Anne offers her smile as a response. Under Deborah’s dedication she writes, “Get well! Climb more trees!” and makes sure she shuts the cover before Deborah’s mother can catch it. She feels a certain lift from these girls. Their freshness lightens her heart. Their clean, untroubled adoration provides a shot of joy. She is astonished sometimes at how much they do adore her diary. It makes her think that perhaps people are good at heart. Or might be. Or could be.
She signs another for Samantha, who goes by the name Sammi. With an i at the end, the girl instructs her. When Anne looks back up, she sees that Ruth is busy chatting with the wife of the congregation president, but she also sees a woman without a child to usher, standing in the line. A woman—maybe in her middle forties—wearing an inexpensive jacket and a blue floral scarf on her head.
Anne looks back at the girl in front of her. “What was your name again, liefje?”
“Natalie,” the girl replies.
“Natalie,” Anne repeats, and she concentrates on the pen moving in her hand. Next in line is Rebecca, who says that she gets in trouble with her mom for reading with a flashlight under the blankets past her bedtime. Anne smiles back at this, and then she feels her heart jump and quickly leaps to her feet.
“Hello, Anne,” the woman in the jacket begins, in a voice that carries an accent from the old country.
Anne does not know if she should believe her own eyes. Can this be true? “Bep,” she whispers with joyful alarm. “Bep, is it really you?”
1961
The Empire State Building
Fifth Avenue and West Thirty-fourth Street
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
The brochure calls it the Eighth Wonder of the World, and really it’s the only one that still carries clout, isn’t it? The Pyramids? The Colossus of Rhodes? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? All those corny ancient achievements, now nothing but dust or rubble. Only this most modern of cities can boast of the number-one tourist attraction of the twentieth century. It has 102 stories above the ground. It climbs 1,454 feet straight up into the air like an unchallenged dream. It is the Empire State Building, maybe the Greatest Wonder of Them All, at Thirty-fourth and Fifth.
Bep carries a plastic Brownie in her purse. Anne shoves back her hair with her plastic sunglasses and snaps a shot of Bep posing on the observation deck, smiling blankly, one hand resting on a coin-operated telescope. A lock of Bep’s hair, an escapee from her scarf, is worried by the crosscurrent of wind. Her eyes squint into the light. As a backdrop New York has provided what a million visitors have proclaimed to be the world’s most spectacular view. But Bep looks like an ashen shadow in the brightness of the day. In Amsterdam her face was as plump as a peach, but now it has gone sallow. Her eyes are nervous and shy of contact behind her cat-eye glasses. Anne hands back the camera after snapping the shot, and Bep turns away toward the vast scope of buildings and sky. At this altitude New York is an open jewel box. The broad sprawl of the city is awash with azure under the clouds. The view of West Thirty-fourth Street, a straight artery dividing Macy’s from Gimbels, runs to the Hudson River, and has soaked up the river’s watery blue. A gritty, diamond-encrusted cityscape runs east-west, north-south, buildings stacked like dragon’s teeth, tall and small, on the city’s grid. Cars stream like ants. People are reduced to specks. And off past the jutting piers, where the ocean liners nestle at their moorings, off to the west across the river, the landscape flattens and smears into a blue-pebbled map of crowded townships, and then the world beyond New York levels off and blurs into a band of slate-colored horizon.
Bep’s explanation of her life since she left the Prinsengracht in tears is thin.
She and her husband emigrated to the States in ’48. Children? Yes. Two boys. There is a picture in her wallet of all of them together, standing in front of their small brick suburban house outside Philadelphia. Is she still an office worker? Sometimes. Her husband owns a hardware store. She helps out with paperwork. But mainly she’s a housewife. Een huisvrouw, she says. Only now does Bep find Anne’s eyes directly. “Do you think about it often?” Bep asks her. “The days in Amsterdam?”
“Every day. I think about them every day,” Anne replies. She stares out at the horizon, allowing the wind to tease her hair across her face. Bep joins her in this long stare, and they share the silence high above the city’s hubbub. A mesh of wire fencing in a seriated fringe has been installed below the observation deck to discourage jumpers.
