The Mystery of Right and Wrong
Page 42
“He was a great man,” Rachel said. “A great father. At least, I hope he was.”
“The four of us have been to Amsterdam so many times, but we’ve never been to Anne Frank’s house. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Not at all,” Rachel said. “We didn’t go because I went nuts about Anne Frank. That and the fact that Mom didn’t want Dad finding out that we’d been there. This might be my last chance to see the Achterhuis. I feel like I have to see it.”
“Well, I have to say that I don’t think you visiting her house is a good idea.”
“I don’t either,” I said.
“I feel like it is,” Rachel said to Bethany. “Just like you feel that you’re fat.”
“Ouch. Oh well, I’m penniless, pregnant and stark raving mad. What do I know? Who knows when I’ll get back to Amsterdam again? And, by the way, a pregnant woman gets fatter the more pregnant she gets. It’s not her imagination. I’ll finally be able to convince other people that I am getting fatter. I’m starting to think that Gloria is the most normal one of us all. Scary thought.”
Bethany went on like that as if she might keep it up all the way to Amsterdam, but she eventually went back to sleep.
As was the case on the flight to South Africa, the passenger announcements from the captain and flight crew were made in English, Dutch, German, French and Afrikaans. I was tired of being surrounded by people who seemed to be able to get by in any language. Half the time over the past few months, I hadn’t understood what anyone was saying. Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Swahili—I couldn’t speak any of them.
And there was one language whose very existence affronted me—Arellian. Written by no one but Rachel. Comprehensible to no one but her. Never spoken except, rarely, by her. I had never heard it. A non-existent language? I again wondered. Over the past few days, every time she’d said the word Arellian, I’d felt like screaming at her that there was no such thing.
What went through Rachel’s mind while she was “writing,” I couldn’t begin to guess, even after months of living with her. Nothing, perhaps. Surely the most obsessive, the most delusional thoughts, would be better than nothing. I wondered if she would ever get back to writing in the diary for only an hour a day, let alone rid herself of Anne Frank and the book. I knew what would become of her, and of us, if she got worse.
I was glad I had given in to Gloria’s plea that I keep her secret. What chance of a return to even near-normalcy would Rachel have if she knew what Gloria had done?
As if my unspoken question had triggered her, Rachel took a large notepad from her seat pocket and began to write at a furious pace, hunched over her serving tray, her hair hanging like a tent around the page.
AMSTERDAM
(1985)
WADE
Six months ago, the sight of Amsterdam would have exhilarated and confounded me: the bewildering network of canals spanned by innumerable bridges, the slick, polished-by-time cobblestones, the criss-crossing streams of old-fashioned bicycles with baskets on their handlebars—bicycles as likely to be ridden by nuns and men in three-piece suits as by students. However, aside from the fact that I felt more at home in the chilly early summer of Western Europe than I had in the heat of South Africa, my main impression of Amsterdam was that it was not Cape Town. Gone were the “Blanke” and “Nie-Blanke” signs and all the other racist trappings of Cape Town, the ever-lowered eyes of the coloureds and the blacks who moved about among the whites as unobtrusively as if they were invisible.
Gone, too, of course, were the blacks and the coloureds, for the city was full of whites paler than those of Newfoundland.
After finding our flat and dropping our bags, Rachel and I walked two and a half miles to Merwedeplein, the apartment building in Amsterdam South, where, after fleeing Germany, the Franks had lived on the second floor from 1933 to 1942. I tried to imagine Amsterdam after its occupation by the Germans in May of 1940, those who had been identified as Jews walking about the cobblestone streets, the conspicuous yellow Star of David enclosing the word Jood stitched onto the front of their clothing, the Jews still seemingly free but soon not to be.
Rachel pointed at the window of the Franks’ flat. “The only film that exists of Anne Frank is of her leaning out that window to watch the wedding of some family friends. It lasts about three seconds. She laughs and smiles. She was happy here. They all were, for a while.”
By 1942, Jews were not allowed to use the trams, so, the day they went into hiding, the Franks had carried all their movable possessions with them for two and a half miles through the rain to Prinsengracht. “People sometimes forget that the Franks were Germans,” Rachel said. “Anne’s father fought on the side of the Germans in World War I. It’s said that he was proud to have served his country with such honour. Anti-Semites try to make Otto Frank out to be a bit of a shady character. The business he co-owned with his non-Jewish friend made food preservatives. When he and his family went into hiding, he signed the company over to the friend and it operated throughout the war. People say that he made money from helping to keep the Germans in rations, the very Germans who killed his wife and daughters. But that’s not true. He was so poor by the end of the war that he had to live with friends for the next seven years.
