“For Jews,” she says.
“Yes. For Jews.” He doesn’t deny it.
She swallows. Feels a rise of heat in her breast. “Do you ever hate the world, Pim?” It’s a simple question to her, but it appears to shock her father. He shifts back in his chair as if to distance himself from it.
“The world? Of course not. How could I?”
“I do,” Anne tells him. “Sometimes I do.”
Pim looks back at her, pained. “Anneke,” he whispers. “Please, it would break my heart if I thought that were true.”
* * *
Biking over the Singel Canal bridge to the Rozengracht, Anne remembers the vulgarities once slopped in paint across the bridge wall. DOWN WITH THE JEWS! THE JEWS ARE OUR PLAGUE! They’ve since been whitewashed over, like many things, but they’re still visible in her mind. However, she concentrates on other things. The stretch of her muscles as she pedals. The cool breeze ruffling her hair. The boy with the straw-blond hair. The touch of his fingers on her face. The salty taste of his mouth before she bit him. Another cyclist dings his bell as he passes her, breaking her reverie, and in the next instant she is skidding to a halt, gripping the handlebars, her knuckles bleaching white.
It’s as if she has accidentally bicycled backward in time.
There’s a man, rather scrawny, hatless, with a balding head and untrimmed chin whiskers, hard at work scraping yellow paint from a door, colored chips dusting his shoes, but the obscenity he’s attempting to eradicate is still quite legible: KIKES PERISH!
Anne can only stare, rooted in place. She grips the handles of her bicycle, her palms going sweaty, her heart drumming in her chest, and she tastes a sickly-sour kind of fear in her mouth. How could this be? How can she still be confronted by such filthy scrawls?
The sign above the shop reads NUSSBAUM TWEEDEHANDS-BOEKVERKOPER. Nussbaum Secondhand Book Handling. A dowdy little place, the windows papered over with newsprint or boarded up. The scrawny man quits his scraping to take a breather and must notice her, because he turns about, still swallowing to catch his next breath. “I’m, sorry.” He smiles. “May I be of assistance?”
No response.
“Are you a reader,” he wonders, “looking for a good book?”
Her eyes blink from the door to the man, back to the door.
“Ah. Yes,” he says. “Just removing an unfortunate eyesore. Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose.” He says this with a slight frown but then returns to his smile, though his eyes are studying her now. “If you’re looking for a book, you should come inside. I’m happy to make recommendations.”
“Shouldn’t you do something?” Anne demands.
“Do something? Well, as you can see I’m scouring off the paint.”
“No, I mean, do something. Call the police.”
A shrug. The police? “And what would they do, really?”
“You mean because you’re a Jew.”
A smile remains, but a bit of the life in his eyes goes slack. “I think I’ve had enough of scraping for now. My arms are getting tired. Why don’t we step inside? We can share a pot of tea, and you can have a look at the shop. It’s really much nicer on the inside,” he confides.
* * *
• • •
A bell jangles above them as they enter. The shop has the comfortably musty smell that some bookshops develop after years of too many books packed into too small a space. The man is rubbing his arm as he goes to the hot plate sitting on a table behind the wooden sales desk. “I have no sugar or milk, I’m afraid. Not even surrogate.” He speaks in Dutch to Anne, but she can quite definitely recognize the clipped accent of a Berliner.
“Is it because you’re Jewish that you won’t call the police?”
“No, it’s because I see no point.”
“So you should let them get away with it? Defacing your property.”
“Someone slapped a door with a paintbrush.” He shrugs. “Not exactly a capital offense.”
“I’m sorry, it’s only that—”
His eyebrows lift. “Yes?”
“I’m Jewish, too,” she informs him.
The man shows her that smile again. “Yes, I rather surmised as much. But you needn’t be sorry about it. It’s not a crime any longer,” he assures her, and then he observes Anne with a kind of gentle appraisal. “I’m Werner Nussbaum,” he tells her, and leans across the sales desk to offer his hand. Anne stares at the hand for an instant, then steps forward and takes it.
“Mr. Nussbaum,” she repeats, and examines his face more closely. A long, aquiline nose, slightly bulbous. A powerful forehead, balding across the crown, close-cropped curls, and a scraggly gray-white mustache over a vandyke beard. One eye droops as if it is simply too exhausted to open at full mast, though the core of his gaze is still probing, still eager.
“And you are?” he inquires.
“My name,” she says, “is Anne Frank.”
Mr. Nussbaum cocks his head slightly to one side, as if a thought has knocked it a bit off balance. “Frank,” he repeats. “Well, that’s a coincidence. I knew a man named Frank. German originally.”
“We came from Germany,” Anne admits. “Frankfurt-am-Main.”
“Oh, no—this is too impossible,” the fellow insists. “By any chance in the world,” he wonders, “could you be related to an Otto Frank?”
Anne straightens. “Otto Frank is my father.”
“Otto Frank. Who ran—what was it?—a spice business, I think, here in Amsterdam?”
“He still does,” Anne answers.
“So you’re saying . . . he lives?”
