Annelies полностью

“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.

22 ANOTHER BIRTHDAY

Dearest Kit,

Another birthday has gone by, so I’m now fifteen.

—Anne Frank, from her diary, 13 June 1944

1946

Leased Flat

The Herengracht

Amsterdam-Centrum

The Canal Ring

At breakfast the telephone rings and Dassah answers it, but only to hang up a moment later. “Werner Nussbaum has returned,” she announces to Anne and Pim at the table, pouring Pim a second cup of coffee. “Anne, he’ll be expecting you at the shop this afternoon.”

Anne stares back, above her plate of fried mush. She’s relieved, but also a little miffed. “That’s all? He’s returned and expects me? No further explanation?”

Pim raises his coffee cup to his lips and takes a sip. “Anne, I’m sure you will interrogate the man when you see him,” he says coolly. “For now eat your breakfast, please.”

Nussbaum

Tweedehands-Boekverkoper

The Rozengracht

Mr. Nussbaum is pale. Thinner than he was. His smile looks waxy as Anne rolls her bike into the shop, leaning it against the wall. “And here she is,” he announces with a brittle joviality. “The future of literature.”

Somehow Mr. Nussbaum’s friendly exclamation rubs her wrong. It sounds just too ridiculous. “I was afraid something had happened to you, Mr. Nussbaum,” she tells him with undisguised reproach. “When I came to the shop and it was completely locked up.”

The smile on Mr. Nussbaum’s lips slips a notch. “Yes, well, I’m sorry about that, Anne. I am. I had to travel to the Hague, unexpectedly. Apparently the government has determined that while I was imprisoned in Auschwitz, I was also accruing a substantial sum of unpaid taxes.”

Anne feels her face heat. “That’s obscene.”

A shrug as he sets the kettle on the small hot plate. What else can be said?

“Is the same thing happening to Pim?”

“Isn’t that a question for him to answer?”

A frown. “We’re not exactly talking much these days.”

“I see.” He blows a spot of dust from the bowl of a china cup. “Will you have some coffee? It’s only ersatz, I’m afraid.”

“No, thank you,” Anne replies, her voice subdued, thinking of Pim’s chilly expression at breakfast. “It upsets my stomach.”

Mr. Nussbaum nods. Begins measuring the ersatz blend into the tin coffee press. “I understand that you have a birthday approaching,” he says. “You’ll be seventeen?”

Anne has picked up the broom to sweep the grit from the front entryway. “Yes,” is all she says.

“And there’s a celebration scheduled?”

“Not my idea. But yes.”