Annelies

by David R. Gillham

  “Anne.” Her father tries to interrupt, but she won’t allow it.

  “If it was God who has given us life, Pim, then where was he at Birkenau?” she demands. “Where was God at Bergen-Belsen?”

  Her father raises his palm as if to deflect her words. “Anneke.”

  “The only thing God has given us, Pim, is death.” She feels the horror erupting inside her. “God has given us the gas chambers. God has given us the crematoria. Those are God’s gifts to us, Pim. And this,” she declares, exposing her forearm to the mirror’s reflection. This is his mark.” The indelible blue defilement stains her forearm. A-25063. The number that replaced her name. Sometimes she still feels the sting of the tattoo needle that etched it into her flesh. Sometimes she can still feel the ink burn under her skin. It was so obscene. A woman in stripes with a green triangle wielding the needle. So impossible to believe in what was actually happening to her. “God has taken our lives away, Pim. He’s stolen them like a thief.”

  And now her father is only nodding rhythmically, eyes shut tight. When he opens them, he takes a gulp of air as if he has just escaped drowning. His face in the mirror pales with loss and fear. “Yes, Annelies,” he says, “it is impossible to believe that God has chosen life for us. Chosen you and me among so many others who died. It’s utterly impossible to comprehend, yet that is precisely what we must believe,” he tells her, “if we are to survive.”

  Silence is all Anne can offer him.

  * * *

  • • •

  The morning is bright and sharp as glass as they travel to the office. Her father keeps up a brisk pace as they walk to the tram. He is carrying a leatherette portfolio under his arm, a gift from Miep and her husband, Jan, as a replacement for the one stolen by the SS Grüne Polizei. They walk quickly and silently up the Waalstraat to the broad lanes of what had been the Zuider Amstellaan but is now the Rooseveltlaan, the new name painted across a large wooden signboard. People swarm the sidewalks with the quick pace standard to the Dutch, but many of them have their heads bent downward.

  Pim’s companies survived the war through a bit of a bureaucratic shell game, so now, after returning from Auschwitz barely more than a bag of bones, he can still sell pectin to housewives to make jam and spices to butchers for making sausages. Sales have plummeted, but Pim is not pessimistic. Oh, no, not Pim. Housewives may not yet have fresh fruits to preserve, but there’s always a market for spices, and in any case it’s only a question of time before the economy picks up. A year. Maybe two. “We can survive a year or two, don’t you think?” he asks Anne, but does not appear to expect her to answer. “A year or two is not so bad.”

  There’s a crowd of people waiting on a traffic median in the center of the Rooseveltlaan. Some of the town’s trams are actually up and running again. The new GVB has managed to scrape up enough functioning cars to run limited service, in the mornings and afternoons, though the carriages are appallingly overcrowded and slow. Tramlijn 13 grumbles to a halt in front of the solemn crowd that’s gathered. Anne and her father must elbow their way aboard, but shoving is a lesson learned at the camps by young and old, and she finds some eerie comfort in the jam of people. All those tram riders crammed together. Her body is used to that kind of human packing from the cattle cars and barracks blocks and accepts it, going loose, boneless. Offering the crush of bodies no resistance. Her mind hangs blankly in her head like a stone. No thought as she inhales the smells of human grime and routine exhaustion.

  Pim has begun a miniature lecture on the subject of food. How expensive it has become. “Miep and Jan have been very generous with us. But food is still quite overpriced. Just look at the cost of beans, simple beans. I will contribute, of course, when Mr. Kleiman agrees that the business is strong enough for me to take a salary again. But until that time we must be careful not to consume more than our fair share, Anne.”

  Anne says nothing. She glares at the buildings as they pass in a flat conveyor belt of tall brick façades and ornate masonry. Terra-cotta red striped with ocher or white ermine like the sleeves of royalty.

