“You can’t imagine what this means. The diary would come out in German and English, telling everything that went on in our lives when we were in hiding—all the fears, disputes, food, politics, the Jewish question, the weather, moods, problems of growing-up, birthdays and reminiscences—in short, everything.”
—Otto Frank in a letter, November 11, 1945,
quoted in The Hidden Life of Otto Frank,
by Carol Ann Lee
“Though I have been beaten, I have no scars left.”
—Otto Frank in a letter, January 26, 1975,
quoted in The Hidden Life of Otto Frank,
by Carol Ann Lee
I HAD NOT PLANNED TO READ IT, but I finally did. How could I not? I read it at my workbench in the basement, when I was supposed to be building a toy chest for Abigail’s room; and in the bathroom in the middle of the night, while Madeleine slept on the other side of the locked door; and in the parking lot of a supermarket where she did not shop because though the prices were lower, the produce was inferior; and in the railroad parking lot, until she asked one night if that had been my car she had seen as she drove past the station that afternoon. Railroad stations worried her. Her sister had recounted the story of a survivor of one too many cattle cars, who had lain down on the tracks and waited for a train to go over him. The accident, if that is what you call it, halted trains going in both directions for hours. I told Madeleine it had not been my car, and stopped going there, but I did not stop reading the diary. I could not. I was like a boy with a secret vice, as I had been then, lying in the coffin-narrow bed, holding on to myself, not caring whether my parents on the other side of the damp sweating wall heard, or whether I went blind, or crazy, or grew hair on my palms, because I would probably be dead before any of that could happen.
When I was not reading it, I was thinking about it. Such, as Dr. Gabor might have pointed out had I continued to see him, is the nature of a secret vice. It became my real world, more real than the basement where I built things for my wife and children; than the bathroom where I tried to escape under a pounding shower, though why I should think I could escape those memories in a shower, of all places, I cannot imagine; than the supermarket parking lot where women hurried past with obscenely full shopping carts. The dampness of the canal crawling up the walls was real, and the stench of mildew and sweat and farts and piss and shit, and the taste of rotten potatoes and moldy beans, and the cold that turned my mother’s hands white as frost under the moth-eaten gloves, and the heat that beat down from the sky and steamed up from the streets where we were forbidden to walk, and the terror, and the degradation of that terror. I was trapped in that book as I had been trapped in that house. But—and this was what I could not understand—I was homesick for it too. I longed for those rank-smelling rooms where the walls steamed in summer and dripped as if in a cold sweat in winter. I yearned for those parents. I missed Anne. I ached for myself.
Occasionally I grew angry. It was not only that she had changed the names, though that was bad enough. When she had called Pfeffer Dussel, which was German for idiot, behind his back in the annex, it was the innocent joke of two young people straining against the leash, but now poor Pfeffer was Dussel for the ages. She had also mauled and manhandled my mother and father. These renamed van Daans were not my parents, I wanted to shout at her, but I could not, because the aroma of my father’s cigarettes closed my throat and the sound of my mother’s laughter drowned out my voice. I was no match for the memories the diary brought back. I could not resist the pull of those ghosts. They rose from the torn gritty pages, threw their arms around my neck, and wrestled me panting and laughing and sobbing back into their lives, back into the time when they were alive.
My mother crooks a ringed finger. Remember the night I cut your hair? she whispers, and we are dancing around the room, I in my swimming shorts and tennis shoes, she in a mended print dress, my hands on her wrists, her arms thrashing in mock struggle. She is laughing and crying and screaming at me to leave her alone, and I am pushing and pulling and flinging her around the room, half in fun, half in fury, filled with terror at the power, which for a moment overwhelms the other terror, the one we all live with.
My father shouts at me to give him the book, not the book I am hunched over in the dusk-shrouded car, but another book, because I am too young to know about such things—though I am not too young to go with him and Mr. Frank down to the offices, my hand gripping the hammer in case we come upon the burglars—and he grabs that other book, the one about penises and vaginas and sexual intercourse, from my hands, and we shove and slap and kick, and he curses me and sends me to the attic without dinner, where I sit listening to the earthquake rumble of my empty stomach and the sounds of them eating and talking and rattling dishes below me, and wish him dead, though I know it is an unconscionable thought under the circumstances. He is a fool, I rant in my head, a bigger dussel than Pfeffer. At least Pfeffer got his son on the ship to England.
But then another time, we are kneeling, my father and I, shoulder to shoulder, as we fit the screens into the food safe we are building, and Mr. Frank, who helps me with my English but cannot build anything practical, stands watching. My father says quietly, as if it is a secret we must keep from the others who do not understand how to make things, well done, Peter, well done.
I sat in the supermarket parking lot, hearing my father murmuring in my ear, as I stared at the book propped up against the steering wheel. It was an invalid, its binding broken from being flung onto the railroad tracks, its pages torn from the fall. I reached over, opened the glove compartment, and took out a roll of Scotch tape. And just as I might bandage Abigail’s knee or kiss Betsy’s booboo, I began mending the book’s wounds. I hummed as I worked. Madeleine says I often hum while I work, though I am not conscious of the fact. But suddenly I became aware of it. I was humming Mozart. Eine kleine Nachtmusik filled the car, and I am back in the front attic with Anne. It is the evening of Easter Sunday, the second Easter Sunday we spent there, the last we will spend there, and we are listening to the music on the radio, while the chestnut tree outside the window makes a spiteful promise of spring.
I finished my ministrations and began leafing through the book again.