Now it’s Anne who’s feeling a bit off balance, thrown by this question that Jews must now ask one another. All she does is nod her head to answer, and she watches the man slump at the shoulders as if he had been working hard to keep his spine straight till this very moment.
“So miracles do persist. The mensch still lives,” he declares, then looks back at Anne. “You must be confused. But I came to know your father quite well,” Mr. Nussbaum explains gently, as he bares his forearm, revealing a tattooed number, “while we were guests at the same hotel.”
* * *
When Mr. Nussbaum appears in the Jekerstraat flat, he begins to whistle Beethoven at the sight of Pim. Pim stands to his full soldier’s height, his eyes flooding, and joins in whistling as well. This is how their reunion begins. All in all a teary welter, neither man able to control his emotions, and, watching them, neither is Anne. Pain strikes her, as if her heart has been thumped by a hammer, and she is forced to retreat to her room. Margot attempts to console her, or rather interrogate her, in her Lager rags. Anne, why are you crying? Why are you crying? But Anne has no answer for her. She cannot contain her own tears; she cannot control her own grief, though both seem to exercise perfect control over her. She is curled up in a ball on her bed when her father knocks.
“Anne?”
“Yes?” she calls, sniffing, staring at the wall beside her bed.
“May I come in?”
“I’m not feeling well,” she answers, but Pim cracks open the door anyway.
“I’ll only need a moment.”
She rolls over and sits quickly, her eyes reddened. “Is Mr. Nussbaum still here?”
“No. He’s gone for now,” Pim tells her. “I’m sorry if our reunion was such a strain on you. Old men can get emotional.”
“How did you meet?”
“How?” A small exhale. “At Auschwitz—we were billeted in the same barracks block. But I’m ashamed to say that the first time we met, I punched him in the face.”
Anne blinks. “You punched him?”
“In the face, yes.” Her father nods. “I don’t even remember why now. Some measly dispute. But we were not the masters of our temper there.”
“So you became friends because you stru
ck him in the face?”
“No. We became friends because I heard him whistling ‘Clair de Lune.’ Terribly so, but with passion, as if every note he whistled were an affirmation that he was still alive. I knew immediately that I must ask him for his forgiveness. So I began to whistle it, too. After that”—Pim shrugs—“we became close comrades. We talked of music or art and literature. He had run a publishing company in Berlin before the Nazis stole it from him. He could recite Schiller, Heine, Goethe—especially Goethe—all from memory. It was quite inspiring. To keep using our minds, that was the thing. In the end, when I was truly on the edge of oblivion, it was he who brought one of the prisoner physicians to me. It’s how I was admitted to the convalescent block of the infirmary, which probably saved my life. So I owe him a great deal. I tried to locate him through the Red Cross after liberation, but all I could determine was that he had been marched out of Auschwitz when the Germans were evacuating the camp. Honestly? Until today I assumed that he hadn’t survived. So I must thank you, Anne, for returning him to me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she says.
“Perhaps you don’t think so, but Werner tells me you made an impression on him.”
“Did he tell you what happened? Did he tell you what they did to the door of his bookshop?”
“Yes,” her father answers carefully. “He did. He also told me that he was struck by your spirit. And thought you were quite self-possessed.” Pim says this, and then he adds, “In fact, he wondered if you might be interested in spending some time working in his shop.”
Anne stares. “His shop?”
“Yes. I told him of your love of books,” her father says. “He seemed eager to have you aboard. I’d still expect you to help out at the office, of course. But a few afternoons a week, shelving books after school . . . It’s just him otherwise, so I think he could use another pair of hands. Does that sound like something that might interest you, meisje?”
* * *
Nussbaum
Tweedehands-Boekverkoper
The Rozengracht
The shop is not so very far from where Pim used to lease an office on the Singel. Anne now bikes there twice a week for a few hours before supper. She likes the place. She likes the smells of old paper and aging binder’s glue and even the leathery stench of Mr. Nussbaum’s cigar smoke. And of course she likes the shelves bursting with tatty old books of every size, shape, and color. Even when it’s empty of customers, as it often is, there is still a comforting benefit from all those books, floor to ceiling, wall after wall. It’s really quite gezellig, Anne writes in her notebook—a favorite word of the Dutch. A cozy den of books, she calls it. Her job is to categorize new arrivals, compiling them into stacks according to their type and then stocking the shelves. She loves handling the books and often forgets herself, opening the covers for a peek, only to lose herself in the pages instead of finishing her work. But Mr. Nussbaum doesn’t seem to mind. He lends her this book and that and says, “Give this one a try,” or “I think this is a story you might find either scintillating or preposterous. Or maybe both.” And, of course, in addition to the books, books, and books, there is the cat. He’s a hulking tortoiseshell lapjeskat with a lazy gaze, and Anne has named him Lapjes for his calico patches. He tolerates Anne’s affection when he’s in the mood, but he’s a street cat by nature and only looks out for himself, lounging about in a spot of sun. Anne admires this ability of his but cannot seem to successfully imitate it.