  Maybe it’s her body that remembers. The rumble under her feet of wheels on a track. The mob of humanity compressed. She is suddenly reliving the transport that carried Margot and her to the heathland of Bergen-Belsen without their mother. She can smell the septic odor of boxcar transport, feel the cold sickness in her belly. Margot’s face was sticky with tears as they clutched each other. They had been separated from the men on the ramp in Birkenau, and the women were on their own now, utterly. But instead of their mother collapsing in despair, all of her fragilities had simply fallen away. She became a lioness, protecting and caring for her girls, even as starvation and exhaustion racked her body. Anne was shocked at the pride she felt for her mother. And the love. But now Mummy had become so sick that she’d been taken to the Women’s Infirmary Barracks, so that when the selection was made by the SS doctors, Anne and Margot had been herded without her into the boxcars to be transported deep into Germany.

  We’ll see her again, Anne kept repeating to her sister. After this is over, we’ll see her again.

  But even as she spoke the words, she could not believe them. Somewhere in the car, a woman was chanting the kaddish in a croaking voice. A prayer of affirmation and a prayer for the dead. The cadence of the woman’s voice merged with the clunking rhythm of the train wheels, and Anne knew that they had seen their mother for the very last time.

  Leaving the tramlijn, she trails her father’s pencil-thin shadow. They follow the path of the canal that flows between the tall, narrow brick faces of the old merchant houses. The street is lined with the skinny iron bollards bearing the trio of St. Andrew’s crosses. Little Ones from Amsterdam, they’re called. Amsterdammertje. When they were small, she and Margot would play a game, chasing each other through the rows, pretending that they were dodging a mouthful of teeth owned by some great dragon about to chew them up. She thinks of this as if she is remembering a fairy tale she once read, instead of a piece of her life.

  Pim natters on about the length of the walk, tapping the dial of his wristwatch. She has noticed that on those occasions when they’re alone, her father drums up some sort of efficient chatter about the schedule of street trams, the scarcity of spices, or the price of substitute ingredients. Anne tastes something foul at the back of her mouth.

  “I can’t do this, Pim,” she says.

  “Anneke, please. It’s all right. It’s only a building. Just an old building. You’ll be fine once you get inside.”

  But Anne is shaking her head. “No. No, I won’t be.”

  “Anne.” Her father speaks to her softly. “Think of our friends. Our friends who cared for us so well while we were in hiding. Think of Bep and Mr. Kugler, not to mention Miep. They’re all there waiting for you, Anne. They’re all so excited to have you back with them. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you?”

  Anne stares darkly, as if their disappointment might be something to see hanging in the air. The truth is, she fears that they will all smell death on her the moment she steps into the office.

  “Shall we go on, then?” her father wonders.

  Tightly, she nods her acquiescence.

  “That’s my girl,” Pim tells her. “That’s my Annelies.”

  It rained the night before. A drenching downpour, drumming against the window glass and the roof tiles. But the sky is clear this morning and crisp. Sunlight lifts the faces of the old Grachtengordel canal houses into sharp, clean relief against the blue, rain-scrubbed sky. Those neat façades of pastel brick take the sunlight like paint. Anne gazes at them as she walks. Their scrolls and flourishes still stolidly thrifty in their adornments after three hundred years.

  Closer. They’re getting closer to the last home she’d known. Crossing the bridge arching the Leliegracht, Anne feels her stomach lurch, and a passing cyclist scolds her when she vomits greenish bile into the gutter.
Pim hurries back with a handkerchief for her to wipe her mouth. “Only a little way farther. A few more minutes,” he tells her. “Breathe deeply,” he instructs, and she does. “Are you ready to keep going?”

  Anne swallows. But she nods again, though she knows quite well that she is not ready. A few minutes pass until her father slows and removes a key from his coat pocket. Anne steps to the edge of the pedestrian walk and stops. Facing the set of battered and dingy wooden doors, her feet stick to the brick pavement. There is nothing extraordinary about the face of Prinsengracht 263. It is modest, unembellished. The address placard is still in place. The names of the businesses are stenciled on one of the warehouse doors in block letters. A board has been tacked over the hole that was kicked in by burglars while they were still in hiding.