“Anne, I have something to tell you,” Bep says thickly. Her voice has now exposed the full urgency that she’s been trying to hide. “But I don’t know how to say it.” Anne feels a cold weight in her breast. “Do you . . .” Bep begins to ask her, “do you recall my younger sister, Nelli?”
A pause. “I remember her,” is all Anne says.
Bep expels a difficult breath. “It’s about her,” she explains, “this thing I have to tell you. It’s about her.” Bep’s eyes fall, tearless but stricken. “She was a collaborator.”
Anne feels her back stiffen. “Landverrader” is the word Bep has used in Dutch. A homeland traitor. A homegrown Quisling.
“There was a German soldier she fell for.” Bep’s fingers twist around the handle of her purse. “They were lovers throughout the occupation.”
Anne says nothing. Only waits.
“Somehow . . .” Bep informs her, “somehow she knew the truth. About the hiding place.” Bep shakes her head at a dead spot in the air. “I don’t know how she found out. I swear I never told her a thing, I swear it, Anne. But somehow she found out anyway. I knew because once we were having a terrible row over her . . . over her relationship with this German, and she shouted at me, ‘Why don’t you forget about me and just go back to your Jews?’”
Anne is now staring. Staring at the movement of Bep’s lips as she forms words.
“It was her, Anne,” Bep confesses. “It was Nelli who rang up the Gestapo and betrayed us all. It wasn’t one of the warehousemen, it wasn’t the charwoman. It wasn’t anybody but my sister.”
Anne says nothing. She can say nothing.
“I mean, I have no documents to offer as proof,” Bep admits. “No letters of confession. Nelli was very roughly handled at the end of the war. They shaved her hair off in the middle of the street and painted her head orange. Even so, she has never owned up to anything. She still blames others for her troubles. Regardless, I know it to be true. I know it to be true in my heart that it was she who denounced you.”
What she feels first surprises Anne. Not anger, not shock, not even relief, but a pinch of regret. It’s true that many theories have been offered, but inwardly, Anne has assigned this crime to Raaf. Raaf, that straw-haired boy with his hands stuffed in his pockets. And now if this is true? All these years blaming Raaf in her heart to discover now that she’s been wrong? It hurts her.
“I’m sorry, Anne,” Bep says. “I’m so very sorry. I should have told you long ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I just couldn’t.”
Anne blinks at her and stares. “Why? Why would she do it? What had we ever done to her?”
Bep looks down. Shakes her head. “I have no good explanation. She was angry. Papa was so sick, and it was terrible. The cancer was taking him slowly and with great pain. She was angry and grieving and wanted to lash out. At me, at anyone she felt had judged her. That is my only explanation as to why. That and maybe because we were young and child-foolish in the middle of an ugly time. I don’t know. All I can say for certain is that a kind of cruelty simply consumed her.”
A kind of cruelty, Anne thinks. Can it finally make sense? Why Pim always resisted investigation. Why he always refused to pursue the subject of their betrayal, clinging obstinately to the parody of forgiveness he had constructed. How could he do otherwise? Bep’s sister? He could never be party to dragging Bep through such public disgrace. Not after the dangers she risked in caring for his family and friends. “
My father knew, didn’t he?”
A swallow. Bep brushes away the forelock of hair that’s escaped her scarf. “I never told him directly. I’ve never told anyone directly until now. But I always believed he knew, yes.” A shrug. “I know you won’t credit this, Anne, but I do believe that in a sense Nelli didn’t really understand what she was doing. That she didn’t really know about those terrible places where the Nazis sent the Jews.”
“No. No, of course not. Nobody knew, after all. Nobody had the slightest clue, did they? Whole populations were nothing but innocent dupes, even though the BBC was broadcasting across the continent that Jews were being gassed. It was just English propaganda, wasn’t it?”
Bep shrivels into a slump, her shoulders disappearing. “I knew you would be angry. Of course. You have every right to be angry. You have every right to hate me.”
