1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Her new room in the new flat has striped blue-on-white wallpaper and a creaking hardwood floor. With the window open, she can see the traffic passing on the canal—and often smell it as well. New furnishings have arrived for her father’s new life, including a velveteen sofa and a tall Viennese wingback chair, plus a double bed for the newlyweds. Anne’s lumpy old thing, however, has simply been transferred from her former room in the Jekerstraat. And her mother’s French secretaire, which once adorned the corner of her room in the Merwedeplein, has remained behind with Miep. When Miep resisted this gift, Anne whispered, “Keep it, Miep. Please. I’d rather you have it than her.”
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
After classes are dismissed, she initiates a shoving match by the bike shed with one of the other girls, a girl named Clare Buskirk, that scrap of carrion. But before it escalates, the normally all-too-jovial nature and health teacher, Mrs. Peerboom, comes galloping over to separate the combatants, her face two shades redder than a beet. “Goeie hemel!” she calls out righteously, with deep astonishment. “This is indecent. You’re supposed to be ladies!”
“She’ll never be a lady, Mrs. Peerboom,” Clare spits, her ugly little face on permanent display. “She’s just a Jewess.”
“And you’re just a pile of shit!” Anne shouts back.
“Quiet!” Mrs. Peerboom barks. “Now be on your way, both of you, unless you want to explain yourself to the headmistress.”
Anne goes silent, but her hatred is still loud in her ears. “I should have bashed her in the mouth,” she tells Griet later, sharing a cigarette behind the school. “I should have squashed her like a bug.”
But Griet is preoccupied, it seems. She is busy looking off in another direction.
“What?” Anne wants to know.
“What?”
“You’re barely listening to me.”
A shrug as Griet frowns at the cigarette between her fingers. “I have to tell you something.”
Anne feels a sharp and immediate pinch of anxiety in her belly but tries to hide it with her impatience. “Tell me? Tell me what?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Tell me, Griet,” Anne now commands. “You can’t just announce that you have something to say and then say nothing.”
Griet raises her eyes and stares.
“Griet?”
“I’m leaving school,” the girl says.
Anne feels another pinch. “What? That’s ridiculous.”
“Why? You’re always saying that it’s such a waste of time.”
“For me, not for you,” Anne answers, trying to make a joke. “You need educating, lieveling,” she says, rubbing Griet’s mop of curls.
Griet smiles faintly and without mirth. “I’m getting married,” she says.
Anne swallows. Repeats the word. “Married.”
“Yep.”
“Married,” Anne repeats again, feeling a buzz of anger return. “To whom?”
“To ‘whom’? To ‘whom’ do you think, Anne?”
“I don’t know.” Plucking the cigarette from Griet’s fingers, she says, “Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the boys you’re doing it with.”
Griet’s mouth hardens. “That’s a shitty thing to say.”
“Sorry,” Anne says, without meaning it. “I guess you just took me by surprise. So it’s the Canadian?”
“His name is Albert.”
“Did he get you pregnant?”
“No. He just asked me, and I said yes. Why are you being so nasty? I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Griet mutters to herself, standing and snatching up her book satchel. “I knew you’d react like this.”
And suddenly Anne feels a bleak stab of remorse. “Griet. I’m sorry,” she says, meaning it this time, but too late. Griet is already retrieving her bicycle.
“Griet, please.”
The girl stops, wiping away tears but refusing to look in Anne’s direction. “Good-bye, Anne,” is all she says. Then she mounts her bike and pushes off into the street. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
Dejected, Anne arrives at the bookshop, only to find no sign of Mr. Nussbaum. The door is bolted, shades drawn. She knocks tentatively and can hear Lapjes meowing like a big grump on the other side, but no Mr. Nussbaum. No note on the door, only the faint scour marks and chipped-paint reminder of the anonymous request for Jews to perish.
So now she is riding her bike, going nowhere, trailing the canals to let her mind drain to empty. No thought, no ambition, no feeling. But when she stops near a short metal bridgework to light a cigarette, it’s Bep she spies stepping out of a sadly dilapidated old canal pub. Bep! She wants to call out the girl’s name. She wants to run to her and hug her tightly. She wants to pour out the surge of affection she feels, but some internal drag of caution stops her. She thinks of what Kugler told her. That Bep could not tolerate the burden of Anne’s friendship.
Bep buttons her jacket in the doorway and steps away. Anne considers following her, but then there’s someone else stepping out of the pub. A lean-eyed girl wearing a kerchief over her short, stubby hair. She’s gained a hard angle to her face since the time Anne spotted her on a tram on the arm of a mof soldier. And when she catches Anne’s glare for an instant from across the cobblestones, all she offers is a hard blink before she turns in the opposite direction from Bep and walks away, head down.
“That’s Bep’s sister,” Anne says to Margot, who is standing beside her in her Lager rags, her face livid with sores.
Really? Are you sure?
“Yes, I’m sure. You think I’m blind? That’s Nelli.”
She looked so broken, Margot observes. Poor thing.
“Poor thing? You expect me to have sympathy for her?”
Don’t you?
“She was a bitch, Margot. A mof prostitute.”
Why must you judge people so harshly? Mummy would never have called anybody such names. Didn’t she always try to have a good opinion about people? Didn’t she teach us to keep a good opinion of people, no matter what?
“Maybe. But Mummy has no opinions any longer about anyone,” Anne answers. “She can’t teach us a thing. She’s dead.”
So am I, Margot reminds her. And yet here I am.
“Yes,” Anne must admit. “You’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me.”
The following day Griet is not at school, leaving Anne sitting beside an empty spot.
The next day she pedals to the bookshop again, hoping this time to find it open, but the door is still locked tight. She raps on the window, cups her hands around her eyes to blot out the glare, and peers through the glass, but there’s nothing to see except shadows. Back at the Prinsengracht, she knocks on the door to the private office and pokes in her head. “Pim?”
Her father is on the telephone, looking harried, but he waves her in anyway. She sits.
She’s hesitant to involve Pim. She feels that the bookshop is her realm now. A small sanctuary, where, surrounded by books, she is insulated and protected by its quiet space. In the shop she can pretend to share the soul of the cat, that old calico rug, who lazes in the sunlight with a headful of cat dreams. Does she really want to open the door of that sanctuary to her father? Yet she’s worried.
“When I arrived at Mr. Nussbaum’s shop yesterday to work, it was completely locked up,” she says. “No note. Nothing. I’m afraid that something’s happened to him.”
Is that a small flicker of caution she spots in Pim’s eyes? “I’m sure he’s fine, Anne. We spoke a few days back on the telephone, he and I. And now that you mention it, I do believe he said he had to do some traveling.”