  The restored carillon of the Westertoren chimes clearly. The same clang that punctuated their days in hiding. She had come to rely on them for their continuity, until the Germans removed the bells and melted them down for their bronze. On the sunny morning of their arrest, the belfry was silent as they were loaded into the rear of a dark green police lorry. No clarion chime as eight fugitive onderduikers were hauled away. The Gestapo had placed a bounty on Jews in hiding. Seven and a half guilders a head, half a week’s pay for most Dutch workers, though Miep says that by the war’s end the bounty had risen to as high as forty a head, paid to anyone willing to repeat a rumor or betray a secret. Anne wonders, rather distantly, about who betrayed them. How much they were paid? Was it someone they knew? Before this moment their betrayal had felt fated to her, part of an inescapable outcome. This is the first time she has wondered about a person with motives. But then her mind jumps, as it often does now, as her father has opened the door to the high office stairwell and is peering with concern in her direction. “Anneken?”

  Anne stares at the impossibly steep steps leading upward from the open door and then asks a question that feels both terrible and matter-of-fact. “When you thought I was dead, Pim, were you relieved?”

  Her father flinches as if she has struck him in the face. “Anne,” he manages to say. She is pleased to have hurt him, as if inflicting this wound can in a small way compensate for all the wounds she herself has suffered.

  “I think you must have been a little relieved. I know I was never easy. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if Margot had lived instead?”

  Her father continues to stare at her with blank alarm. “Anne, that you could say such a thing.”

  But Margot, too, seems to be interested in an answer to Anne’s question, for she has appeared beside the open door, dressed in the pastel blue shift that she so often wore during their years in the hiding place. Mummy had taken it in so that Margot could fit into it, which made Anne jealous, because everyone knew that particular shade of pastel blue looked much better on her than on her sister. She tries to forgive Margot for wearing it now. “Isn’t it true, Pim?” she asks.

  Her father advances on her. For a moment he glowers, gripping his briefcase, and then his finger pokes the air sharply. “Never say this,” he commands, his eyes flooded by a terrified fury. “You must never ask such a question again. Do you understand me, Anne? Never.”

  Anne gazes back at him. She feels empty. Her father’s anger sags, and his eyes are awash with pity. He grips her tightly enough to squeeze the air from her, and slowly she returns the embrace. He smells of a dab of cologne. She can feel the light stubble on his cheek, after he’d shaved with a dull razor blade. She can feel his bones through his coat. Margot maintains her questioning gaze, asking Anne when she will tell him the truth.

  * * *

  • • •

  Prinsengracht 263 has suffered through a long war, too. Its paint is peeling in shreds. The sleek layered finish on the doors has been scoured away by five years of Dutch weather and five years of German occupation without paint or varnish for repair. She waits for her father to step into the building first. “They’re all so thrilled to have you here. Really quite thrilled,” he assures her as they climb the leg-breaking Dutch stairs, her father having assumed the role of the Unblinking Optimist. He opens the door, its frosted window stenciled with the word KANTOOR. Anne hears the chairs scrape and the voices rise happily in the light and airy space. Mr. Kugler lopes in from his office on the other side of the alcove. He is a tall man, Mr. Kugler, with sloping shoulders, a jar-shaped head, and valiantly melancholy eyes. He clasps Anne’s hand in both of his and kisses her like an uncle on the cheek. “So wonderful,” he tells her in a heavily heartfelt voice. “So wonderful.” Anne feels oppressed. But then she sees Bep. Bep—Anne’s darling Bep. She is thinner, her face sharper. She offers Anne a short, timid hug and a smile weighted by trepidation, eyes widened by the pair of rounded eyeglasses she still wears. Anne is confused. Is she now so frightful that her friend cringes at the sight of her? Miep’s earnest embrace, on the other hand, is still too dangerous, still too alarmingly maternal, so Anne quickly breaks it off. A dusty light is filtering through the high, unwashed window marked with adhesive patterns from the tape used as protection against flying glass after a bomb blast. The room smells of the cast-iron coal stove in the corner, which, starved of coal, only whispers a rumor of heat.

  Throughout this scene Pim has been standing aside clutching his briefcase, his wide-sweep fedora on his head, his baggy raincoat hanging on him as if he were a scarecrow, gently beaming with approval. But he takes his first opportunity to retreat, withdrawing to his private office down the corridor past the coal bin. A moment of awkwardness ensues as Miep sets Anne down at a desk with instructions about how to evaluate piles of papers. Office work after Auschwitz. The dry little details. Anne must struggle to focus. Really, she’d rather be breaking up greasy batteries, sticky with silver oxide. Really, she’d rather be hauling the barracks shit bucket. This is too clean. She repeats the details of her instructions back to Miep, who nods. “Yes. Absolutely correct,” Miep tells her with obvious satisfaction.

