Anne can only stare. Her eyes have gone damp.
“Werner was right. Your work is a treasure, Anne.” Cissy smiles gently. “Now. Let’s discuss a plan. Shall we? As luck would have it, I’ve recently come in contact with a very eclectic publisher from overseas,” she says. “They specialize in youthful literature, and I think that they might be quite interested in you.”
“You said ‘overseas’?”
“Yes, an American firm.”
Anne feels her heart thump.
“One of the senior editors expressed an interest in having some of my books translated into English,” Cissy tells her. “But that can wait. Because with your permission, Anne, I’d like to send him this typescript of your diary. What do you think?”
* * *
Leased Flat
The Herengracht
Amsterdam-Centrum
The Canal Ring
She finds Pim napping over his newspaper in the Viennese wingback. His spectacles have slipped down onto the bridge of his nose, the hair at his temples has gone quite white, and his lips flutter mildly with a cooing snore. She forgets sometimes that he is aging.
In the kitchen she finds Dassah washing up after the midday meal, a large cast-iron soup pot clunking against the side of the sink. Dassah turns her head. “So. She has returned.”
“You sent Cissy my pages,” Anne says.
“You make that sound like a crime, Anne. Isn’t it what you wanted? Isn’t that what Werner promised he’d do?”
“How do you know what Mr. Nussbaum promised me about anything?”
“Because he told me, Anne. How else? He told me the day before he drowned himself in the canal.” A shrug as she scours the bottom of the soup pot. “It was simple enough. He gave me the woman’s address. I borrowed the pages from your room for an afternoon, retyped them at the office, and dropped them into the post.”
Anne swallows. “Why?”
“Ah. You don’t enjoy feeling indebted to me, I suppose.”
“All I asked you is why? You’ve always made it clear how much you despise me.”
“Actually, you have that the wrong way around. It’s Anne Frank who’s always made it clear that I am despised by her. But no matter. I do what I think is best. What I think is best for me, best for your father, and best for you.” She pulls the pot out of the sink and sets it down to dry it with a dish towel. “This diary of yours. I knew that Otto had it in his possession. I never read a word of it at the time, mind you, but I didn’t have to in order to see that it was an anchor chain around your father’s neck, pulling him down. I can recall him clutching the small plaid book as if he were clutching his own heart in his hands. He couldn’t accept that the girl in its pages was gone. Which is why he couldn’t give it up, even though it tortured him to keep it from you. He simply couldn’t relinquish that memory. But then came the day his daughter was fished from a canal,” she says. “And I thought enough is enough. He could not keep it from you any longer without his own guilt eating him alive.”
Anne frowns. “You’re saying it was you who convinced him to give it back to me?”
“Me? I don’t convince your father of anything, Anne. He agreed because he knew it was the right thing to do. And also . . . well, he might have hoped to distract you. To silence your constant pestering about America. At least for a while. At least so he could sleep a night or two in peace.” She says this before a heavy, apprehensive voice comes from behind them.
“What’s going on here?” Pim wants to know.
Dassah’s eyes flick from him to Anne. “All right. No more of this war between the two of you,” she says. “Sit down at the table, please, both of you. We are going to either untie this knot or cut it.”
* * *
• • •
Cigarette smoke drifts through the sepia-colored afternoon light slanting through the windows. Around the table an embattled hour has passed. But finally it comes down to this in Pim’s opinion: “You decided you’re finished with Amsterdam. With your home here. With your family and your friends. With me. With everything. And you intend to abandon your past and go to America in order to publish the most intimate memories of people who are passed, so that anyone—Jews, not Jews, taxi drivers, rubbish collectors, grocery clerks, housewives, and schoolgirls—can pick up a copy for a few pennies and pass judgment on us all. All our foibles and shortcomings. All our petty feuds and human failings. All of it. On public display.”
“Otto—” Dassah says, but Pim cuts her off.
“No. Please, Hadas. I’m speaking to my daughter directly because, like it or not, you are still my daughter, Annelies, and will always be so. Have I summed up the situation correctly?” he wants to know. “Those are your intentions?”
Anne sits. Her hands clenched together in her lap. Her back straight. “Yes,” she replies without blinking. “Those are my intentions.”
Pim glares silently, as if the entirety of the universe is balled up in this moment. His hands resting in fists on the tablecloth. His back straight as well. His eyes like caves. “Well, then. Who am I to stop you?” he says. “No one. Just an old man whose judgment and opinion have lost their value.” Standing slowly, his unbuttoned waistcoat hanging open, his necktie slightly askew, he seems to have aged a decade in a moment. “I think I require some air,” he informs them.
Dassah gives Anne a look from across the table. It’s a pointed look, even slightly pained, but for once it is devoid of criticism. Then she stands without a further word and follows Pim to the door. Anne watches them. Pim buttoning his waistcoat, slipping on his old tweed jacket and brown fedora from the hall tree. Helping Dassah into her cardigan, then bending forward to allow her to straighten his necktie and brush a bit of lint from his shoulders. The door opens. Light floods the threshold. And then the door closes and they are gone.
So, says Margot, who has appeared in the chair beside Anne, clad in her tattered Judenstern weeds. Now you are free?