“So why didn’t he tell me that? Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“It didn’t occur to me, Anne. Perhaps it should have,” he is willing to admit, but meanwhile he’s started slitting open the mail on his desk with a letter opener. Obviously attempting to send her the message that he’s too busy to continue this discussion.
“Where is he traveling to?” Anne wants to know.
“I don’t know, and he didn’t say. Doesn’t he travel for business on occasion? Estate auctions? That sort of thing?”
A spasm of paranoia strikes Anne. Pim and his barracks-block comrade. What else does Pim know that Anne doesn’t? What else has Mr. Nussbaum been discussing with him? What sort of intelligence does he provide her father about the girl who works in his bookshop? “How often do you speak on the phone, the two of you?”
“How often? Not often,” Pim answers.
“He’s not giving you reports on your daughter’s behavior? On her mental state?”
“Anne.” Her father exhales. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” She feels willing to believe this.
“Yes,” he informs her in no uncertain terms. “Now, please, I’m busy. Aren’t you? Doesn’t anyone have work for you?”
Anne frowns. Her paranoia suppressed for the moment, her voice becomes lightly petulant. “There is nothing for me to do here. Miep’s out on a sales call with Kugler. Mr. Kleiman went home with a sick belly.”
Browsing through his correspondence. “Well, if you truly have nothing to do, then you can find something to clean. Isn’t that what your mother would always recommend?”
The mention of her mother hardens Anne’s expression. “I’d rather go out and have a bicycle ride,” she says.
“Fine. Then do that if you must,” her father concedes. “Only be sure you’re not late. Remember your promise to help Hadas prepare for Shabbat supper.”
“And since when do we observe the Sabbath anyway?” she asks with faint accusation.
Eyes lift from the letter in his hand. “So now you have an objection to the Shabbat?”
“No, of course not. Just curious. Are you becoming pious, Pim?”
“Please don’t be rude, Anne. All I’m asking is that for once you do as I ask without argument.”
“I’m not arguing. I was just wondering if maybe this is your new wife’s influence.”
“Anne, really,” her father says irritably. “Why must you be so intentionally provocative? Is it so hard to accept that your stepmother should wish to celebrate the Sabbath in our new home?”
Home. Anne thinks about the word. What a weight it suddenly carries. Leaving the private office, she clambers down the steps to the warehouse, making an escape.
“Going out, miss?”
She takes hold of her bicycle. The door to the warehouse stands wide open for ventilation, and the scented air smacks of ground cumin. But old Mr. Nobody Lueders is looking up from one of the milling machines, his face grimy from the work but stretched out in anticipation of her response.
What’s it to you, you ugly old plague? That’s what she would like to reply, but instead she says, “Yes, Mr. Lueders. I am indeed going out. Just for a ride.”
Lueders nods mournfully, his expression slumping into a frown. Since the advent of Mrs. Zuckert, this particular hireling has been happy to become her personal dog. Chasing after this stick and that one, with a tip of the cap. Sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. Paying far too much heed to Anne’s comings and goings. “Be careful, now,” he adds as she mounts her bike and shoves off with a hard press on the pedal. “The town’s still not what it used to be. Lots of rascals on the prowl.”
The Skinny Bridge
Brugnummer 242
Amsterdam-Centrum
Her bicycle may look like a battered old piece of salvage, but even with its clacking gears and patched tires, Anne bustles over the cobblestones and whizzes past greasy old lorries to a narrow whitewood drawbridge off the Kerkstraat. This is the Magere Brug, cinching a narrow stripe of the muddy Amstel, but nobody ever calls it anything except the Skinny Bridge. Still half mounted on the bike, she’s propped herself against the railing and has just lit a cigarette when she spots Raaf ambling toward her.
“You’re late,” she tells him.
“Late?”
“We agreed on half past.”
“No we didn’t. We didn’t agree on anything. You just like to give orders.”
“That’s true,” she admits. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not late. You must get a bicycle,” she decides.
“Oh, yeah?” Raaf lets his eyebrows lift. “And how do I get one of those, huh? Are the Canadians giving away bikes along with chocolate bars?”
Anne chirps back, “I’ll get you one.”
And now Raaf’s face contracts. She is getting used to this. His genial, thoughtful expression, crimping when she’s embarrassed him about something. His clothes. His ridiculous haircut. The snort at the end of his laugh. She never intends to embarrass him, of course—it simply seems to happen.
“Females don’t buy stuff for men.”
“No? Is that how it works?” She’s teasing him, slightly maybe, but also interested to know if this is true.
“At least not bicycles. Men earn their own money.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about buying anything anyway,” Anne explains. “I can pretend mine’s been stolen, so my father’ll get me another one.”
“I don’t need my own,” Raaf says. “We can share yours.”
“Oh, and how do we do that?”
“Here, give it over,” he tells her, and she allows him to take her bicycle in his hands. “Now climb on in front of me,” he says, offering his hand.
She feels herself grin.
Climbing on in front of him with only the smallest perch on the tip of the seat, feeling his arms stretched around her, his hands clamped onto the bike’s handles, feeling the force of motion as he pedals harder, driving up the speed, it’s all just so scary and delicious. The wild, unpredictable jolt of the bumpy cobbles, her arms stretched behind her, gripping his waist as her only anchor, on the edge of tumbling off. The thrill of it streaks through her like lightning.
“Stop! Stop!” she cries with eager laughter as they bump down the street.
At first he pretends to be deaf, still pedaling hard. “What? Can’t hear you!”
“No. Stop up there at the corner,” she commands. “There’s something I want to do!” This time the boy obeys, skidding to a squeaking halt, at which point Anne twists about and seizes him for a kiss as if she is set on vacuuming the breath from his lungs. And oh, what a terror of desire she feels bubbling up in her. What a swallowing hunger she feels, the starving girl sharing her bicycle with too much boy. She glares into his face, her eyes vibrating. Drilling into his gaze with all the sharpness that is in her.
They sit in a grassy spot adjacent to the canal, filled with pale Amsterdammers eager to soak up a bit of sunlight. Cyclists glide past. Anne rests her head against his shoulder, smelling his sweat that’s tinged with the aroma of boiled hops. She breathes him in and watches a squirrel scramble crazily across the grass. “Have you been with many girls?” she wonders. “Like this?”
“You got a lot of questions,” he points out, but he still answers. “Many girls? I don’t guess many.”
“You know I’m still a virgin,” she says.
A small shrug. “Yeah, I figured.”
Anne stiffens. “You figured, did you? How exactly did you figure? Am I wearing it stamped on my forehead?”
This makes him grin at the ground. “Nah. It’s just the way you act.”
Anne lifts her head and blinks. “I act like a virgin?”
