“What’s happened to Bep?” Anne demands, though she’s really frightened to know the answer. “Why was she crying?”
Kugler draws a breath as if to choke up an answer, but her father hands him the paper and takes a small step forward.
“Anne, Bep has resigned,” Pim says quietly.
Anne glares back. “What?”
“She’s left the firm.”
“But . . .” Anne shakes her head, as if to clear away such an unacceptable idea. “But why? What happened to her?”
Kugler and Miep both look up at this, as if they might be called upon to provide an answer, but Pim simply says, “There was nothing to be done, Anne. Bep’s father is so very ill. The cancer has spread, and he needs care. We must accept that there are some circumstances that cannot be altered no matter how we might wish otherwise.”
Anne clamps her mouth shut. Once she never would have imagined that Bep could possibly have betrayed them. But now? Perhaps she needed money for her father’s treatment. Who knows what medicines cost on the black market while the mof still stood astride the world? Wouldn’t Anne herself have sacrificed the lives of others to save Pim’s life or even simply ease his pain?
She does not want to cry in front of Pim or Kugler, so she holds back till she can shut herself up in the WC, where she releases a knotted sob and allows the tears to flow. She’s still losing people. Will that ever stop? Will she ever be able to truly count on someone’s love again? Count on people’s devotion without the fear of losing them? Without fear of their abandoning her, because even death is a kind of abandonment. How can she ever trust her own life not to crush her?
17
FORGIVENESS
Shouldn’t I, who want to be good and kind, forgive them first?
—Anne Frank,from her diary, 19 January 1944
From where do we know that it is cruel to not forgive?
—The Talmud, Bava Kamma 8:7
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
In the afternoons after school, Anne slips through the hidden door behind the bookcase to the confines of their former hiding place. Closing the door behind her, she feels as if she is shutting out the world. Shutting out the present. Up in the attic, she sits on the floor holding le chat Mouschi in her lap. They have cut a deal, she and he. Monsieur le chat Mouschi. She has cultivated his cooperation with treats of fish skin and bits of tinned tuna, and he is now a purring ball of fur for her to pet.
She breathes in and out. Once, she felt this place to be a sanctuary, but now its emptiness settles over her like the quiet storm of dust drifting in the sunlight through the window glass. The leaves flutter on the branches of the old horse chestnut. She has organized a pack of cigarettes from her father’s desk and lights one with the scratch of a wooden match. Sweet Caporals supplied by the Canadian troops who liberated the city. A superior North American product. Before the war Holland was famous for the rich quality of the tobacco imported from its colonies, but now the dark brown shag of East Indian yield has been replaced by weak, fast-burning ersatz brands, so the punch of the genuine tobacco makes Anne’s head swim. Canadian cigarette cards feature the members of the English royal family. The king, the queen, the princesses. Once those might have gone up on her wall, but now they simply go into the rubbish bin. She inhales a rush of smoke and feels it settle inside her. Once again they are depending on Miep, who has maintained her contacts in the Jordaan for essentials. Dried fish, Canadian cigarettes, potatoes, tinned meats and oats, plums and string beans, malt coffee, sugar surrogate, and even the occasional gristly beefsteak from a cooperative butcher.
Anne expels smoke and watches it waft like a thin ghost across the empty room.
Peter.
He was older than Anne but younger than Margot. Tall and solid, with a broad face and densely curly hair that often defied his comb. For a moment she remembers the feel of his body sitting beside her on the divan, up here in the seclusion of the loft. He was very male. So heavy with his strength, the inadvertent strength of his arm, its weight slung across her shoulder. At the time she’d had many girlish thoughts about the depth of his soul. On the outside he would have been a roughneck boy from Osnabrück, better at fighting than at talking. No religion beyond the work of his hands. Easily bored to laziness, ridiculous in his excuses, and absurdly morbid in his obsessions with imaginary diseases. Look at my tongue. Isn’t it a strange color? But he also possessed a sweet, curious gaze that could settle on Anne with its guileless yearning. He had a good mind; she’d been so sure of it, but maybe that was more her desire than the truth. He preferred heavy work to too much thinking, so Anne had simply inserted the deep thoughts into his head for him. His silence she had taken for buried intensity. But really it was just the silence of a boy with nothing more to say. He was at ease with her. She listened to him when he jabbered on authoritatively, as boys do, or vented steam over his father’s harsh disapproval. And with her head resting against his chest, she counted the beats of his heart after he’d run out of words, here in the gray attic.
