1946
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Six months since Anne’s return
The snow comes, the snow goes. Anne watches the frost dissolve from the windowpanes as a weak, sickly spring arrives. The weather warms, and the grass greens. Amsterdam rumbles along with the clumsy efficiency of one broken wheel on the wagon, patched too many times.
At Pim’s insistence Anne is scheduled to appear at the office to help with the clerical work three afternoons a week. Also at Pim’s insistence, she has begun attending the De Keiser Meisjeslyceum, a school for girls in the Oud-Zuid. It’s not much more than an old brick pile, this place, with many of its windows cracked or boarded over, but Anne doesn’t care. She is indifferent to her studies. Sometimes Margot appears in class to set a good example with her attentive posture, but her lice-infested rags and boiling sores spoil the intent. In Anne’s mathematics class, her teacher is Miss Hoebee, a skinny Dutch mouse chalking numbers across a slate. But numbers make no difference to Anne. Algebra cannot hold her attention. At thirteen she was the Incorrigible Chatterbox who couldn’t keep from gabbing and had to write an essay entitled “Quack, Quack, Quack! Went Mrs. Quackenbush.” Now she simply falls into silences. To her, school is just another kind of prison camp.
There’s a Jewish girl in her class. Griet, who was passed off as Christian during the war. She can astonish Anne by reciting the Apostle’s Creed without a slip. Anne applauds as if Griet were performing a magic trick, which in a way she is. In the classroom Griet is as bored as Anne, but for different reasons. Griet has always hated school, she says, whereas Anne once loved it. After Birkenau, however, what is the importance of oblique angles? After Belsen what can the Pythagorean theorem mean to her? Anne watches Griet lazily doodling in her exercise book. Griet is not exactly brilliant, but Anne appreciates the girl’s instincts to change one’s nature when circumstances dictate.
Anne has organized a shell-shaped compact from one of her classmates, Hildi Smit, that obnoxious kattenkop, and used its soft pink puff to powder over the number on her forearm. She has considered more drastic solutions, such as staging an accident while cooking. But she also has no doubt that even as she might try to explain to Pim how the hot pan slipped and burned her skin, he would guess the truth and gaze at her with that sorrowful expression of sympathetic disappointment of which he is the master. And it doesn’t help that he treats his own tattoo as a kind of shrine, which he folds back his cuff to reveal as the holy relic of his survival.
“What are you doing?” Griet wants to know.
“Nothing,” says Anne, the notebook in her hands, finishing off a sentence with her Montblanc. They are outside, sitting on the short stone wall after dismissal.
“You’re always writing in that thing now,” Griet complains.
“Am I? Not that much.”
“Yes you are. All the time.” Griet does not like to write. She says it only makes her hand hurt. “What is it anyway?”
“It’s just . . .” Anne hesitates. Since she began to commit words to paper again, she’s been driven. Every night before sleep, every time she can steal a moment to herself, she is writing. Writing simply to write. “It’s just a diary. Nothing important.”
“And what are you writing about? Sex?” Griet inquires hopefully.
“Ha! Yes, since I’m such an expert on the subject,” says Anne, closing the notebook. Then she squints at Griet. What she likes best about her new friend is that she makes no demands on Anne. Griet does not require her to be thoughtful or patient or grateful. Their conversations are relaxing, mindless, curious.
“Have you ever?” Griet asks her.
“Have I ever what?”
“You know. Done it with a boy?”
“Nope,” Anne replies, closing her notebook and leaning forward on her knees. Sometime it’s so pleasurable to be frivolous. To pretend that she’s a young Dutch girl like any other. “Never even come close,” she says, thinking of Peter up in the attic. His damp lips, their clumsy touching, all very tame. But the memory stings her so strongly that she dismisses it. She knows there is a boy named Henk whom Griet has taken up with. She’s seen the two of them necking. “Have you ever?”