“Don’t get offended,” he tells her.
“I’m not offended. I’m just very curious. Just what . . . just how do I act like a virgin?”
“Well, like this,” Raaf says, his grin crooked. “You get all fidgety.”
“I get all fidgety,” Anne repeats with a frown.
And now Raaf frowns, too. “I know I’m not saying it right. I just figured it out, is all. Don’t get so ruffled. It don’t bother me.”
“No?” Anne says tensely. But she must admit to a small flare of relief in her heart.
“No, Anne,” he tells her.
And at the sound of her name on his lips, she seizes him with a kiss. Diving deeply as he combs his fingers through the thickness of her hair and clutches the back of her neck, she gripping him tightly until a scold from a passing policeman on his bicycle separates them. “Hey, boy! Let’s see some daylight between you two!”
Their lips part. “See now, you got me in trouble with the law.” Raaf half grins.
She leans her forehead against his chin and breathes in the intimacy. “Of course. Blame the virgin.”
Raaf picks up a stick, breaking it in two before tossing the pieces aside. Anne lolls her head against his shoulder and absently measures the size of her hand against his just for the sake of touch. That’s when she notices that his finger is bent. The third finger on his left hand. Well, not bent, really, not like a bent nail, but definitely crooked. Why has it taken her so long to notice? “What happened to your finger?” she asks, and he snatches his hand away. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t I ask?”
Raaf flexes his hand in and out of a fist, as if he’s trying to muscle out a cramp. At first he says nothing, but then he tells her, “It was my pap.”
Anne blinks. “Your father bent your finger?”
Raaf shrugs. Picks up another twig from the grass to snap. “He was always kind of a canker, my pap,” he says. “Always looking for a fight with somebody. But after Mam died, he got even worse. He did this,” the boy says, flexing his hand again, “’cause I waved to a neighbor he didn’t like.”
Anne goes silent. She has learned about violence and plenty of it. She is not shocked by it, as she once was as a child, but it still saddens her.
“Pretty loopy, right?” Raaf grins painfully. “He’s gone now. Dead. Got drunk and fell down the stairs last winter. Snapped his neck,” says Raaf, snapping the twig absently.
“I’m sorry,” Anne says, and means it. She’s sorry because she can recognize the pain in the boy’s face. The boy gives a glance at nothing and a shrug. “Did he beat you often?”
“Usually only when he was loaded. After I got bigger—quicker—I used to punch him back when my mam was around. To try to keep him off her. But then she died. Also, he was getting old, and his punching arm wasn’t what it used to be. So when he started swinging, I’d just hit the street.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know. I hated his guts most of the time, the old pox.”
Anne swallows quietly. “You have no brothers, no sisters?”
“Nope. After me, something happened to my mam. She couldn’t give birth again. That pissed Pap off, too. He always said it was my fault there’d be no daughter to take care of him when he was old. Mam never seemed to mind so much, though.” Tossing away the broken twig, he tugs out his tobacco pouch. “You want to share a smoke?”
“Sure.” She watches him roll the shag. She’s hesitant to probe further but then does so anyway. “May I ask you something else?”
“I guess.” The boy seals the end of the smoke with a lick.
“How—” Anne starts to say, then stops and starts again. “How did your mother die?”
Raaf swallows. He lights up with a match. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he says. Then he says, “There’s a place I want to take you today.”
“A place?”
“Yeah. A place the rest of the world has forgotten.”
The Transvaal
Oost-Watergraafsmeer
Amsterdam-Oost
During the Hunger Winter, when all of Amsterdam was crazy for wood to burn to keep from freezing to death, people started with the trees. The parks had trees, so why not chop them all down? Also, the wooden blocks in the tram tracks could be ripped out, so that’s something, too. Furniture! Old Auntie’s chipped Frisian cupboard! She won’t mind if we burn it—she’s in heaven anyway. And how about the empty homes of the Jews? Now, there’s an idea, plenty of wood to be had there. Maybe Mr. Puls’s removal company has hauled off all the furnishings, but there’re still wooden beams, wooden floorboards, wooden stair rails and steps and spindles. Just tie a pry bar and a few hammers onto a sledge and you’re on your way.
That was the thinking. In fact, it was so much the thinking that with all the wood stripped out, the walls of Jewish houses began to collapse for lack of support. Buildings crumbled wearily into brick piles. It was a mess. But so what? It wasn’t as if the Jews were ever coming back. Everybody knew that.
They have crossed the Berlagebrug. Anne walks her bicycle through the streets, feeling a gritty disquiet grinding her belly.
Broken walls stand as ugly monuments. Rubble scattered. Signposts continue to boast the grand colonial names of streets: the Krugerstraat, Schalk Burgerstraat, De la Reystraat, the Paardekraal, and Tugelastraat. Street names of past imperial pride in what is now a precarious empire. The Spice Islands, Suriname, and the East Indies on the brink of revolution. The Kaapkolonie surrendered long ago, but here the names remain if nothing else. They are empty shells, these houses, the life husked from them. The vacant Pretoriusplein is surrounded by a square of debris and teetering façades, as if it has suffered under a rain of bombs. A playground for a residential park in the President Brandstraat that once would have teemed with children is now just an acre of mud. The empty corner of the Schalk Burgerstraat is boarded up.
This is the Transvaal.
Before the war it was a smart-looking enclave of workers’ housing populated by Jews of a certain status. Maybe the old Jodenbuurt had been fed by the so-called Orange Jews—three centuries of Ostjuden fleeing the pogroms of the east—but the Transvaalbuurt had been built by the likes of the Handwerkers Vriendenkring to house a hardworking class of Jewish artisans. Cutters and polishers from the diamond district, neighborhood merchants, tailors, grocers, ink sprayers, and government clerks. Still far removed from the haute bourgeois Kultur bastions of the Merwedeplein in the Amsterdam-Zuid, perhaps, where pampered little girls like Anne and Margot Frank had lived, but the Transvaal had been home to Jews scrambling up the ladder. Les petit bourgeois juifs on their way up.
Now it’s a wasteland. A designated “Jewish Quarter” by the moffen, it had been cut off from the rest of the town and emptied, trainload by trainload.
Anne stares up at the broken streetscape. A swirl of air catches dust and whirls it about as Raaf scoops up a chunk of brick and pitches it through one of the few unbroken windows.
“Don’t do that, please,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Break windows.”
Raaf shrugs. “It was just a window. It’s not like anybody was looking through it anymore.” But Anne is not so sure of that. The swirl of dust could carry a thousand souls. Ten thousand.
“Come on,” he tells her, and bounds ahead over a pile of slag.