Now she sits with his cat instead, for Peter van Pels is far beyond her touch.
I’m sure that he knew you still cared for him, she hears Margot say.
“Are you?” Anne shakes her head. She doesn’t look at her sister’s face but only hugs the cat. “I’m not.” The cat struggles, suddenly uncomfortable in her arms. She must be gripping him too tightly. She does not attempt to calm him but lets him bound away. “I wasn’t always very kind to him,” Anne confesses, breathing in smoke from the smoldering Caporal she picks up from a red Bakelite ashtray.
You outgrew him, Margot points out, and Anne does not disagree.
“I always worried that it was painful for you.”
For me? Margot sits on her heels, wearing a floral-print dress and the sweater Mummy had knit from cashmere wool. Why for me?
“You know why,” Anne insists.
Anne. Now it’s Margot’s turn to shake her head. Her voice is meant to sound comforting, at least as comforting as the dead can manage. I was not at all interested in Peter in that way. I told you that.
“I didn’t believe you.”
Well. Perhaps at first I was disappointed, in a minor way, when I saw the direction in which his interests were roaming. But really, he was simply not my kind of boy. Nor was he your kind of boy. The only difference was, I was old enough to realize it, while you, she says, you were so desperately romantic.
“And lonely,” Anne tells her.
Well. You didn’t have to be. I was there. Pim was there. Mummy was there. If you were lonely, it must have been your choice.
“No, you don’t understand.”
Don’t I?
“I’m not like you, Margot. I’m not like Mummy, or even Pim. I need something more in my life.”
More? Margot asks. She blinks through the lenses of her spectacles. Like what, Anne? What more do you need that none of us could supply?
Anne shakes her head. “I can’t explain.”
Oh. You mean sex.
“You don’t have to be so smug, Margot. And no, I don’t mean sex. Really, I can’t explain it.”
Her sister shrugs. If you can’t explain it, then how can it be so important?
The cat inserts a pause between them as he pounces on the cigarette pack left on the hardwood planking, but it’s enough. Margot has not waited to hear Anne’s reply and has dissolved into the gray daylight, leaving Anne with a hard itch of discontent. Or maybe it is this place. The attic. Their hiding place. The Achterhuis. Perhaps this hard itch is the only part of her former self she has recovered. The need to be something more. She had suffered so long from a secret loneliness, even surrounded by her chattering friends in the school yard, even as she laughed at jokes and flir
ted with the boys; there was an emptiness that she could never fill. And when they had slipped into hiding, the emptiness had followed her. Peter had been there for that. At least at first. In the small space in which they were trapped, his roughneck physique seemed manly. His boyish energy alluring. But then something changed. She changed. The satisfaction that Peter provided thinned. She realized he would never truly understand her and that, most likely, he didn’t really wish to try. So what was left to her, trapped in this cramped and drab annex? She found that when she sat down in front of a clean page with her fountain pen in her hand, the emptiness was filled.
A sigh rustles through the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside as a burst of sunshine burns through the clouds. She watches the windowpanes brighten.
* * *
Tuschinski Theater
Reguliersbreestraat 26-34
Amsterdam-Centrum
The gorgeous deco towers are still standing. The Tuschinski Theater was a favorite before the war. Pim used to take them all to the matinees on Sunday afternoons and then to the Japanese tearoom on the premises for green-tea ice cream. Once on Pim’s birthday, Mr. Tuschinski himself stopped by just to say mazel tov. When the moffen came, they called the place the Tivoli and showed anti-Semitic propaganda. But since the liberation, the Tuschinski name has been restored, though Anne heard from Pim that Mr. Tuschinski and his whole family went up the chimneys of the Kremas.