  Anne catches Bep’s gaze for an instant, but Bep’s eyes quickly drop.

  * * *

  • • •

  Throughout the afternoon Anne crinkles papers. She wonders if the person who denounced them worked for the company, or even works there still, the name of the betrayer printed on one of these sheets she’s pushing around the desk, secretly mocking her. Mr. So-and-So the wholesale spice trader or Mr. Such-and-Such the freight master. Maybe him, maybe not. She sorts invoices this way and that way and makes a stack here and another one there. But then she gets lost in the blunted light streaking the dirty windowpanes. Unlike the Germans, the Dutch do not believe in shutters. They believe in open windows that speak to the world. Honest citizens have nothing to hide and have no need to shutter their windows. But the grime of occupation has made Dutch windows opaque.

  Don’t rush so, you’ll make mistakes, Margot tells her.

  Anne ignores her.

  I’m sure those invoice copies are not in the proper order.

  She hears a long, plaintive mew and looks down at a scrawny black tomcat. “Mouschi!” she exclaims in utter amazement, and scoops up the slinky little thing in her arms with a desperate pulse of need. Peter’s cat alive, alive. “Mouschi,” she purrs against the soft peak of the cat’s ear. “Mouschi, little Mouschi, you sweet, sweet boy . . .”

  “For a while one of the salesmen took him home for his wife,” Miep says, and gives the skinny tom a playful rub on his bony cat noggin. “But she sent him back because he wouldn’t stop scratching the upholstery, the little devil.”

  “Of course he was scratching the upholstery. He knew that it wasn’t really his home.” Anne squeezes Mouschi against her breast and rests her cheek on his head, but she must be squeezing him too tightly, because the cat suddenly squirms free and pounces to the floor, padding away, leaving Anne with a sickly feeling of loss. Anne thinks of her own little Moortje, her beloved tabby, to whom she was so devoted. But Pim had insisted that sh
e leave Moortje behind when they went into hiding. Anne had sobbed but had done as she was told. And then Anne was so livid when she found that Peter had been permitted to bring his cat to the hiding place that she absolutely hated the boy. But now here is Mouschi again. At least God has deigned to spare a sooty black little mouser.

  * * *

  • • •

  She leaves her desk to find Monsieur Mouschi a saucer of milk in the kitchen to coax him back to her, but instead she finds an unusual sight. Bep with a lit cigarette in her hand. “Bep?”

  Bep reacts as if she’s been caught in mid-crime, and there’s a dash to extinguish the cigarette by tossing it into the sink and twisting open the tap.

  “Bep, I’m sorry,” says Anne. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. Really, you don’t have to hide a cigarette.”

  “Mr. Kugler doesn’t like smoking in the kitchen. And I really have no taste for tobacco. It’s just that sometimes it calms my nerves.” She clears her throat. Once Bep’s hair was a stylishly fluffy affair, which required extensive treatment by a hairdresser on the Keizersgracht. But now her hair is flat and lackluster. Her complexion is like clay. But more than her appearance has been altered. Where once there was warmth, there is now only this cold distance between them.

  Anne says nothing at first, wondering what has changed. She can summon up only one possibility. “Bep,” she asks, “do you hate me now?”

  Bep responds as if she has been singed by a spark from the stove. “Hate you? Of course not, Anne. How could you think . . .” she starts to say, “how could you possibly think . . .” But her words fray to nothing.

  “It’s only that you’ve barely spoken to me all morning. Hardly a word.”

  Bep shivers. Shakes her head at the air. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I seem distant,” she whispers. “But the truth is, it’s all too much. I simply can’t bear any more. I prayed to God for such a long time to make things right, but look what happened. Look what you went through in those terrible places,” she says. “Your mother and sister. The van Pelses. Mr. Pfeffer. All gone. I have such horrible nightmares about it. It’s too much, Anne. I know that sounds cowardly and unfeeling. But it’s just all too much.”