A vacant block of flats on what was once the Louis Bothastraat. The front door is long gone, but she still pauses with her bike at the empty threshold, as if she should wait for permission to enter. Pigeons flutter out of the window indignantly as Raaf kicks at them shouting, “Shoo!” They’ve already splattered the windowsill with globs of blue-white droppings. There are no floors left. The floors have been taken down to dirt, but Raaf has dropped a few boards as a walkway, and he clomps across them like his own one-man army. “This way,” he tells her. “You can leave your bike outside. There’s no one here to steal it.”
It was probably a bedroom at one point. He’s covered up the windows with a sheet of dirty canvas, but there’s light coming in from a hole in the ceiling. Here the floor is a slab of concrete. An empty crate marked CANNED PEARS turned upside down serves as a table. The actual pear tins are stacked beside it. There’s a dirtied ashtray from a café called De Pellekaen sharing the crate top with an electric flashlight and a few half-burned paraffin candles. The bed is made from an old yellowed mattress covered by a patchwork of blankets. It’s a hideout.
“So what do you think?” Raaf asks her with a crooked smile of pride at his digs.
“What is this place?” she asks, though really she already knows.
“It’s my castle, where I am the king,” Raaf tells her. “King Raaf the First!” he says with a laugh before flopping onto the bedding. Grabbing a pear tin, he applies an opener to the lid. “Want some?” he asks.
“No,” says Anne. “Thank you.”
“Sure? It’s pretty good stuff. I like to drink the syrup first,” he says, and then demonstrates by raising the tin to his lips and tipping it back. “Mmm. Sometimes I pour some schnapps into it, and then it gets even better.”
Anne gazes at him from the doorless doorway.
“Aren’t you gonna come in?” he asks her.
“I’m not sure,” Anne answers. “Is this where you take them?”
Raaf tosses back another swig of pear juice from the tin and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Take who?”
“Your other girls,” she says.
He looks back at her with that curiously broken expression he often wears. “Anne. There are no other girls.”
“I bet,” says Anne.
“No, it’s true. Just you.”
“I’m not your girl,” she says.
“No?”
“No. I can’t be.”
“Because you’re Jewish?”
“Because you’re not.”
“Then why do you let me kiss you?”
“Do you want me to stop letting you?”
“No.”
“Then shut up about it.” She glances around at the walls. “This is what you call a castle?”
“I know it’s not much.” He shrugs at the truth. “I started coming here when my pap went on a bender. Or just when I kinda needed to get away from everything.” Lighting one of the paraffin candles with a match, he then lights a cigarette. “So are you just gonna stand there?” he asks, and blows out smoke.
“I’m not going to do it with you,” she assures him flatly.
Raaf sniffs. “Do what?”
“You know what.”
“I didn’t say you were,” Raaf says simply. “So you still haven’t come in,” he points out.
Lying with her head resting on Raaf’s chest, gripping his body like this, she feels as if she is holding on to a lifesaver in the middle of a flood. She listens to the slow bellows of his breathing. Listens to the unembarrassed thump of his heart. There are two buttons at the back of her blouse, just two below the neck. She feels him absently tug at the top button till it comes loose. One button and then the second.
“What are you doing?” she wants to know.
“Nothing.”
“No, that’s not true. You are very definitely doing something.”
“I just want to feel your skin, that’s all.”
“You can feel the skin on my arm,” she informs him, but doesn’t complain any further when he continues to stroke the small patch of bare skin on her back.
“So it was two whole years?”
Anne does not move. She opens her eyes and glares at a crack in the plaster wall. “Was what two whole years?”
“You hid out from the moffen for two years.”
“Did I say that?”
“I don’t think I made it up.”
“It was twenty-five months,” Anne says without emotion. “Until the Grüne Polizei came.”
“And you know who did it?” he wonders. “Who tipped ’em off?”
Anne lifts her head to look at him. To examine his face. His expression is blank.
“Why are you asking these questions?”
“I dunno. You ask me stuff all the time.”
A blink before she lowers her head back to his chest. “There are theories,” is all she tells him. She is surprised at how painful it is to discuss the subject. She is surprised that she feels not just the anger of the betrayed but also the shame of a victim. She rolls over on her elbow and gazes at Raaf’s face. He’s never been too curious before about what happened or how she survived the war. “Why do you want to know?”
“I don’t really want to know,” he answers. “I’m just trying to . . . to, I don’t know. Be closer to you. To find out what you’re thinking. It’s not easy. I’m sorry I ever opened my trap,” he says, and huffs out a sigh.
She looks at him, then lowers her head to his shoulder. “No. I’m sorry. I’m happy that you want to know more about me. I am. There are just some subjects . . . It’s hard for me,” she says.
The boy says nothing for a moment. And then when he speaks again, his voice is numb. “She starved,” he says.
Anne raises her eyes.
“My mam. That’s how she died. She starved.” For a moment the boy holds on to a deep silence, then shakes his head. “It was like she shrank. Her body was just a bunch of sticks, except her belly was all bloated up. And her eyes,” he says, “they looked like they might pop out of her head.”
Anne feels her heart contract. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeats. Tears heat her eyes. She can feel his grief. She can feel the great weight of sadness he must carry, because she feels it herself. But her sadness is also bitter. She has refused to picture this moment of her own mother’s death before, but now she sees it. The fragile body of sticks. The swollen belly, flesh tight against the bone. The popping eyes. And her mother’s face.
The tears stain her cheek. She does not wipe them away. She feels the boy gently stroke the patch of bare skin at the base of her neck. She breathes in and out. Pigeons coo, a strange, hushed lullaby. An ersatz peace of a kind descends. More physical than spiritual, like a blanket for a pleasantly sleepy dip in the temperature. Anne presses her ear closer to his chest. He smells of toasted shag, of maleness. A heaviness that she can cling to. The beat of his heart, slowly descending into her subconscious, as her eyes drift shut. . . .
And then she is bolting upright on Raaf’s lumpy mattress, smelling the stink of pigeon shit. Her skin is chilled, and a heavy shiver weakens her body. The light is drifting toward dusk as a drizzle of rain patters through the hole in the ceiling.
“Raaf!” She punches him in the shoulder with her balled-up fist, as hard as she can, and he bolts up beside her in confusion.
“Oww! What? What is it?”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” she answers furiously, wiping her eyes. “The sun is setting. The Sabbath’s about to start, and you let me fall asleep! My father’s going to be livid!”
The cloudy afternoon sky has given way to a leaden gray twilight, wet with rain. She is out of breath when she reaches the Herengracht, bangs in the front door, her clothes damp, her hair in wet ringlets on her brow as she stows her bicycle in the foyer. “Pim?” she calls, but what she finds is a shadow nested in the Viennese wingback.