* * *
• • •
That night Anne sits on her bed, her red tartan diary in her hand, tracing the pattern of the plaid cover with her fingertip, when she recognizes the knock at her door.
“Come in, Pim,” she tells him.
He opens the door and pokes in his head. “Good night, daughter,” he says mournfully. “I hope you won’t stay up too late.”
“Pim,” she says. “Wait.”
He hesitates but then pushes open the door just far enough to step in.
“Before he died . . .” Anne says. “Before he died, Mr. Nussbaum told me that I should ask you about the boy in your barracks block at Auschwitz. Do you know who he was talking about?”
Again Pim hesitates. But he slips his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown. “What exactly did Werner tell you?”
“Only that I should ask you about him. He said if I wanted to understand my father, I should ask him about the boy in Auschwitz who called him Papa.”
Pim remains silent.
“Please, Pim. Tell me. I want to understand.”
A long breath, in and out, as if resurrecting such a memory is a feat of heavy labor. Glancing to the floor, he shakes his head. “He was alone at Auschwitz, you see. This lad. Not much older than Peter, but he had no one with him. No one at all.” Then his eyes rise to hers, and he swallows. “In the best way I could,” he says, “I tried to look after the boy. I remember that the others around us, all they could talk about was food. Nothing but food, day and night, and so I said to him that we must get away from such talk or else go insane. Instead we talked of music. The great symphonies, the great composers. He was a fervent fan of the classical composers, the boy. In particular Schubert. It became a routine between us. Whenever we could, we would recall the melodies of our favorite pieces. I think we both began to depend on it, really. Then one evening in the barracks, I asked him. I asked him if
he would consider calling me Papa.” Pim lifts his eyebrows over this memory, obviously returning to the barracks, returning to the moment in his mind. “I suppose I’d been thinking of it for some time, but it stunned me a bit that I actually had—if you’ll pardon the expression—that I actually had the chutzpah to ask him. He must have been a bit stunned, too, this young man, because at first he resisted. He said that he was indebted to me but had to point out that he already had a papa who was still very much alive in hiding.” A small shrug. “So I tried to explain. I tried to explain to him,” says Pim, “that I was a man who must have someone to call him Papa, or else . . . or else I wouldn’t know who I was any longer.”
Anne feels her eyes dampen. “And did he?”
“Did he?”
“Call you Papa?”
“He did. He called me Papa Frank till the day we parted after the liberation.”
Anne looks at Pim, says nothing.
“I suppose,” Pim tells her, “that Werner hoped this story would help you understand how difficult it is for me, a man of my age, to alter the image of himself inside his own head. Even when that image has been obviously proved false.” He swallows, his eyes wetting brightly. “I failed you, Anne. I could not protect you. I could not be your papa, the papa you needed when you were suffering at Birkenau. Or the papa who could rescue you and your sister from Bergen-Belsen. It’s a terrible thing,” he says, and shakes his head. “A terrible thing when a man who has defined himself for so long in a certain way finds that he is powerless to protect the very ones who have loved and trusted him the most. The ones who depended on him the most. His own family,” he says, swallowing back his sorrow. “I know that you have been enraged by the fact that I engaged in commerce with the enemy. And perhaps with good reason. But please, daughter, try to understand that regardless of my choices, good or bad, I did what I did,” he says, “sacrificing my own principles to keep us all alive and fed.” Removing his handkerchief from the pocket of his robe, he dabs at his eyes. “All I’ve ever hoped for, Anne. Since you and I were reunited. Since you and I survived. All I’ve ever hoped is that you would understand that and forgive me my weaknesses.”
A silence. Anne lightly hugs her diary to her chest, and she feels a tear on her cheek. “So now, Pim,” she decides, “now it is my turn to tell you a story.” She breathes in. “It’s the story of a girl who once believed that God only wished for people to be happy, a girl who believed that if a person had courage and faith, then any hardship could be overcome. A girl who believed that despite all the evidence to the contrary, people were good at heart.”
“Yes.” Pim nods. “I think I know that girl.”
But Anne only shakes her head. “She’s dead, Pim. That girl? She didn’t survive.”
“But how can that be true, meisje? How can that be true? I look at you and see such spirit. Such resolve. You have been so badly hurt. So unfairly scarred, yes. I know that you think I’ve been blind to what has happened to you. Willfully so, and maybe I’ve pretended to be,” he admits. “But really, I’m not so foolish as to imagine that you could possibly be the same girl I recall as a child. The same girl who called me in to hear her prayers, even if sometimes I might have convinced myself otherwise. Or wished to do so. And if you believe that I have tried to trap you in your former childhood in order to avoid having to face my own failings, then I won’t lie and say that there is no truth in that. But it is only a partial truth,” he says, wadding his handkerchief into a ball. “I am a man who must feel useful. I am a man who thinks he can understand the workings of the world. But I am baffled by my own daughter. I want so desperately to help her. To be useful to her. But I don’t know how.”
“If you don’t know how, Pim,” Anne says, her eyes heavy, “then perhaps you should ask her. Perhaps you should simply ask her.”