“So tell me,” Mr. Nussbaum begins. He wears a double set of sweaters, because, he says, he can never get warm, not with a hundred sweaters. Still, two are better than none. “Tell me, is it true?” he inquires. “Your papa says you have a talent with words.”
Anne looks up from a heavy tome. Blinks. “Did he?”
“Oh, yes. He was adamant about it, actually. He said you were quite gifted.”
Anne swallows. Turns back to the box of mismatched books she is unpacking. “Once I thought so,” she answers.
“And what changed your mind?”
She looks up at Mr. Nussbaum’s face. Is he making a joke? The man has a sly affection for irony, no doubt about that. But there’s nothing ironic in his expression, only a humble curiosity.
“I was keeping a diary. When we were in hiding. I was going to write a book after the war. Maybe a novel or something. About our life. What it was like for us. For Jews,” she says. “But it was all lost when we were arrested.”
“And after that?” he asks.
“After?”
“After that you just quit writing altogether?”
Anne hesitates. “No,” she admits.
“No.”
“No, I still write. But it’s not the same.”
“Not the same, I see.” He nods. He draws a thoughtful puff from his cigar and balances it, ember outward, on the edge of the sales desk, where there is a spot scarred black by many small burns on the varnish. “And why’s that?”
“Because,” Anne says. “Because it doesn’t mean anything.”
“No? Well, it must mean something, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum points out. “Else why would you be doing it?”
“I don’t know,” Anne confesses, turning away. “I suppose,” she begins, but then shakes her head as she is displeased with her thoughts. “I suppose I’m simply compelled,” she confesses, and picks up another book from the box.
“Hmm. That sounds like a writer talking to me.”
“Do we really have to discuss this, Mr. Nussbaum?”
“Oh, no. No, not if you’d rather not,” he says, opening up the thick sales ledger on the desk. “I only wonder . . .”
A beat. Anne looks back up. “Wonder what?”
“I only wonder,” he says, perusing the ledger’s contents, issuing her a brief but solid glance, “why you think your writing is worth less now than it was before? It’s still your story. Isn’t it?”
Anne stares.
“But you don’t have to answer that question. Just something to think about,” he says as he retrieves his smoldering cigar from the edge of the desk.
“Pim said that you owned a publishing house in Germany.” Maybe she brings this up merely to block further interrogation on the subject of her writing, but a cloud scuds across Mr. Nussbaum’s face.
“Yes, that’s right,” he answers. “My father’s firm. It had been a small, scholarly, rather esoteric affair under him, but after he passed, I took it over with the idea of building up the list of authors,” he says. “Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth, André Breton. Really it was quite a remarkable time.”
“Until the Nazis,” says Anne.
He agrees, his voice dropping into a quiet hole. “Until then.” He shrugs almost imperceptibly. “I tried to start again elsewhere. I followed what had become the well-worn trail of literary exiles. First to Paris and then to Amsterdam. Amsterdam in particular hosted a constellation of German publishers at the time, so I dearly hoped I could make a go of it. But the money ran out, and, uh . . . life was not so easy. The magic in my world drained away.”
Anne understands this. Even though Mr. Nussbaum is so much older, she feels a touch of pure kinship. A literary heart brought so low.
* * *
• • •
The next afternoon, when Anne arrives at the office, she finds that Mrs. Zuckert is yet again sequestered in Pim’s private office with her steno pad.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” she must ask Miep.
“Doesn’t what bother me?”
“That she’s taking over.”
Miep shakes her head. “No one is ‘taking over,’ Anne.”
At four o’clock Mr. Kugler goes into the kitchen, as he does at this hour every day for his afternoon cup of tea. Anne slips from her desk. “I’m getting a drink of water,” she tells Miep, but doesn’t wait for a response. In the corridor she can hear the laughter
from the private office and then the chatty tone of their talk. What’s worse, they’re speaking German. German! The language of the executioners.
She catches Kugler in the kitchen gazing forlornly at the kettle on the hot plate as it builds steam. The air of talented modesty he once cultivated has been wrecked. Instead his expressions are often haunted or blank. She’s noted that he’s given to long, pointless stares while seated at his desk. He may rally then, he may rouse himself and become good old Mr. Kugler again, the man with all the answers. But she can tell that in his heart he has no answers any longer.
Slipping into the kitchen, she retrieves a water glass from the dish drain. Kugler looks up, but it’s as if he doesn’t quite see her for a moment. Then he takes a breath. “So,” he says without much conviction, “how is Anne today?”
“How am I?” she asks with a tone that asks, Isn’t that obvious?
“School, I mean. How is school this year?”
But Anne does not answer his question. She walks to the sink and unscrews the tap, letting water rush into her glass. “She seems highly skilled,” Anne points out.
“I’m sorry?”
“Mrs. Zuckert.”
“Ah. Yes,” he agrees. “Highly.”
“I suppose she must have plenty of experience.”
“She does,” Mr. Kugler confirms, maintaining his mildly distracted tone. “Ten years as an assistant bookkeeper in an accounting firm. Before the war she helped out Mr. Kleiman from time to time.”
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