The Mystery of Right and Wrong
Page 45
I rummaged in my shoulder bag and withdrew from it the tape-wrapped copy of Het Achterhuis that I had shown to Wade in Cape Town.
“What in God’s name is that?” Bethany said. “It looks like something you pulled out of the garbage.”
“It’s a copy of Het Achterhuis. My first one ever. It was given to me by a friend when I was thirteen. A birthday present. I was planning to make a grand gesture. I was going to leave this at the base of the stone with all the other offerings. My oh so unique tribute to the memory of Anne and the others, a ceremonial and final parting with my past. But I can’t leave without it. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
Wade sighed and surveyed Bergen-Belsen. I kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry I dragged you here on this phony pilgrimage.”
I had to get out of here now, had to leave her here with her sister. I felt the pull of the dark that I was half in love with. I couldn’t imagine the place after dark. Among the people who maintained it, there must have been some who would have to spend the night, patrolling the grounds, the museum, what ruins still remained, ensuring that the dead were never left alone. I must have read her book ten thousand times, but I wondered if I’d ever really read it.
The words I had planned to say to the stone came out of my mouth: “I am sorry about what was done to you and the others, Anne. Margot, I’m glad that you had Anne until the very end. Anne, I’m glad the end came quickly for you after Margot died. I’m glad that all three of my sisters are alive.”
“She’s talking to ghosts,” Bethany said. “We’d better go before we offend them, too.”
WADE
“I won’t be much company on the ride back,” Rachel said when we were once more on the train. “I have a new Dutch copy of the book in my bag and I’m going to read it, but not for long because I’m so tired.”
She did read the book for a while and fell asleep as she said she would. I decided to move to another seat so as not to wake her. There were empty seats near the back of the train. I sat in the last one on the other side of the aisle, from which there was a better view, one not blocked by the never-ending stand of blazing white birch trees.
A few minutes later, Bethany made her way down the aisle and sat beside me. “So how are you doing, buddy boy?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Really? You seemed kind of out of it back there.”
“Concentration camps have that effect on me.”
She looked at me for longer than she ever had, her eyes searching.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Can’t a girl chat with her sister’s boyfriend? That was a strange odyssey, wasn’t it?”
“Relatively speaking? Not really.”
“Try to hang in there. She might not be as far gone as she seems.” She gently rubbed her belly. “I, on the other hand, am exactly as far along as I seem. I’ve been giving you a hard time since we met. Truce?”
“Truce,” I said.
“I guess Rachel is just as screwed up in her own way as we are, but she’s not selfish. All of this Anne Frank stuff, I don’t understand it. It’s as if she thinks the death of a girl before she was born is somehow her fault. Maybe she thinks the whole bloody Holocaust was her fault. All that reading, rereading, and all that writing—it’s as if she thinks she is to blame for everything and has to find a way to make it right, or explain it, or keep it from happening again.”
“She used the word fix this morning. She feels like there’s something that she has to fix.”
Bethany shrugged.
“I don’t get it, Bethany—”
“Shhh, not so loud,” she said. I looked up and saw several people staring back at us, including Gloria, who, I was not surprised to see, looked especially concerned. Bethany waved to her and she turned around.
“Bibliomania can happen to anyone, right?” I said. “You don’t have to have been traumatized. If you’re genetically predisposed—”
“You’re never going to know for certain, Wade. You have to decide if you can live with that. You take this whole life thing very seriously, don’t you?”
“Yes. So do you.”
“You’re right. I do. But you think those green eyes of yours can see right through everything, and they can’t. Some things just are, period. Not what a writer wants to hear, I guess.”
“I’m not a writer. A writer writes. I’m starting to think I’ll be a would-be writer the day I die.”
“Like I said, hang in there.” She rubbed her belly again. “I called it my bundle of boy, trying to convince myself that it was a boy. Over and over I prayed, ‘Please God, don’t let this baby be a girl.’ Now that Dad’s gone, I won’t mind if it’s a girl. I’ll mind that she’s his granddaughter. That’s how he would have thought of her, as his, even though he wasn’t the father. When I found out I was pregnant and went back to Clive and Mom and Dad—well, I was thinking of the baby then, too. I had this notion that a baby would fix everything, make up for everything, almost undo it. A new start for everyone, the baby with four doting grandparents, all of us oozing domestic bliss in pastoral Cape Town. Did you know that after she moved back to South Africa, Gloria wrote to Mom and Dad in St. John’s every day? Every day for seven years. That’s about 2,500 letters.”
