“Anne.” She hears again this voice from a far distance, only now it’s closer, and her eyes pop open. It’s Dassah in her pine-green office frock, standing in the threshold of the room, her hand resting on the doorknob as if she’s prepared to slam it shut if required to protect herself.
Anne blinks roughly, bent into a jackknife on her knees; she shakes her head and glares at the floorboards. “Go away.”
“Anne, are you ill?”
“Go away, please,” she half commands, half begs.
“If you’re ill, we should call for the doctor.”
“Just . . . go away.”
Dassah steps forward. She spreads a handkerchief on the dusty floor and carefully kneels down beside Anne. “These are the rooms where you lived, correct?” she asks, but she does not seem to expect an answer. “Incredible,” she says. “This would have been considered a palace by most Jews in hiding.”
But Anne is not interested in her stepmother’s appraisal of the Achterhuis. “If you don’t mind, please go to hell,” she requests, and is surprised by the snort of Dassah’s laugh.
“Well.” The woman sighs. “I think I’ve already been there once, Anne,” she says. “Have you forgotten?” And then she does something even more shocking. Gently, she turns back the cuff of Anne’s sweater, exposing Anne’s tattoo to the ghosts inhabiting the air. A-25063. Dassah lightly brushes her fingertips over the number as if she can feel it raised on Anne’s skin. “This ink,” she says, “is a poison. We have all been poisoned by it. Your father, you, me. But it has failed to kill us.” There is something so lonely in her voice when she says, “You should remember that. We are alive. Not dead.”
Anne gazes. Slowly, she draws her arm away from Dassah’s hand. The woman takes a breath. Blinks a sheepish pain from her eyes. Her face has taken on a shadow of loss, but then she is Dassah again, her eyes shut off from pity. “Yet maybe you know that you’re alive. At least maybe your body knows. Are you having intercourse?”
Anne glares.
“It’s a question, Anne. A question that needs to be asked.” Dassah frowns. “I hope not. I hope you are not so stupid. But if you are, please tell me that you are using the proper precautions. A condom,” Dassah says to be blunt. “If you wish to live as a whore with that boy—” she is saying when Anne cuts her off.
“That’s over.”
A pause. “Is it?” She doesn’t bother to ask why but only says, “So you finally came to your senses. Well, let us thank God for that.”
Anne gazes at her blackly. “Why are you so horrible to me?”
“Oh, is that what I am? Horrible? You’ve already called me a ‘monster,’ so I suppose I shouldn’t expect any charity from you. The truth is, Anne, you were terribly spoiled when you were a child. That much is obvious. It’s made you weak and self-centered and eager to blame others for your shortcomings. Honestly, it’s a wonder you survived at all. But since you have, you think that the world now owes you tribute. You’ve been twisted by your experiences into a kind of morose, self-absorbed little tyrant who demands that everyone worship her pain and loss as much as she does. And if they don’t—if they refuse to give in to your egotism—then they are labeled ‘a monster.’”
Anne smears at her eyes, glaring at the corner of her room where her desk once sat. “I hate you,” she whispers bitterly.
“I can live with that,” Dassah informs her. “But whether you can believe it or not, I am only trying to help you, Anne. I am trying to help you look in the mirror and see yourself as you are, because I have some very bad news for you. The world owes you nothing. You survived? So what? Millions didn’t. Your sister didn’t. Your mother didn’t. But all your tears are for yourself, Anne Frank, the poor victim. And nobody loves victims. Victims are resented. Victims are reviled, that’s the way things are. You must earn love, just as you earn respect. That is what I’m trying to teach you.”
“If I’m such an awful human being, such a black spot, then why don’t you help me get out of your hair? Convince Pim to let me go. He listens to you.”
“Oh, you think so? Well, in some matters, perhaps. But Otto is still bent on keeping you sheltered. He is disinclined to give up on his sentimental attachment to you as a child. Disinclined to give up the memory of love that once bound you two together.” Standing, Dassah retrieves her handkerchief from the floor and folds it into a square. “But what your father really requires from you now isn’t love. It isn’t even gratitude or respect, though he deserves all those things. It’s cooperation. He won’t admit it, but he’s facing some serious trouble with the government, and the last thing he needs is your unrelenting attacks.”