It is my mother’s birthday, and my father gives Miep money in hope she can find red carnations, his traditional gift. My mother screams with pleasure at the scarlet excitement in our gray lives, and throws her arms around my father’s neck, and kisses him lingeringly on the mouth, but now instead of turning away in disgust, as I did then, I narrow my eyes to see them more clearly. How young they are; my mother buxom and bustling with a wide mouth ready to take a bite out of life; my father tall, dapper, wreathed in cigarette smoke and corny jokes. What goes click ninety-nine times and clack once? A centipede with a club foot. Do they love each other? Do they make love in this putrid unprivate annex?
I hear them screaming at each other.
“I won’t sell the coat.”
“Fine, we’ll eat rabbit fur this winter.”
“You only want the money to squander on your cigarettes.”
“You want it to buy more clothes after the war. After the war! What do we eat until after the war?”
But they make up. They always make up. He steals up behind her as she stands at the sink, reaches around her, and cups her melon breasts in his big nicotine-stained hands. “Don’t,” she shrieks, and the word becomes yes in her mouth. “Kerli,” he croons into her ear. And they waltz into the bedroom.
Greedy, Anne calls them. Oh, yes, they are greedy.
I keep turning the pages, hungry for news of us. An entry stops me.
Peter’s very shy, but not too shy to admit that he’d be perfectly happy not to see his parents for a year or two.
I am staggering around the annex, bouncing from one damp crumbling wall to another. I am suffocating here, too big for the low ceilings and cramped rooms, too strong for my terrified helpless mother and raging powerless father, too old to be beaten down by her and beaten by him. My huge feet make too much noise. My long arms knock things over. I fear I will smash them all. I dream of smashing them all.
I reached out and picked up a pack of cigarettes Harry had left on the front seat. Holding the book with one hand, I shook out a cigarette and pushed in the lighter. I did not even know what I was doing until I inhaled. The smell of my father closed around me. I could barely breath. I wrenched open the car door to get some air. The book tumbled out of my lap onto the ground. Anne stared up at me from the black tar of the parking lot. I picked her up, brushed her off, closed the car door. Her steady eyes gazed at me from her eternally childish face.
“The grown-ups are just jealous because we’re young,” I whisper, as we climb the stairs from my bedroom to the attic.
But they are younger than we, or at least more innocent. Outside the annex, bombs fall, and murderers march the streets, and freight cars carry their cargo east, while inside, the parents, who never see eye to eye on anything, agree that Anne and I should not spend evenings together alone in the dark, and Otto, who still trusts in the old decencies—I was an officer in the German army in the last war, he will tell the man from the Grune Polizei, as the brute stuffs our valuables into the briefcase—takes me aside and speaks of primrose paths, and one thing leading to another, and saving ourselves, or at least Anne, for the future. What future? I want to ask him, but I do not, because I need to believe he is right. Nonetheless, Anne and I continue to climb the stairs to the attic, where we sit in the darkness, inhaling the first ripe stirrings of spring and the rank fumes rising from the canal in front of the house, and holding on to each other for dear life. If God lets her live, she says under cover of night, she will achieve more than her mother ever did, and make her voice heard, and work for mankind. If I survive, I tell her, I will go to the Dutch East Indies and make something of myself. But gradually we stop talking and begin, with halting steps, to find our way down Otto’s primrose path. I feel her childish body coming of age within my arms, and life shrieks in my ears, or maybe only the air-raid sirens.
I close my eyes, but Anne and my father and mother, and all of them, even poor Pfeffer, are imprinted on the inside of my lids. There is no getting away from them. I open my eyes. Drops of water spatter Anne’s face on the dust jacket of the book. It has begun to rain. I reach out to roll up the window. It is already closed. I look up. The sun hangs like a tarnished coin above the supermarket.
I take a handkerchief from my pocket, blow my nose, and look around. Women hurry past, their bodies cantilevered forward with the effort of pushing their overflowing baskets, their eyes cutting to me, then away. A boy stops to stare. His mother grabs his hand and drags him away. Another woman does not even take the chance. Holding a child with one hand, she steers her cart in a wide circle around me. I stare out at them from the cage of my car. I read their suspicions as clearly as if they hang over their heads in ballooned captions. Madman. Criminal. Murderer.
THAT NIGHT, as Madeleine slept beside me, I got out of bed and padded quietly down to the kitchen. After the soft carpeting, the linoleum felt cold and slippery beneath my bare feet. I closed the louvered doors before I switched on the overhead light and blinked against the brilliance. On the way to the refrigerator, I leaned against the window, cupping my eyes with my hands to shut out the glare of the room, and looked out at my neighbors’ houses. A full moon spilled a ghostly glow over the yards, but no lights burned. Indian Hills slept, peacefully, I imagined.
I crossed to the refrigerator, opened the door, and began taking things out. One after another, I carried them to the table. Two chicken legs, a slab of meatloaf, half a pie, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of milk, a bowl of spaghetti covered with waxed paper, a half-eaten jar of baby food. I had worked my way through one chicken leg and the spaghetti, when Madeleine pushed open the louvered doors. She blinked against the lights. Her eyes moved from plate to bowl to bottle of my obscene banquet, then to me.
“Are you all right?” she asked gently.
“Just a little hungry.”
Her eyes lighted on the jar of baby food.
“I must have been half asleep.” I stood and carried the baby food back to the refrigerator. “I thought it was regular applesauce.”
She was still staring at me when I turned back from the refrigerator, her lovely loving face screwed into a knot of worry. My poor wife was beginning to suspect what I had known all along. She had not won such a prize after all.