Griet frowns sheepishly. “Only sort of,” she confesses. “I’ve let Henk do some things. Touch me places. But that’s all.” Henk’s given her cigarettes and chewing gum and has even promised her a lipstick, since he claims that his older brother is in the black market. Also, he’s a goy! Maybe Griet’s become so accustomed to playing the role of a gentile that it’s hard to go back to being a Jew in this world.
“And have you ever,” Anne wonders, “touched him places?”
“Oh, you mean his lul? No, though he showed it to me once.”
“Really?”
Griet snorts a small laugh into her hand and then drops her voice. “It looked like a sausage,” she confides. “Like a weisswurst, only kind of purplish, and it stood up at attention. He wanted me to rub it, but I wouldn’t.”
Anne smiles. “Like Aladdin’s lamp,” she says, and laughs, delighted at the little crudity.
Griet grins back, devilish. “Until out comes the genie!”
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
Pim has found her a bicycle, her first since hers was stolen during the occupation. It’s an old black tweewieler with a worn brown leather seat and actual rubber tires, while much of Amsterdam is still riding on metal rims. After pedaling through a damp afternoon to the Prinsengracht office, Anne wheels her bicycle into the warehouse, because fingers are still generally too sticky for her to risk leaving it on the street. The noise of the milling machinery is loud, and the smell of the spices seasons the air. Cloves, pepper, and ginger. Monsieur le Félin Mouschi darts in a blur across the dusty floor, pursuing a rodent snack no doubt, leaving a trail of clover-shaped paw prints in the dust. Before the war Anne had looked forward to visiting the warehouse with Pim, especially when they were grinding nutmeg or cinnamon. The aroma made her feel giddy. And the older workers, softened up by the thought of their own kids, often gave her sweets. Licorice or sometimes honey drops. Mr. Travis showed her a magic trick with a coin that made her laugh, and she marveled at the mysterious warehouse slang the men barked at one another over the hum of the grinders. But all that changed once the Germans came. Mr. Travis had to take a job closer to the hospital when his son was badly wounded in the army. Mr. Jansen moved his sick wife to the country, where his brother had a farm. New men were hired. Unfamiliar names were written on the strips of tape above the coat hooks by the warehouse doors. “NSBers,” she remembers Bep claiming in a dark whisper. Dutch Nazi Party men.
Anne squinted. “Really?”
“Some of them,” Bep confirmed.
“And my father knows?” Anne had asked.
“It was your papa who told my papa they must be hired.”
Shortly after they went into hiding, Bep’s father, who was a chief participant in their secret, was struck by cancer and had to be replaced as workshop foreman. So with the family in hiding, the warehouse workers on the ground floor became a source of daily danger. If one of them heard something. If one of them saw something. If one of them suspected. They became the enemy in a sense, just as much as the moffen.
But now those men are gone. It’s a new crew, free of traitors, but they keep themselves to themselves and have no interest in Anne Frank. Except maybe one of them. It’s a Wednesday. Always a heavy day of milling to fulfill shipments for the end of the week. Propping her bike in the corner, Anne inhales the warm, nutty aroma of mace but can’t help but notice that one of the workers gives her a direct look as he hefts a second barrel of spice onto a pull cart. He is a lean, sinewy youth with a hard, pale glare, and he muscles the large barrel into place as if he’s showing off his strength. As if maybe he has something to prove to the dark-headed Joods meisje who’s the owner’s daughter. Anne peers back at him. The boy’s hair is straw blond and uncombed. His clothes are patches sewn together. His jaw is square, and there’s a heaviness to his eyes, as if something terrible and unalterable has settled in his gaze, turning his eyes the color of ashes. His name? She’s never heard it, nor has she ever heard him speak. Something about the boy does not invite conversation. A second later the youth grunts and looks away like she doesn’t exist, but he leaves Anne with a lift that starts just below her belly and spreads out into a breathy lightness that reaches all points of her realm.
