Annelies

by David R. Gillham

  “Well, like this,” Raaf says, his grin crooked. “You get all fidgety.”

  “I get all fidgety,” Anne repeats with a frown.

  And now Raaf frowns, too. “I know I’m not saying it right. I just figured it out, is all. Don’t get so ruffled. It don’t bother me.”

  “No?” Anne says tensely. But she must admit to a small flare of relief in her heart.

  “No, Anne,” he tells her.

  And at the sound of her name on his lips, she seizes him with a kiss. Diving deeply as he combs his fingers through the thickness of her hair and clutches the back of her neck, she gripping him tightly until a scold from a passing policeman on his bicycle separates them. “Hey, boy! Let’s see some daylight between you two!”

  Their lips part. “See now, you got me in trouble with the law.” Raaf half grins.

  She leans her forehead against his chin and breathes in the intimacy. “Of course. Blame the virgin.”

  Raaf picks up a stick, breaking it in two before tossing the pieces aside. Anne lolls her head against his shoulder and absently measures the size of her hand against his just for the sake of touch. That’s when she notices that his finger is bent. The third finger on his left hand. Well, not bent, really, not like a bent nail, but definitely crooked. Why has it taken her so long to notice? “What happened to your finger?” she asks, and he snatches his hand away. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t I ask?”

  Raaf flexes his hand in and out of a fist, as if he’s trying to muscle out a cramp. At first he says nothing, but then he tells her, “It was my pap.”

  Anne blinks. “Your father bent your finger?”

  Raaf shrugs. Picks up another twig from the grass to snap. “He was always kind of a canker, my pap,” he says. “Always looking for a fight with somebody. But after Mam died, he got even worse. He did this,” the boy says, flexing his hand again, “’cause I waved to a neighbor he didn’t like.”

  Anne goes silent. She has learned about violence and plenty of it. She is not shocked by it, as she once was as a child, but it still saddens her.

  “Pretty loopy, right?” Raaf grins painfully. “He’s gone now. Dead. Got drunk and fell down the stairs last winter. Snapped his neck,” says Raaf, snapping the twig absently.

  “I’m sorry,” Anne says, and means it. She’s sorry because she can recognize the pain in the boy’s face. The boy gives a glance at nothing and a shrug. “Did he beat you often?”

  “Usually only when he was loaded. After I got bigger—quicker—I used to punch him back when my mam was around. To try to keep him off her. But then she died. Also, he was getting old, and his punching arm wasn’t what it used to be. So when he started swinging, I’d just hit the street.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know. I hated his guts most of the time, the old pox.”

  Anne swallows quietly. “You have no brothers, no sisters?”

  “Nope. After me, something happened to my mam. She couldn’t give birth again. That pissed Pap off, too. He always said it was my fault there’d be no daughter to take care of him when he was old. Mam never seemed to mind so much, though.” Tossing away the broken twig, he tugs out his tobacco pouch. “You want to share a smoke?”

  “Sure.” She watches him roll the shag. She’s hesitant to probe further but then does so anyway. “May I ask you something else?”

  “I guess.” The boy seals the end of the smoke with a lick.

  “How—” Anne starts to say, then stops and starts again. “How did your mother die?”

  Raaf swallows. He lights up with a match. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he says. Then he says, “There’s a place I want to take you today.”

  “A place?”

  “Yeah. A place the rest of the world has forgotten.”

  * * *

  The Transvaal

  Oost-Watergraafsmeer

  Amsterdam-Oost

  During the Hunger Winter, when all of Amsterdam was crazy for wood to burn to keep from freezing to death, people started with the trees. The parks had trees, so why not chop them all down? Also, the wooden blocks in the tram tracks could be ripped out, so that’s something, too. Furniture! Old Auntie’s chipped Frisian cupboard! She won’t mind if we burn it—she’s in heaven anyway. And how about the empty homes of the Jews? Now, there’s an idea, plenty of wood to be had there. Maybe Mr. Puls’s removal company has hauled off all the furnishings, but there’re still wooden beams, wooden floorboards, wooden stair rails and steps and spindles. Just tie a pry bar and a few hammers onto a sledge and you’re on your way.