A sharp sob strikes Anne in the chest. She grabs her forehead, eyes squeezed tightly shut. She can feel the thump of her heart dictating her reaction, but she resists it. Shaking her head, she blinks open her eyes and wipes them roughly with the palms of her hands. “No,” she answers, though her voice shivers. “No, Bep. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. You risked your life to keep us safe. And what your sister did?” A heavy breath stops her. “What your sister did or didn’t do,” she says. “You bear no responsibility for that.”
Bep gazes back at her. Her eyes are dark with suffering, wounded, begging forgiveness. When she breaks down in tears, Anne hesitates but then steps forward. She gathers the woman into her arms, her own tears wetting her cheeks, and stares past Bep at Margot’s thin shadow, her Belsen death rags hanging from her body as she gazes back at them with blighted sympathy. Clouds move. The envelope of light drains of color. Drains of anger. Empties itself of regret and reprisal. What can Anne possibly do but embrace an exhausted forgiveness, along with her lost friend?
Bep breathes in and out as they separate. Opens her purse for a handkerchief and mops her eyes. “I have something for you, Anne,” she manages to say. Replacing the handkerchief, she draws out a small, flat package, wrapped in brown paper and closed with Scotch tape. “Something that was yours many years ago. I took it because . . .” says Bep, but then it’s hard for her to explain why she took it. She shakes her head. “I wanted a memento of you. It was an impulse, but once I had it, I was too embarrassed to give it back.”
Anne gazes at Bep, who nods at her to accept it. Her gaze drops to the package as she takes it into her hands. The package is soft. Pliable. Carefully, she tugs open the tape that binds it and stares at its contents. “My combing shawl.”
“I found it on the floor that awful day. And I took it. I thought I would keep it for you until you came back. But I suppose it’s taken me a long time to return it.”
Odd how such a small thing, such an insignificant item from her girlhood, has such an effect. “I would wear this over my shoulders every night. And I remember how sometimes Margot would brush my hair for me,” she says. “We could be arguing all day, but that special moment would overcome all of it. It made me feel so close to her that it was impossible to feel anything except love. More than love,” Anne says. “I felt as if we had something magical that only sisters could share.” She looks past Bep, to the spot where Margot should be standing, yet it’s nothing save empty light now.
“Anne—” Bep starts to say, but Anne breaks in, the words coming unbidden, unplanned.
“I killed her,” she announces. A thin shiver passes through her body.
Bep squints at her, confused. “You . . . you what?”
“I killed her. I killed her, Bep. I killed my sister at Bergen-Belsen.”
Bep opens her mouth. “I don’t . . .” she begins, but then she shakes her head as if to shake the words away. “Anne . . .” she whispers.
“It’s not my guilt speaking,” Anne says. “That is, my guilt at surviving when she did not. I do feel a terrible guilt over that. Survival? That is its own kind of crime. But my crime is something different.” Rolling tears begin to ice her cheek, but she does not wipe them away. “We were . . .” Anne tries to continue, but her words die in her mouth, and she must start again. “We were in Barracks Block 1 in Belsen, Margot and I. Both of us had been brought into Germany from Birkenau. The weather was freezing. The camp was overflowing with disease. Typhus, dysentery, scurvy,” she recites the list. “Both of us were dreadfully, dreadfully sick. And I had been suffering from these . . . these horrible visions—rats the size of dinner platters crawling over us. Blinded cats, their eyes gouged out, shivering and mewing in agony, but when I tried to pick them up, they would spit at me and bite my fingers until I was bleeding. I suppose it was the fever. I felt like my eyes were slowly boiling inside my skull, and I was so, so horribly exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep. To fall into the deepest sleep ever conceived and never, ever wake up. But the barracks block was noisy. And Margot was coughing so loudly. We were lying close beside each other on the same pallet. There were lice in the straw. Lice in our ears and under our arms. Lice everywhere. In every crevice and pit of our bodies. I couldn’t sleep no matter how exhausted I felt, because everything itched so badly, my whole body. I just wanted to tear my skin off. And Margot was still coughing. I remember how I shouted at her, ‘Be quiet! Can’t you be quiet?’ But she just kept coughing. I only wanted to sleep,” she tries to explain as the tears flood her eyes and cling to her lashes. “I only wanted to sleep.”
