“It’s not cowardly,” Anne tells her, grateful for a glimpse of the old intimacy between them. “I can’t bear it either. I try to tell myself to accept it. That I’m nothing special. That so many people lost everyone. Lost everything. Yet . . . I can’t think . . .” She shakes her head. “I don’t know how to proceed. The sun comes up, and I fill the day, but it means nothing to me, and I want so desperately for that to change,” she hears herself saying. “I want so desperately to have a purpose. A real purpose.”
She swallows. When she thinks of purpose, she can’t help but think of her diary. Even if it was nothing but embarrassingly adolescent scribblings, it gave her purpose. It was the last innocent purpose that Anne had. “When we were in hiding, you remember, I had my diary,” she says. “I know everybody thought it was a silly thing. Just childish doodling. But to me it was so important. It was all I had that was truly mine.” And it’s true. When she thinks of her diary now, she still feels the loss of it physically. As if a limb is missing. An arm or a leg. “But it’s gone now, too.” All that work. All those words. She blinks at that reality and drags her fingers through her hair. “At times I feel so guilty. My mother is dead. My sister is dead. So many dead, and yet I mourn a pile of papers. What does that say about me, Bep?” she wants to know. “What does that make me?” And for an instant she is truly hoping for an answer. But all at once the gate is closed. Anne has bared too much of herself. Bep has a very odd expression patched onto her face. Her mouth is closed by a frown, but her eyes are hiding something electric.
“What?” Anne asks her. “What is it, Bep?”
Bep only shakes her head tightly. “I must get back to my filing,” she declares, and abandons the room.
Alone in the kitchen, Anne feels a thunderous wave of loss crash over her. She feels a greasy charge of nausea in her stomach and retches roughly into the sink, spitting bile over the remains of Bep’s cigarette. Anne has lost her ability to be among people. She must learn to protect herself from them better. To protect them from her. Opening the drain, she washes the mess away.
If you’re ill, you should tell Pim, Margot insists.
“Shut up,” Anne replies. “Can’t you just . . . shut up?”
Out in the corridor, Anne hears the low mumble of her father’s voice on the telephone. Mr. Kugler opens the office door and then blinks dully at the sight of her. “Anne?” is all he says, but she is on the move and does not respond. Where are you going? Margot dogs her. Anne, where are you going? Miep is depending on you to finish your work, she complains, but Anne slips past the inner office’s doors. She hears Mouschi on the stairs ahead of her. Anne, you have work to complete, her sister calls out. Mouschi glances back and then hops forward, shooting up the steep steps to a dust-shrouded landing above, where the windows are still plastered with opaque cellophane. Anne follows.
And then the bookcase confronts her.
Just a battered old thing, hammered together from scrap by Bep’s papa. A three-shelf construction jammed into the corner near the window, loaded down with sun-bleached ledgers, their labels peeling, leaving crusty glue stains. Above it an old map hangs, tacked to the floral-print wallpaper.
But what remain hidden are the latch and the iron hinge. What’s hidden is the wooden door behind it. All one need do is tug the concealed cord that lifts the latch and the bookcase will swing open, because it’s not a bookcase. It’s a gateway.
Mouschi curls around her ankle with a quiet purr as her hand reaches out. Her fingertips brush the rough wood. She stares at the shelf as if she can see through it, but then a voice startles her and her hand snaps back.
“Anne?”
It isn’t Margot, it’s Pim. Her father is frozen halfway up the steps, gazing at her with quiet concern. Kugler must have alerted him that his daughter had strayed from the office area. She glares wildly as he approaches her on the landing. “Anne,” he says again, but then stops. Something in him takes a step back, she can see it. “You know,” he tells her with a gentle distance in his voice, “there’s nothing up there any longer. The Germans stole everything. Miep says they pulled a moving van up to the door and cleaned everything out. Completely. Not a tack remains.”
Anne stares at the bookshelf, then back at her father. “Have you gone up there?” she asks.
His eyes empty. “Yes.”
Mouschi meows drowsily in front of the bookshelf. “I want to go up, too,” she says.
“No, Anne. Are you sure?”
