Waverly Place and Mercer Street
Greenwich Village
NEW YORK CITY
The apartment is dark but for a yellowish glow from the street that defines the edges of the room and the furniture. So Anne doesn’t bother turning on a lamp till she reaches the kitchen table by the fire-escape window. Miep’s portable typewriter is stationed there. A battered old thing by now, with a sheet of onionskin cranked around the rubber platen.
She keeps photographs on the wall.
When her diary was published in Hebrew, a letter came from Tel Aviv. In it was a picture of Hanneli and her husband with a baby on her lap. Both had thought the other dead, but now there is this photo of life. Beside it a small frame from B. Altman’s encloses a snapshot of Miep posing with Anne in her cap and gown after she was graduated from Barnard. Then there’s the fading color shot of Pim with his arm around Dassah, the ancient architecture of Jerusalem behind them. Pim is squinting, smiling into the desert sun, and Dassah is shading her eyes.
And Margot? The photo of Anne and Margot on the beach at Zandvoort more than twenty years before is locked in a sterling silver frame. Locked in time.
She opens her purse, plucking out the combing shawl. A flag of silk unfurls, and she feels her pulse quicken. Pale beige fabric decorated with roses and small figures. She gathers it to her nose to see if she can still smell the past clinging to it, but the sachet of her adolescence is long gone and she can only smell a musty trace of memory.
Sitting at the table, she lights a Camel. Her tawny cat, Mina, curls around her ankles and then struts away. “Odd after all these years, to know the truth,” Anne says, and stares into Margot’s eyes. “I thought I would feel something more. But really I don’t.” She nearly laughs. “I find,” she says, wondering if this could really be true, “that it makes no difference. So it was Nelli who betrayed us. So what? Even if it’s true, no one comes back to life.”
Margot is sitting beside her at the table, a young schoolgirl with a yellow Judenstern sewn neatly to the breast of her sweater. Resting her cheek against her hand, she observes Anne from behind the lenses of her glasses with half a smile. Anne gazes back at her. She realizes just how young Margot still is. Just a teenager, never to be any older.
Do you feel unburdened?
“Unburdened?” Anne considers this. “Bep made her confession. I made mine. But I doubt I will ever feel unburdened.”
But she could be right, you know. Bep. Belsen was so hellish, Anne. We were both so sick. We were both so weak. I fell from the pallet. Maybe it wasn’t your fault at all.
A shrug. Who knows? Who will ever really know? “There are times when I feel so lonely, Margot. So separate from the rest of the world. As if I don’t actually exist. As if I’m just a shadow,” she says. “Like you.” Exhaling smoke, she watches Margot dissolve quietly in its cloud.
The telephone gives a chilly ring, and she crosses the room to snap the receiver off the wall. On the other end, she hears the voice of an old man. “Er is er een jarig, hoera-hoera. Dat kun je wel zien dat is zij!” An old man’s happily croaking birthday song. “Zij leve lang, hoera-hoera, zij leve la-ang hoera!”
“Hello, Pim,” she says. “You know it’s actually tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes, I know that.” He speaks to her now in English. “Of course I know. But waiting for another day was too much. Hadas said I must wait, but I thought, ‘No. I must sing my daughter her birthday song right this moment.’”
“Pim,” Anne says. “Pim, you’ll never guess who appeared today.”
“Who appeared?” he asks, as if perhaps his daughter is describing a magic trick.
“Bep,” Anne says, swallowing quietly.
“Bep?”
“Yes.”
“Our Bep?”
“Yes. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. Just as planned when we were in hiding. Do you remember?”
“Of course. Of course I remember,” he says, though a slight vacancy in his tone makes her doubt that he really does.
“And what did Bep have to say for herself?” Pim wants to know.
Anne pauses. The smile that has half formed on her lips stiffens.
“Anne, are you still there?”
“Yes. Yes, Pim. She said she’s lived here in America for years. She said her husband owns a hardware store. And she has two children.”
“Well,” Pim replies with a satisfied tone. “That is wonderful. Wonderful to know. I am so very glad to hear that she is happy.”
Anne’s eyes have gone damp with tears. She starts to speak, but as it happens, all she can speak is silence.
“Anne?”
“Pim. This call. It must be costing a fortune. I should let you go before you have to take out a bank loan.”
“Take out what?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Pim. I should let you go. I mean, I should say good-bye.”
“Happy birthday, meisje,” he tells her. “I think of you daily.”
“Me, too, Pim,” she says. “Me, too.”
And sets the phone’s receiver back on its hook.
In the bedroom she has changed into her kimono and sits in front of the vanity mirror, gazing deeply into the shadowed eyes contained in the circle of glass.
When she peels off the Band-Aid strip, her secret number is revealed. She brushes the spot with her finger. A-25063. The ink has faded to a tender shade of violet.
One beautiful thing.
Draping the pale combing shawl over her shoulders, she straightens the fringe hanging from its edges and picks up her brush from among the scattered lipsticks, eyeliners, and bits of crumpled Kleenex smudged with eye shadow. Combing her fingers through her dark curtain of hair, she applies the brush, stroke after stroke after stroke. The long ritual. And then, for a moment, she pauses. Leans forward toward the face in the glass.
Could it all be nothing but a vivid flash? Her life, she wonders. Could it be no more than a blink in the hectic desire of a dying girl’s thoughts? A moment’s hesitation before the angel of death collected her into his bundle of sticks? This life, now contained in the circumference of a vanity’s mirror, is it real? Can it be real? A life for a girl who should have had no life beyond the mudflats of Bergen-Belsen. If she blinks, will she feel her last breath constricting her body? She cannot help but test it.
A blink.
And yet she breathes.
If it is all a dream, then she is dreaming a life that did not end. A life that demands the purpose that is coloring her gaze. Why does she have such a life? Who can say? But she has it and must therefore put it to use. Where will it take her? How will she pursue it, this woman she has become, this Annelies Marie Frank confirmed by the proof of her reflection?
Tikkun olam, Rabbi Souza had told her. Her duty to repair the world.
How? By living. By putting words on paper.
She steals another breath. She steals another breath as she counts another brushstroke, just as she counts another heartbeat, alone with herself, a survivor, a beating pulse, a living inheritor of all that has passed, advancing into an unfixed future, the chatterbox, the bundle of contradictions, Anne favored by God, surrounded by the hope of the dead.