“Hello?” she tries.
The figure sits motionless, and then the head rises.
“Hello, Anne.” The voice is barely recognizable. It sounds dead somehow. Soulless.
“Dassah.” Anne speaks the name.
“Do you know?” Dassah asks her slowly. She is wrapped in a knitted throw. The light sketches across her face. “Do you have any idea, Anne, what time it is?”
Anne says nothing, glaring.
“When you didn’t show up at the appointed time, he became worried. When you didn’t show up an hour later, he was agitated. When you didn’t show up at the start of dusk, he began to go a bit mad. I couldn’t calm him,” Dassah tells her. “It was impossible. He insisted on telephoning everyone he knew. Anyone who might know where you’d disappeared to.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne says with a swallow. She edges a glance to the dining table, laid with a white linen cloth and a trio of silver-rimmed porcelain place settings. A hand-embroidered cover for the challah bread. A pair of silver candlesticks holding two tall white tapers. The smell of something slightly burned coming from the oven. “I was . . .” she says, “I was with a friend.”
“A friend,” Dassah repeats, a touch of wily bitterness in her voice. She raises a snifter and lets the brandy inside drift back. “Is that what you call him? A friend?”
“Where’s Pim?” Anne asks suddenly.
“Probably sitting in the local police precinct by now, describing his missing daughter to the constable. He ran off with his faithful Miep at his heels an hour ago. Good and faithful Miep.”
“Then I should go after them,” Anne breathes. But she doesn’t move. She feels stuck in place.
“I’ve never told you, Anne,” Dassah says, “I’ve never told you the story of my daughter? My Tova.”
A cold shock strikes Anne. A daughter? It’s as if a frigid gap has opened up in the air. The presence of another daughter. Another secret kept from her.
“She was not a very pretty child. She had her father’s looks, unfortunately. Smart enough, a good head for numbers like him, too, but a gullible nature. Sweet eyes, but a homely smile. Not like you, Annelies Marie. Not such a lovely princess. She never had beaux. She was shy and clumsy. Not like you. When there were parties, she was seldom invited. I told her that looks didn’t matter. Popularity didn’t matter. Only what is in your mind mattered. And she was a good daughter, so she didn’t argue. I told her if I had worried about being invited to parties, I would have worried myself to pieces. Of course, the truth is that I was always invited to parties. The truth is that I was never shy or clumsy. And if I wasn’t as pretty as some girls, I still had something special that boys liked to be around. You must be able to relate to that, Anne. Can’t you?”
Anne does not answer.
“In any case, I didn’t really understand my Tova’s suffering. I didn’t understand what it was like to be lonely, not yet. Not in the way Tova was lonely.”
Anne stays frozen as the woman gazes at her snifter of brandy, then takes another swallow. “When the Boche came rolling in with their tanks and troop lorries,” she says, “they were billeted in several of the houses up the street. All those strapping, fair-headed farm boys with their big black boots. They would jeer at my Tova on her way to school. A homely Jewish girl with the star pinned to her coat. They would jeer at me, too, of course, but not in the same way. It was harder for Tova. She took their insults inside her. That’s when she began to have nightmares. Terrible nightmares. I told her to keep her chin up. I told her that she had to be strong, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to be strong, not like you, Anne. In any case. One night she was late coming home. Very late. I was frantic. The razzias had started. Hundreds of Jews had already been rounded up in the public squares. I went to the police station, where they laughed at me. A missing Jewess? Who cared? There must be plenty by now. But when I came home, Tova was back.”
She falls silent for a moment, Dassah, scowling into the pocket of a private shadow. “I knew immediately that something had happened, but Tova wouldn’t tell me what it was. I kept asking her, ‘Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you?’” The woman shakes her head and then looks bleakly in Anne’s direction. “It was a German. A soldier, she said, but that she wasn’t hurt. I’ll never know exactly how it happened. Did he force her? She wouldn’t say a word. But as the days passed, I knew. . . .” For a moment she breathes in and out. “I knew that it was still going on. I could tell by the look on her face. I was so angry. So enraged. My own daughter—a moffenhoer. But she said to me, ‘Mama, don’t worry. We’ll be safe now.’ At first I didn’t know what she meant. I just couldn’t fathom it. And then I realized: Tova was protecting us. She said that the SS would never harm the mother of a German soldier’s child.” A pause as Dassah swallows bitterly. A smear of tears glosses her eyes. “I struck her when she said that,” Dassah admits simply. “As hard as I could. I think in that instant I wanted to . . .” she starts to say, but cannot finish the sentence. “The truth is,” she croaks, “the truth is that I wanted to believe her. Underneath all my fury, I wanted to believe that my Tova had actually made the right decision by whoring herself to a Nazi. Of course”—she shrugs in a small way and stares out into the air—“of course, that was a fantasy. When she was four months pregnant, there was a massive razzia in the Jordaan. The biggest yet. I wasn’t there. I was in Amstelveen making arrangements with a man I knew, a Dutch Christian, who was willing to hide us for the right price. When I came back to our flat, I was told by the only neighbor who still deigned to speak to Jews that the Grüne Polizei had swept the neighborhood, street by street, house by house.” She breathes out, as if she is finally ousting a breath that has been caught in her ribs for a very long time. “Tova was gone, and I never saw her again. As far as I have ever been able to determine, she was gassed during her first hour at Sobibor, as were all the pregnant women in her transport. She hadn’t protected anyone by defiling herself. Just the opposite. Her childish scheme was her death sentence.” She shrugs, but when she turns to Anne, a kind of dead fury is buried in her eyes.
“So now, my dear Annelies”—she glares—“you can imagine my concern when I hear that you are whoring yourself in a similar manner.”
Anne’s jaw tightens. “That’s a lie.”
“Is it? I know what you’re doing, and I know with whom you’re doing it.”
Anne blanches.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m the only one who knows—for the moment. Your father still assumes you are pure, and I have no desire to create more pain for him. There’s no reason for him to know that his daughter is desecrating herself.”
“If that’s what your spy Lueders is telling you, he’s wrong.” Anne swallows heavily. “I see a boy, yes. But I’m not doing anything with him,” she declares. “At least not what you think.”
“No? Well, then maybe I should test you. Shall I, Anne? Shall I ask you if he’s touched you here or touched you there?”
“I’ve let him kiss me. That’s all.”
“Don’t lie!” Dassah bursts out. “Don’t lie, Anne. I hate lies. Lies are worse than the crime!”
“I’m not lying, and I haven’t committed any crime!” Anne shouts back. “I’m not Tova, and he’s not a Nazi!”
“Oh, really? Are you actually trying to tell me that you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“His father was NSB.”
