Annelies полностью

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.