Annelies полностью

“Very well, then. You should know,” says Mr. Nussbaum. “The sooner you get out of this country, the better, Anne. The Dutch have started deporting Germans. Even if they’re German Jews.”

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

The door to the private office bangs opens. Pim and Kleiman look up as if she is a hurricane just blown in. “Anne!”

Anne glares. “How can I trust you when you don’t tell me the truth?”

Silence strangles her father’s voice for a moment. Then he forces out a breath and turns tightly toward Mr. Kleiman, who looks at her in a sickly way. “Mr. Kleiman, would you mind excusing us for a moment?” he asks.

Kleiman doesn’t answer but stands with a dubious expression and slips past Anne.

“Close the door,” Pim instructs her. “There’s no use in the whole world hearing our business.”

Anne keeps up her glare but closes the door. “I know everything,” she says.

A terse swallow. The back of Pim’s neck has gone stiff as he straightens a pen on his blotter. “Everything? And what does that entail?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

A strong frown at the desktop before he pronounces her name. “Annelies . . .”

“Is that what the bureau men are investigating? When were you planning on telling me, when they’re at the door about to drag us away?”

An odd spark of confusion enters her father’s expression. He blinks, and his eyes narrow. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘drag us away’?”

“What do I mean? I mean when they come to stuff us into the cattle cars and deport us back to Germany.”

“Anne, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And how can that be true, Pim? Mr. Nussbaum respects me enough to tell me what’s happening.” And she repeats what she was told in the bookshop. How the government has done something “clever,” as Mr. Nussbaum called it. In denouncing the Nuremberg racial laws, they have converted all German-born Jews back into German citizens—thereby branding them “enemy nationals.” Enemy nationals subject to deportation back to Germany. “Don’t pretend that this is a revelation to you, Pim,” she says.

And now, to his daughter’s deep chagrin, Pim leans back into his chair with a small laugh of relief. “Ah, Anne. Is that all this is about?”

The laugh, of course, incenses Anne further. Her hands are fists. “You think this is a joke, Pim? Those men who’ve come here to the office to interrogate you—how long will it be till they come with a lorry waiting outside to carry us away?”

“Anne,” he says, his voice having regained its standard tone of confident control, “you’re jumping to conclusions. This issue with the authorities. It’s about property. Property and money. No one is coming to deport us.”

“So you’re saying that Mr. Nussbaum lied to me?”

“From what I understand, a handful of German factory workers have been expelled from the borderlands, but these were men who came during the war. It’s only a bit of bureaucratic maneuvering on the government’s part. A matter of territory, of business. And like any other business matter, it can be dealt with. That’s all. We are safe, daughter. Let me repeat: No one is coming to deport us. That much I promise you.”

“Promise? Now that’s a funny word for you to use, Pim, isn’t it? Didn’t you also promise to keep us safe once before, and look how well that turned out.”

All the light leaves Pim’s face. “Anne . . .”

But she does not care if she has wounded him. That her words have cut him more deeply than anything she has done or said before. The risk is too great. “I will not be sent back to Germany, Pim,” she bursts out, and bangs the table with the flat of her hand. “I will die first.”

3 August

The next morning Anne tells her father that she has a sick stomach and should stay home. They have barely spoken since her outburst the day before, but Pim examines her with a hint of sympathy and nods. She waits until he and Dassah have both evacuated the flat, and then she fills up the tub and takes a bath. She washes her hair and puts on the best dress in her wardrobe, a robin’s-egg-blue frock with a white velveteen collar that Miep found for her. She puts on her only pair of cotton stockings without mended holes and her suede shoes with the tiny silver buckles, and then she inspects herself in the mirror. Her final preparation before she leaves the house is to powder over the number on the inside of her forearm.