She whips about but then straightens. Staring. “I was looking for matches,” she claims.
Raaf points to the box of wax tips sitting in plain sight. “Matches,” he says.
Anne frowns at them. Her belly churns, and she takes a step forward. Really, she is beyond pretense. The idea of continuing it is sickening. She will strike him with the truth as hard as she is able. “Your father was an NSBer,” she declares.
The muscles along Raaf’s jaw contract, and he turns his eyes away from her. “Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter. But it’s true. He was a Nazi.”
Shaking his head with a frown. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Too bad. Because unless we do, I’m walking out and you won’t see me again.” She stares at him until he meets her eyes.
The boy looks cornered. Trapped. Finally he kicks the concrete with the toe of his shoe and huffs out an answer. “He needed a job,” he says. Then seems to shake his head at the painfulness of what he’s about to confess. “He used to be a real labor-pillar man, ya know? Always for the trade unions. Always. Even when I was just a little kid, he used to take me to the rallies and stick me up on his shoulders so I could see all the flags. Things were easier then. Pap did a lot of metalwork. For a while he was a welder for this shop in the Jordaan, but then he had some sort of trouble with the shop steward. I don’t know what it was—maybe it was the drinking—but however it started, he made a grudge out of it. You were either with Pap or against him. Those were the only two choices he ever gave anybody. Anyhow, he lost his temper, the old dope, and ended up socking the steward in the snoot. Not only did he get the ax, but they put him on a list so he couldn’t get a union job anyplace else. For a long time, he just kicked around. Doing one shit job or another, but there was never much food on the table. Then the war started and the moffen came. I guess he saw a way back to a payday.”
“And my father was forced to hire him.”
Raaf tilts a frown. “He wasn’t a bad worker, Pap,” he insists. “Most of the time. Sure, maybe he drank, but it’s not like he was lazy or stupid just because he’d become a party man.”
“But it must have been so . . . so ‘unbearable’ for him,” Anne says. “So unbearable. A National Socialist working for a Jew?”
“He just needed to make a living,” the boy repeats. “That’s all. It’s not like he wore the uniform or anything, or went around shouting ‘Hou Zee!’ to everybody on the street. He just went to meetings here and there. Why not? They had free beer. And I never heard him complain about working for a Jew.”
“But you said he called the Jews ‘bloodsuckers,’” Anne reminds him. “Those were your words.”
“What are you trying to prove here anyway?” the boy demands.
“I just want to know the truth, Raaf. If your father was a Nazi, then I think I have the right to know. Was he a Jew hater? If he was still alive, wouldn’t he be beating you for polluting yourself with a filthy yid?”
“Anne, you’re starting to sound kinda crazy.” He tries to put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugs off his touch.
“He was a party member. I heard that he bragged about having connections to the Gestapo. That he had a pass from an SD man in the Euterpestraat.”
Ask him now many Jews his father denounced, Margot proposes.
“How many Jews do you think he denounced?”
“Pap liked to feel big, but it was mostly all bullshit. That ‘pass’ he bragged about? He won it from some canker playing dice. He didn’t know the goddamned toilet cleaner in Euterpestraat.”
Don’t let him hoodwink you, Anne, Margot warns, whispering in her ear. His father was a Nazi. He’s admitted as much. Who knows what crimes the man was complicit in committing? Crimes against our people.
But Anne cannot completely ignore the pain in the boy’s face. Carefully, she allows herself to sink down onto one of the crates. “Tell me the truth. I want to know. I want you to say it: yes or no. Was it your father who telephoned the Grüne Polizei?”
Raaf gazes damply at her.
“Was it your father who denounced us, Raaf?”
His gaze is unchanged. “What if I say no?”
“Is that the truth?”
The boy stares at her. “The last summer of the war. He wasn’t drunk. He came home and wasn’t drunk. Not that night,” the boy says. “Instead he was talking to me like . . . like, I don’t know. Like I was somebody important to him for once. Somebody to count on. He told me that he was going on a job. That he was going on a job and needed me along. Course I knew, I guess, what sort of job it was gonna be, but back then who wasn’t pinching what they could? He said there was this place where he’d worked in the Prinsengracht that stored spices. Kegs full of spices worth plenty of poen. But that he couldn’t do the job on his own.”
