1946
Amsterdam
Closed up in the private office. Sifting through her past. The notebook with the cardboard cover of malachite green. The sandy brown book of “Stories and Events of the Achterhuis.” The long, stony gray “Book of Nice Sentences.” Sorting the pile of multicolored pages. All of it swept up from the floor in fear of the Gestapo and then stuffed into a drawer—it’s such a mess. But she reads.
When I think back to my life in 1942, it all seems so unreal. The Anne Frank who enjoyed that heavenly existence was completely different from the one who has grown wise within these walls.
Do you think Father and Mother would approve of a girl my age sitting on a divan and kissing a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old boy?
We were up at six yesterday morning, because the whole family heard the sounds of a break-in again.
There are photographs, too, pinned to the pages. Photographs of Anne and Margot.
Do you remember that day at the beach at Zandvoort? Margot wonders. She is sitting on the bed wearing the green sweater that Miep found for her in hiding. Her eyes are large and warm behind her glasses.
“Of course I do. Look at you in that bathing suit. Already so well equipped, while I was still just a twig.”
The air tasted salty, Margot says. That’s what I remember.
“I remember rolling down the dunes. It was so much fun.”
Last night Margot and I were lying side by side in my bed. It was incredibly cramped, but that’s what made it fun.
The conversation turned to the future, and I asked what she wanted to be when she was older. But she wouldn’t say and was quite mysterious about it. I gathered it had something to do with teaching; of course, I’m not absolutely sure, but I suspect it’s something along those lines. I really shouldn’t be so nosy.
Reading, she finds the ghosts of her dead still living on the page. All of them caricatured in ink. Dissected by her pen. Sometimes she can hear their voices in what she has written so clearly. It warms her and terrifies her, raising the dead.
Mrs. van Pels was so upset her face turned bright red. . . . The nonflushed mother, who now wanted to have the matter over and done with as quickly as possible, paused for a moment to think before she replied. . . .
Mother: “I didn’t say you were pushy, but no one would describe you as having a retiring disposition.”
Mrs. van Pels: “I’d like to know in what way I’m pushy! If I didn’t look out for myself here, no one else would, and I’d soon starve, but that doesn’t mean I’m not as modest and retiring as your husband.”
This morning I lay on Peter’s bed after first having chased him off it. He was furious, but I didn’t care. He might consider being a little more friendly to me from time to time.
Night. Propped up by a folded pillow on her bed. No covers and sleeping in a rayon slip. The room is hot even with the window open. She reads in secret by candlelight so no one can see the gleam of a lamp under her door. In her hands is a stack of the cheap wartime loose-leaf she has shuffled together. Sometimes she thinks the pages are properly assembled, only to have an errant page confuse her until she picks it out and adds it to the pile beside her on the mattress. This entry in particular is a long one, July 1944, and she’s had to deal with several pages gone truant from the proper order. She rubs the tension from her eyes. Ignites a cigarette and inhales smoke.
In everything I do, I can watch myself as if I were a stranger. I can stand across from the everyday Anne and, without being biased or making excuses, watch what she’s doing, both the good and the bad. This self-awareness never leaves me. . . .
And then there is another page out of order. She frowns as she starts to remove it, but then a string of words catches her eye.
It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical.
She feels something narrow within her. A tightness behind her eyes.
Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
If she had just been stabbed in the chest with a knife blade, she could not have suffered a sharper pain. There were those at Birkenau who would seize the electrified fence as a final escape. She often wondered how that freedom would feel. The high voltage ripping through your body. It’s what she feels now in her small, flattened soul. The flash of electrical tremor as the pages fall from her hands, and she contracts into a keening knot.