“No, that’s not true.”
“It is true.”
“No. I know that his father was beastly and brutal, but that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi.”
“You must know that your father was forced to hire party men by the local NSB office?” Dassah informs her bluntly. “Well, he was one of them. A Nazi, Anne. For all you know, he could have been the one who betrayed you and your family to the Gestapo. The man who sent your mother and sister to their deaths!”
“No! No,” she repeats to Dassah. “You’re the one who’s lying!”
“If you think so, Anne, then ask the boy,” Dassah suggests, “the next time he’s got you on your back.”
Anne seizes the nearest thing to her, a book that Pim has left on a shelf, and hurls it. Not really aimed at anything, but the crash of the porcelain vase bursts inside her head. She is sobbing with such wild anger as she charges out the door, not even seeing her father hurrying through the drizzle until she collides with him on the sidewalk.
“Anne! My, God, Anne, what’s happened?! Where have you been? What’s happened?”
But she has no explanations to offer. All she can do is try to swallow her tears without choking on them. “Let me go, Pim,” she cries. “Let me go!”
“I will not. Not till you tell me what’s happened.”
“She’s a monster!” Anne shrieks at him. “You’ve married a monster!”
“She insulted me, Pim.” Smearing the tears from her eyes. “In a very hurtful way.”
They are camped together in her tiny room. Pim’s stooped figure folded onto the chair. A blanket around his shoulders. She has retreated to her bed, curled up against the wall, a fortress, refusing to look in her father’s direction unless it’s to offer him a volcanic glare. Rain dribbles down the window glass.
“If she said something harsh,” Pim tells her, “I’m sure that she was simply speaking out of fear.”
“You’re defending her?”
“People often say regrettable things when they’re afraid. They hide their fear with anger. You should understand that by now.”
“Because I’m so well known for my cowardice?”
“Because you often let your fears get the better of you. Because you often speak without thinking things through. You can be quite hurtful at times.”
“I can be quite hurtful?” she says. “Again, am I understanding this correctly? That according to my father, I am the one at fault?”
“So tell me, then, what did she say that was so evil?”
Anne starts to speak but then stops. Perhaps she does not exactly wish to explain it to Pim. “It was insulting,” she repeats. “Terribly so. That’s all I’ll say.”
“I’m not trying to assign fault to anyone, Anne,” Pim insists.
Anne wipes at her eyes. “What else is new?”
“You think that’s so bad?”
“I hate having to call her ‘Dassah.’”
“What would you prefer to call her, then?”
“I would prefer not to speak to her at all.”
“All right. That may be your preference. But it’s going to make life quite difficult. Because the fact of the matter is this, Anne: Hadassah and I are married. Like it or not, she is your stepmother. I’m not saying she doesn’t have her faults. Of course she does. We all do. But we have an opportunity here. An opportunity to become a family. To repair some of the ruin inflicted upon us. I cannot bring anyone back. Death has taken them, and that is all there is to say. I will always feel a terrible hole in my heart after losing your mother. And Margot, God rest her. My poor, poor Mutz,” he says. “That hole will never be filled. My marriage to Hadas won’t fill it. I know that. Even the return of my beautiful daughter Anne could not fill it. But I must try to find happiness again, and so must you. Otherwise what is the point of having survived? What is the point of living if we are to be poisoned by our own sorrow?”
Anne glares blindly at the windmill pattern on her bedspread. For a moment she feels her old love for Pim take hold. “You make it sound so very simple, Pim,” she says.
“Oh, no. No, it is not simple, as tonight has proved. It will take work. Very dedicated work. But then what is our motto?” he asks.
“Oh, God, Pim.”
“Come now, Süsse, say it for me, please. What has always been our motto?”
Anne frowns, rolling her eyes at the wall with a kind of flattened anger. “‘Work, love, courage, and hope,’” she answers unwillingly.
“Exactly.” Her father nods, his voice settling into a kind of imposed certainty. “Exactly. Now let us all try to make a new start, shall we?”
Silence. And then a knock at the door, which Pim opens, allowing Dassah to step into the threshold.
“I apologize,” she says to Anne, “if I lost my temper tonight and spoke in anger.”
“You see,” Pim injects. Proof.
“I really should stay away from brandy when I’m tense.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t the brandy, Hadasma,” Pim informs her. “I have no doubt that my own anxiety contributed greatly to the situation. When you didn’t come home, Anne, I simply went off my head. Which reminds me, daughter,” he says pointedly, “you haven’t offered a single explanation. Exactly where were you?”
“Apparently,” Dassah answers for her, “she went cycling with a friend from school. What was her name again, Anne?” she asks.
Anne blinks. “Griet,” she answers blankly.
“Yes. Griet. That’s it. They went cycling to the Vondelpark and stopped to rest but must have dozed off until the rain woke them. You remember how it can be, Otto. To stretch out on the grass in the late afternoon? It’s better than a feather bed.”
Pim draws a breath and slowly expels it as he nods. “I do remember,” he claims. And it’s obvious from his expression that he thinks this is a fine explanation, which he’s quite willing to accept.
Dassah turns to Anne, cementing the falsehood between them. “So I hope you can forgive me,” she says, “for speaking so roughly to you.”
Anne stares.
Pim leans forward as a prompt. “Anneke?”
“Yes,” says Anne thickly. “I forgive you,” she lies.
“Wonderful,” Pim breathes. “Thank you, Anne. Now you should change out of those damp clothes. You don’t want to catch your death.”
When Hadassah leaves, Pim huffs a breath of relief. “You have no idea, Anne,” he says, “how much your approval means to her. Her only wish is for the two of you to become friends.”
Anne glances over to the corner of the room, where Pim’s poor Mutz is standing in her Kazet stripes, the filthy yellow star sagging on her pullover. She gazes back at Anne coolly.
At least, Anne, you will have some kind of mother again, she points out. Isn’t that better than none at all?
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Anne is due at Pim’s office after classes and dreading it. She spoke no more than two words to Pim this morning before stealing out the door for school and now feels the covert shame and anger from the night before pressing on her chest. When she arrives at the warehouse and stows her bike, she spots the foreman, Mr. Groot, stepping out to the edge of the street to roll a smoke. So instead of heading up the steps, she slips the strap of her book satchel over her shoulder and approaches him.
“Excuse me. Mr. Groot? Can I ask you something?” Groot looks a little undecided about that question, but Anne doesn’t wait for him to say no. “That boy. Raaf Hoekstra, who worked here. You said he didn’t have a good name.”
“Did I say that?” Groot wonders.
“Does that mean he was NSB?”
“The boy? No. Not so much as I know.”
“But the father, then. He was?”
Groot tends to his shag closely, glancing out at the canal.
