“What if I agree, then? The difficulties are immense. If you say so, I won’t argue the points. But haven’t you always taught me that difficulties are to be overcome?”
“It’s out of the question.”
“Why? Mummy’s brothers are there,” Anne says. “And you still have your friend in New York. Mr. Straus.”
“It’s much more complicated than that.”
“Always your answer to everything.”
“Because the world is not a simple place,” Pim shoots back. “Your uncles entered the States fifteen years ago, long before the war. They were seeking asylum. The Gestapo had already imprisoned Walther once, and it was only a matter of time before both of them would land in a camp for good. So it was a completely different set of circumstances.”
“Who cares how they got there? The point is they’re still there. They could help us.”
“Again—not so simple. Your uncle Julius is in poor health. And I say this in confidence, Anne—they’re barely scraping by. They’re workmen in a box factory, for heaven’s sake. They couldn’t possibly support more mouths to feed.”
“But Mr. Straus isn’t scraping by. He’s rich. He must have connections.”
“Enough, Anne. I’m not going hat in hand, begging, to Charley Straus. Not again. You have no idea what you’re asking of me.”
“So it’s your pride that’s stopping you, Pim? Is that what you’re telling me? Your pride?”
Pim glares at her with red eyes. Then he turns his back and strides from the threshold, but Anne is still shouting after him. “You know what the proverb says, Pim! Pride is the mask of a man’s faults!”
“Pride has nothing to do with it!” Pim halts and turns back to her. “We owe a debt, Anne, to the Netherlands. Has that ever occurred to you? We owe a debt to the Netherlands and to its people. Oh, there may have been some bad apples in the barrel—of course there were—but the Dutch welcomed us when few others did. And it was good Dutch people who risked their own lives to protect us. That cannot be forgotten. The Netherlands has become our home.”
“You keep telling me that, Pim, but it’s a lie. I have nothing here. Nothing left.”
“We have people who care for us, Anne. That’s not nothing. We have people we can trust.”
“But that’s the point, don’t you see? I don’t know who to trust.”
“Then trust in me,” he says, both a command and a plea. “I’m your father. If no one else, trust in me.”
Anne goes silent, staring back. When she speaks, her voice is low, barely controlled. “Amsterdam is a haunted place. I don’t belong here anymore,” she insists.
“And you think you will belong in America? That’s absurd, Anne. And even if it weren’t, half of Europe wants to go to America. There are, however, quotas in place severely restricting immigration.”
“You mean for Jews?”
“I mean for everyone,” her father answers. “For anyone. And we are fine just where we are. I have responsibilities here, Anne. A life to lead.”
“You have a life!” Anne is suddenly incensed. “You! But what life do I have, Pim? What life do I have?”
“A life with the people who love you, Anne. Isn’t that enough? You belong where your family is.”
“My family is dead!” she hears herself shout.
“I am not dead!” Pim, angry now, ignites. “I am not dead, Annelies! I am your father, and I am still very much alive!”
“Are you sure of that, Pim? Everyone tells me that I have survived. What joy! Anne Frank has survived! Praise God in his heaven! But I don’t feel it, Pim. I feel like this is an illusion and that I really belong in the burial pit with Margot!”
His eyes panic. “Anne.”
“Then, at the same moment, I want everything,” she declares, her hands clenching into fists. “I want everything there is to have, and America has everything. That’s why I cannot stay here. That’s why I must go. With you or without.”
Pim swallows. “I won’t permit it.”
“You think I require permission? You say I have no passport, but what does that matter? This is all the permission I need,” she says, yanking up her sleeve. “This will be my passport.”
She watches a shadow fall across Pim’s expression as he gazes down at the number tattooed on his daughter’s forearm. It’s a radical transformation. His skin seems to shrink tightly across his skull. His eye sockets deepen. His mouth contracts into a straight line, and something terrible scalds the color from his eyes. She thinks perhaps this is his true face now. The face that meets him when he’s alone with the mirror.
“Anneke,” he whispers. The blunt rebuke in his voice has disappeared. He sounds hollow. “You must realize how much I need you here with me,” he tells her. “How desperate I am to have you close by. I thought I had lost you both. Both my children. You cannot possibly comprehend the pain that a parent feels. For a father to lose his children? It’s so tragic. So unbelievably tragic. But then I found you. I found you, and my heart found a reason to keep beating. Please. You’re so young still. You need a father. And a father needs his daughter. Think about this. You must.”
Anne gazes back at him. Her mouth opens, but she has no words left to speak. The air is suddenly too thin. The walls too close. She shoves past him to get out. Out of the flat, out of the prison that the past has made of her present. She bursts into the street, and the open air swallows her. She runs. Runs until she sinks down on her knees in the grassy scrub beside the sidewalk. And there she remains, breathing in the tang of an approaching storm as a stripe of thunder unrolls above the chimneys.
Is this how you’re going to behave? Margot inquires. She has knelt beside Anne, dressed in the dirty blue-and-red prisoner’s smock they were forced to wear in the Westerbork Punishment Barracks. Her glasses are broken at the left hinge and repaired with a twist of wire.
