The Anne Frank House was filled with visitors. There were schoolchildren, excited, pushing the limits of the discipline their well-meaning teachers could enforce. There were a few Africans in robes, immense, obsidian, bejeweled. Japanese, Indonesians, a scruffy Canadian couple with maple leaves embroidered on their backpacks. The heat of all those bodies. Caitlin flexed her fingers, thawed.
There was a long line in front of the ticket window. It cost six guilders to get in, a dollar fifty. She waited with the others, and when she reached the window she told the young dark woman selling tickets that she had come for the conference. Caitlin spoke very slowly, hoping the girl’s English was good.
“Then you must go to over there,” the woman said, with a smile. She had a gold tooth like a Gypsy. She was pointing across the crowded room, once the living quarters for the extraordinary Dutch family who hid the Franks during the terror and now a white room filled with photographs of Hitler, street rallies, war, the camps.
Caitlin stood on her toes to see over the crowd; there was a door with a sign in Dutch on it.
“There?”
“Yes, you must ask for Margot Spijkers.”
Caitlin walked across the lobby. In the next room there were fifty or so people looking at photographs in an exhibition called “The Rise of Extremism Today.” The narrow staircase leading up to the rooms where the Frank family hid was jammed with people, holding orange admission tickets, talking to each other.
Caitlin knocked on the door and was let in by a young, large-faced woman with pale, almost denatured frizzy hair the color of fallen leaves. This was Margot Spijkers, sallow, slow-moving, who even if she were standing in a stark, empty room would always seem to be peering out from behind something. They introduced themselves, Caitlin told Margot she had arrived for the conference, Margot welcomed her, and then pointed to a desk upon which a high, unstable stack of papers seemed ready at any moment to slide onto the floor. In the middle of the clutter was a rather foreign-looking telephone— it looked more like an obsolete piece of medical equipment— with the receiver out of the cradle. “I am only just now talking to my boyfriend,” explained Margot. She had an odd, delicate voice; she was one of those people who didn’t mind not being heard.
The office was small, damp, with a virtuous gray chill in the air. There was a poster from Indonesia, presumably to save on heating costs through the power of suggestion.
Caitlin sat in a swivel chair near a metal desk, which was empty of all papers and had on it only a teacup with delicate blue flowers on the outside and dark amber tea stains on the inside. Margot was, with obvious strain and unhappiness, speaking to her boyfriend. There were occasional bits of English, like OK, or movie, Rolling Stones, and collect call.
Then, quite abruptly, Margot hung up and for a moment just stood there, staring at the phone and composing herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Caitlin.
“I could have waited outside, you know,” Caitlin said. Now that the girl was facing her and she saw the flush in her cheeks, the dark blue eyes, the broad, earnest mouth, Caitlin liked her enormously, and in one of those leaps of feeling that feel for a moment like premonition, she imagined introducing Margot to her son—they fall in love, marry, insist that she spend at least half the year with them in their houseboat on a canal.
“My boyfriend is my great problem of life,” said Margot, with no apparent intent to be humorous. “And working here, it makes it seem very small.”
“It’s none of my business,” Caitlin said. It came out sounding wrong; she hadn’t meant to express impatience, only benign disinterest. And Margot was, at first, taken aback. She tilted her head to the left as if to see Caitlin from the other side of the barrier between them. But then Caitlin smiled, made a self-deprecating gesture—a small shrug with the hands held near the heart—and Margot relaxed, sensed this middle-aged American lady as a friendly presence.
“Would you care to see the house?” Margot asked. “I can take you up the private staircase and save you the long queue.”
At the top of the narrow, dignified house, where on July 6, 1942, Otto Frank and his wife and daughters went into hiding, everything was as it was during the Occupation—all that was missing was the dirt and stench of people living in terror. Today, the chilly bare rooms, with their low ceilings and slanted walls, were filled with both pilgrims and tourists. It seemed, really, there were too many people on the old, bare wooden floors, and the fear went through Caitlin like a gust of leaves that this house was cursed, doomed, and that at any moment the floor might give way and they would all plunge through it, down through the well of the house, drawn faster and faster by the ravenous silt upon which it rested.
Margot showed Caitlin around, giving no evidence of boredom, of having seen these preserved rooms a thousand times before. She brought Caitlin to a window from which they saw an old tree that Margot named in Dutch and that looked to Caitlin to be a pin oak.
“This is the tree Anne looked at,” Margot said.
“And over there,” Margot continued, “is the church whose bell rang the time every quarter hour. The Westertoren clock. It used to make Anne’s parents terribly nervous. They simply did not like it, day and night. But Anne loved it. Did you read the diaries?”
“Yes, I did,” said Caitlin. “But some years ago.”
“She said she loved the clock most especially in the night,” said Margot. “ ‘It is like a faithful friend.’ ”
And as she said it, the clock in the Westerkerk began to toll. A few of the other visitors turned toward the sound; a nun with a dozen ten-year-olds in tow was reminded that it was time to go, and she began herding the children out of the room.
