“Oh, Bep,” Miep calls, holding up her own cup and saucer, but Bep is already gone. “Anne, I’m sorry, but would you mind taking this in, too?” she asks. Her voice is dim and distracted, hiding unspoken nerves.
“What’s happening?” Anne asks.
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Yes. Something.”
“I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Anne, please. The cup.”
She takes it, pursing her lips. Passing her father’s office, Anne can hear the weave of voices but cannot make out a word spoken. She slips into the kitchen behind Bep and sets Miep’s cup and saucer on the sink. “Another cup, Bep,” she says.
“Oh.” A blank glance. “Thank you,” Bep tells her with a thin smile, and returns to the teacup she is scrubbing.
Anne lifts herself onto the counter for a seat, legs dangling. “So who’s in my father’s office with him?” she asks as casually as possible.
Bep’s glance is clouded. “Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler are in there,” she says. “And some other gentlemen. I don’t know who they are. Honestly, no one is telling me anything.” Bep frowns fearfully. “Not Mr. Frank, not Mr. Kleiman. Not even Miep.” Her posture and expression are guarded, and the light of the flagging sun from the window turns her glasses opaque. Then, “Excuse me,” she says, leaving the towel hung over the sink’s faucet and returning the cups and saucers to the cupboard. “I should get back to my work. There’s still so much to do.”
Quickly, Anne drops her feet back to the floor, latching onto Bep’s arm. “Bep,” she whispers. “Wait.”
“I have to go.”
“In a moment. Please wait for just a moment,” Anne begs. Bep seems to freeze in place. “It’s been hard for you, I know, with me around,” Anne says. “And maybe one reason is that I should have said this to you sooner. So let me say it now: Thank you. Thank you, Bep, for all you did for us. Even if it all ended the way it did, you and Miep cared for us so well. You risked your own safety for ours.”
Bep is still fixed in place, still staring, her eyes locked open behind the lenses of her glasses. “I don’t need any thanks,” she says tightly. “I don’t want anyone to feel grateful to me.”
“But I am grateful. You must let me be grateful, Bep. It’s one of the few human things I can still feel. Grateful to you and Miep, Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler. I can’t explain it, but I need to be grateful.”
Bep bites into her lower lip, shaking her head. “No. You don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand anything anymore,” Anne admits. “I’m lost. So utterly lost. I need some purpose, Bep. I must accomplish something to justify myself. Why am I alive? Mummy’s dead. Margot’s dead. Why am I the lucky one? How can I deserve that?”
For an instant Bep looks at Anne with stark, pale terror. “It’s the police,” she confesses suddenly, as if the words were too dire to remain unspoken a second longer.
“The police?” Anne repeats.
“The BNV. In your father’s office.”
Fear like a poke from a needle. Police? The BNV is the Bureau of National Security, and that only means one thing to Anne: arrest. She feels her throat thicken. “Why would you think that?”
“Because who else could it be? They’ve been here all afternoon. They called Miep in. For an hour she was in there. And when I asked her what was going on, all she did was tell me to stay calm and keep my head on. And then came my turn and all those dreadful questions. How well did I know the men working in the warehouse? How often did I talk to them? What was my contact with the man from the home office in Frankfurt?”
“The mof?”
“How many times did I speak to him over the telephone? How could I be expected to remember such a thing?” she exclaims. “I answered the telephone ten times a day.” She bites down to steady the quiver of her chin, and then she whispers a dark conclusion to herself. “I think they suspect me.”
Anne feels her neck heat with sweat. “Suspect you?”
A quick blink from Bep, as if for an instant she’d forgotten that Anne was there. Her eyes go wet. “Of betrayal.”
“Bep,” Anne breathes. “You’re frightening me.”
“I’m sorry, but what if it’s true? What if they’re planning on taking me into custody as a collaborator?”
And for the smallest fraction of an instant, Anne introduces that possibility into her brain: Bep as betrayer. A painful pinprick till she shakes it off. “No. That can’t be true.”
