Pim’s sigh ends with a frown. “Ah. Yes. Yes, you’re correct. Thank you, Mr. Kugler.” Returning to Anne, he says, “I’m sorry. I must take this call.”
“But what were you about to say, Pim? What were you about to tell me?”
Pim’s expression turns circumspect. “We’ll talk about it later, Anne,” he assures her, his voice now gaining a velvety disinclination to say more. “I’m sorry, but I must go.” He pauses. “Please, don’t stay up here too long. The dust,” he insists. “It’s not healthy.”
* * *
Jan is working late again, past supper. The demands of the Social Service Bureau in a chaotic time, Miep explains, so it’s just them—Miep, Pim, and Anne—as Miep serves a tureen of thick beet soup. Pim is holding forth on an article he’s run across in newspapers. As the First Canadian Army liberated the western Netherlands, young women would try to communicate with friends and relatives in towns still under occupation by chalking messages on the sides of Canadian tanks. Pim finds this not only ingenious but very heartening, apparently. “That these girls should have such faith in the future,” he says with satisfaction. Anne doesn’t seem to notice the bowl of beet soup in front of her; instead she stares at Pim. Her father’s desire to leave behind the horrors they suffered is overwhelming. He is bent on returning to what he likes to call “ordinary life” and has no time to “belabor” the past. Anne finds this maddening.
“Anne, you’re not eating,” Miep observes.
Anne blinks. Stares down at the soup and then finishes it with steady strokes of her spoon. When she has sopped up the last traces of it with her bit of bread, she expels a breath. “So, Pim, who do you think betrayed us?” she asks, finally giving voice to the question that has been sparking about in her brain. Her tone is pointedly casual, but it’s a question designed to force the past into the present. Pim’s face goes blank. He rests his spoon on the edge of the bowl and enters a deep, momentary silence.
“I have no idea, Anne,” he says finally, and gives his head a single shake. “I really have no idea.” Only now does he meet her eyes, now that he has erected the wall of his response.
“You don’t think it was one of our warehousemen?”
“Possibly,” her father replies, now starting to stir his soup again with his spoon, signaling that he is finished with this topic.
“Mr. Kugler thinks it was the man who replaced Bep’s father as foreman.”
“He was troublesome, yes.” Pim nods without commitment. “Especially after he’d found the wallet Mr. van Pels had dropped in the storeroom. But we have no proof that he is the culprit.” He returns to his soup.
“Then what about the cleaning woman?”
Tapping the excess from his spoon against the rim of the bowl. “Who?”
“The cleaning woman told Bep that she knew there were Jews hiding in the building.”
“Anne,” says Miep.
“And how do you know about that?” her father inquires dubiously. “Did Bep tell you?”
“She told Miep,” Anne answers. “I overheard them in the kitchen.”
Miep frowns. “Anne, that was a private conversation.”
“A private conversation,” Anne repeats. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there should be anything private about this, Miep. Not about this particular subject. Do you think that Bep was telling the truth?”
“Of course,” Miep replies, her voice stiffening. “You know that Bep would never fabricate. Not about something so serious. How could you even consider?”
“How should I know what to consider? She’s stopped talking to me.”
“Yes, well, she’s having a very difficult time,” Miep says in Bep’s defense. “Please, you shouldn’t take it personally.”
“No? Hmm,” Anne says. “That’s an interesting point of view. I live through three concentration camps, but I shouldn’t take anything personally.”
“Anne,” Pim jumps in, but Miep stops him.
“It’s fine, Otto,” Miep assures him.
Pim disagrees. “No, it’s not, Miep.”
“Thank you,” Miep says, “but honestly, you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s true that I have no idea how Anne feels. I have no idea how either of you feel. After what you’ve suffered, I can only imagine.”
“Only you can’t imagine,” Anne points out. “So what do you believe happened, Miep? Do you believe it was the cleaning woman who telephoned the Gestapo?”
