m saying is the truth,” his mother replies with a sly wink. She is getting thinner, too, but from twenty months of dwindling food quality. Her face sags now. Her rouged lips look waxy. “A career girl,” she says with mocking significance.

  “You’ll have to learn better French if you intend to live in Paris,” Margot tells Anne with a thin whisper of superiority. “Votre français est plutôt atroce.”

  Anne replies sourly, “Aller manger un escargot, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Well, I for one am happy to hear that Anne has ambition,” her mother chimes in surprisingly. “Though, really, Anne. Paris? New York? Why should you need to go so far away? I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe to get away from constant criticism,” Anne says, more harshly than she intends to. It’s just that she’s so easily rubbed wrong by adults. Though now the table has gone silent, except for Her Majesty Kerli van Pels, who snorts at Anne’s cheekiness.

  “Well.” Mr. Pfeffer offers a snide look down his nose as he helps himself to more of Mrs. van P.’s overcooked potato casserole. “Not just a writer but a famous writer? Really?”

  “You find that so difficult to imagine, Mr. Pfeffer?” Anne snaps back.

  Pfeffer had been well groomed and a meticulous dresser when he first arrived. Now his collars and cuffs are frayed and his hair is a dismal swath of gray brushed carelessly back from his forehead. “Difficult?” he says mockingly. “It’s only that writers must possess talent, mustn’t they? By definition, that is, they possess talent for something other than making trouble.”

  Anne shoots to her feet, ready to shriek, but her mother is quick with a reprimand.

  “Anne. Sit back down,” she commands. Her face has grown tighter, her features more pronounced, as if someone has been slowly whittling away at her. “Donnerwetter, child, we’re in the middle of supper.”

  “So you’re just going to allow him to speak to me like that?” Anne demands to know.

  “Anneke, please. Sit back down,” Pim advises. “Let’s not upset everyone’s digestion.”

  Anne scowls but plops back down in her chair, pouting. Bep is seated beside her. She has joined the gang of onderduikers this evening for supper and looks up from her plate. “Well, I for one would love to see New York City,” she says.

  Mummy sounds puzzled by this. “Would you, Bep? Actually?” Perhaps she cannot imagine a young lady visiting so far from home. But Bep sounds eager.

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “I’ve dreamed about standing atop the tallest building in the world and gazing out at the horizon, high up as a bird.”

  “Good for you, Bep,” says Pim, always willing to be encouraging. “New York is really the most astonishing city I have ever known.”

  “Pim was in New York when he was a young man,” Anne explains happily. “When he was still a bachelor. He worked for a college friend, whose father ran a big department store. What was his name, Pim?” she asks. “I don’t remember.”

  “Straus. Nathan Straus. But his friends all called him Charley.”

  “Maybe we should plan on going there together, Bep,” Ann
e says, only too keen to plan the future. “Both of us could view the world from the top of a skyscraper.”

  “That would be wonderful, Anne,” Bep replies, but this draws a grouchy response from Hermann van Pels.

  “When I was a lad, my old man would have whacked me good with a rod if I were ever as mouthy as this one. So now you want Bep tangled up in your silly daydreams, too?” he grumbles. “That’s—”

  “They’re not silly,” Peter cuts in on his father’s grumping. “Anne is very smart. Very smart,” he defiantly declares, to which his mother responds with a snide grimace.

  “There’s an old saying, Anne, and I think it applies: You are smart, smart, smart—but you are a fool.”

  “Mum, that’s an awful thing to say,” Peter shoots back. “If Anne thinks she’s going to be a famous writer in New York or Paris or wherever, then that’s what’s going to happen,” he insists, prompting his father to roll his eyes.

  “And who are you? Mr. Gypsy Fortune-Teller?” his father wonders loudly, shoveling some stewed onion into his big mouth. A touch on his arm from his wife.

  “Kerli,” Mrs. van Pels reproves her husband lightly. “Let it go. They’re young. Let them have their folly.”

  “Excuse me! But I really can’t take another breath in this company,” Anne announces sharply, pushing up from the table, feeling her eyes wet as she abandons the room.