That night in her room, she stares at herself naked in the wardrobe mirror and inventories her parts. Unlike Griet, with her voluptuous silhouette, Anne has remained quite petite in that department, and it makes her wonder what she would have looked like at this point if Christians had hid her as well. If she hadn’t been starved to a cat’s weight at Belsen. Would she have a woman’s full body by now? Would the Canadian liberators call to her in the street in the same way they do to Griet?
In bed she pulls up the covers. Griet has tried to advise her on how to touch herself in a way that feels good, but it’s a feat she has not yet managed to accomplish. She follows the instructions in her head, attempting to coax some kind of tingling reaction from herself. She imagines what it would feel like to have a boy’s hand where her clothes hide her body. She thinks of the boy from the warehouse with the mop of blond hair. But then she’s ambushed by a memory of Peter. Sitting with him up in the attic of the hiding place, sharing a bit of privacy while Mouschi purred in his lap, sprawled in a ridiculous paws-up position. Peter was three years older than Anne and spoke with an air of casual, clinical understanding as they discussed it all: Genitalia, both male and female. Sexual procedure. Preventive measures. Somewhat embarrassing at the time, but all highly informative. Her textbook understanding of the male organ had been confirmed—verbally, of course—as had her hunch that boys knew nothing whatsoever about the apparatus of the female. So she had explained. She had already educated herself on the various pipes and functions of a woman’s plumbing and could give Peter a detailed lesson. He was impressed by her composure and comprehensive knowledge. But as she had confided to her diary, she had been a little perplexed when she’d explored herself in the privacy of her bath. She had been a little alarmed. How could a man ever penetrate such a tiny opening? Even more alarming, how could a baby ever be expelled through it?
What are you doing? Margot suddenly demands, as if thoughts of Peter have summoned her instead, and Anne practically jumps out of her skin, clutching the blankets up around her chin. “Damn it, Margot, what do you want?”
I want to know what you’re doing, her sister replies, seated on the edge of the bed in her blue-and-white-striped rags and a lice-matted pullover. Her head shaved down to the scabs, her face colorless with death.
Anne frowns. “You know what I was doing,” she insists. “You know very well.”
And you think it’s appropriate to do that with Miep and Jan in their bed right next door?
“Well, what do you think Miep and Jan do in their bed, dumbbell? Play tiddlywinks?”
Don’t be crude, Margot instructs. They’re a married couple. You’re just a girl with roaming thoughts. It’s not healthy, Anne.
“Oh, what? What’s not healthy?”
You know, Margot assures her. Just what you were doing. Touching yourself in that manner, she says.
“How can that be so? How can it possibly be unhealthy?”
Because it . . . it unnaturally accelerates your development, Margot decides.
“Well, if that’s so, then how come you were doing it?”
What? Margot squawks. I was not. She frowns.
“You were, I heard you. I heard you when we were in the same room before that old bag Pfeffer arrived. And it was Mummy and Pim in the room right next door,” she adds with malicious relish. “You can’t deny it, Margot. I heard what I heard. Maybe I was a few years younger than you, but I could still tell what was going on under your covers.”
Don’t make up lies, Anne, her sister warns, and Anne feels the anger surge freakishly through her body.
“I’m not lying. I’m not lying!”
Suddenly there is someone rapping fearfully at her door. “Anne?” Miep’s voice calling. “Anne, are you all right? Anne?”
She is breathing frantically, sitting bolt upright with the blankets clutched to her chest, white-knuckled. But Margot is gone, leaving only empty space in her wake.
Anne assures Miep that there is nothing to worry about, using as few words as possible. She is oké. A word they have all adopted from their Canadian liberators. Oké.
But when she lies back down in her bed, she doesn’t feel oké. She feels robbed. She feels frustrated. She feels shamed. It makes her think that desire can be a trap. A trap that once it snaps shut on you, keeps you trapped. Never to be completely free. That, she thinks, is the truth about desire.