Anne’s eyes sharpen at this.
“My mam was still alive. There was nothing in the pantry, so I thought . . . who cares? Money’s money. Who cares how you get it? It only matters what you use it for, and I thought I could use it for Mam. There were still half-decent pork shanks to be had on the black market then, if you had the cash. So I said who cares what I do in this klootzak of a world, you know? Who the hell cares what I do or how I do it?” He says this and stops. “Maybe I don’t have to finish this story?” he says.
Anne does not speak, but perhaps the boy does not really expect her to.
“I mean, you know what happened next,” he tells her. “You were there.”
Anne gazes at him. “You smashed out a panel in the warehouse door,” she answers.
“We brought the tools on a sledge. I used a pry bar at first and then just kicked in a plank. That’s when I heard somebody yell for the police from inside.”
Anne swallows. “That was Mr. van Pels. He was a spice merchant. After we were arrested, he was gassed.”
Margot appears in her death rags to whisper in Anne’s ear. Now you must ask him the real question.
Anne’s mouth goes bitter. She would like to be sick. That’s what she would like. But instead she looks at him and asks, “Was it you, then?”
Raaf gazes back at her with a drift of pain in his eyes.
“Was it you,” she says, “who went to the Gestapo?”
He blinks, but the pain remains.
“Money’s money. You said so. Who cares how you get it? Jews were worth forty guilders a head.” Anne feels a flame ignite inside her chest. It burns up the oxygen in her lungs and leaves her searching for a breath.
“I would never do anything to hurt people. Not on purpose. You gotta believe me.”
Slapping her hands over her eyes, she bursts into tears and collapses into herself, but when she feels Raaf’s hands on her shoulders, she tears away from him. She hears a crack, feels a jolt in her palm, and it isn’t until after the boy blinks at her with dumb shock and she feels the sting of her palm that she realizes she’s struck him. A full-handed slap across the face. When she strikes him again, however, it’s with real intention, her fists balled up with the force of her fury. The boy does not attempt to defend himself or deflect her rage, only allows himself to stand as her punching bag while she hits him again and again, until she’s spent. Stumbling over the masonry lip of a doorway, she rips the knee out of one of her stockings as she falls and pukes. Pukes up the desire, the rage, and the poisonous grief being wrenched up from her belly, splattering her sleeves until she retches dryly. For a moment her hand trembles as she wipes her mouth with the palm of her hand. The boy is down there with her, but she bats his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she shouts, and then she is up, pushing herself clear of him. By the time she hits the street on her bicycle, she’s pedaling with her blood pounding in her ears.
“Wait!” Raaf calls. He’s shouting her name, but she is deaf to him. Deaf to him, deaf to her name, deaf to everything. T
he town passes by her in a welter of tears, the wind stinging her eyes. The door to the warehouse is open when she reaches the Prinsengracht. The men are loading up a lorry with barrels as she rushes past, abandoning her bike and banging up the ankle-breaking stairs, up, up, up, straight to the landing, the panic of her footsteps ringing in her ears. The bookcase squeals painfully as she swings it open and thumps up the steps into the embrace of the past. If her mother were there still, she would collapse into her arms, but her mother is at the bottom of an ash pit, so there is nothing and no one left to embrace her here in the dusty remains of her life. She lurches into the room where her desk once stood, finding nothing but the dry rot and the peeling magazine pictures stuck to the wall, and she drops to her knees and curls into a ball.
There the bells of the Westertoren summon her sister. Margot with her hollow eyes and her filthy pullover. Yellow triangles forming a star on her breast.
“Are you happy now?” Anne demands to know.
Am I happy?
“Isn’t this what you wanted? Me, all to yourself. Never with a chance to be with someone else. Just stuck to you forever! Isn’t that your plan?”
Anne. I don’t have a plan. You know that.