Pim’s gaze goes level as he inhales a long breath. “So perhaps I will.” His eyes sharpen. With pain? With fear over the answer to the question he has not yet asked. “How, Anne? How can I be useful to my daughter?”
“You can let her go, Pim,” his daughter replies. “Just that. You can let her go.”
* * *
The day is bright. Outside, the smell of wood smoke hangs heavily in the air. Up in the Achterhuis, Anne stares out the window of the attic, stroking Mouschi, who is a ball in her lap. The leaves of the chestnut tree are turning.
Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, says Margot, kneeling beside Anne in her lice-infested rags.
“Yes,” Anne says, listening to the cat’s purr.
“Are you going to temple?”
“You think I should?”
You have to answer that question for yourself, Anne.
“Do you think I should fast?”
It’s not for me to decide.
“Hunger pangs are something I’m familiar with,” Anne points out. “You don’t think I’ve fasted enough for one lifetime?”
I think you should do what you believe is best.
“Since when?”
Since always.
“You think I must make atonement?”
Silence. Anne looks over at her sister, but her sister is gone. There’s a squeak of wood from below as Pim climbs the ladder from the landing and steps into the attic behind her. Anne looks at him, hugging the cat. He is dressed in his overcoat, his fedora raked to one side of his head. He glances about the shabby room. “It’s so drafty up here, daughter,” he points out. “Don’t you feel it?”
Anne does not answer this question, however. “Dassah wouldn’t say where you’d gone.”
Pim draws a breath and expels it. “I was attending to some business,” he tells her. “You may wish to know that our business practices have been cleared by the government. I’ve received a letter from the Institute for Enemy Property Management that serves as a clean bill of health.”
Anne looks up but says nothing. Pim is obviously surprised by her silence.
“Nothing to say? I imagined you would have a stronger reaction to this news,” her father points out. “All restrictions on the business—on us—have been lifted. All fears of deportation over. I thought you would be relieved.”
“Tomorrow is Yom Kippur,” she tells him.
“It is,” Pim agrees.
“Are you going to temple with Dassah?”
“I am.”
“Are you going to fast?”
“We are. She and I.”
“Are you going to make atonement?” Anne asks her father.
“As a Jew, what else can I do?” he asks, and draws an elongated kraft envelope from inside his coat pocket.
“What’s that?” she asks him.
He frowns thoughtfully as he considers the envelope, tapping it against his fingers. “It’s the result of much work by many people in a short period of time.”
Anne grips the cat hard enough to elicit a mewing complaint.
“It’s what is known as an affidavit in lieu of a passport,” he says of the envelope, his eyes going bright with tears. “And it will permit entry into the United States by one Miss Annelies Marie Frank.”
Anne is stunned. The tears come, freely drenching her cheeks as she still grips the cat.
“I understand dreams, Anneke,” her father tells her. “Youth does not have the monopoly on hope.” And then he asks thickly, “So you can forgive an old man?”
“Pim,” she breathes, but the tears get the better of her. A sob chokes her, and, dropping the cat, she runs to him, just as she did before the war, when she was still a girl favored by God.
Pim whispers, “You are a brave young woman, meisje, who’s been unjustly brutalized by forces far beyond your control. My only prayer is that if you can forgive me, perhaps you can begin to forgive the world as well. And, more important, forgive yourself.”
But even before she opens her eyes, Anne knows that she will see Margot th
ere. Waiting. Waiting for her to atone.
34
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
Seriously, though, ten years after the war people would find it very amusing to read how we lived, what we ate and what we talked about as Jews in hiding.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 29 March 1944
1961
Waverly Place and Mercer Street
Greenwich Village
NEW YORK CITY
Dear Miss Frank,
I think I must be one of your biggest fans. I’ve read “The Diary of a Young Girl” six times! The library at my school only has one copy of it, and I keep checking it out over and over again. Sometimes, though, Mrs. Mosley (our librarian) says I should give somebody else a chance to read it, and makes me check out a Nancy Drew instead, which is O.K. I like Nancy Drew books, but I like your book better. You are so smart, and Nancy Drew has never had to escape Nazis or hide in a secret annex with nothing very good to eat.
Maybe this isn’t nice to tell you, but once after somebody else had checked out your book, I found mean things written in the margins about Jewish people. If it had been in pencil, I would have just erased it, but it was in pen, so I had to scratch it out. This got me in trouble with my Granny Flynn, because she saw me scratching it out and said I should NEVER write with a pen in a library book for ANY reason. But I still think I did the right thing. I hope you will think so too.
Warm regards,
Edwina C. Buford (Winnie)
P.S.—Grampa Flynn says that he doubts your whole story is really true. He says writers like to make things up. But I told him that I think it is ALL true. It is, isn’t it?
Dear Winnie,
It made me very happy to receive your letter. You are so kind to have checked out my book so many times. And there is certainly nothing wrong with reading Nancy Drew either. Though I will have to admit that I read several Nancy Drew books when I first came to America and couldn’t understand what the heck was happening! That was probably because I was still so new to this country and never felt like I understood what the heck was happening inside or outside of the books I was reading.
Annelies Page 36