Anne only stares.
“Do you know how often I awake to find him standing in the threshold of your room, watching over you as you sleep? You are the star in his eyes, Anne,” Dassah tells her. “I am his wife. We are partners now in this life, and he will always take my part. I know this. But no one has ever filled his heart like you.”
* * *
Miep has been the victim of a most common crime—a thief stole the tires from her bicycle—so she arrives on foot to pick Anne up for an afternoon movie matinee. A rain scarf covering her head, ginger bangs fringing her forehead. They board the Tramlijn 5 at the Koningsplein as it begins to drizzle. Anne watches people on the street convinced by the rain to pop open their umbrellas. Along the Leidsestraat many windows are still taped against air-raid bombs.
“Has he told you?” Anne asks.
Miep turns her head. “Has who told me what?”
“Pim. Has he told you what I did? That I went to the American consulate? Has he told you that I attempted an escape?”
A short intake of breath. “Well. That’s a very harsh way of putting it.”
“So he has told you. And what do you think, Miep? Do you think I’m a childish, self-centered bitch?”
“Anne, please. Language. It’s not necessary.”
“Do you think I’m a coward, wanting to desert him?”
Miep shakes her head. “No, neither of you is being cowardly. You’re both being very brave, in my opinion. Trying to set things right. I’m only sorry that . . .”
Anne raises her eyebrows. “Sorry that what?”
“I’m sorry, Anne,” she hears Miep say plainly, “that I kept your diary a secret from you. I haven’t said that aloud to you, and I think I must. I’m sorry,” she repeats. “It was against my better judgment, and I shouldn’t have done it.”
Anne swallows. Looks away. “You were only doing as my father asked.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Maybe not,” Anne agrees. “But, Miep, if it wasn’t for you, it would have all been lost. Actually lost. Forever. So you don’t need to apologize to me.”
Miep blinks away a gleam of tears and swallows. “Thank you,” she whispers.
Anne allows silence to separate them until, “You know, Miep, at first when I was writing in my diary—when I was thirteen—it was a kind of game to me. A fun way to pass the time. But then in hiding . . . in hiding, it became something very different,” she says. “Do you remember the cabinet minister’s broadcast over Radio Oranje? About all of us keeping wartime writings?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I took it to heart. I started to rewrite what I had already put down. All of it. I changed people’s names. Gave them, you know—schuilnaamen,” she says. Hiding names. “I thought I would sew it all together into a story I could tell.”
“We all believed you had talent, Anne. I remember how you would read us bits and pieces. We all believed you had talent.”
“Really?” Hearing Miep say this makes it sound true.
“Oh, yes.”
“Even Mummy?” she asks.
“Of course. You think because she scolded you here and there that she wasn’t proud of you? She was. Sh
e was immensely proud. It was only that . . .” Miep starts to say, but then she can’t seem to finish the sentence. “She was so burdened. Her mind was so burdened.” Miep frowns at her knuckles and shakes her head. “I tried so hard to help her, your mother. I couldn’t blame her for feeling so pessimistic, of course. The world had become so brutalized.”
Anne remembers her mother’s eyes. The dim lights they had become after they went into hiding. Then their sharp, darting hunger, suddenly brightly displayed at Birkenau.
“So I tried to keep her focused on what was good and hopeful for the future,” Miep says, and she must dig her handkerchief from her purse to dab at the tears she is obviously trying to resist. “But. To no avail,” she can only conclude. “To no avail at all.”
Anne recognizes the black onyx ring Miep has on her finger. A jet-black stone with a tiny gleam of white diamond. “You’re wearing the ring from Mrs. van Pels.”