“Can’t it? All I know is that the whole town’s out for vengeance. Don’t you know? It’s ‘Hatchet Days,’ and I’ve seen what’s done in the name of justice. Up close!” Eyes darting. “I’m sorry, Anne, but I must go. I really must.”
“Bep.” Anne speaks her name as if trying to snag her with a hook, trying to latch onto Bep’s arm again, but this time Bep won’t permit it.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bep keeps repeating. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you or I can do. Things will never be the way they were again, Anne. Not ever,” she declares, and beats a tearful retreat, leaving Anne alone. Her eyes burn hotly. Her breathing shortens, and she feels she must force herself into her next breath.
* * *
• • •
Out in the corridor, Anne finds Mr. Kleiman lighting a cigarette outside Pim’s private office, thin as a reed with short, silvered hair and round horn-rimmed spectacles. Because of his stomach troubles, Mr. Kleiman rarely smokes. Everyone knows that. But this afternoon he is inhaling the chalky gray smoke before he turns with a dismal gaze and observes Anne standing in the threshold of the kitchen.
“Goedemiddag, Anne,” he offers with an unusual formality.
“Is something going on, Mr. Kleiman?” she asks him.
But Kleiman only shrugs as if to say, Who could explain it? His expression is pale and bleak. No more sunshine from Mr. Kleiman. Before the war he was a man with a cheery, sympathetic manner, who was known for his love of jokes, riddles, and tongue twisters. Now Mr. Kleiman is known for his sudden silences, as if he has been confronted by a riddle he simply cannot crack. A puzzle that will not be solved. He gazes at Anne through his spectacles; his expression looks bludgeoned and burdened by a deeply routine pain.
“Those men in there,” she says. “Who are they? What do they want?”
His head shakes. “You’ll have to ask your father about that, Anne,” he answers simply. “It’s not my place to say.”
“Can I see him?” She takes a step forward, but Kleiman raises his palm to stop her.
“No. No, not now. Now is not good.”
But Anne feels a rush of dark energy building up inside her. She quickly ducks past Mr. Kleiman and rattles the door handle.
“Anne!” Kleiman squawks. But the door is locked.
“Pim!” she demands, and in a moment the latch turns and the door cracks open, Pim blocking her entrance.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Kleiman is apologizing tensely behind her. “I had no idea that she would try to barge through like this.”
“Anne,” Pim says firmly. “This is no time for antics.”
“What’s going on in there? That’s all I want to know.” She tries to peer past Pim, but her father will not permit it.
“Anne, I’m closing the door.”
“No! You can’t keep any more secrets from me.”
“I’m not. But some matters are private. There’s a difference. Go back to your work and allow the adults to handle things.”
“Oh, as if the adults have handled all matters so perfectly up till now.”
“Anne.”
“All the adults have done is raze half the world to the ground.”
“Anne, do as you are told!” Her father’s voice booms with an unnatural jolt of anger. “Do
as you’re told or there will be consequences.”
“Consequences? Ha!” she shouts back. “And what could those consequences possibly be? What can you take away from me that I haven’t already lost?”
Pim simply doesn’t answer her and simply bangs the door closed, relatching the lock. Anne bulls past Kleiman and storms away, but not to fume. Quickly, she dashes around to the landing and up the steps. Unhooking the bookshelf, she pushes it aside and enters the Achterhuis. The room creaks. Gulls squawk outside the windows, but she can hear a muffle of voices drifting upward from the private office beneath her. Once, after they’d gone into hiding, a big wheel from Pomosin-Werke in Frankfurt had traveled to Amsterdam to confer with Kugler and Kleiman over Opekta’s financial health. Pim had been so anxious about missing this meeting that he’d lain down with his ear pressed to the floorboards to listen in. Margot, too, had been conscripted into lending her ear to the effort, trying to take notes in shorthand while prone on the hardwood. This worked for a bit, but when Pim had grown too stiff to continue, Anne had been drafted next. Now, down on her belly, she presses her ear to the floor. She can hear a strange tone enter her father’s voice, stiltedly formal but also weighted by a hard anger and something else: fear.