“Fritz once said to me, ‘Have you ever wondered how he survived Auschwitz? He did it by informing on the other prisoners, that’s my guess. He was once a German soldier. That would have impressed the Nazis.’ But none of the others who survived Auschwitz accused him of being an informer. None of them accused him of anything.”
On the way back, we walked by the house in which Hans grew up, one of a row of high, attached houses that opened onto a canal-facing street, all of it unchanged since the war, just as the Achterhuis and the buildings around it remained unchanged.
“He was a child once, in that house,” Rachel said, her eyes welling with tears. I put my arm around her waist and pulled her to me. “I wonder what happened in there. Nothing, maybe. Or did he do what he did to Bethany, and maybe to me and my other sisters, because someone in that house did the same to him? Or did something even worse happen to him? It’s just a house. But it was just a house in the 1930s and ’40s, too. Our houses were never just houses. Each of them seemed like the entire world. Maybe this house was never just a house to him.”
“Things will get better,” I said, hugging her hard. “They will when we’re back home.”
I looked again at Hans’s childhood home. In Amsterdam, many collaborated in the hope of saving their lives or improving their lot. From what I now knew about Hans, I suspected he wanted to be accepted by the Nazis because he had never been accepted by any group before. In his adult life, he was excluded by every group in which he sought membership because he repeatedly curried favour with his superiors by informing on those he believed to have been unfairly promoted at his expense. He was certain that he had been held back by favouritism, nepotism or inexplicably bad judgment. He may even have believed that what the Nazis sought to create was a pure meritocracy in which the strong would advance and the weak be left behind, a society, a world, in which there would be no advantage in being high-born, and in which those who accrued wealth by usury, dishonesty and greed would be relieved of it and thereafter relieved of life itself. I imagined Hans having been made a kind of honorary Nazi by the men whom he amused by his presumptuous eagerness to be one of them. If I was right, it was a wonder one of them hadn’t shot him dead on a whim.
It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to
the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.
More than forty years ago, when my father was less than half his present age, these things had happened here. One street away, the two teenage daughters of a man who, ostensibly, was not unlike Hans van Hout were dragged from their hiding place along with six other people and, for no reason but that they were Jews, were sent to concentration camps. Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen—in chronological order, the series of camps to which Anne Frank and her family were sent and where they stayed until they died, places that, before the war, were no more sinister-sounding than St. John’s or Halifax.
RACHEL
I didn’t sleep a minute during our first two nights in Amsterdam. I sat up in bed beside Wade, writing in a frenzy in the diary.
“Two days now and we haven’t gone to Anne Frank’s house,” he said. “You’ve barely budged from this apartment, from this bed. This is how you told me it was when you were sick.”
“Not even close. I mean it. I’m not shipshape but I’m a far cry from being at my worst.”
“You write and write, but you never seem to stop to think about a single word. You write as if you’re writing the same thing over and over.”
“I’m not. And I’m not ready to go, but I will be soon.”
“You’re writing so hard, the bed is shaking and the springs are creaking. There are better ways to make a bed do those things.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Things will get back to normal. We will. But right now, here in Amsterdam, it feels as if she’s everywhere. I can’t think about anything else.”
* * *
—
That night, I left Wade sleeping and I went to stand on the canal bridge closest to Het Achterhuis. I leaned on the rail, facing the water. Every man who crossed the bridge slowed down to appraise me. None of them spoke, but I sensed them wondering, hoping. What is a woman doing on a bridge by herself this late at night?
I thought of what might happen if I told Wade the truth about my involvement. I was afraid that it would drive him away, but also afraid that it would destroy him, whether he stayed with me or not. He loved me. There was not enough left of me to love him as much as he loved me. I would lose him if I told him. I might lose him if I didn’t. It seemed that dead ends lay in all directions.
I had my first copy of Het Achterhuis, mummified by various kinds of tape, hidden beneath my coat. I tried to work up the nerve to let it slide from my hands into the water as if by accident. I wasn’t sure that it would sink, and wished that I had tested it in the tub in our flat. If it floated away, I might follow it as I would a person who was in need of rescuing. I might follow it until I lost sight of it. I wouldn’t have minded if someone rescued it, ripped the tape open and found the forbidden book and somehow preserved it. Look what I found, floating in the canal. There must be a story behind it. What do you think it could be? It would be nice if it inspired speculation, stories—another myth, another legend, yet more lore about Anne Frank, of which I was secretly the origin. Perhaps the mummy would make it all the way to the Amstel River and never be found. Eventually, the tape would loosen, decay and release the book, which, upon contact with the water, would dissolve.