“Is everyone in this family a writer?”
She sniffed. “The van Houts’ beautiful, dutiful daughters. When I was in Halifax, I wrote to them every week and they called every Sunday, and I took their calls and we made small talk for four or five minutes. I was a faithful correspondent last summer. Now we are all beyond his reach. I need to keep reminding myself of that. I have never been in love. Before you, Wade, Rachel had never been in love. Gloria and Carmen have never been in love. But Rachel is in love with you. She seems just plain better than the rest of us in some way that she might deserve no credit for. It may be that she has some innate gift that God withheld from her sisters.
“I can never become clean again. How do you wipe away that stain? When doctors tell you not to blame yourself for what was done to you against your will, they still sound as if they’re blaming you for something, as if they’re convinced that, at some level, you wanted to be defiled, that you enticed him in some way, that he was helpless to fend off your advances. When people find out what your father did, it’s you they point to for having no better sense than to let him do it, or for giving in to some primal urge that other girls and women can resist.
“The few times that I slept with Clive, thinking of England wasn’t enough to distract me from what he was doing. The only thing that worked was imagining what it would be like to live on Madagascar. Poor Clive. I wanted a baby. I’m not sure what he wanted.”
She folded her arms and closed her eyes. A tear ran down one cheek. She opened her eyes and stared at the back of the seat in front of her. “So.” The word was one long sigh.
“I’m sorry, Bethany,” I said. “For what it’s worth, I do believe you. About your father, I mean.”
Another tear ran down her cheek. “Have you noticed that I’m eating? Not voraciously, but it’s a start. Bethany van Hout, eating for two—that’s ironic, isn’t it? But I’ll never get married unless there’s a greater demand for knocked-up crackpots than I think there is. Anne O’Rexia, a lovely Irish lass. I wonder what kind of mother I’ll make. I know where the smart money is right now, but that could change. Everyone rolls their eyes when they think of a newborn depending on me. Gloria’s agreed that I can stay with her and Max, not just for now but for as long as I like after the baby is born.”
“That’s good,” I said. “One less thing to worry about.”
She nodded. “Hug?” she said. I held out my arms and she wrapped hers around my chest and laid her head sideways on my shoulder. “Be nice to Rachel,” she said. She broke our embrace, got up and gingerly went back to her seat.
* * *
—
“Gloria called,” she said.
“What did she want?” I said, trying to sound casual.
“She said that you and I should leave for home tomorrow.”
“I’m all for that,” I said, but she shook her head.
“I want to do what we came here for,” Rachel said. “I want to visit her house. I want to go there with you and with my sisters.”
“What’s the point, Rachel? Look at what happened at that concentration camp.”
“I’ll go there by myself if I have to.”
From The Arelliad
THE NIGHT BEFORE (1985)
Tomorrow I will see Anne’s house—
already, I can hear her voice:
“I didn’t die to change the world.
I was an ordinary girl
with ordinary girl concerns.
I represent the Holocaust—
if I had lived, what would be lost?
Had I grown up, what would I be
without a place in history?
I would still be ordinary,
and someone else’s diary,
a better book, one overlooked
because of mine, would be The Book,
some other girl the heroine;
some other girl would be The One—
how many others might have been?
Had I grown up, what would I be—
an obscure writer, probably,
if I was any kind at all,
but everything seems possible—
the heaven of what might have been
is where you do it all again.
If there had never been a raid,
the eight of us would have been freed
when the West was liberated.
The two years in Het Achterhuis
would have been a mere hiatus
from the life I took for granted—
could I have just returned to it?
“I envy you your real life:
what will you be, perhaps a wife—
a mother, too? What you will be
would be of no concern to me
if I were not a part of you
that must do what you tell me to.
“I have no wisdom to dispense,
no words to say in your defence—
likewise none of condemnation,
absolution, accusation.
I have not come back from the dead
to judge you for the things you did.
I would forgive you if I could;
I wonder if you think I should.
I have to wear this yellow star;
the star reminds me who you are—
that is, it tells me I was caught,
the thing I was that you were not.
You want to know what I would do
if you were me and I were you.
I may as well just say it straight:
it’s you that you interrogate.”
Her lips move as she speaks to me,
but my voice is the one that she
seems unsurprised to find that we
are using interchangeably,
the voice of Rachel in her mouth
and mine. She always told the truth;
I wish that I could do the same—
dissenting voices with one name.
“You’re older than I ever was;
I was the happy one of us.
You had to hide inside your head;
I chose my diary instead,
although I wrote it long before
the declaration of your war.