Anne coughs miserably. Sniffs back her tears and wipes her eyes with her palms. She feels like she has fallen to the bottom of a deep well. “So now,” she breathes, “so now I’m alone again.” She shoves her hair from her face. “I think maybe I’ll always be alone as long as I am here. It’s why I want so badly to go to America. If I stay for Pim, I’m afraid I’ll never leave this room. I’ll be a prisoner here forever,” she says, staring into the air. Then she meets Margot’s eyes. “Do you think Peter ever thought of me?” she asks.
Peter?
“After we were separated on the ramp.”
I think he must have.
“Do you?” A soft shrug to herself. “I didn’t think of him that much,” Anne confesses. “Hardly at all, until I came back to Amsterdam. Only then,” she says. And then her eyes deepen. “Sometimes I think it would have been so much easier if I had just died with you, Margot. If neither one of us had ever left Bergen-Belsen. Is that so terrible?”
She asks this question, but no answer comes. The spot where her sister crouched is now empty. She is alone.
22
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY
Dearest Kit,
Another birthday has gone by, so I’m now fifteen.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 13 June 1944
1946
Leased Flat
The Herengracht
Amsterdam-Centrum
The Canal Ring
At breakfast the telephone rings and Dassah answers it, but only to hang up a moment later. “Werner Nussbaum has returned,” she announces to Anne and Pim at the table, pouring Pim a second cup of coffee. “Anne, he’ll be expecting you at the shop this afternoon.”
Anne stares back, above her plate of fried mush. She’s relieved, but also a little miffed. “That’s all? He’s returned and expects me? No further explanation?”
Pim raises his coffee cup to his lips and takes a sip. “Anne, I’m sure you will interrogate the man when you see him,” he says coolly. “For now eat your breakfast, please.”
* * *
Nussbaum
Tweedehands-Boekverkoper
The Rozengracht
Mr. Nussbaum is pale. Thinner than he was. His smile looks waxy as Anne rolls her bike into the shop, leaning it against the wall. “And here she is,” he announces with a brittle joviality. “The future of literature.”
Somehow Mr. Nussbaum’s friendly exclamation rubs her wrong. It sounds just too ridiculous. “I was afraid something had happened to you, Mr. Nussbaum,” she tells him with undisguised reproach. “When I came to the shop and it was completely locked up.”
The smile on Mr. Nussbaum’s lips slips a notch. “Yes, well, I’m sorry about that, Anne. I am. I had to travel to the Hague, unexpectedly. Apparently the government has determined that while I was imprisoned in Auschwitz, I was also accruing a substantial sum of unpaid taxes.”
Anne feels her face heat. “That’s obscene.”
A shrug as he sets the kettle on the small hot plate. What else can be said?
“Is the same thing happening to Pim?”
“Isn’t that a question for him to answer?”
A frown. “We’re not exactly talking much these days.”
“I see.” He blows a spot of dust from the bowl of a china cup. “Will you have some coffee? It’s only ersatz, I’m afraid.”
“No, thank you,” Anne replies, her voice subdued, thinking of Pim’s chilly expression at breakfast. “It upsets my stomach.”
Mr. Nussbaum nods. Begins measuring the ersatz blend into the tin coffee press. “I understand that you have a birthday approaching,” he says. “You’ll be seventeen?”
Anne has picked up the broom to sweep the grit from the front entryway. “Yes,” is all she says.
“And there’s a celebration scheduled?”
“Not my idea. But yes.”
Mr. Nussbaum seems puzzled. “You’re not looking forward to it?”
“So I’m seventeen, so what? It’s not exactly an accomplishment. How many girls never lived that long?” she hears herself say. “Why am I owed a celebration?”
“Anne. You must never say that,” he instructs her. “You don’t have the right to say that.”
Anne stops sweeping and looks up at the ghastly emptiness of Mr. Nussbaum’s face.
“All those girls who didn’t live?” he says. “You owe it to them to celebrate. Don’t be so selfish.”
She parts her lips but has no words to speak.
The kettle whistles a low note. Mr. Nussbaum removes it with a rag over the handle and pours the steaming water into the press. “I’m sorry. Perhaps that was uncalled for.”
But Anne shakes her head with a twinge of humility, gripping the broom handle. “No. No, I can be selfish. Pim continues to remind me of that.”