Her jaw clenches as she steps forward. The hinge behind the bookcase still works. She hears the drab clank of the latch as she tugs the cord. Then the case swings forward as if it’s floating, and she stares at the door hidden behind it. Slate-green paint. Her hand is on the doorknob, and as the door opens, Mouschi peeks in but then shoots away, retreating down the stairs, leaving Anne alone to peer into the short hallway. She bends quickly to snatch a small bean from a crack in the floorboards, clutching it in her fist. It was always Peter’s job to haul the heavy sacks of dried beans they stored here up to the kitchen, and she’d been pestering him about something, just for fun, as he huffed away, when the seam split on a forty-five-kilo sack. It sounded like thunder as a tidal storm of brown beans came roaring down the steps, scattering into every crevice. Anne was standing at the bottom of the stairs, up to her ankle socks in dry beans, blinking back at the shock stamped on Peter’s long, boyish face. Then suddenly he erupted into a gale of pure, unsullied laughter. It became a house sport afterward to find one or two slippery beans left behind after the cleanup.
Stepping into the hallway, she approaches the room to the left of the stairs. Hand on the doorknob, she shuts her eyes as she opens it. With her eyes closed, she can see it as it was. The mash-up of furnishings. The patchwork curtains that Pim and she had sewn by hand. The worn throw rug. This was the communal living room during the day and the bedroom for Mummy and Pim at night. For Margot, too, after the great tooth yanker Pfeffer arrived to steal her sister’s bed and force her to sleep on a folding cot. On one side stood their mother’s bed with the pale cream crocheted throw under the heavy walnut shelving. Mummy always kept her shoes under the bed, and Anne would have to crawl under to fetch one when it was accidentally kicked back too far. After Mummy’s bed came the black stovepipe, followed by the table near the window with the embroidered cloth and mismatched chairs. And then came the wobbly old bed where Pim slept, its brass reddened with tarnish. When the English bombers arrived, Anne would run to Pim’s bed in terror, a child in search of sanctuary. Never to Mummy’s bed. She can see Mummy now in her mind’s eye, arranging the bedclothes in the morning, her pine-green cardigan threadbare at the elbows, her hair dulled by wisps of gray pinned into a bun at the back of her head. Anne feels a surge of joy at the memory, but a joy contaminated by loss and guilt. How blind she was to her mother’s true courage and love. How foolish she was to have wasted so much time arguing. She had written such terrible, critical things in her diary in anger but had never thought to ask for Mummy’s forgiveness, not even in Birkenau. In Birkenau it was hard for her to think of forgiveness, only survival. If only she had the chance now to open her eyes and find Mummy looking back at her.
But when Anne’s eyes open, no one is there. There is nothing left. Only unswept floorboards, peeling paint on the window frames. She can hear the mice skittering away from her intrusion. Gloom drapes the room. The rags she and Pim had patched together those first days in hiding still shroud the windows. With a sweep she pulls them down, permitting the daylight to penetrate the room for the first time in years. She lets them fall to the floor and brushes off her hands.
The door to the next room stands open. This was her room. The room she shared with the eighth member of their household of onderduikers: le grand dentiste Pfeffer. Two lumpy beds, a meter apart, hers extended by a chair so her feet wouldn’t stick out. A hook on the back of the door for her robe and nightclothes. A chair and a narrow
wooden desk, and oh, how she had battled with that stuffy old bag Pfeffer for the privilege of that desk. It was one of the ongoing wars of the household. A battle so frustrating that she cannot seem to spare sympathy for Mr. Pfeffer’s shadow in the crowd of dead memories that trail her. She thinks of the smirk of disapproval on the old fart’s face and wants only to smack it away. When he wasn’t shushing her or criticizing her, he was commandeering her precious desk space for his so very essential “work,” the study of the Spanish language. Anne can still see him, his trousers yanked up to his chest, wearing a red dressing jacket and black patent-leather slippers, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose as he frowned, hunched over his orange-and-white-striped Spanish grammar, Actividades Comerciales, in the shrunken pool of light from her desk lamp. His lips moving in a whisper as he conjugated verbs. Me gusta el libro. Te gusta el libro. Nos gusta el libro.