Inside, the palatial Grote Zaal is nicknamed the “Plum Cake,” and even though the war has taken its toll on maintenance, it still looks rather scrumptious. The plush velvet, the confectionary swirls of the bric-a-brac. In the rear of the auditorium, Griet has just passed Anne a cigarette, but she draws a puff slowly, totally captivated by the screen as an American newsreel trumpets into the space. “This is New York,” a narrator declares as an aerial view of soaring building spires circles in the reflection of Anne’s eyes. “The greatest city the world has known!”
Anne’s heartbeat swells. The subtitles are blurry, but who needs them? The sprawl of images is mesmerizing; Griet must nudge her twice in order to get her cigarette back. “The dazzling marquees. A glittering extravaganza,” the narrator intones. “Crossroads of the world. Bright lights, the theaters, good food, and dancing to the music of the world’s most famous orchestras.” Something in Anne starts to expand. She can feel it rising from the pit of her belly. The Waldorf Astoria, the Starlight Roof, the Empire Room, Peacock Alley, Radio City Music Hall! Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to 110th Street. “The sidewalk cafés and towering apartment houses.” People stream from banks of crowded elevators. The Empire State Building! “The tallest structure on the face of the earth.” Sixty thousand tons of steel, ten million bricks, seven miles of elevator shafts going straight up. The never-ending view. “The turreted heights.” The Statue of Liberty, a beacon of freedom! Anne’s stare is steady. The force invading her feels like some kind of . . . what? Some kind of destiny, nothing less. Like a message for her alone from the future, or from fate, or maybe even from God himself. Could it be?
A hot dog with everything on it! On the screen a girl takes a huge bite in front of a street vendor. Grand Central Terminal! People streaming across a cavernous concourse, in sunlight pouring from massive cathedral windows. “This is New York,” the narrator reminds with zest. “Where everyone’s wish comes true. Where dreams come to life. Where the lights outshine the stars in the heavens!”
Squinting into the sunlight after the film, Anne feels as if the image of those towers has been singed onto the insides of her eyes.
This is New York. Where everyone’s wish comes true.
* * *
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Two additions have been made to the office over the past few weeks. The first is a new typewriter. An Olympia Model 8. It’s German-made war booty with a sleek military shape, a roll of vulcanized rubber, and a grin of punishing type bars. It boasts an assertive array of slate-gray keys, including a key for umlauts. It is a ruthless machine manufactured to type out arrest lists. To type out execution lists. Not so long ago, it was used to hail the führer’s name at the close of every decree, in a clatter of steely type. Now it types out memos and correspondence advancing the sale of gelatin products to Dutch housewives. How humiliating for the Herr Typewriter. Such a demotion in rank.
Then there’s the second addition. She is a well-built machine, too. A woman, with carefully managed hair, capable hands, and a profile as regally featured as the queen’s head on a fiver. This is Mrs. Zuckert. Ostensibly it was Mr. Kugler who hired her as both a typist and a part-time bookkeeper, but Anne knows that nothing happens in the office without Pim’s approval, and Pim certainly seems to approve. She’s attractive for a woman of a certain age, handsome, with thick reddish curls, and a gaze as strong as hot coffee. And then there’s the matter of her forearm, or rather what’s tattooed upon it. Anne has only seen it once, as the woman stretched for a box of powdered milk surrogate on a shelf in the office kitchen. She’s not very tall, and her sleeve was tugged away from her forearm, revealing a string of purple numbers.
In the kitchen, where the women address one another by their given names, Mrs. Zuckert explains that her mother named her Hadassah but directs everyone to call her Dassah. That is the name she answers to, she says. Everyone is polite, but there’s a sense that Dassah is a creature that should be given a wide berth. There is something in her gaze that reveals the lioness at her core.