I could just jump in when there was no one on the bridge but me, leaving the book and Wade and the world behind. Another abandonment of Wade, possibly his destruction. I decided that I would not jump, or drop the book. I needed to go back to him because he needed me.
From The Arelliad
HOLOCAUST (1975)
Beware, my friends, because the past
Becomes the present very fast.
I move among them every day as if some invisible spy has infiltrated their hiding place and has no fear of being caught, an eavesdropping, trespassing voyeur. In Anne’s book, the observations are the same; their life-prolonging self-confinement drags by through a tedium of days that seem identical, nothing to distinguish one from another but the food their minders cook for them on the free side of the bookcase. Just the length of the breezeway away is a world that was once theirs, but whose very air is forbidden to them now.
It isn’t with her liberation
that her words reach their conclusion,
or with her words that her book ends.
It ends: “Anne’s diary ends here,”
the words of her first editor—
that’s where it ends; the book ends there.
The diary must end too soon,
or, rather, it must never end,
only seem to be abandoned,
put aside because of boredom,
cast aside because of freedom.
In time of war, in time of peace,
the record of events must cease—
the writer is outlived by time
and time outlives the writer’s name,
for time continues just the same.
The last entry of Het Achterhuis, ten days before the raid took place, does mark a kind of ending, though—she must have sensed, the story goes, that they were about to be caught. She wishes that she was the last person left on earth, that there was no one left alive but her, Anne Frank, living in a world of absolute freedom and solitude, a respite at last from the suffocating confines of those tiny rooms.
The sunrays move around the walls. The dark is coming much too soon. It’s summer, but the light is that of a winter afternoon, the afterlight of a sun that set before the day was done.
Might she have known the end was near and not have been surprised by the breaking down of the lower door, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, the loudest sound she’d heard in years, the thundering Gestapo boots, her mother screaming, “Please don’t shoot.” So long confined to one small space, so long accustomed to the faces and voices of the others and their minders, she must have known this was the end. How strange the strangers must have seemed as more and more Gestapo streamed through the secret passageway as if into the hiding place of the only eight Jews they’d been searching for since the war began. They stormed and stomped about that secret tiny space where, for years, only whispering had been allowed, where three children, three men and two women had been hiding out but now were caught, each of them soon accused of being born a Jew and refusing to sacrifice themselves to murder. Her father, shamefaced, looked about as if he thought he should have found a better place for them to hide. His daughters froze while Edith fell to the floor.
All eight were sent to Westerbork, a transit camp at which they worked until the Franks were moved again, this time to Auschwitz on a train.
* * *
—
I’m travelling with them in a windowless boxcar whose destination is known to all, though no one dares to say its name. All of us are crammed together, with no choice but to use each other to keep from falling to the floor as the speeding train sways wildly back and forth.
“It’s barely possible to breathe.”
“I think I might just sweat to death.”
“It won’t be like some people are saying. There’ll be a place for us to stay. Why else would they let us take so much with us, clothing, linen, pots and pans. I’m not expecting first-class accommodations, but all this talk of coming misery is nonsense, if you’re asking me.”
I see the Frank family. I have no doubt that it is Them.
I speak, but in Arellian.
They cannot hear me, anyway—
the youngest of Them looks my way.
I have no doubt that it is Her,
the very picture of her picture,
the cover of her famous book.
Her face takes on a different look,
no longer Anne of Anne Frank’s book:
she stares at things but doesn’t see,
nor does she see them inwardly;
her mind’s a blank, it’s not like mine
that must be thinking all the time—
or so it seems, perhaps she spies
the look that I cannot disguise;
she understands it, in which case
Anne Frank has recognized her Fate.
Crammed into a corner of the car, Otto, with his back against a wooden bar that is nailed across two doors, his arms around his wife and daughters, can think of nothing but mere words. I hear him tell them that this will be the hardest day, so they should try to think of the better ones that lie ahead. Margot, resting her head sideways on his chest as if to hear his heart, closes her eyes but gives a jolt like someone waking from a dream.
Anne smiles to reassure the other two, but Edith cries and faintly shakes her head. She looks at me as Anne did, as if she’s able to tell by my expression that all hope is lost.
I fall in with the family and listen as Otto tells them that, at Auschwitz, men and women will be separated. Edith interrupts him: “Stop exaggerating. They wouldn’t do that. Some sort of arrangements have been made. There might be underground shelters. The Germans are renowned…”
I hear these words in Otto’s head: What if, when all of them are dead, I think of things I should have said that might have saved their lives? The girls are younger, but they’re stronger than Edith.
So he tells them, in a whisper: “There won’t be time to say goodbye and there are things that you should know…
Do what you’re told, my darling girls,