She sees it all again. The disease-rotted barracks. The pallet on which she lay beside Margot. She can smell the stench of the filthy, lice-infested straw. The stink of bodies. The noise of Margot’s cough. She feels the impulse to shut her up. To heave her away. A beat. She swallows something hard and heavy. “So I shoved her,” she confesses. “She was lying with her back to me, and I shoved her from behind. I only wanted her to stop. Just stop coughing so loudly, so I could sleep. I didn’t mean to shove her . . . to shove her so hard.” Her voice diminishes. “So hard that she would roll off the pallet. But I did. I must have. And when she fell, it was too much for her. She was so weak. We were both so weak. The impact was too great a shock for her body.” The slowest beat. “She was dead,” Anne whispers. And then her sister is on the ground. Limbs akimbo. Her body motionless. Eyes open but her gaze stolen. Anne can feel the scream clog her throat, but she is too weak to release it as those around her begin to strip the corpse of its value. The dead have no need for socks on their feet. They do not require a woolen pullover.
Bep stares, her eyes raw. And then slowly she says, “Anne. Anne, I want you to listen to me, please.” She wipes her eyes, but a strange calm has transformed the woman’s face. “Will you? Will you listen to me? What you just told me—what you just told me you think happened,” she corrects. “You should consider it nothing more than a nightmare. Do you hear me, Anne? You were so ill. So fevered. It was simply—I’m sure of it—simply another hallucination.”
Anne gazes at Bep heavily. “Hallucination,” she repeats.
“You were so young,” Bep tells her. “Just a helpless child. You must believe me when I tell you that you have no right to take on the guilt of your sister’s death. The blame for that lands squarely on the men who perpetrated these crimes. Not on you, do you understand that?”
Anne is shaking her head, swiping at the tears on her face. “I know what I know.”
“But you don’t know, Anne,” Bep insists sharply now. “You don’t know. You think that you were strong lying there in that hideous place? Do you really? If Margot rolled off the pallet and died, then it was because she was coughing so violently. Not because of any kind of pitiful shove on your part. Not because of you.”
Anne can’t find any words. All she can do is concentrate on drawing in a breath against the tears and grip the flat package against her breast until it’s Bep who embraces her.
With forgiveness.
With love.
Like a sister.
35
REPAIRING THE WORLD
If God lets me live, I’ll achieve more than Mother ever did, I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind!
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 11 April 1944
1961
Waverly Place and Mercer Street
Greenwich Village
NEW YORK CITY
The apartment is dark but for a yellowish glow from the street that defines the edges of the room and the furniture. So Anne doesn’t bother turning on a lamp till she reaches the kitchen table by the fire-escape window. Miep’s portable typewriter is stationed there. A battered old thing by now, with a sheet of onionskin cranked around the rubber platen.
She keeps photographs on the wall.
When her diary was published in Hebrew, a letter came from Tel Aviv. In it was a picture of Hanneli and her husband with a baby on her lap. Both had thought the other dead, but now there is this photo of life. Beside it a small frame from B. Altman’s encloses a snapshot of Miep posing with Anne in her cap and gown after she was graduated from Barnard. Then there’s the fading color shot of Pim with his arm around Dassah, the ancient architecture of Jerusalem behind them. Pim is squinting, smiling into the desert sun, and Dassah is shading her eyes.
And Margot? The photo of Anne and Margot on the beach at Zandvoort more than twenty years before is locked in a sterling silver frame. Locked in time.
She opens her purse, plucking out the combing shawl. A flag of silk unfurls, and she feels her pulse quicken. Pale beige fabric decorated with roses and small figures. She gathers it to her nose to see if she can still smell the past clinging to it, but the sachet of her adolescence is long gone and she can only smell a musty trace of memory.
Sitting at the table, she lights a Camel. Her tawny cat, Mina, curls around her ankles and then struts away. “Odd after all these years, to know the truth,” Anne says, and stares into Margot’s eyes. “I thought I would feel something more. But really I don’t.” She nearly laughs. “I find,” she says, wondering if this could really be true, “that it makes no difference. So it was Nelli who betrayed us. So what? Even if it’s true, no one comes back to life.”
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