“Please, allow me to finish my point,” he is saying. “The survival of my family was my only concern. The businesses were secondary.”
“That’s irrelevant,” she can hear one of the unknown men correct. “Regardless of your motives, Mr. Frank, facts are facts.”
Anne, what are they saying? Margot wants to know, suddenly lying beside her, just as if they were still together in hiding, ear pressed to the wood. I can’t hear them, Anne. What are they saying?
“Quiet, will you?” Anne hisses back. But she’s missed what Pim has just said, and now the other man is talking.
“This will do for today, Mr. Frank. We’ll keep you informed as necessary while we continue our investigation.”
By the time Anne makes it back belowstairs in the front of the building, it’s too late. Whoever the people were in Pim’s office, they have made their exit. She can hear Kleiman’s voice warning them to mind the steepness of the steps as they descend to the street. She thinks of trying to follow them, but before she can do so, Pim pokes his head out of the private office. “Anne. I want to speak to you, please,” he announces darkly.
* * *
• • •
The private office was always considered very plush. The padded upholstery. The velvet drapes. The warm oak paneling. The well-polished desk and the brass fixtures. This was the spot where they would gather in hiding to listen to the BBC or Radio Oranje after the workers below had gone home. But now there is a forlorn quality to it. The brass has begun to tarnish. The furnishings show their many nicks and scratches. The heavy drapes are dull with dust, and years of plumbing failures have stained the wallpaper.
“I cannot conceive of what made you feel justified in indulging in such an outburst.”
“Who were those men?”
“Anne, I’ve told you. It’s a private matter.”
“There’s nothing private about who betrayed us, Pim.”
“Betrayed us?”
“Why is the BNV investigating Bep?”
“Anne,” says her father patiently as if naming a silly, irrational thing.
“They were interrogating her. She told me. Both her and Miep.”
“Anne,” he says again. “Those gentlemen are not BNV, and they were not interrogating anybody. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. There were simply certain matters that needed to be cleared up. Certain questions that needed to be asked.”
“Asked by whom? If you say those men are not BNV, then who are they?”
“Enough, daughter,” Pim says firmly, his voice going ragged around the edges. “Please, enough. I’ve already told you everything you need to know.”
“You’ve told me nothing,” Anne protests.
“Untrue. I’ve told you it’s none of your concern and that you should leave it be.”
“Bep is very upset,” Anne says.
“She had a difficult interview,” Pim is willing to admit.
“Is she going to be dismissed?”
Pim huffs with an exhausted air. “No one is being dismissed. Bep is still a valued employee and a good friend to whom you and I both owe a great debt.” At this point her father leans forward, hands clasping on his blotter. “So please, meisje,” he says, adopting a sturdy calm, as he used to when he was soothing her agitations during a bombing raid. “Enough. I don’t wish to argue any longer. I understand that you’re confused. I understand that you’re anxious. It’s a very anxious world,” he agrees. “But you must trust me to do what’s best. For all of us.”
* * *
• • •
Trust. Anne writes the word on the page. What an odd little word that has become to her. Anne should “trust” in Pim. She should “trust” in God. But how can she possibly?
Margot has appeared in her Kazetnik’s rags, her face shrunk down to the bone by starvation and disease.
“What?” Anne demands to know. She is up in the Achterhuis, bundled in an old sweater, sitting with her notebook, her back pressed against the wall in the spot where her desk once stood. Margot’s eyes are greasy with death in the light from the bare windows.
Have you really sunk so low that you could believe that a woman who risked her life for us could be a criminal? Bep? Bep of all people? You can’t actually believe for a minute that she could have betrayed us, can you? That’s lunacy.
“Maybe. Maybe it isn’t,” Anne replies dryly, flexing her writing hand. “Under the right circumstances, who is not capable of anything? Didn’t the camps teach you that much, Margot?”