You chose it too, you made it yours—
we disappeared at age thirteen;
I survived until fifteen,
two years of self-imprisonment.
Things could have been so different;
I still exist inside the books,
yours and mine, the one you took
to mean things that I didn’t mean—
the real Anne is what might have been.
I’d like it if you set me free
but I am you and you are me
and so, it seems, we’ll always be.”
RACHEL
We went to het Achterhuis in the afternoon the next day, Wade, Gloria, Carmen, Bethany, Fritz and I. Max had been there before and said he didn’t want to go again. Fritz said that we were horror tourists like the ones who visited Dealey Plaza, voyeurs of suffering who got a thrill out of going to places where bad things had happened. “Her house is the Disneyland of bleeding hearts. Non-Jews go there to reassure themselves that they would be incapable under any circumstances of doing what the Nazis did. They cry. They kneel down and pray. But where were their parents and grandparents when everyone in North America and Europe knew what was happening to the Jews? Laying low, that’s what they were doing. Looking the other way.”
“I’m so glad you feel that way,” Bethany said. “I cherish the times when you’re not around.”
“I didn’t say I’m not coming,” Fritz said. “I want to witness baby sister’s first visit to her heroine’s house. Baby sister returns to the scene of the crime.”
“Shut up, Fritz,” Wade said. Fritz, raising his hands to shoulder height as if to fend him off, backed up a few steps.
In the queue, it was cold enough to see your breath and a light drizzle was falling. There were many schoolchildren of Anne Frank’s age. Their teachers did their best to impress upon them the solemnity of this field trip, but as they waited, the children laughed and skylarked and passed cigarettes back and forth.
“I could use one of those cigarettes,” I said, my hands in the pockets of my jacket. Wade put an arm around my shoulders, which were shaking.
The stairs that led to the Secret Annex were very steep and narrow. Visitors ascended and descended at the same time in two never-ending streams, crushing each other against the walls amid protests, apologies and laughter. “It’s nothing but a bunch of empty rooms,” someone said as he hurried down the stairs.
“Pregnant lady coming through,” Bethany shouted. “I might not look like it, but I am. Don’t squish the fish.”
People made way for her as best they could.
“It’s a good thing they didn’t have to walk up and down these stairs every day,” I said to Wade. “I already feel like I’m suffocating.”
The second I passed the bookcase that had hidden the secret entrance, and crossed over the breezeway into the bare and empty house, I wobbled unsteadily and would have fallen had Wade not grabbed hold of me.
“Nice catch, big guy,” Bethany said. “Wade is going to carry you out of here if you do that again. You’re as white as a sheet.”
I wondered what, in the circumstances of me and my sisters, the all-forgiving fifteen-year-old of the Secret Annex would have done with Hans van Hout. Had Anne Frank still believed in the basic goodness of people when, though it was winter, she could no longer stand to wear her lice-infested clothes?
Fritz tagged along with each of us in turn, holding Carmen’s hand, standing with Bethany and whispering something that made her roll her eyes and slowly shake her head in disbelief. He walked in silence with Gloria, who seemed not to notice him. He moved among the crowd like a pickpocket. He stood beside Wade and me as we looked out the rear window of the Secret Annex onto the quadrangle across which free people ha
d walked every day during the Franks’ confinement. By day, scores of people had walked beneath the window; by night, only a few. The window was supposedly one of the back windows of the working warehouse they hid above, so a sound coming from the window at night would have been more startling than one by day.
“Isn’t it all so fascinating?” Fritz said. “Empty rooms, bare walls.” He all but shadowed me for a while, staring at me as I stared at the meagre contents of one of the world’s most famous houses. There were pictures of Anne’s drawings on the walls of the bedroom she had shared with Pfeffer.
“What do you want, Fritz?” Wade said.
Fritz shrugged and went away just as I began to cry. The visitors stared as if I was part of the exhibit. “We should go,” Wade said, but I shook my head and told him I was fine.
“I just need some time,” I said. He frowned but let me move away from him.
I’d seen photographs of reconstructions of Het Achterhuis. I stared, with my mind’s eye, at Anne’s little bed, a cot pushed against one wall, and Pfeffer’s pushed against the other, three feet of space between.
They trusted Anne with Pfeffer, Anne, who was thirteen, not Margot, who was seventeen. What a choice to have to make. A flimsy curtain hung between the rooms. Pretend you didn’t hear. Pretend you didn’t see. Pretend you don’t know. If everyone did this for long enough, they’d forget they were pretending, and pretense would become the truth.