It’s your arrogance, Margot tells her. Her willfulness. She cannot forget. She cannot forgive.
But stepping into the narrow oblong space, she feels tears chilling her cheeks. The wallpaper is brown with water stains, and dust floats in the light that penetrates the filmy windows. In hiding she had pasted her postcard collection on the wall alongside the pictures of film stars she’d scissored out from issues of Cinema & Theatre. Deanna Durbin and Charles Boyer. Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. She had adored movie idols and the European royal families. A young girl’s infatuation with glamour. Incredibly, they have survived, these pictures. Some torn. Some ruined by splotching from roof leaks, but still here. She had traded with her friend Jacqueline for a postcard of the young princess of England. A pretty little girl smiling over the legend H.R.H. THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH OF YORK.
Once these pictures afforded Anne comfort, but now they mean nothing. She turns to the empty spot where her writing desk once stood. A rickety wooden table with a shelf and a gooseneck lamp. She recalls the sound of the chair scuffing the floor as she tucked her knees under the desk. Recalls the hard grain of the wood beneath her paper. Recalls how the desk wobbled slightly as she leaned her elbow on it. But mostly she recalls the deeply nurturing satisfaction she felt as she wrote, netted by the yellow lamp glow. The scratching of the nib of her fountain pen. The scrambling release to spill herself onto the paper.
A floorboard creaks, and she’s back in her empty present. It’s Pim. He steps up beside her, and his arm encompasses her shoulder. For a moment she permits this false comfort.
“Anneke,” he says, as if he’s about to speak some difficult words, some disclosure of memory. “There’s something. Something I should tell you,” he begins, but whatever it is, she doesn’t want to hear it. The weight of his arm is confining, and she breaks away. Wipes her eyes. The next door leads to the washroom and the delft-blue commode in the WC. The porcelain sink with its brass taps still shiny from use. The large mirror hangs above it. She avoids its dark reflection and climbs the tall steps to the next floor, listening to the sound of her heels on the wooden steps, and enters the kitchen. There’s a deep sink with a battered copper bottom and a goose-neck faucet. A long countertop below a few tiers of shelving.
When her father appears on the threshold, she blinks wildly at him, then turns away. “Do you remember the strawberries, Pim?” she asks, her voice strained by a manic joy over the memory.
“Yes,” he replies quietly.
“Bushels of strawberries.” How they all crowded the dining-room table, laughing as they cleaned piles of vivid red fruit, popping the fresh sweetness into their mouths. “I can almost smell them,” she says, and feels herself smile. But then the smile simply floats away from her.
At night this room was where the van Pelses slept. Peter’s parents, Hermann and Auguste. Putti and Kerli. He was a businessman, Mr. van P., but there was something rough about him, like unvarnished wood. He had a talent, though. He could name any spice, no matter how exotic, blindfolded, with only a whiff. And what can be said about Auguste van Pels? She liked to flirt and argue, both. Always ready to praise Pim’s gentlemanly behavior and to go at it with Mummy about whose linen was being stained or china chipped. In hiding, she had begged so pitifully to keep her furs when her husband gave them to Miep to sell for food and cigarettes.
A short breeze clatters past the windowpanes. “We found Mrs. van Pels at Belsen,” Anne says, staring at the empty room. “Margot and I.” And for a moment she can see the woman, emaciated, all the happy conniving and farcical self-pity starved out of her. “She did her best to look after us.”
“Well.” Pim nods, his voice dropping into a pit. “For that I am grateful to her.”
“She vanished, though. It was easy to do at Belsen. Do you know what happened to her?” Anne is aware that Pim has written letters, visited many offices. Obtained copies of camp records through the International Red Cross. She knows that he has become the repository for obituaries, but she hasn’t asked for a single detail until now.
“She died,” he tells her, “probably on a forced march to a camp in Bohemia.”
Anne turns her ear to Pim, but not her eyes. “And her husband?”
She hears her father exhale.