Another small shrug. Mr. Nussbaum sets the kettle back on the hot plate. “Everybody can be selfish, Anne. But if you’re finding it so difficult to communicate with your father,” he suggests, “perhaps you don’t understand his needs very clearly. Perhaps his life has been more difficult than you’re aware of. Can children ever properly comprehend their parents’ hardships? I don’t know. But I do know that regardless of the past he does his best to remain positive and to concentrate on what’s beautiful in life.”
Anne feels herself go still. One beautiful thing, she hears Margot whisper in her ear.
“And what’s the most beautiful aspect of life to Otto Frank? The most important? Family. Being part of a family.” The melancholy in Mr. Nussbaum’s eyes is as dry as dust. “Maybe I shouldn’t say,” he tells her, “but if you want to learn something essential about your father, you should ask him sometime about the boy in our block in Auschwitz who called him ‘Papa.’”
Anne feels an odd sting. “Papa?” How dare he ask someone else to call him that?
“I won’t say more about it, but you should ask him.”
Anne takes this and files it in the back of her brain, trying to swallow her jealousy. Can’t she forgive Pim for finding a way to survive Auschwitz? But then that’s the question, isn’t it? Can she forgive him? Can she forgive anyone, Annelies Marie Frank included?
* * *
Wednesday, 12 June
Anne’s birthday arrives, and a small party has been organized. Her chair at the dining table is decorated with crepe-paper streamers and ruby-pink dahlias that Miep brought from her window boxes. Dassah has taken a slagroomtaart from the oven, baked with sugar surrogate and dried fruit, and Mr. Kugler has hung up a handmade banner reading GELUKKIGE VERJAARDAG! Anne smiles, feeling on display, when, God knows why, Mr. Kleiman decides to lead the small
assembly in a mortifying exhortation of “Hieperdepiep hoera!” in her honor. Swallowing a bit of panic, she accepts hugs and kisses from Miep and Jan and hearty handshakes from Kleiman and Kugler and three-cheeked kisses from their wives, though Anne and the new Mrs. Frank assiduously avoid any such tactile exchange. Pim, as always, reads a poem to the room, composed of the usual sugary paternal sentiment and daffy, awkward rhymes, all written on a scrap of paper he had to unfold several times and then peer at closely with his reading glasses on his nose. Applause follows. Anne permits Pim a peck on the cheek. But through it all she feels empty. She smiles as required, yet secretly there is nothing to fill her heart. Pim’s pride in her, which had once been a gift in and of itself, has lost its value. It is all a charade.
Anne retreats to the kitchen to help her stepmother make the coffee. As a wedding gift, Miep and Jan have given Pim and his new wife a Kaffeegedeck-Set of good Meissen Zwiebelmuster with a delft-blue floral pattern. Dassah examines a small chip she’s already made in a saucer. “I’m not used to owning such delicate things,” she confesses. “My mother had an iron kettle she used for brewing and serving alike. To pour you had to place a piece of cheesecloth over the cup to filter the grounds.”
Measuring the ersatz coffee makes Anne think of her mother as she fills the stainless-steel percolator from the tap. How particular Mummy was about the proper ritual, insisting the water always be cold. Screwing shut the tap, Anne releases a breath. This snag of memory, she finds, is like smelling a rose while being pricked by the thorny stem. She clutches it even as it wounds her. She watches the new Mrs. Frank slicing the tart into sections with a cake knife. How is this woman her mother now?
For a moment she is transported back into the past.
In the Achterhuis. It’s another birthday celebration, but Mr. Pfeffer is complaining to Miep about the recent decline in the quality of vegetables. “I really don’t mean to find fault. I’m sure it’s very difficult, but really, it’s often barely edible these days,” he declares. The contingent of helpers from down below have been rather quiet throughout the party. Miep, Bep, Mr. Kleiman, and Kugler. It’s as if they are clustered together as a visiting delegation from a foreign land. Miep clears her throat of whatever she would really like to say to old Pfeffer and replies in a well-managed tone, “Yes. It’s barely edible everywhere,” she informs the good dentist. “The Germans are shipping all decent food into the Reich.”
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