Annelies полностью

Cigarette smoke drifts through the sepia-colored afternoon light slanting through the windows. Around the table an embattled hour has passed. But finally it comes down to this in Pim’s opinion: “You decided you’re finished with Amsterdam. With your home here. With your family and your friends. With me. With everything. And you intend to abandon your past and go to America in order to publish the most intimate memories of people who are passed, so that anyone—Jews, not Jews, taxi drivers, rubbish collectors, grocery clerks, housewives, and schoolgirls—can pick up a copy for a few pennies and pass judgment on us all. All our foibles and shortcomings. All our petty feuds and human failings. All of it. On public display.”

“Otto—” Dassah says, but Pim cuts her off.

“No. Please, Hadas. I’m speaking to my daughter directly because, like it or not, you are still my daughter, Annelies, and will always be so. