She stands with the boy, sharing his hand-rolled shag, watching the smoke from it drift in the breeze that tousles their hair. This close she can’t help but see that his face is caged. As if he’s bracing himself for pain. He leans forward onto the railing, and she follows his lead so that their shoulders brush together. She presses her elbow against his and lets it stay. When he turns, she sees that the light has sharpened to points in the lazy blue of his eyes. His hand touches her cheek. And then his hand is slipping past her cheek, caressing her neck, and he is guiding her forward toward his mouth. Pressing her lips against the sudden dampness, she feels a shock of joy. In that moment the soft squish of their kiss quells the pang of her loss, releasing her from herself. Gentling the anger of her incompressible desire. In that moment her heart beats in a clean, strong pulse, as she seizes the uncombed hair at the back of his head and presses herself into him, absorbing his heat. Her need fusing with his. Losing herself in a deep swim of stunningly guiltless pleasure.
When their lips separate, she gazes into the light of his eyes. It’s steady and clear. His face is unlocked. “Raaf,” she pronounces quietly.
“What?” His voice is close.
“Nothing,” she replies. “I wanted to speak your name aloud.” Raaf. Not Peter. A boy named Raaf with a thatch of straw-blond hair. She feels herself drawing him toward her, her arms slipping over his neck—she, opening her lips, opening herself to the messy, blissful invasion of human craving.
21
THE TRANSVAAL
And behold, thistles had grown all over it; nettles had covered its surface, and its stone fence had been torn down.
—Proverbs 24:31
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Her new room in the new flat has striped blue-on-white wallpaper and a creaking hardwood floor. With the window open, she can see the traffic passing on the canal—and often smell it as well. New furnishings have arrived for her father’s new life, including a velveteen sofa and a tall Viennese wingback chair, plus a double bed for the newlyweds. Anne’s lumpy old thing, however, has simply been transferred from her former room in the Jekerstraat. And her mother’s French secretaire, which once adorned the corner of her room in the Merwedeplein, has remained behind with Miep. When Miep resisted this gift, Anne whispered, “Keep it, Miep. Please. I’d rather you have it than her.”
* * *
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
After classes are dismissed, she initiates a shoving match by the bike shed with one of the other girls, a girl named Clare Buskirk, that scrap of carrion. But before it escalates, the normally all-too-jovial nature and health teacher, Mrs. Peerboom, comes galloping over to separate the combatants, her face two shades redder than a beet. “Goeie hemel!” she calls out righteously, with deep astonishment. “This is indecent. You’re supposed to be ladies!”
“She’ll never be a lady, Mrs. Peerboom,” Clare spits, her ugly little face on permanent display. “She’s just a Jewess.”
“And you’re just a pile of shit!” Anne shouts back.
“Quiet!” Mrs. Peerboom barks. “Now be on your way, both of you, unless you want to explain yourself to the headmistress.”
Anne goes silent, but her hatred is still loud in her ears. “I should have bashed her in the mouth,” she tells Griet later, sharing a cigarette behind the school. “I should have squashed her like a bug.”
But Griet is preoccupied, it seems. She is busy looking off in another direction.
“What?” Anne wants to know.
“What?”
“You’re barely listening to me.”
A shrug as Griet frowns at the cigarette between her fingers. “I have to tell you something.”
Anne feels a sharp and immediate pinch of anxiety in her belly but tries to hide it with her impatience. “Tell me? Tell me what?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Tell me, Griet,” Anne now commands. “You can’t just announce that you have something to say and then say nothing.”
Griet raises her eyes and stares.
“Griet?”
“I’m leaving school,” the girl says.
Anne feels another pinch. “What? That’s ridiculous.”
“Why? You’re always saying that it’s such a waste of time.”
“For me, not for you,” Anne answers, trying to make a joke. “You need educating, lieveling,” she says, rubbing Griet’s mop of curls.
Griet smiles faintly and without mirth. “I’m getting married,” she says.
Anne swallows. Repeats the word. “Married.”
“Yep.”
“Married,” Anne repeats again, feeling a buzz of anger return. “To whom?”
“To ‘whom’? To ‘whom’ do you think, Anne?”
“I don’t know.” Plucking the cigarette from Griet’s fingers, she says, “Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the boys you’re doing it with.”
Griet’s mouth hardens. “That’s a shitty thing to say.”
“Sorry,” Anne says, without meaning it. “I guess you just took me by surprise. So it’s the Canadian?”
“His name is Albert.”
“Did he get you pregnant?”
“No. He just asked me, and I said yes. Why are you being so nasty? I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Griet mutters to herself, standing and snatching up her book satchel. “I knew you’d react like this.”
And suddenly Anne feels a bleak stab of remorse. “Griet. I’m sorry,” she says, meaning it this time, but too late. Griet is already retrieving her bicycle.
“Griet, please.”
The girl stops, wiping away tears but refusing to look in Anne’s direction. “Good-bye, Anne,” is all she says. Then she mounts her bike and pushes off into the street. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
* * *
Dejected, Anne arrives at the bookshop, only to find no sign of Mr. Nussbaum. The door is bolted, shades drawn. She knocks tentatively and can hear Lapjes meowing like a big grump on the other side, but no Mr. Nussbaum. No note on the door, only the faint scour marks and chipped-paint reminder of the anonymous request for Jews to perish.
So now she is riding her bike, going nowhere, trailing the canals to let her mind drain to empty. No thought, no ambition, no feeling. But when she stops near a short metal bridgework to light a cigarette, it’s Bep she spies stepping out of a sadly dilapidated old canal pub. Bep! She wants to call out the girl’s name. She wants to run to her and hug her tightly. She wants to pour out the surge of affection she feels, but some internal drag of caution stops her. She thinks of what Kugler told her. That Bep could not tolerate the burden of Anne’s friendship.
Bep buttons her jacket in the doorway and steps away. Anne considers following her, but then there’s someone else stepping out of the pub. A lean-eyed girl wearing a kerchief over her short, stubby hair. She’s gained a hard angle to her face since the time Anne spotted her on a tram on the arm of a mof soldier. And when she catches Anne’s glare for an instant from across the cobblestones, all she offers is a hard blink before she turns in the opposite direction from Bep and walks away, head down.
“That’s Bep’s sister,” Anne says to Margot, who is standing beside her in her Lager rags, her face livid with sores.
Really? Are you sure?
“Yes, I’m sure. You think I’m blind? That’s Nelli.”
She looked so broken, Margot observes. Poor thing.
“Poor thing? You expect me to have sympathy for her?”
Don’t you?
“She was a bitch, Margot. A mof prostitute.”
Why must you judge people so harshly? Mummy would never have called anybody such names. Didn’t she always try to have a good opinion about people? Didn’
t she teach us to keep a good opinion of people, no matter what?
“Maybe. But Mummy has no opinions any longer about anyone,” Anne answers. “She can’t teach us a thing. She’s dead.”
So am I, Margot reminds her. And yet here I am.
“Yes,” Anne must admit. “You’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me.”
* * *
• • •
The following day Griet is not at school, leaving Anne sitting beside an empty spot.
* * *
The next day she pedals to the bookshop again, hoping this time to find it open, but the door is still locked tight. She raps on the window, cups her hands around her eyes to blot out the glare, and peers through the glass, but there’s nothing to see except shadows. Back at the Prinsengracht, she knocks on the door to the private office and pokes in her head. “Pim?”
Her father is on the telephone, looking harried, but he waves her in anyway. She sits.
She’s hesitant to involve Pim. She feels that the bookshop is her realm now. A small sanctuary, where, surrounded by books, she is insulated and protected by its quiet space. In the shop she can pretend to share the soul of the cat, that old calico rug, who lazes in the sunlight with a headful of cat dreams. Does she really want to open the door of that sanctuary to her father? Yet she’s worried.
“When I arrived at Mr. Nussbaum’s shop yesterday to work, it was completely locked up,” she says. “No note. Nothing. I’m afraid that something’s happened to him.”
Is that a small flicker of caution she spots in Pim’s eyes? “I’m sure he’s fine, Anne. We spoke a few days back on the telephone, he and I. And now that you mention it, I do believe he said he had to do some traveling.”
“So why didn’t he tell me that? Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“It didn’t occur to me, Anne. Perhaps it should have,” he is willing to admit, but meanwhile he’s started slitting open the mail on his desk with a letter opener. Obviously attempting to send her the message that he’s too busy to continue this discussion.
“Where is he traveling to?” Anne wants to know.
“I don’t know, and he didn’t say. Doesn’t he travel for business on occasion? Estate auctions? That sort of thing?”
A spasm of paranoia strikes Anne. Pim and his barracks-block comrade. What else does Pim know that Anne doesn’t? What else has Mr. Nussbaum been discussing with him? What sort of intelligence does he provide her father about the girl who works in his bookshop? “How often do you speak on the phone, the two of you?”
“How often? Not often,” Pim answers.
“He’s not giving you reports on your daughter’s behavior? On her mental state?”
“Anne.” Her father exhales. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” She feels willing to believe this.
“Yes,” he informs her in no uncertain terms. “Now, please, I’m busy. Aren’t you? Doesn’t anyone have work for you?”
Anne frowns. Her paranoia suppressed for the moment, her voice becomes lightly petulant. “There is nothing for me to do here. Miep’s out on a sales call with Kugler. Mr. Kleiman went home with a sick belly.”
Browsing through his correspondence. “Well, if you truly have nothing to do, then you can find something to clean. Isn’t that what your mother would always recommend?”
The mention of her mother hardens Anne’s expression. “I’d rather go out and have a bicycle ride,” she says.
“Fine. Then do that if you must,” her father concedes. “Only be sure you’re not late. Remember your promise to help Hadas prepare for Shabbat supper.”
“And since when do we observe the Sabbath anyway?” she asks with faint accusation.
Eyes lift from the letter in his hand. “So now you have an objection to the Shabbat?”
“No, of course not. Just curious. Are you becoming pious, Pim?”
“Please don’t be rude, Anne. All I’m asking is that for once you do as I ask without argument.”
“I’m not arguing. I was just wondering if maybe this is your new wife’s influence.”
“Anne, really,” her father says irritably. “Why must you be so intentionally provocative? Is it so hard to accept that your stepmother should wish to celebrate the Sabbath in our new home?”
Home. Anne thinks about the word. What a weight it suddenly carries. Leaving the private office, she clambers down the steps to the warehouse, making an escape.
“Going out, miss?”
She takes hold of her bicycle. The door to the warehouse stands wide open for ventilation, and the scented air smacks of ground cumin. But old Mr. Nobody Lueders is looking up from one of the milling machines, his face grimy from the work but stretched out in anticipation of her response.
What’s it to you, you ugly old plague? That’s what she would like to reply, but instead she says, “Yes, Mr. Lueders. I am indeed going out. Just for a ride.”
Lueders nods mournfully, his expression slumping into a frown. Since the advent of Mrs. Zuckert, this particular hireling has been happy to become her personal dog. Chasing after this stick and that one, with a tip of the cap. Sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. Paying far too much heed to Anne’s comings and goings. “Be careful, now,” he adds as she mounts her bike and shoves off with a hard press on the pedal. “The town’s still not what it used to be. Lots of rascals on the prowl.”
* * *
The Skinny Bridge
Brugnummer 242
Amsterdam-Centrum
Her bicycle may look like a battered old piece of salvage, but even with its clacking gears and patched tires, Anne bustles over the cobblestones and whizzes past greasy old lorries to a narrow whitewood drawbridge off the Kerkstraat. This is the Magere Brug, cinching a narrow stripe of the muddy Amstel, but nobody ever calls it anything except the Skinny Bridge. Still half mounted on the bike, she’s propped herself against the railing and has just lit a cigarette when she spots Raaf ambling toward her.
“You’re late,” she tells him.
“Late?”
“We agreed on half past.”
“No we didn’t. We didn’t agree on anything. You just like to give orders.”
“That’s true,” she admits. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not late. You must get a bicycle,” she decides.
“Oh, yeah?” Raaf lets his eyebrows lift. “And how do I get one of those, huh? Are the Canadians giving away bikes along with chocolate bars?”
Anne chirps back, “I’ll get you one.”
And now Raaf’s face contracts. She is getting used to this. His genial, thoughtful expression, crimping when she’s embarrassed him about something. His clothes. His ridiculous haircut. The snort at the end of his laugh. She never intends to embarrass him, of course—it simply seems to happen.
“Females don’t buy stuff for men.”
“No? Is that how it works?” She’s teasing him, slightly maybe, but also interested to know if this is true.
“At least not bicycles. Men earn their own money.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about buying anything anyway,” Anne explains. “I can pretend mine’s been stolen, so my father’ll get me another one.”
“I don’t need my own,” Raaf says. “We can share yours.”
“Oh, and how do we do that?”
“Here, give it over,” he tells her, and she allows him to take her bicycle in his hands. “Now climb on in front of me,” he says, offering his hand.
She feels herself grin.
Climbing on in front of him with only the smallest perch on the tip of the seat, feeling his arms stretched around her, his hands clamped onto the bike’s handles, feeling the force of motion as he pedals harder, driving up the speed, it’s all just so scary and delicious. The wild, unpredictable jolt of the bumpy cobbles, her arms stretched behind her, g
ripping his waist as her only anchor, on the edge of tumbling off. The thrill of it streaks through her like lightning.
“Stop! Stop!” she cries with eager laughter as they bump down the street.
At first he pretends to be deaf, still pedaling hard. “What? Can’t hear you!”
“No. Stop up there at the corner,” she commands. “There’s something I want to do!” This time the boy obeys, skidding to a squeaking halt, at which point Anne twists about and seizes him for a kiss as if she is set on vacuuming the breath from his lungs. And oh, what a terror of desire she feels bubbling up in her. What a swallowing hunger she feels, the starving girl sharing her bicycle with too much boy. She glares into his face, her eyes vibrating. Drilling into his gaze with all the sharpness that is in her.
* * *
• • •
They sit in a grassy spot adjacent to the canal, filled with pale Amsterdammers eager to soak up a bit of sunlight. Cyclists glide past. Anne rests her head against his shoulder, smelling his sweat that’s tinged with the aroma of boiled hops. She breathes him in and watches a squirrel scramble crazily across the grass. “Have you been with many girls?” she wonders. “Like this?”
“You got a lot of questions,” he points out, but he still answers. “Many girls? I don’t guess many.”
“You know I’m still a virgin,” she says.
A small shrug. “Yeah, I figured.”
Anne stiffens. “You figured, did you? How exactly did you figure? Am I wearing it stamped on my forehead?”
This makes him grin at the ground. “Nah. It’s just the way you act.”
Anne lifts her head and blinks. “I act like a virgin?”
“Don’t get offended,” he tells her.
“I’m not offended. I’m just very curious. Just what . . . just how do I act like a virgin?”
Annelies Page 24