“I was with Hermann van Pels in Auschwitz up until his death,” he says dimly. “I tried hard to keep his spirits up, but it was no good. He injured his thumb on a labor Kommando and made the foolish mistake of requesting lighter duty, but really he had already given up by then. The next day a selection claimed him. All I could do was watch as he was marched away toward the Krematorien.”
Anne nods. People who simply gave up. Her fist clenches around the dried bean in her hand. She passes through the next door to the cramped enclave where Peter van Pels made his bed. She is halted for an instant by the emptiness of the spot but then moves toward the ladder leading up to the attic. She can hear the concern in her father’s voice as he calls after her, but she does not care if the floor is unsafe or the ladder too rickety. In the attic there is nothing but dust and rot and debris to greet her. A rusty set of bedsprings, a few forgotten tins of UNOX pea soup, a pile of moldering barrel slats. Then through the dirty window she sees it. The horse chestnut tree. Its broad old branches, as tough as history, listing calmly in the breeze. A heartbeat swells in her breast. She feels, perhaps, that the tree can recognize her. That its leaves are whispering their grief, too.
The noise of Pim’s ascension intrudes behind her. “Anne,” she hears him call, but she simply gazes at the tree’s rustling branches.
“And Peter?” she asks him with a lifeless voice. “What became of Peter?” For a moment she remembers the two of them curled up together on the divan here in the attic. She remembers the athletic beat of the boy’s heart as she rested her head against his chest, his arm hooked around her shoulder as the leaves of the horse chestnut tree gently trembled.
Mauthausen-Gusen. According to Pim that is the name of the camp in Germany where Peter died after the mof evacuated Auschwitz. “I begged him to stay with me,” Pim says. “Begged him to stick it out in the infirmary barracks until the Red Army came. The Russians were so close. We could hear the boom of their artillery.” But Peter was headstrong. Even Auschwitz hadn’t cured him of that. He wouldn’t stay. “Of course, it was very easy to believe that the SS would simply murder everyone they didn’t evacuate.” Pim shrugs dimly. “Very easy to believe. Just as it was very easy to believe that compared to where we were, anything was preferable.”
Anne stares. “He never liked to sit still for too long in one place,” she says.
Pim nods. “I’m sorry, Anneke.”
“Sorry?”
“I know that you had feelings for the boy in a special way,” he says.
But Anne only shakes her head dully. “I thought for a while that I loved him,” she says. “But that’s a feeling that’s hard for me to imagine now, Pim.”
Her father leans against a wooden post, tall and lanky. The daylight is as soft as ashes, a spongy light that a
bsorbs all brightness. Vast, full-bellied clouds scud across the sky. “Your mother was so worried,” he says, “that something improper would happen between you and Peter up here. Unsupervised.”
Anne narrows her eyes. “Nothing did happen. Not really.” She wipes tears from her cheek thoughtlessly. “It’s so strange, Pim. I think that’s why I—” she starts to say but then shakes her head. “It’s hard to explain. I think that’s why I feel such grief over the loss of my diary.”
“Grief?” Pim’s posture stiffens at the shoulders, and his eyes narrow with a quizzical distress. “You feel grief?”
Anne shrugs, embarrassed. “It may sound ridiculous. It was scribbling on paper. I know that, and I know it sounds terribly absurd, and perhaps even terribly selfish. But ‘grief’ is still the word for what I feel. Maybe it’s because if my diary had not been destroyed, they would all still be alive to me in some way. Not just in my memory but on the page.”
Pim does not interrupt his gaze but expels a heavy breath. “Anne. There’s something I must tell you,” he says. “But I don’t know how to begin. So I suppose the only way forward is to simply say it.”
But before he can speak another word, there are footsteps below. Mr. Kugler calling Pim’s name with an urgent tone. Pim crosses over and peers down the attic’s ladder. “Mr. Kugler?”
“My apologies for interrupting, but . . . but there’s a gentleman for you on the telephone.”
“A gentleman?” Pim sounds puzzled and a bit irritated.
“Concerning the issue we were just discussing. I’m afraid it’s rather essential that you speak with him.”
Annelies Page 14