“Enough,” Pim finally decides. “Enough, Anne. Just because a charwoman who occasionally ran a vacuum over the office carpet had suspicions that she voiced to Bep, that doesn’t mean she was guilty of a crime. People gossip. Unfortunate things happened. The building was burglarized, for heaven’s sake—how many times?”
“Three,” Miep reports.
“Three times. Also, we made mistakes. Plenty of them, I’m sure. Windows were left open when they should have been closed. The front door was left bolted when it should have been unbolted. Curtains were peeked through in the middle of the day,” he reminds her adamantly. “After two years I have no doubt that there were many people who harbored suspicions. But we don’t have a shred of proof to indict any single one of them.” Her father raises his spoon to his lips and slurps efficiently. Anne knows he is trying to close the discussion. In one way this doesn’t surprise her. Pim is an expert at closing down conflict. But in another way it shocks her. How can he be so complacent? His wife died. His daughter died. His friends died. How can he simply sit there and slurp his soup?
“Why don’t you want to know, Pim?” she whispers, her voice a thin knife blade.
“Anne,” Miep breaks in again, but Pim raises his hand. He swallows and stares sharply into the hollow air.
“It will do no one any good,” he says finally. “Vengeance? Reprisal?” His eyes lift to Anne’s. They are heavy and darkly magnetic. “They only cause pain, Annelies. More pain.”
“So the guilty deserve no punishment? The dead deserve no justice?” Anne asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying that I will not devote a single moment of the life I have remaining to retribution. And as for the dead? We live well, we love each other, and we keep them alive in our hearts. That is the justice they deserve, in my opinion.”
Anne stares.
Margot is standing behind Pim, wearing her glasses, ready for bed, her hair brushed, dressed in a white, freshly laundered nightgown, just as their father must remember her.
That night Anne takes the Montblanc she had organized into her hand and touches the nib to the blank paper, producing a small dot of ink. But then the dot becomes a word, and the word becomes a sentence.
She once believed that being a writer would make her famous and that she would travel to the capitals of the world and be adored. Now she knows that this future is nothing but a fantasy. She will never be famous. She will never be adored. Her story is too badly poisoned by pain and death. Who could stand to read it?
14
THE TRUTH ABOUT DESIRE
I’m in a state of utter confusion: on the one hand, I’m half crazy with desire for him, can hardly be in the same room without looking at him; and on the other hand, I wonder why he should matter to me so much and why I can’t be calm again!
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 12 March 1944
1946
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Six months since Anne’s return
The snow comes, the snow goes. Anne watches the frost dissolve from the windowpanes as a weak, sickly spring arrives. The weather warms, and the grass greens. Amsterdam rumbles along with the clumsy efficiency of one broken wheel on the wagon, patched too many times.
At Pim’s insistence Anne is scheduled to appear at the office to help with th
e clerical work three afternoons a week. Also at Pim’s insistence, she has begun attending the De Keiser Meisjeslyceum, a school for girls in the Oud-Zuid. It’s not much more than an old brick pile, this place, with many of its windows cracked or boarded over, but Anne doesn’t care. She is indifferent to her studies. Sometimes Margot appears in class to set a good example with her attentive posture, but her lice-infested rags and boiling sores spoil the intent. In Anne’s mathematics class, her teacher is Miss Hoebee, a skinny Dutch mouse chalking numbers across a slate. But numbers make no difference to Anne. Algebra cannot hold her attention. At thirteen she was the Incorrigible Chatterbox who couldn’t keep from gabbing and had to write an essay entitled “Quack, Quack, Quack! Went Mrs. Quackenbush.” Now she simply falls into silences. To her, school is just another kind of prison camp.
There’s a Jewish girl in her class. Griet, who was passed off as Christian during the war. She can astonish Anne by reciting the Apostle’s Creed without a slip. Anne applauds as if Griet were performing a magic trick, which in a way she is. In the classroom Griet is as bored as Anne, but for different reasons. Griet has always hated school, she says, whereas Anne once loved it. After Birkenau, however, what is the importance of oblique angles? After Belsen what can the Pythagorean theorem mean to her? Anne watches Griet lazily doodling in her exercise book. Griet is not exactly brilliant, but Anne appreciates the girl’s instincts to change one’s nature when circumstances dictate.