On the other hand, Pim appears quite eager in his approach toward the lady. Suddenly he is spending time in the front rooms, just to look out the windows, he says, and absorb some good Dutch sunshine. Or he happens to remember a joke as he delivers a file to Mrs. Zuckert’s possession. Mrs. Zuckert smiles appreciatively, regardless of the fact that it’s a repeat of the joke from two days before. “Ah, yes.” She nods, eyebrows arched. “Very clever, Mr. Frank,” she responds in her good Germanic Dutch. “Very funny.”
“Yes, Pim,” Anne cannot help but cut in, “even more funny than it was the first time you told it.”
“Anne,” Miep scolds her mildly. “Decorum, please. We’re in a business office.”
Tell him that, she almost answers, but buttons her lip. Pim, however, chuckles and takes his daughter’s rudeness in stride. “Never mind, Miep,” he says. “Anne has always had a talent for rudeness. God knows her mother, may she rest, tried to cure her of it, but . . .” He shrugs and allows the sentence to finish itself.
Anne feels her face blaze, but a terrible blackness overcomes her, so that she must look away. She must glare blindly at the small button keys of Miep’s typewriter. Pim hands Mrs. Zuckert the file he carried in from the private office, along with a set of petty instructions, then strolls out in a businesslike manner as Anne seethes. To break up the concrete silence, Kugler begins to whistle. He’s good, actually, and is whipping through a wireless hit from the Dutch Swing College Band. Anne’s eyes rise and are caught by the pincer of Mrs. Zuckert’s gaze. The message there is clear: Don’t like me? Too bad. It’s not your opinion that counts. Then, as a kind of counterpoint to Kugler’s whistling, Mrs. Zuckert begins to rattle across the keys of the Herr Typewriter, spitting out her own impenetrable staccato rhythm.
* * *
• • •
“Have you talked to Bep, Miep?” Anne hears herself asking later in the afternoon, finding Miep in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea for Pim.
“A few days ago, yes,” Miep tells her, turning off the fire under the steaming kettle. “She telephoned. Her father is back in the hospital.”
“Did she say anything about me?”
“About you?”
“Yes. Anything, good or bad.”
“Anne.” Miep pronounces her name firmly and then takes a breath. Obviously to compose her words. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking. But Bep was overjoyed when you came
home. Just as we all were.”
Anne says nothing more on the subject. Instead she says, “I’ll take Pim his tea.”
She knocks but doesn’t wait for permission to enter, popping open the door to Pim’s office. Pim glances up from the telephone with a wary expression. Anne brings in the tea and sets it on his desk but then doesn’t leave. Instead she sits and waits, causing Pim to excuse himself from his call long enough to press a hand over the mouthpiece.
“Yes, Anneke?”
“I brought your tea,” she tells him.
“I can see that, meisje, but I’m on a call.”
“Yes, I can see that, too,” Anne replies, but she does not budge.
Returning to the telephone with a half frown, he asks if he might ring the caller back. Setting the receiver on its hook carefully, he turns his frown on his daughter. “Is there something wrong?”
“Who were you talking to?” Her voice is neutral.
“When?”
“Just now on the telephone.”
“Mr. Rosenzweig. My attorney.”
“Why do you need an attorney?”
“Anne. Darling. I’m really rather busy.”
“Why didn’t we go to America?” she asks bluntly.
Pim blinks. Appears mildly stricken. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mummy’s brothers were already there. You knew people in New York City. Mr. Straus,” she says. “Why didn’t we go there when we left Germany?”
“Why?” Pim lifts his eyebrows. “Well, it didn’t seem necessary at the time. You must understand, Anne, when we emigrated, Hitler had only just been appointed Reichskanzler. It was years before any danger of war. And my first responsibility was to make a living and support the family. You and Margot were still so young. You were just a toddler then. So when your uncle Erich had an opportunity for me here in Amsterdam with Opekta, I took it.” He curls his lower lip, staring for an instant at nothing. “We actually did consider the States, your mother and I, but it was so far away, an ocean away. Also, the Americans,” he says. “They had very strict immigration quotas.”
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