“I am named Margot in honor of Anne’s sister,” Margot said to Caitlin, as she led her out of the common family room, into a smaller room where the walls were pocked and cracked and covered with old pictures of movie actors and actresses. “My mother did not want to call me Anne. It would have been impertinent. But her older sister, Margot—that we could do, at least.”
“Many times,” Caitlin managed to say, though now what had begun as a wordless anxiety was becoming a very specific and demanding dread: You must get out of here, it said to her. “Many times children with committed parents decide to reject all of those things.”
“Yes, I have seen that, too,” Margot said. “My sister is like that.”
Caitlin nodded. She imagined Margot as a girl older than her years, sexually shy, dutiful, somewhat disdainful of her irresponsible, hedonistic contemporaries. She guessed that her own son would prefer the sister.
“This was Anne Frank’s room,” Caitlin said.
“Yes,” said Margot. “It was so bare. She put the postcards and her film-star collection up with paste.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She wanted always to make things more beautiful,” said Margot.
“She was just a child,” Caitlin said. She had meant to say it as a way of putting those old, innocent pieces of decoration into some kind of manageable perspective, to somehow denude them of their awful, awful pathos, and she had meant as well to place herself slightly above the experience of being in this room, and to distance herself from what she perceived as Margot’s wish to sentimentalize the pictures.
“Just a child,” she repeated, driving the point deeper—but her own heart broke like an egg, with a terrible, almost unsavory ooze of emotion. Her throat closed as if to suppress a cry, and Caitlin covered her eyes with her hand. She had not meant to say that, after all, had not meant to allow herself to be invaded by the pity and anger she felt now. This girl, this child: destroyed. Where was the world? Where was justice? Where was God?
“Are you all right?” Margot asked, touching Caitlin’s elbow gently.
This act of solicitude was finally too much. Like a stranger who has been stalking her, hiding behind this linden, that pine, Caitlin’s grief leapt out, wild-eyed, fatal, and seized her. She felt it clutch at her heart. And her blood,
as if in flight from grief’s fierce grip, rushed to her face. She was scalding from the inside out. It felt as much like some rapturous humiliation as it did like sorrow. She thought of Anne Frank, of Betty, of her son and his anxiousness to be away from her, of her own life running down like a top someone has sent spinning and then left, and she thought of that house on Von Egh-enstraat with the scarlet shutters, the ever-changing names taped to the mailbox.
“Shhh,” said Margot. “It’s OK, it’s goot. You are not the first, not the only one.” She had her arm around Caitlin. Caitlin wanted to stop crying but she was too tired to control herself entirely, the blow was too sudden, too hard. Those pictures, the sad gray light coming through the annex windows, the calm faces of the tourists, and the ghosts everywhere. There are days when you miss everyone you’ve ever known, ever loved, ever lost.
Margot led Caitlin down the plunging, vertiginous staircase and back to the offices. Caitlin had stopped crying. Margot sat her down in the swivel chair and poured a cup of coffee. It was tepid but good. “Many come here to weep,” Margot said, as she watched Caitlin drink.
“I didn’t … ” Caitlin stopped herself. “I don’t know why I came here. I mean here, to Amsterdam. I thought I might see someone.”
“Family? You are Dutch, yes?”
“Yes, partly. But I have no family here.” She hesitated again, and though her habits of privacy were as much a part of who she was as the scent of her scalp, the timbre of her voice, she felt suddenly that this girl, Margot, was someone in whom she might at least begin to confide. Caitlin had no idea what had brought her to this moment. Was it the large, forgiving, sorrowful eyes of the girl, the weight of the coffee cup in her own hand, or had travel and exhaustion allowed her to slip from the tether of habit?
“For me the war was two people,” Caitlin said to Margot. “One of them was murdered. She didn’t understand what the war was about, though she was intelligent. She was from a certain time and place. And I cared for her a great deal.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Margot said. Unlike most people her age, Margot seemed to understand that twenty-six years is not very long, the gap between the then and the now can be spanned by just one of sorrow’s cold fingers.
“I don’t know why I’m going on like this. It’s just been on my mind.”
“Did they catch the murderer?”
“I looked for him, with a friend. A dear friend. The man was never brought to justice. He was trying to stop a congressman from making certain statements, statements that might have exposed a great deal of German influence in the government at the time.”
“In the American government?”
“Yes. The congressman was on a plane to Windsor County—that’s where he was from. And my good friend, who was with him, who worked for him, was killed, too. A bomb. There were nineteen others on the plane, all killed.”
“What happened to the man, the murderer?”
“Disappeared. And you see, my other friend, the friend that I thought I might see here, he has spent many years looking for this murderer. But of course he will never find him.” Caitlin sipped her coffee. It was quite cold now and it had gotten sweeter. “I have to go. I’m traveling with my son and I said I would meet him. What time is it?”
“Almost twelve in the noon,” said Margot. She said it without consulting a clock.
“I’m supposed to meet him at a place called the Vondel Bar. Is it far?”
“It’s on the Leidseplein.”
“Yes, he said that. I like to walk. New York is a walking city. And before … I’ve walked all my life. It helps me think. Is it very far?”
“You could walk but it would take you a long time,” said Margot. “It will only be a few guilders in a taxi.”
“Do you know this bar?”
“Yes,” said Margot, coloring slightly.