  That was the thinking. In fact, it was so much the thinking that with all the wood stripped out, the walls of Jewish houses began to collapse for lack of support. Buildings crumbled wearily into brick piles. It was a mess. But so what? It wasn’t as if the Jews were ever coming back. Everybody knew that.

  They have crossed the Berlagebrug. Anne walks her bicycle through the streets, feeling a gritty disquiet grinding her belly.

  Broken walls stand as ugly monuments. Rubble scattered. Signposts continue to boast the grand colonial names of streets: the Krugerstraat, Schalk Burgerstraat, De la Reystraat, the Paardekraal, and Tugelastraat. Street names of past imperial pride in what is now a precarious empire. The Spice Islands, Suriname, and the East Indies on the brink of revolution. The Kaapkolonie surrendered long ago, but here the names remain if nothing else. They are empty shells, these houses, the life husked from them. The vacant Pretoriusplein is surrounded by a square of debris and teetering façades, as if it has suffered under a rain of bombs. A playground for a residential park in the President Brandstraat that once would have teemed with children is now just an acre of mud. The empty corner of the Schalk Burgerstraat is boarded up.

  This is the Transvaal.

  Before the war it was a smart-looking enclave of workers’ housing populated by Jews of a certain status. Maybe the old Jodenbuurt had been fed by the so-called Orange Jews—three centuries of Ostjuden fleeing the pogroms of the east—but the Transvaalbuurt had been built by the likes of the Handwerkers Vriendenkring to house a hardworking class of Jewish artisans. Cutters and polishers from the diamond district, neighborhood merchants, tailors, grocers, ink sprayers, and government clerks. Still far removed from the haute bourgeois Kultur bastions of the Merwedeplein in the Amsterdam-Zuid, perhaps, where pampered little girls like Anne and Margot Frank had lived, but the Transvaal had been home to Jews scrambling up the ladder. Les petit bourgeois juifs on their way up.

  Now it’s a wasteland. A designated “Jewish Quarter” by the moffen, it had been cut off from the rest of the town and emptied, trainload by trainload.

  Anne stares up at the broken streetscape. A swirl of air catches dust and whirls it about as Raaf scoops up a chunk of brick and pitches it through one of the few unbroken windows.

  “Don’t do that, please,” she says.

  “Do what?”

  “Break windows.”

  Raaf shrugs. “It was just a window. It’s not like anybody was looking through it anymore.” But Anne is not so sure of that. The swirl of dust could carry a thousand souls. Ten thousand.

  “Come on,” he tells her, and bounds ahead over a pile of slag.

  A vacant block of flats on what was once the Louis Bothastraat. The front door is long gone, but she still pauses with her bike at the empty threshold, as if she should wait for permission to enter. Pigeons flutter out of the window indignantly as Raaf kicks at them shouting, “Shoo!” They’ve already splattered the windowsill with globs of blue-white droppings. There are no floors left. The floors have been taken down to dirt, but Raaf has dropped a few boards as a walkway, and he clomps across them like his own one-man army. “This way,” he tells her. “You can leave your bike outside. There’s no one here to steal it.”

  It was probably a bedroom at one point. He’s covered up the windows with a sheet of dirty canvas, but there’
s light coming in from a hole in the ceiling. Here the floor is a slab of concrete. An empty crate marked CANNED PEARS turned upside down serves as a table. The actual pear tins are stacked beside it. There’s a dirtied ashtray from a café called De Pellekaen sharing the crate top with an electric flashlight and a few half-burned paraffin candles. The bed is made from an old yellowed mattress covered by a patchwork of blankets. It’s a hideout.

  “So what do you think?” Raaf asks her with a crooked smile of pride at his digs.

  “What is this place?” she asks, though really she already knows.

  “It’s my castle, where I am the king,” Raaf tells her. “King Raaf the First!” he says with a laugh before flopping onto the bedding. Grabbing a pear tin, he applies an opener to the lid. “Want some?” he asks.