“I am.” Miep nods. “I thought I should begin to. It’s such a lovely thing, you know. I can’t help but think of what it would have been worth to the van Pelses on the black market. Yet they chose to give it to me as a birthday gift. It was really quite a beautiful gesture,” she says, looking out at the rain. Then she turns her face back to Anne. Her mouth straightens. “If I may tell you something honestly, Anne, it was so hard for me sometimes. When you were all in the hiding place, it was so hard to climb the stairs and find everyone lined up, waiting for me. So desperate. So confined and so needy. There were days I wanted to scream. But then I knew I could always count on you to break the tension. Do you remember what you’d say to me every time I arrived?”
Anne reclaims a hollow brightness in her voice. “Say, Miep—what’s the news?”
“That’s it.” Miep grins through her tears. “That’s it exactly. It was always such a tremendous relief.” Then the grin fades. She purses her lips and examines the frittering rain. “Impossible to believe that they’re all gone. That only you and your father . . .” she says, but doesn’t finish her sentence. “Impossible to believe that there could be such evil in people’s hearts.”
“People do wicked things,” Anne replies. “Commit terrible crimes.” In the reflection of the tram’s rain-splattered window glass, she meets Margot’s desolate gaze, glazed over by death. She stares at Anne with sad accusation. The conductor calls out the coming stop, and the tram hums to a halt. Passengers climb down; new passengers climb aboard with a routine jostling of shoulders. The bell rings, and the conductor sings out the name of the next stop.
“That’s us,” Miep says, obviously still disturbed.
“I killed Margot, Miep,” Anne hears herself whisper.
But Miep is busy returning her handkerchief to her purse, sniffing back her sadness. Reassembling herself. “I’m sorry, Anne, but I didn’t hear what you said.”
Anne is glaring hard at the dirty floor of the tram. Staring at her scuffed saddle shoes. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”
* * *
De Uitkijk Bioscoop
Prinsengracht 452
The Canal Ring West
By the time they’ve exited the tram, the rain is coming heavily, settling into a solid drubbing of a downpour, so they must dash across the slippery cobbles from the tram to the cinema. Inside, some of the last remaining Canadians, still waiting to be shipped back to their homeland, lounge at the bar, off duty, bored with the Netherlands by now since nobody’s shooting at them any longer. Their empty expressions say it. Bored of wooden shoes and windmills, of delft-blue chinaware and smelly summer canals. One of them is searching through the pages of a booklet entitled All About Amsterdam. He glances up and offers Anne a routine wink. She stares back at him without response. But in the auditorium a darkness is sweeping over her. The room is clammy with a sickly aroma of smoke and damp clothing. She feels all expression fall away from her face. An ugliness grips her belly. An oily guilt slithering through her.
An English newsreel begins with a fanfare of trumpets. The narrator’s voice is a trumpet itself, as the images of the world flash past. Presenting the world to the world! Anne slouches deeply into her seat as crimes against humanity scorch across the screen and the camera pans across the piles and piles of corpses carpeting a scrubby expanse of mudflats. A bottomless hole opens under her. It makes her dizzy. She blinks. On the screen a few of the corpses are moving still, imitating the living as the narrator’s tone drops into a righteously grim timbre. “This,” he declares, “is Belsen,” and Anne feels her heart go rigid. “A city of the dead and the living dead.” A woman squats as she sips from a bowl in the midst of the ragged debris of bodies. Skeletons stumbling in their rags, aimless faces gaping into the camera without comprehension. “What is impossible for film to communicate is the stench,” the narrator insists, but Anne can smell it. That putrid perfume of animal rot. She watches the SS women, still in their feldgrau frocks, rounded up by Tommies. Scowling and sneering into the camera. “Members of Himmler’s female legion now required to bury the victims of their homicidal desires at the point of Royal Army bayonets.” The bodies of the dead, decaying, shrunken limbs, sacks of bones, are being dragged to the burial pits, where they are tossed in like rubbish. The corpses tumble down, limbs akimbo—one more onto the dung heap. When Anne was in the DP hospital, she’d been so deeply gratified to hear that the SS had been forced to handle disease-bloated corpses with their bare hands. But seeing it now—seeing their disregard for the humanity of their bundles, seeing the grim repulsion stamped on their faces as they grip each corpse by wrists and ankles and heave it into the pit with the flourish of trash removers—it enrages Anne. The obscenity of it. The despicable handling of these naked dead, stripped and decaying.