“I know there were party men working here, Mr. Groot,” Anne assures him. “I know it was my father who said they must be hired. It’s not a secret, if you’re worried that you’ll be spilling the beans.”
The man shrugs. Then nods his head. “Sure, old Hoekstra had a party number, all right. But it wasn’t just that.”
Another blockage.
“No?”
The man smokes.
“Mr. Groot?”
A glance in her direction, as if he’s calculating odds. “Maybe you ought to ask your papa about this, miss.”
“He doesn’t like to talk about any of it. All that happened during the war,” Anne says. “He thinks it’s too painful. But I think it’s important to know the truth.”
“Maybe,” Groot is willing to allow. “I just don’t like spreading stories.”
“Please. I won’t say a word to anyone. I just want to know.”
Groot puffs out an elongated breath. “We had a problem with thievery,” he says heavily. “This was back when van Maaren was still running things. Somebody was stealing from the spice inventory. To tell the truth, I always wondered if it wasn’t van Maaren himself—but he said he had his eye on this other fellow we had. Dreeson was the name. Not the worst sort, Dreeson, when he was sober, but a boozer like Hoekstra. And Hoekstra and he had some kind of falling-out on the floor of the shop, over what I’ve got no idea. I think Dreeson had sneaked a few shots of kopstoot on his lunch break, and he said something that got Hoekstra angry. It came to blows, until I separated them and sent ’em both home. Then, the next day, Hoekstra showed, but Dreeson didn’t. Not that day or the day after. It took a while for us to get the news, but it turned out Dreeson and his wife’d been hiding their boy from the Huns to keep him out of the labor conscription. Until the Grüne Polizei paid them a late-night call, and that was that. The whole family got hauled away.”
Anne feels her throat thicken. “And you think . . . you think it was Hoekstra who betrayed them?”
“I don’t think anything,” Groot assures her. “But the truth is, Hoekstra liked to brag about his connections. He flashed around a pass he said he got from some Gestapo man in the Euterpestraat.” A shrug. “Who knows if it was real? Who knows if any of it was real? He was a drunkard. It could’ve all been nothing more than big talk. But I do remember that fracas he had with Dreeson. And that Hoekstra could have the devil’s own temper if you riled him.”
“And what happened to him?” Anne wants to know. “To Hoekstra. After liberation?”
“Can’t say. It was the last winter of the war. He started coming in for his shift drunk as a badger, so van Maaren finally gave him the boot.”
“Still, you hired his son in his place.”
“I didn’t think it was fair to condemn the boy just because his father was a pox,” says Mr. Groot. “So when he showed up looking for work, I gave him a chance.” He tells her this, then yells over to one of the other workers and then turns back to Anne and stamps out the butt of his cigarette. “Excuse me, miss. Back to the job.”
She has a difficult time forcing herself up the steps to the office. Halfway up, she stops, feeling herself teeter on the edge of a cliff. Panic swells inside her. She tries to focus on something, a crack in the wood of one of the steps. Counting backward from a hundred, she pinches her wrist, monitoring the surge of her pulse. Margot is there in her death rags. So it’s true, she points out. His father was a Quisling. A collaborator.
The Transvaal
Oost-Watergraafsmeer
Amsterdam-Oost
The air is thick with humidity. She ducks out of school and bikes to the secret den in the Transvaal. Bumping across the Skinny Bridge. Sweaty by the time she turns onto the Louis Bothastraat. It’s shocking to see the ruined buildings so overgrown, life insisting on life even in a graveyard.
When she enters Raaf’s castle, she finds that the king is not in residence. Seized by an urge, she begins to search through the blankets, then raises the mattress, searching for some bit of evidence. Some connection to the Grüne Polizei. To betrayal.
Keep looking, Margot prods, appearing in her lice-ridden rags. Her skin ruddy with sores. Keep looking. There must be something here to find. Some evidence.
But Anne’s afraid suddenly. Afraid that she will find something. Some evidence of guilt. Yet she can’t stop searching. If the truth is ugly, then she must know it. She remembers the death’s-head on the SD man’s cap the day they were arrested. Is it still following her? Still watching her? Some nights she dreams it is. The Totenkopf keeping an eye on her. She feels her heart banging away in her chest.
“If you’re digging for treasure, you’re gonna be outta luck,” she hears, and swings around with guilty alarm. Raaf is standing in the threshold, hands stuffed into his pockets.
She whips about but then straightens. Staring. “I was looking for matches,” she claims.
Raaf points to the box of wax tips sitting in plain sight. “Matches,” he says.
Anne frowns at them. Her belly churns, and she takes a step forward. Really, she is beyond pretense. The idea of continuing it is sickening. She will strike him with the truth as hard as she is able. “Your father was an NSBer,” she declares.
The muscles along Raaf’s jaw contract, and he turns his eyes away from her. “Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter. But it’s true. He was a Nazi.”
Shaking his head with a frown. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Too bad. Because unless we do, I’m walking out and you won’t see me again.” She stares at him until he meets her eyes.
The boy looks cornered. Trapped. Finally he kicks the concrete with the toe of his shoe and huffs out an answer. “He needed a job,” he says. Then seems to shake his head at the painfulness of what he’s about to confess. “He used to be a real labor-pillar man, ya know? Always for the trade unions. Always. Even when I was just a little kid, he used to take me to the rallies and stick me up on his shoulders so I could see all the flags. Things were easier then. Pap did a lot of metalwork. For a while he was a welder for this shop in the Jordaan, but then he had some sort of trouble with the shop steward. I don’t know what it was—maybe it was the drinking—but however it started, he made a grudge out of it. You were either with Pap or against him. Those were the only two choices he ever gave anybody. Anyhow, he lost his temper, the old dope, and ended up socking the steward in the snoot. Not only did he get the ax, but they put him on a list so he couldn’t get a union job anyplace else. For a long time, he just kicked around. Doing one shit job or another, but there was never much food on the table. Then the war started and the moffen came. I guess he saw a way back to a payday.”
“And my father was forced to hire him.”
Raaf tilts a frown. “He wasn’t a bad worker, Pap,” he insists. “Most of the time. Sure, maybe he drank, but it’s not like he was lazy or stupid just because he’d become a party man.”
“But it must have been so . . . so ‘unbearable’ for him,” Anne says. “So unbearable. A National Socialist working for a Jew?”
“He just needed to make a living,” the boy repeats. “That’s all. It’s not like he wore the uniform or anything, or went around shouting ‘Hou Zee!’ to everybody on the street. He just went to meetings here and there. Why not? They had free beer. And I never heard him complain about working for a Jew.”
“But you said he called the Jews ‘bloodsuckers,’” Anne reminds him. “Those were your words.”