  “No,” says Anne. “Thank you.”

  “Sure? It’s pretty good stuff. I like to drink the syrup first,” he says, and then demonstrates by raising the tin to his lips and tipping it back. “Mmm. Sometimes I pour some schnapps into it, and then it gets even better.”

  Anne gazes at him from the doorless doorway.

  “Aren’t you gonna come in?” he asks her.

  “I’m not sure,” Anne answers. “Is this where you take them?”

  Raaf tosses back another swig of pear juice from the tin and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Take who?”

  “Your other girls,” she says.

  He looks back at her with that curiously broken expression he often wears. “Anne. There are no other girls.”

  “I bet,” says Anne.

  “No, it’s true. Just you.”

  “I’m not your girl,” she says.

  “No?”

  “No. I can’t be.”

  “Because you’re Jewish?”

  “Because you’re not.”

  “Then why do you let me kiss you?”

  “Do you want me to stop letting you?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up about it.” She glances around at the walls. “This is what you call a castle?”

  “I know it’s not much.” He shrugs at the truth. “I started coming here when my pap went on a bender. Or just when I kinda needed to get away from everything.” Lighting one of the paraffin candles with a match, he then lights a cigarette. “So are you just gonna stand there?” he asks, and blows out smoke.

  “I’m not going to do it with you,” she assures him flatly.

  Raaf sniffs. “Do what?”

  “You know what.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” Raaf says simply. “So you still haven’t come in,” he points out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lying with her head resting on Raaf’s chest, gripping his body like this, she feels as if she is holding on to a lifesaver in the middle of a flood. She listens to the slow bellows of his breathing. Listens to the unembarrassed thump of his heart. There are two buttons at the back of her blouse, just two below the neck. She feels him absently tug at the top button till it comes loose. One button and then the second.

  “What are you doing?” she wants to know.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, that’s not true. You are very definitely doing something.”

  “I just want to feel your skin, that’s all.”

  “You can feel the skin on my arm,” she informs him, but doesn’t complain any further when he continues to stroke the small patch of bare skin on her back.

  “So it was two whole years?”

  Anne does not move. She opens her eyes and glares at a crack in the plaster wall. “Was what two whole years?”

  “You hid out from the moffen for two years.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I don’t think I made it up.”

  “It was twenty-five months,” Anne says without emotion. “Until the Grüne Polizei came.”

  “And you know who did it?” he wonders. “Who tipped ’em off?”

  Anne lifts her head to look at him. To examine his face. His expression is blank.

  “Why are you asking these questions?”

  “I dunno. You ask me stuff all the time.”

  A blink before she lowers her head back to his chest. “There are theories,” is all she tells him. She is surprised at how painful it is to discuss the subject. She is surprised that she feels not just the anger of the betrayed but also the shame of a victim. She rolls over on her elbow and gazes at Raaf’s face. He’s never been too curious before about what happened or how she survived the war. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t really want to know,” he answers. “I’m just trying to . . . to, I don’t know. Be closer to you. To find out what you’re thinking. It’s not easy. I’m sorry I ever opened my trap,” he says, and huffs out a sigh.

  She looks at him, then lowers her head to his shoulder. “No. I’m sorry. I’m happy that you want to know more about me. I am. There are just some subjects . . . It’s hard for me,” she says.

  The boy says nothing for a moment. And then when he speaks again, his voice is numb. “She starved,” he says.

  Anne raises her eyes.

  “My mam. That’s how she died. She starved.” For a moment the boy holds on to a deep silence, then shakes his head. “It was like she shrank. Her body was just a bunch of sticks, except her belly was all bloated up. And her eyes,” he says, “they looked like they might pop out of her head.”

  Anne feels her heart contract. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeats. Tears heat her eyes. She can feel his grief. She can feel the great weight of sadness he must carry, because she feels it herself. But her sadness is also bitter. She has refused to picture this moment of her own mother’s death before, but now she sees it. The fragile body of sticks. The swollen belly, flesh tight against the bone. The popping eyes. And her mother’s face.

