Night. Propped up by a folded pillow on her bed. No covers and sleeping in a rayon slip. The room is hot even with the window open. She reads in secret by candlelight so no one can see the gleam of a lamp under her door. In her hands is a stack of the cheap wartime loose-leaf she has shuffled together. Sometimes she thinks the pages are properly assembled, only to have an errant page confuse her until she picks it out and adds it to the pile beside her on the mattress. This entry in particular is a long one, July 1944, and she’s had to deal with several pages gone truant from the proper order. She rubs the tension from her eyes. Ignites a cigarette and inhales smoke.
And then there is another page out of order. She frowns as she starts to remove it, but then a string of words catches her eye.
She feels something narrow within her. A tightness behind her eyes.
If she had just been stabbed in the chest with a knife blade, she could not have suffered a sharper pain. There were those at Birkenau who would seize the electrified fence as a final escape. She often wondered how that freedom would feel. The high voltage ripping through your body. It’s what she feels now in her small, flattened soul. The flash of electrical tremor as the pages fall from her hands, and she contracts into a keening knot.
28 THE CANAL
Amsterdam abounds in water, and even in the new quarters, we have not been able to suppress our hobby of canals.
—
1946
Amsterdam
It’s a dreary, muddy-sky day. She has been compelled to go shopping with Dassah, since Anne is outgrowing what she has in her dresser drawers. Mostly underclothes. Much of the trip is a tersely mannered affair, but at a shop on the Kalverstraat, when Anne tries on a pastel green dress with a subtle floral embroidery, she shocks herself in the mirror. Her hair is past her collar now, thick and dark in a wave, and the dress, rather than hanging on her like a sack, fits her neatly. The reflection the mirror throws back at her is womanly. Even Dassah sounds surprised. “Lovely,” her stepmother has to admit, and an oddly intimate expression touches her face. Her lips part as if she is about to speak again to Anne, but instead she turns to the shopgirl. “Wrap it up. We’ll take it, please.”
As they make their way down the sidewalk, Anne carrying the packaged dress against her breast, Dassah says, “You’re not a child any longer, Anne.”
And then they both stop dead in their tracks.
Anne grips the package tightly, her pulse beating in her belly. Sweat prickles on the back of her neck. The sight is painful. These people. Their clothes are rumpled and their faces grim and exhausted. They lug their valises or clutch bundles. Men, women, children in their mothers’ arms or groping for their parents’ hands, marched down the street by a squad of Dutch gendarmerie in khaki uniforms, rifles slung over their shoulders.
Some onlookers try to ignore the spectacle, stealing a glance before bustling onward with intentional blindness, but many stop and stare with heavy, blank expressions. A few decide it’s funny and laugh, and a few more pitch insults. “Moffen animals!” they shout. “Back to your filthy burrow!”
A stooped, middle-aged man in a dusty coat shouts back in desperation from the guarded column. “We are Netherlanders! We are Amsterdammers!” But his words are met with boos and more insults.
Anne turns frantically to a stubby little fellow beside her wearing a ragged cloth cap. “What’s happening? Who
The little man gives her only the briefest of assessments before he replies, “Dirty krauts.” He scowls. “And God willing they’re being packed off to their rotten scumhole of a country.” He cups his hand around his mouth and hollers, “Germans out! Netherlands for the Netherlanders!”