Annelies полностью

Mouschi is sulking somewhere belowstairs, so she has tried to capture the second warehouse cat, a brutish, hulking old mouser without a name until she called him Goliath. But Goliath is uninterested in affection. It is not his job to comfort Anne Frank, and he refuses to indulge any notions of cuddling that might interfere with his day. So she sits alone. A swift breeze wrinkles through the thickly leafed branches of the chestnut tree, and she listens to the familiar, untroubled rustle, closing her eyes. There are times when she wishes she could become a breeze. To be carried away into the sky. No memories. No past. No future but the open, endless air.

A waxy squeak of wood comes from the floorboards below. She recognizes the tread of Pim’s footsteps; each step forward sounds a certain cautious optimism. She watches the leaves brush the window glass as he climbs the ladder and stands behind her.

“Anne?”

Anne says nothing, but her father doesn’t seem to notice. “Anne, I’m happy to have found a moment alone with you. I’m happy because there’s something I must tell you. I’m happy,” he repeats, “but also unhappy, because the something I’m about to tell you is both good and bad.” He shrugs, shakes his head at nothing. “I don’t even know how to begin. So I suppose the only way forward is just to say it. Just to say it aloud.” His voice is dense.

Anne looks at him stiffly, burying a secret and sudden desire to panic.

Pim turns, his head stooped, his hands hung on his hips, causing his elbows to stick out like wings. His face is a stone. “I have misled you.”

He says this, but then further words on the subject are caught in a logjam. He must clear his throat roughly. A deep frown furrows his expression, and he blinks at the floor. “That’s the bad part. But the good part is . . .” he tells her, “the good part is that your diary—the diary you kept all those many months while we were in hiding here . . .”

A chilly anxiety climbs lightly up Anne’s spine.

“It was not . . .” he manages to say, his posture clenched. Blinking again, he forces his eyes to meet hers. “It was not lost,” her father declares. “I have it.”

She feels as if she cannot breathe, as if the weight of the silence that separates them is pressing down on her chest. The words make no sense to her, and neither do the dizzying surges she feels of both joy and rage. She feels confused by herself. Her mouth opens. Her heart triples its beat, but all she can say is, “You?”

Pim draws in a long breath through his nostrils and then releases it. “It was Miep who gave it to me,” he tells her. “She and Bep had salvaged it from the floor the day the Gestapo arrived, and they kept it safe, waiting for you to return. But after . . .” he says thickly, “after we thought that you wouldn’t be coming home . . .” His voice trembles as he yanks out his handkerchief to blot his eyes. “That was the day. That was the day,” he tells her, “that my life ended as well, Anne. It was. But then”—he puffs breath into his chest, his lip quivering—“then comes Miep walking into my office with . . . with her arms filled,” he says, wiping at his eyes and steadying himself. “She comes into my office and sets a stack of books and papers in front of me, saying, ‘Here, Mr. Frank, is the legacy of your daughter Anne.’”

Silence.

Pim gazes pleadingly at her, begging her to understand as an empty space expands between them. “It saved me, Anne,” her father whispers. “It saved my life. Because it brought you back to me.” He sniffs, stuffs away his handkerchief, shaking his head in wonder. “Such a gift,” he tells her. “That was my thought. My daughter had such a gift. I was stunned by what you wrote. Stunned and humbled. And then, out of thin air it seemed, you appeared. You appeared, alive, and my heart soared.” He laughs, a sudden heave of joy in his voice.

“But . . .” says Anne, and she bites down on her lip before she can continue, “but you still kept my diary.”

Once more Pim’s face drops. He must nod his head to this, and he clears his voice of emotion. “I couldn’t help but feel that it was,” he starts to say, “and you may not credit this, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was mine now. Can you make any sense of that?”

No reply.

“When you returned to Amsterdam,” says Pim, “having survived such torture, you were so very different. No longer my little kitten. Of course, how could you be the same? How could any of us ever be the same? And yet I felt that the diary . . . it was all I had left of the Annelies I’d known. That child whom I had adored.”

Anne stares. “So for all this time . . . you kept this secret. Miep kept it,” she says, and swallows the first trace of anger in her voice.