“What are you trying to prove here anyway?” the boy demands.
“I just want to know the truth, Raaf. If your father was a Nazi, then I think I have the right to know. Was he a Jew hater? If he was still alive, wouldn’t he be beating you for polluting yourself with a filthy yid?”
“Anne, you’re starting to sound kinda crazy.” He tries to put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugs off his touch.
“He was a party member. I heard that he bragged about having connections to the Gestapo. That he had a pass from an SD man in the Euterpestraat.”
Ask him now many Jews his father denounced, Margot proposes.
“How many Jews do you think he denounced?”
“Pap liked to feel big, but it was mostly all bullshit. That ‘pass’ he bragged about? He won it from some canker playing dice. He didn’t know the goddamned toilet cleaner in Euterpestraat.”
Don’t let him hoodwink you, Anne, Margot warns, whispering in her ear. His father was a Nazi. He’s admitted as much. Who knows what crimes the man was complicit in committing? Crimes against our people.
But Anne cannot completely ignore the pain in the boy’s face. Carefully, she allows herself to sink down onto one of the crates. “Tell me the truth. I want to know. I want you to say it: yes or no. Was it your father who telephoned the Grüne Polizei?”
Raaf gazes damply at her.
“Was it your father who denounced us, Raaf?”
His gaze is unchanged. “What if I say no?”
“Is that the truth?”
The boy stares at her. “The last summer of the war. He wasn’t drunk. He came home and wasn’t drunk. Not that night,” the boy says. “Instead he was talking to me like . . . like, I don’t know. Like I was somebody important to him for once. Somebody to count on. He told me that he was going on a job. That he was going on a job and needed me along. Course I knew, I guess, what sort of job it was gonna be, but back then who wasn’t pinching what they could? He said there was this place where he’d worked in the Prinsengracht that stored spices. Kegs full of spices worth plenty of poen. But that he couldn’t do the job on his own.”
Anne’s eyes sharpen at this.
“My mam was still alive. There was nothing in the pantry, so I thought . . . who cares? Money’s money. Who cares how you get it? It only matters what you use it for, and I thought I could use it for Mam. There were still half-decent pork shanks to be had on the black market then, if you had the cash. So I said who cares what I do in this klootzak of a world, you know? Who the hell cares what I do or how I do it?” He says this and stops. “Maybe I don’t have to finish this story?” he says.
Anne does not speak, but perhaps the boy does not really expect her to.
“I mean, you know what happened next,” he tells her. “You were there.”
Anne gazes at him. “You smashed out a panel in the warehouse door,” she answers.
“We brought the tools on a sledge. I used a pry bar at first and then just kicked in a plank. That’s when I heard somebody yell for the police from inside.”
Anne swallows. “That was Mr. van Pels. He was a spice merchant. After we were arrested, he was gassed.”
Margot appears in her death rags to whisper in Anne’s ear. Now you must ask him the real question.
Anne’s mouth goes bitter. She would like to be sick. That’s what she would like. But instead she looks at him and asks, “Was it you, then?”
Raaf gazes back at her with a drift of pain in his eyes.
“Was it you,” she says, “who went to the Gestapo?”
He blinks, but the pain remains.
“Money’s money. You said so. Who cares how you get it? Jews were worth forty guilders a head.” Anne feels a flame ignite inside her chest. It burns up the oxygen in her lungs and leaves her searching for a breath.
“I would never do anything to hurt people. Not on purpose. You gotta believe me.”
Slapping her hands over her eyes, she bursts into tears and collapses into herself, but when she feels Raaf’s hands on her shoulders, she tears away from him. She hears a crack, feels a jolt in her palm, and it isn’t until after the boy blinks at her with dumb shock and she feels the sting of her palm that she realizes she’s struck him. A full-handed slap across the face. When she strikes him again, however, it’s with real intention, her fists balled up with the force of her fury. The boy does not attempt to defend himself or deflect her rage, only allows himself to stand as her punching bag while she hits him again and again, until she’s spent. Stumbling over the masonry lip of a doorway, she rips the knee out of one of her stockings as she falls and pukes. Pukes up the desire, the rage, and the poisonous grief being wrenched up from her belly, splattering her sleeves until she retches dryly. For a moment her hand trembles as she wipes her mouth with the palm of her hand. The boy is down there with her, but she bats his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she shouts, and then she is up, pushing herself clear of him. By the time she hits the street on her bicycle, she’s pedaling with her blood pounding in her ears.
“Wait!” Raaf calls. He’s shouting her name, but she is deaf to him. Deaf to him, deaf to her name, deaf to everything. The town passes by her in a welter of tears, the wind stinging her eyes. The door to the warehouse is open when she reaches the Prinsengracht. The men are loading up a lorry with barrels as she rushes past, abandoning her bike and banging up the ankle-breaking stairs, up, up, up, straight to the landing, the panic of her footsteps ringing in her ears. The bookcase squeals painfully as she swings it open and thumps up the steps into the embrace of the past. If her mother were there still, she would collapse into her arms, but her mother is at the bottom of an ash pit, so there is nothing and no one left to embrace her here in the dusty remains of her life. She lurches into the room where her desk once stood, finding nothing but the dry rot and the peeling magazine pictures stuck to the wall, and she drops to her knees and curls into a ball.
There the bells of the Westertoren summon her sister. Margot with her hollow eyes and her filthy pullover. Yellow triangles forming a star on her breast.
“Are you happy now?” Anne demands to know.
Am I happy?
“Isn’t this what you wanted? Me, all to yourself. Never with a chance to be with someone else. Just stuck to you forever! Isn’t that your plan?”
Anne. I don’t have a plan. You know that.
Anne coughs miserably. Sniffs back her tears and wipes her eyes with her palms. She feels like she has fallen to the bottom of a deep well. “So now,” she breathes, “so now I’m alone again.” She shoves her hair from her face. “I think maybe I’ll always be alone as long as I am here. It’s why I want so badly to go to America. If I stay for Pim, I’m afraid I’ll never leave this room. I’ll be a prisoner here forever,” she says, staring into the air. Then she meets Margot’s eyes. “Do you think Peter ever thought of me?” she asks.
Peter?
“After we were separated on the ramp.”
I think he must have.
“Do you?” A soft shrug to herself. “I didn’t think of him that much,” Anne confesses. “Hardly at all, until I came back to Amsterdam. Only then,” she says. And then her eyes deepen. “Sometimes I think it would have been so much easier if I had just died with you, Margot. If neither one of us had ever left Bergen-Belsen. Is that so terrible?”
She asks this question, but no answer comes. The spot where her sister crouched is now empty. She is alone.