Anne gives her a stare, then shakes her head. “So now you’re judging me, too?”
No one’s judging you, Anne.
“Liar.”
Well, if I am, it’s only because you’re being selfish. Besides—since when has Anne Frank cared what other people think of her?
Gazing at nothing. “I’m not so impervious as everyone has always believed.”
Then do the right thing, her sister urges. Pim needs you. I can’t help him, but you can.
Thunder rolls through the clouds, and a sudden dash of rain starts to patter the sidewalk. Anne feels the rain as if it’s nothing. In the camps they stood on the Appelplatz for hours in driving rain during the endless roll calls. The SS guards called the prisoners “Stücke.” Pieces. Nothing human, only pieces. And pieces think nothing of the rain.
“I want so much, Margot,” Anne whispers. “I want so much. Enough for ten lifetimes. How can I stay here? How can I possibly make this my life? I want to mean something. To be someone other than just a girl who did not die. I want to be a writer!” It’s the first time she’s actually spoken the words aloud since her return, even if she is only speaking to the dead. She glares into Margot’s eyes, but the dead do not comprehend urgency. Her sister’s eyes blacken into a pair of holes. Mummy would want you to stay, Margot tells her. Think how she cared for us in Birkenau. Think how she sacrificed for us. Are you saying, she asks, that you can’t now sacrifice a little for Pim?
“Sacrifice . . .” Anne speaks the word as if it tastes of a burnt offering.
24
ENEMY NATIONALS
I love Holland. Once I hoped it would become a fatherland to me, since I had lost my own.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 22 May 1944
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
“So I hear Bep is going to be married,” Anne says.
Miep turns to her from across her desk, where’s she’s sorting through the morning post. “Yes,” is all she says. “That’s right.”
“You’re probably wondering how I found out.”
“No, not really.”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything,” Anne lies. “But Mr. Kleiman isn’t very quiet on the telephone.”
“I see.”
“I mean, it’s not as if Bep actually writes to me. Did she tell you directly?”
“She sent a note,” Miep answers. “I’m sorry, Anne, perhaps I should have mentioned it to you. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want your feelings hurt.”
“Because I’m not invited to the wedding.”
A small shrug. “I don’t think they’re doing much. Just a magistrate,” Miep tells her mildly, with a certain insouciance, as if the matter really has no great weight outside an office chat. “She’s marrying a fellow named Niemen. An electrician, I think, from Maastricht. They’re having the ceremony there, so it’s not actually close. I doubt any of us will make it.”
Anne is silent, glaring at the stack of invoices she’s been charged with ordering. She wants to be happy for Bep. She wants to forgive her for being so distant when Anne returned from Belsen. She wants to think of Bep as a sister again, but the awful question still nags at her. “Do you think it’s possible, Miep?”
“Do I think what is possible, Anne?”
“Do you think it’s possible,” she repeats, “that Bep could have played a part in our betrayal?”
Miep does not react directly. She continues sorting the post.
“Miep?”
“Why would you ask this, Anne?” Miep wants to know. Her eyes have gone sharp. “Did someone put that into your head?”
“No.” How does she explain that if it was anybody, it was Bep herself who put the idea into Anne’s head when Bep was so panicked by the thought that the police had arrived to interrogate her. “No,” she repeats.
“Good. Because anyone saying such a thing would be telling a lie,” Miep informs her. “A grotesque lie. Bep,” she begins, but then shakes her head as if mentioning the name is suddenly painful. “Bep would never have done anything to hurt you or your family. You especially, Anne. Above all people, you. You must know that. Bep is a loyal person. Right down to the bone.”
“Mr. Kugler told me that it was my fault she left. That she couldn’t stand to be around me any longer.”
Miep huffs. Shakes her head. “I won’t blame him for saying that. Mr. Kugler has faced more than his share of suffering, but he doesn’t always know when to keep quiet.”
“Are you saying that he was wrong?”
“I’m saying, Anne,” Miep tells her, “I’m saying that he doesn’t know the full story, and neither do you. Bep, after the war, she had a kind of nervous collapse. And it wasn’t just because of what happened to you. It was because of what happened to everyone. To her. Her father’s illness. The end of her romance with Maurits. There were many troubles. She couldn’t hold up under it all. It was a tragedy,” says Miep. “One of many. But it was no one’s fault, Anne. No one’s.”
* * *
• • •
The fourth of August—Anne can feel the date looming like a ghost. It will mark two years since the day the Grüne Polizei entered the hiding place. Two years since they were arrested like criminals and force-marched toward the moffen slaughterhouses. The office at the Prinsengracht has grown silent. Miep barely speaks. Kleiman has gone home with a bleeding stomach. Kugler has started smoking in the kitchen. Abovestairs in the House Behind, the past waits like a dreadful ghost. Pim grows tense. Easily aggravated. He’s snappy on business calls, and for the first time Anne hears him argue with the new Mrs. Frank. Spats of temper over small things. Where has she put his shoes? His pipe tobacco? Why must she use so much starch in laundering his shirts? Tiny, petty accusations to exorcise his own guilt at marrying her? This is how Anne sees it.