* * *
• • •
Anne has organized a shell-shaped compact from one of her classmates, Hildi Smit, that obnoxious kattenkop, and used its soft pink puff to powder over the number on her forearm. She has considered more drastic solutions, such as staging an accident while cooking. But she also has no doubt that even as she might try to explain to Pim how the hot pan slipped and burned her skin, he would guess the truth and gaze at her with that sorrowful expression of sympathetic disappointment of which he is the master. And it doesn’t help that he treats his own tattoo as a kind of shrine, which he folds back his cuff to reveal as the holy relic of his survival.
* * *
• • •
“What are you doing?” Griet wants to know.
“Nothing,” says Anne, the notebook in her hands, finishing off a sentence with her Montblanc. They are outside, sitting on the short stone wall after dismissal.
“You’re always writing in that thing now,” Griet complains.
“Am I? Not that much.”
“Yes you are. All the time.” Griet does not like to write. She says it only makes her hand hurt. “What is it anyway?”
“It’s just . . .” Anne hesitates. Since she began to commit words to paper again, she’s been driven. Every night before sleep, every time she can steal a moment to herself, she is writing. Writing simply to write. “It’s just a diary. Nothing important.”
“And what are you writing about? Sex?” Griet inquires hopefully.
“Ha! Yes, since I’m such an expert on the subject,” says Anne, closing the notebook. Then she squints at Griet. What she likes best about her new friend is that she makes no demands on Anne. Griet does not require her to be thoughtful or patient or grateful. Their conversations are relaxing, mindless, curious.
“Have you ever?” Griet asks her.
“Have I ever what?”
“You know. Done it with a boy?”
“Nope,” Anne replies, closing her notebook and leaning forward on her knees. Sometime it’s so pleasurable to be frivolous. To pretend that she’s a young Dutch girl like any other. “Never even come close,” she says, thinking of Peter up in the attic. His damp lips, their clumsy touching, all very tame. But the memory stings her so strongly that she dismisses it. She knows there is a boy named Henk whom Griet has taken up with. She’s seen the two of them necking. “Have you ever?”
Griet frowns sheepishly. “Only sort of,” she confesses. “I’ve let Henk do some things. Touch me places. But that’s all.” Henk’s given her cigarettes and chewing gum and has even promised her a lipstick, since he claims that his older brother is in the black market. Also, he’s a goy! Maybe Griet’s become so accustomed to playing the role of a gentile that it’s hard to go back to being a Jew in this world.
“And have you ever,” Anne wonders, “touched him places?”
“Oh, you mean his lul? No, though he showed it to me once.”
“Really?”
Griet snorts a small laugh into her hand and then drops her voice. “It looked like a sausage,” she confides. “Like a weisswurst, only kind of purplish, and it stood up at attention. He wanted me to rub it, but I wouldn’t.”
Anne smiles. “Like Aladdin’s lamp,” she says, and laughs, delighted at the little crudity.
Griet grins back, devilish. “Until out comes the genie!”
* * *
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
Pim has found her a bicycle, her first since hers was stolen during the occupation. It’s an old black tweewieler with a worn brown leather seat and actual rubber tires, while much of Amsterdam is still riding on metal rims. After pedaling through a damp afternoon to the Prinsengracht office, Anne wheels her bicycle into the warehouse, because fingers are still generally too sticky for her to risk leaving it on the street. The noise of the milling machinery is loud, and the smell of the spices seasons the air. Cloves, pepper, and ginger. Monsieur le Félin Mouschi darts in a blur across the dusty floor, pursuing a rodent snack no doubt, leaving a trail of clover-shaped paw prints in the dust. Before the war Anne had looked forward to visiting the warehouse with Pim, especially when they were grinding nutmeg or cinnamon. The aroma made her feel giddy. And the older workers, softened up by the thought of their own kids, often gave her sweets. Licorice or sometimes honey drops. Mr. Travis showed her a magic trick with a coin that made her laugh, and she marveled at the mysterious warehouse slang the men barked at one another over the hum of the grinders. But all that changed once the Germans came. Mr. Travis had to take a job closer to the hospital when his son was badly wounded in the army. Mr. Jansen moved his sick wife to the country, where his brother had a farm. New men were hired. Unfamiliar names were written on the strips of tape above the coat hooks by the warehouse doors. “NSBers,” she remembers Bep claiming in a dark whisper. Dutch Nazi Party men.