“Anne, do you want to go?” Miep whispers, “Do you want to leave?”
Suddenly she can see Margot’s face attached to every corpse. That one could be her. Or that one. Or that one sliding down the sandy bank into the massive open grave, that could be Margot.
She wants to scream. She wants to dive into the screen and shroud her sister’s shameful nakedness with a blanket. She wants to bellow at those SS hags: Get your hands off her, you filthy cunts! And maybe she does, because the next instant she finds herself standing, her body clenched, her hands trembling, as the echo of her own voice thunders inside her head.
Quickly, Miep is up out of her seat and guiding Anne into the aisle. “You’re safe now, you’re safe,” she’s murmuring. “Anne, it’s over, it’s over,” she tells her. But on the screen it isn’t over. On the screen there’s a soldier operating a bulldozer with a kerchief masking his face against the stench, the bodies twisting in the dirt as the broad blade digs in. “Let no one say,” the narrator commands, “that these crimes were never real.”
Tearing away from Miep, Anne runs, bursting from the cinema doors into the rain, desperate to outpace her panic. The bulldozer is behind her, plowing the corpses into the pit, its blade at her heels. She hears someone shout. A cyclist swerves on the slick cobbles; her body swivels out from under her. There’s an instant of wild tumble, nothing but the air clutching her, until she feels the impact as she penetrates the surface of the water. Her body plummets as the canal receives her. She can feel her breath swell up from her belly and into her chest in thick bubbles. Eyes clamped shut, limbs thrashing as the tortured images of Margot’s corpse are washed from her brain. If she doesn’t fight, she will sink, so can’t she just stop? Can’t she? Please, please can’t she just stop? The pressure of the depths grips her, trying to squeeze the final balloon of air from her breast as her feet flail against nothing. No floor to stop her, just a single plunge. The insistent downward draw to the bottom, where regrets end, where fear ends and pain dissolves. The panic of her body weakening. Her eyes flash open, her breath boiling from her lips. She knows the angel of death is waiting below. But before she can surrender, an intrusion. An intrusion! Margot is there, horning
in, slinking down into the water, head shaved, her Kazetnik pullover ballooning around her arms, the Judenstern floating, her eyes wide and black. Not a single breath bubbles from her lips as she speaks. Anne, if you die, we die with you.
A jolt. A jolt to Anne’s heart.
If you die, we die with you.
All she has left is a breath.
If you die—
A single breath.
—we die with you.
A single choice.
Margot liquefies into nothing, but with that last bubble of air in her lungs, Anne is pushing herself upward, fighting the drag of the darkness. Propelling herself toward a skim of light. A heave of desire, unbidden, but now shooting through her, animating her limbs, upward, upward, until she bursts into the air, and her eyes smart as the rain stings her face.
* * *
Her eyelids lift stiffly. She feels something cold, metallic, pressing here, pressing there. She can smell the scent of rubbing alcohol. There is a man bent over her. Thickly jowled, removing the tips of a stethoscope from his large ears that bristle with hair.
“I see you’ve returned to the land of the living,” the doctor observes.
A dull ache creaks through Anne’s body as she tries to move, so she stops and simply lies still.
“You have reached a verdict, Doctor?” Dassah inquires from the threshold.
The doctor replaces the stethoscope into his battered leather satchel. “The patient will live,” he decides. “What you require, young lady, is rest.” Grunting as he stands. “I’ll give you a prescription,” he says, and then, to Dassah, “Something to help her sleep.”
When Dassah returns to the room after seeing the doctor to the door, Anne has rolled onto her side facing the wall. She has been dressed in her pajamas and feels now wholly exhausted, as if she has been running a race for days without an end in sight. But the cold shivers have finally vacated her body. “Where’s Pim?”
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