“It has a bad reputation, doesn’t it.”
Margot shrugged. “For now it is for the hippies. But before, during the Occupation, it was a Resistance bar.”
Caitlin left soon after, with a packet of information about the conference folded over and stuck into her large black pocketbook. There was a taxi, a tan Mercedes, in front of Anne Frank House, and she got in, told the driver to take her to the Leidseplein and he pulled away without any questions.
She settled back in the cab and watched the houses and the canals go by. The sun was out now and the light mixed with the heavy air to make a color like water in a slightly dirty glass.
She rolled the window down and let the wind blow on her face, let it muss her hair. Holland, she said to herself. And then an ancient voice within her added: I’m free. I’m free.
The Vondel Bar was on a square, with a symphony hall on one side, and bars, Dutch and Indonesian restaurants everywhere else. In the middle, trolley cars were pulling in and out. In the warm months the Vondel Bar put chairs outside but now the patio was bare except for a thick length of rolled-up tarpaulin.
Caitlin opened the door and walked in, feeling, as she had all her life upon entering a new place, that someone might come up to her and challenge her right to be there. She adopted what she had come to think of as her Fuck You walk: shoulders back, bosom forward, her eyes moving from side to side as if she were searching for someone far more important than the nobodies who might be judging her.
The bar smelled of beer, cognac, cigarettes, and wet wool. It was just the outer edge of afternoon and they were drinking as if it were late evening. The bartender was a large man with hair as pale as Chablis and small blue eyes in a strong, secretive face. He said something to her in Dutch and Caitlin answered, “I’m here to meet my son.”
She found a table along the wall, near the billiard table, which at this time was covered with a plank of plywood and a tablecloth and was being used by a large party of friends who were smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. They wore turtleneck sweaters and berets, and many of them had books next to their drinks, though to Caitlin they looked too old to be students.
She saw her son near the back of the café. He sat with an older fellow, dark-haired, bearded, with the look of someone routinely questioned by the police, someone clever enough to keep out of jail but not out of trouble. Also seated with her son was a long-faced woman who was combing her red hair with her fingers. She wore a bright turquoise Chinese jacket and chewed her lip as the bearded man said something to Caitlin’s son that made him laugh. They were doing nothing more than that, but the thought that Caitlin had was: This has something to do with drugs.
She thought of her son. She wondered why he took drugs, why he was alone, why he needed a woman to hold him in bed but not to make love to, why he floated above his own life like dust—dust kicked up by a parade that has long since passed. I have failed him, she thought to herself.
And as she had this thought, her son looked across the bar and saw her. His face lit up with surprise and what looked like, at least from a distance, pleasure. He said something to his companions, stood up, and then reached down for his glass of beer, finished it. He shook the man’s hand, bowed slightly to the woman, who might very well have been blind for all her reaction, and then he walked quickly across the crowded, smoky, noisy café and joined his mother.
“What did you come to this place for?” she asked him, as soon as he was seated.
“Do you want a Heineken?” he asked. “They make it about a mile away from here.” And then, before she could answer, he leaned close to her, took her hand easily, lovingly, in a way that he had not been able to for some years.
“Do you know this place used to be a hangout during the Hitler days, I mean for Resistance people, who’d come here and plot against the Germans?”
“Yes, I heard that,” Caitlin said.
“They were telling me …” her son said, indicating the table he had just left. “I don’t know.” He hesitated and his face looked soft, his green eyes not quite so clever, not quite so evasive. “It just made me feel so proud of you, it really did.”
&
nbsp; She put her hand on his shoulder, brushed her fingers against his heavy, unwashed hair.
“I don’t want to take all your time,” Caitlin said. “I know you have things you like to do. But while we’re here I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Yeah?”
He looked at her questioningly, a little mistrustfully. It did not seem to him that this was necessarily a conversation he would want to have.
Caitlin felt a will to retreat, an impulse to just let it drop. But she forced herself to say it, as best she could.
“It’s just you’re all I have, you know, and if you’re interested I’d like to tell you about my life.”
ELEVEN
DECEMBER 5, 1948
“I don’t know what the hell you call this dish,” Caitlin said, bringing to the table the cast-iron skillet she had inherited from Joe. “It’s rice and chopped sirloin and green peppers and I think it smells a lot better than it’s going to taste.”
It was night and it was cold. The wind shook the icy windows in their frames. Caitlin was serving dinner to Gordon, who came to eat once every two weeks now. For a while he had been telling her that he loved her, that they must marry, but she had worn him out on that subject without hurting his huge mass of unformed feelings.
Gordon waved the rising steam from the skillet toward his face and breathed in deeply. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, like a well-mannered cop. He had not gotten soft, but he had thickened in the last year. There were pouches beneath his eyes, broken capillaries on his nose. He’d often said he didn’t trust men who did not show their age. He said such men were clearly not paying attention.
“Mmmm,” he said.
“It looks disgusting,” Caitlin said, serving it up with a spatula.
“Food is the hardest thing to photograph. It’s not really all that visual—it’s about smell and warmth, and being hungry.”
“Well, then, I hope you’re hungry.”
Secret Anniversaries Page 23