“Then trust in me,” he says, both a command and a plea. “I’m your father. If no one else, trust in me.”
Anne goes silent, staring back. When she speaks, her voice is low, barely controlled. “Amsterdam is a haunted place. I don’t belong here anymore,” she insists.
“And you think you will belong in America? That’s absurd, Anne. And even if it weren’t, half of Europe wants to go to America. There are, however, quotas in place severely restricting immigration.”
“You mean for Jews?”
“I mean for everyone,” her father answers. “For anyone. And we are fine just where we are. I have responsibilities here, Anne. A life to lead.”
“You have a life!” Anne is suddenly incensed. “You! But what life do I have, Pim? What life do I have?”
“A life with the people who love you, Anne. Isn’t that enough? You belong where your family is.”
“My family is dead!” she hears herself shout.
“I am not dead!” Pim, angry now, ignites. “I am not dead, Annelies! I am your father, and I am still very much alive!”
“Are you sure of that, Pim? Everyone tells me that I have survived. What joy! Anne Frank has survived! Praise God in his heaven! But I don’t feel it, Pim. I feel like this is an illusion and that I really belong in the burial pit with Margot!”
His eyes panic. “Anne.”
“Then, at the same moment, I want everything,” she declares, her hands clenching into fists. “I want everything there is to have, and America has everything. That’s why I cannot stay here. That’s why I must go. With you or without.”
Pim swallows. “I won’t permit it.”
“You think I require permission? You say I have no passport, but what does that matter? This is all the permission I need,” she says, yanking up her sleeve. “This will be my passport.”
She watches a shadow fall across Pim’s expression as he gazes down at the number tattooed on his daughter’s forearm. It’s a radical transformation. His skin seems to shrink tightly across his skull. His eye sockets deepen. His mouth contracts into a straight line, and something terrible scalds the color from his eyes. She thinks perhaps this is his true face now. The face that meets him when he’s alone with the mirror.
“Anneke,” he whispers. The blunt rebuke in his voice has disappeared. He sounds hollow. “You must realize how much I need you here with me,” he tells her. “How desperate I am to have you close by. I thought I had lost you both. Both my children. You cannot possibly comprehend the pain that a parent feels. For a father to lose his children? It’s so tragic. So unbelievably tragic. But then I found you. I found you, and my heart found a reason to keep beating. Please. You’re so young still. You need a father. And a father needs his daughter. Think about this. You must.”
Anne gazes back at him. Her mouth opens, but she has no words left to speak. The air is suddenly too thin. The walls too close. She shoves past him to get out. Out of the flat, out of the prison that the past has made of her present. She bursts into the street, and the open air swallows her. She runs. Runs until she sinks down on her knees in the grassy scrub beside the sidewalk. And there she remains, breathing in the tang of an approaching storm as a stripe of thunder unrolls above the chimneys.
Is this how you’re going to behave? Margot inquires. She has knelt beside Anne, dressed in the dirty blue-and-red prisoner’s smock they were forced to wear in the Westerbork Punishment Barracks. Her glasses are broken at the left hinge and repaired with a twist of wire.
Anne gives her a stare, then shakes her head. “So now you’re judging me, too?”
No one’s judging you, Anne.
“Liar.”
Well, if I am, it’s only because you’re being selfish. Besides—since when has Anne Frank cared what other people think of her?
Gazing at nothing. “I’m not so impervious as everyone has always believed.”
Then do the right thing, her sister urges. Pim needs you. I can’t help him, but you can.
Thunder rolls through the clouds, and a sudden dash of rain starts to patter the sidewalk. Anne feels the rain as if it’s nothing. In the camps they stood on the Appelplatz for hours in driving rain during the endless roll calls. The SS guards called the prisoners “Stücke.” Pieces. Nothing human, only pieces. And pieces think nothing of the rain.