  The tears stain her cheek. She does not wipe them away. She feels the boy gently stroke the patch of bare skin at the base of her neck. She breathes in and out. Pigeons coo, a strange, hushed lullaby. An ersatz peace of a kind descends. More physical than spiritual, like a blanket for a pleasantly sleepy dip in the temperature. Anne presses her ear closer to his chest. He smells of toasted shag, of maleness. A heaviness that she can cling to. The beat of his heart, slowly descending into her subconscious, as her eyes drift shut. . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  And then she is bolting upright on Raaf’s lumpy mattress, smelling the stink of pigeon shit. Her skin is chilled, and a heavy shiver weakens her body. The light is drifting toward dusk as a drizzle of rain patters through the hole in the ceiling.

  “Raaf!” She punches him in the shoulder with her balled-up fist, as hard as she can, and he bolts up beside her in confusion.

  “Oww! What? What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” she answers furiously, wiping her eyes. “The sun is setting. The Sabbath’s about to start, and you let me fall asleep! My father’s going to be livid!”

  * * *

  • • •

  The cloudy afternoon sky has given way to a leaden gray twilight, wet with rain. She is out of breath when she reaches the Herengracht, bangs in the front door, her clothes damp, her hair in wet ringlets on her brow as she stows her bicycle in the foyer. “Pim?” she calls, but what she finds is a shadow nested in the Viennese wingback.

  “Hello?” she tries.

  The figure sits motionless, and then the head rises.

  “Hello, Anne.” The voice is barely recognizable. It sounds dead somehow. Soulless.

  “Dassah.” Anne speaks the name.

  “Do you know?” Dassah asks her slowly. She is wrapped in a knitted throw. The light sketches across her face. “Do you have any idea, Anne, what time it is?”

  Anne says nothing, glaring.

  “
When you didn’t show up at the appointed time, he became worried. When you didn’t show up an hour later, he was agitated. When you didn’t show up at the start of dusk, he began to go a bit mad. I couldn’t calm him,” Dassah tells her. “It was impossible. He insisted on telephoning everyone he knew. Anyone who might know where you’d disappeared to.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anne says with a swallow. She edges a glance to the dining table, laid with a white linen cloth and a trio of silver-rimmed porcelain place settings. A hand-embroidered cover for the challah bread. A pair of silver candlesticks holding two tall white tapers. The smell of something slightly burned coming from the oven. “I was . . .” she says, “I was with a friend.”

  “A friend,” Dassah repeats, a touch of wily bitterness in her voice. She raises a snifter and lets the brandy inside drift back. “Is that what you call him? A friend?”

  “Where’s Pim?” Anne asks suddenly.

  “Probably sitting in the local police precinct by now, describing his missing daughter to the constable. He ran off with his faithful Miep at his heels an hour ago. Good and faithful Miep.”

  “Then I should go after them,” Anne breathes. But she doesn’t move. She feels stuck in place.

  “I’ve never told you, Anne,” Dassah says, “I’ve never told you the story of my daughter? My Tova.”

  A cold shock strikes Anne. A daughter? It’s as if a frigid gap has opened up in the air. The presence of another daughter. Another secret kept from her.

  “She was not a very pretty child. She had her father’s looks, unfortunately. Smart enough, a good head for numbers like him, too, but a gullible nature. Sweet eyes, but a homely smile. Not like you, Annelies Marie. Not such a lovely princess. She never had beaux. She was shy and clumsy. Not like you. When there were parties, she was seldom invited. I told her that looks didn’t matter. Popularity didn’t matter. Only what is in your mind mattered. And she was a good daughter, so she didn’t argue. I told her if I had worried about being invited to parties, I would have worried myself to pieces. Of course, the truth is that I was always invited to parties. The truth is that I was never shy or clumsy. And if I wasn’t as pretty as some girls, I still had something special that boys liked to be around. You must be able to relate to that, Anne. Can’t you?”