Anne squinted. “Really?”
“Some of them,” Bep confirmed.
“And my father knows?” Anne had asked.
“It was your papa who told my papa they must be hired.”
Shortly after they went into hiding, Bep’s father, who was a chief participant in their secret, was struck by cancer and had to be replaced as workshop foreman. So with the family in hiding, the warehouse workers on the ground floor became a source of daily danger. If one of them heard something. If one of them saw something. If one of them suspected. They became the enemy in a sense, just as much as the moffen.
But now those men are gone. It’s a new crew, free of traitors, but they keep themselves to themselves and have no interest in Anne Frank. Except maybe one of them. It’s a Wednesday. Always a heavy day of milling to fulfill shipments for the end of the week. Propping her bike in the corner, Anne inhales the warm, nutty aroma of mace but can’t help but notice that one of the workers gives her a direct look as he hefts a second barrel of spice onto a pull cart. He is a lean, sinewy youth with a hard, pale glare, and he muscles the large barrel into place as if he’s showing off his strength. As if maybe he has something to prove to the dark-headed Joods meisje who’s the owner’s daughter. Anne peers back at him. The boy’s hair is straw blond and uncombed. His clothes are patches sewn together. His jaw is square, and there’s a heaviness to his eyes, as if something terrible and unalterable has settled in his gaze, turning his eyes the color of ashes. His name? She’s never heard it, nor has she ev
er heard him speak. Something about the boy does not invite conversation. A second later the youth grunts and looks away like she doesn’t exist, but he leaves Anne with a lift that starts just below her belly and spreads out into a breathy lightness that reaches all points of her realm.
That night in her room, she stares at herself naked in the wardrobe mirror and inventories her parts. Unlike Griet, with her voluptuous silhouette, Anne has remained quite petite in that department, and it makes her wonder what she would have looked like at this point if Christians had hid her as well. If she hadn’t been starved to a cat’s weight at Belsen. Would she have a woman’s full body by now? Would the Canadian liberators call to her in the street in the same way they do to Griet?
In bed she pulls up the covers. Griet has tried to advise her on how to touch herself in a way that feels good, but it’s a feat she has not yet managed to accomplish. She follows the instructions in her head, attempting to coax some kind of tingling reaction from herself. She imagines what it would feel like to have a boy’s hand where her clothes hide her body. She thinks of the boy from the warehouse with the mop of blond hair. But then she’s ambushed by a memory of Peter. Sitting with him up in the attic of the hiding place, sharing a bit of privacy while Mouschi purred in his lap, sprawled in a ridiculous paws-up position. Peter was three years older than Anne and spoke with an air of casual, clinical understanding as they discussed it all: Genitalia, both male and female. Sexual procedure. Preventive measures. Somewhat embarrassing at the time, but all highly informative. Her textbook understanding of the male organ had been confirmed—verbally, of course—as had her hunch that boys knew nothing whatsoever about the apparatus of the female. So she had explained. She had already educated herself on the various pipes and functions of a woman’s plumbing and could give Peter a detailed lesson. He was impressed by her composure and comprehensive knowledge. But as she had confided to her diary, she had been a little perplexed when she’d explored herself in the privacy of her bath. She had been a little alarmed. How could a man ever penetrate such a tiny opening? Even more alarming, how could a baby ever be expelled through it?
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