At breakfast Pim announces that the best possible solution to the question of Anne’s future is to send her to a school in the Oosterparkbuurt for a teacher’s certificate.
“I don’t want to be a teacher,” is Anne’s response.
“You would make a wonderful teacher, Anne,” her father assures her briskly.
“No, you’re not listening.”
“I am listening. As a teacher you could make a life for yourself.” His coffee cup clinks against the saucer as he sets it down. “As a teacher you could have a real impact. That’s why you must study harder next term. Get better marks.”
“That was Margot’s fixation. Not mine.”
“Anne.” Pim glowers, his gaze bruised. You should speak more respectfully of the dead is the message in his eyes, but she knows he cannot bring himself to speak the words.
“School means nothing to me. It’s all pointless.”
“Pointless? That I should hear you say such a thing, Anne. It is not pointless. It is essential,” her father retorts, and ignites a cigarette with a small nervous tic of his chin. He’s started smoking day and night, she has noticed, blackening ashtrays wherever he goes. “Anne, you must understand,” he insists. It’s obvious that he’s cross, but he’s also simply perplexed by this unrecognizable Anne. What happened to the child he knew, the daughter who begged to be sent to school, who pined for it? “You must understand that I am still responsible for your future. You must trust me to make the correct decisions for you.”
Anne stares blankly at him. “I cannot pretend, Pim, to be the person you thought I was. I cannot be like you. I can’t sit behind a desk tidying papers into piles and pretend to myself that nothing has happened.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” he asks. “Pretending?”
“Aren’t you? This town is a haunted place. It might as well be a graveyard, and I simply can’t live in a graveyard. It’s too much, Pim. I don’t belong here any longer,” she insists. “Why can’t I go to America?”
Her father releases the breath he holds in reserve for every time he hears her say this. “Again with this,” he mutters. “Anne,” he tells her forcefully. “This is your home. This is where you belong. And in the fall you will return to your classes. It’s my responsibility to see to your education. It’s what your mother would expect.”
But Dassah suddenly offers a differing opinion: school isn’t necessary for girls. “If she doesn’t want to go, then let her get an actual job. By her age,” says Dassah, “I was on my own. Nobody paying my way but me.”
Anne is wary of this. Why is this woman coming to her aid? Not out of kindness, certainly. Perhaps only out of a desire to be rid of Anne, to be rid of the competition for Pim’s affection. But whatever the reason behind Dassah’s interjection, Pim has no desire to be trapped by this assault from both sides. He stands abruptly. “Excuse me. But I’m late for the office.”
* * *
• • •
Outside, Anne pedals through the daily heat. The air stinks of canal trash. But when she arrives at the bookshop, she finds Mr. Nussbaum morosely engaged in a telephone conversation. He glances dark-eyed at her but makes no gesture of greeting. His tie is crooked and his shirt sweat-stained. The shop is airless. It reeks of old rot, old cat piss, and old pain. She tries to find comfort in Lapjes, scooping up the bulky bag of bones.
But then Mr. Nussbaum rings off. At first he simply glares into an invisible pit, his hand resting on the receiver.
“Mr. Nussbaum?” she asks, hugging the cat against her. “Is something wrong?”
His eyes flick to her. His face is as pale as soap. “What has your father told you?”
A swallow. “Told me?”
“About what’s happening. Here. In our adopted country.” His tone is bitter. Barren. “What has he told you?”
“Practically nothing,” Anne answers. “He still pretends to be sheltering me from the ugly
truths of the world.”
“But that’s not what you want any longer, is it? To be sheltered from the truth?”
“No,” Anne says. Though suddenly she’s not so sure that’s true. The desolation in Mr. Nussbaum’s face is frightening.
“Very well, then. You should know,” says Mr. Nussbaum. “The sooner you get out of this country, the better, Anne. The Dutch have started deporting Germans. Even if they’re German Jews.”
* * *
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
The door to the private office bangs opens. Pim and Kleiman look up as if she is a hurricane just blown in. “Anne!”
Anne glares. “How can I trust you when you don’t tell me the truth?”
Silence strangles her father’s voice for a moment. Then he forces out a breath and turns tightly toward Mr. Kleiman, who looks at her in a sickly way. “Mr. Kleiman, would you mind excusing us for a moment?” he asks.
Kleiman doesn’t answer but stands with a dubious expression and slips past Anne.
“Close the door,” Pim instructs her. “There’s no use in the whole world hearing our business.”
Anne keeps up her glare but closes the door. “I know everything,” she says.
A terse swallow. The back of Pim’s neck has gone stiff as he straightens a pen on his blotter. “Everything? And what does that entail?”
“When were you going to tell me?”
A strong frown at the desktop before he pronounces her name. “Annelies . . .”
“Is that what the bureau men are investigating? When were you planning on telling me, when they’re at the door about to drag us away?”
An odd spark of confusion enters her father’s expression. He blinks, and his eyes narrow. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘drag us away’?”
Annelies Page 29