Annelies полностью

Suddenly Anne feels Dassah take her arm. “We should go,” her stepmother whispers tautly. “We should go.”

•   •   •

In the Herengracht, Anne wastes no time. They find Pim just home from the office, in his shirtsleeves, with his necktie loosened. “And how was the shopping expedition?” he’s happy to inquire—and then his expression dulls.

“Pim, it’s begun,” Anne announces immediately.

“What? What’s begun?” He looks to Dassah for an explanation, but Anne is pointing toward the window, as if it’s all happening on the street outside their flat.

“The deportations, Pim. We saw them. People marched down the middle of the street under guard by soldiers with bayonets!”

“It’s true, Otto,” the new Mrs. Frank confirms. “We did see them. A dozen or so, not many. But it’s true.”

“Germans?” Pim asks.

“So it seemed,” Dassah answers. “Of course, there was no way of knowing if any of them were Jews.”

“Well, none of them were wearing the yellow star, if that’s what you mean,” Anne snaps. “At least not yet.”

“Anne, please.” Pim swallows heavily. “Don’t overreact,” he commands her.

But Anne will not be silenced. “We must go, Pim. We must all go.”

“No, I am done,” Pim replies, his expression stiffening. “I am done running, meisje. Amsterdam is our home, and here we will stay.”

In desperation Anne turns to Dassah. “Surely you must see the danger,” she breathes. “Surely you must.”

But Dassah just gazes at her, silent and inscrutable, so Anne turns back to Pim, desperate. “Send me, then, Pim. Alone. If you must stay here, then at least let me go to America.”

Pim breathes a sigh. “Anne . . .”

“I told you—I will not suffer through this. I will not be shipped like a beast back to Germany.”

Pim regards her with a mixture of shock and pity. “Anne. It alarms me. It alarms me,” he says, “to hear you say such things. That you could really feel so alone and frightened that you would have me send you off to a foreign country.”

“Better America than the land of our executioners.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, daughter,” Pim says, shaking his head. “I simply cannot conceive of losing you again. And I promise—regardless of what you may have seen today in the street—I promise you that we are in no danger.”

“No danger,” Anne repeats blackly.

“Whatever comes, we are better off together rather than apart.”

Anne turns her glare on him. “I can only remind you, Pim, that you said the same thing before the war. Mother told us. She felt so guilty, but she told us there had been a chance to send Margot and me to safety in England. You prevented it,” she says. “You prevented it because you were so convinced—so intractably convinced—that we were all better off together.”

The light in her father’s eyes flickers out, and his expression shrinks tightly against his face. “I admit it, if that’s what you wish me to do, Anne,” he tells her. “I admit that I’ve made many mistakes in this life. Mistakes that have harmed the people whom I’ve lived for. And I understand how it may be hard for even my own daughter to trust me. To trust any adult, since we’ve made such a hash of things. But nonetheless that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

“No, Pim. You don’t understand. You don’t understand me.”

Pim stares at her heavily, as if from a distance. “That I don’t understand you? It may be true. Regardless of how close we have been in the past, Anneke, perhaps it’s true that I have never really known you at all.”

There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!

Prinsengracht 263

Amsterdam-Centrum