Margot answers her with a blunt glare. Are you talking about Bep now or yourself?
Anne glares back. “I’m guilty, yes. Is that what you want to hear me say? I’m guilty of the crime of surviving. That wretched sin. Bep must be able to see that. And who can blame her, really?” Anne wonders. Closing the notebook in her lap, she stares at nothing. “I want to trust Bep. Of course I do. But perhaps in a way it’s easier to believe that she could have betrayed us rather than simply believe she’s rejected me. That she can see that I am ruined and wants to put plenty of distance between us.”
Anne speaks this aloud, but when she looks back at Margot, her sister is nothing more than dust motes drifting through the prying daylight.
* * *
Anne pedals through the damp afternoon to the Prinsengracht. At the Keizersgracht she climbs off her bicycle and walks in, just as she did the day the boy from the warehouse followed her, but there is no sign of him. Only people bustling to and fro, on foot, on bikes, as the seagulls mill above their heads. Does she really think he will still try to catch up to her? After she drew blood from his kiss? No, she doesn’t think that, but she also hopes she’s wrong. Maybe he’s just gone to work, and she can catch his glance as he’s lugging a barrel. When she reaches the warehouse, one of the workers holds the door for her, calling her “Little Princess.” It’s hard to know if he means it as a polite endearment or a casual jibe, but regardless, she nods courteously as she pushes her bicycle into the dusty storage room and leans it in the corner. No sign of a straw-headed boy, though. When she asks the foreman, Mr. Groot, about him, the man shrugs his heavy shoulders. “Didn’t show.”
At this point smelly old Mr. Lueders decides to chime in. “What you expect from his sort?”
Anne tilts her head. “What does that mean? His sort of what?”
“Fruit from a rotten tree,” Lueders is kind enough to elaborate.
“All right, enough of that,” Mr. Groot decides. “Sweep your own street, will you, Lueders?”
“What’s his name? Can you tell me that much?” Anne asks.
Mr. Groot frowns as he l
ugs a heavy carton and dumps it on a wooden pallet. “We called him Raaf. But his father’s name was Hoekstra. And Lueders is right. Not a good name around here.”
“Not a good name?” Anne repeats.
The man shrugs, but it’s obvious he’s had enough of this conversation with the boss’s daughter. “If you don’t mind, miss? An end to these questions, please. There’s work to be done.”
Anne feels a queasy kind of disappointment in her belly as she begins to climb the stairs up to the office, when abruptly there is a clatter of footsteps heading down from above. It’s Bep in her coat and hat, her handbag dangling from her arm. She’s in such a hurry that she’s rushing dangerously down the Dutch steps. Anne calls her name and starts to point this out when she realizes that Bep’s face is a flood of tears. And though Anne’s first instinct is to wedge herself against the wall, to clear the steps for trouble to pass, she resists the impulse and blocks the woman’s way, forcing Bep to brace herself against the stairwell wall to halt her momentum.
“Bep. You’re crying.”
“Anne.” Bep is shaking her head, blotting her face with a handkerchief.
“What’s happened?”
But Bep just keeps shaking her head. “I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t continue. I’m sorry,” she cries, and then forces her way past. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Sorry?” Anne freezes up for an instant. “Sorry for what? Bep? Bep, tell me what’s happened! Bep!” she calls out as she follows the woman’s path down the steps, but by the time she pushes past the door and bolts into the street, Bep is already hurrying along the pavement past the Westerkerk, and Anne is nearly run over by a cyclist who inquires if perhaps she’s gone blind.
Clambering back up the stairs herself, she rushes to the kantoor window and bolts into the office, where a wall of stares meets her. Miep’s eyes are red, and she frowns sadly back down at her typewriter. Kugler is seated at Kleiman’s desk and surveys Anne’s entry with a controlled melancholy, but her father is standing, with a sheet of paper hanging in his hand. His face silent.
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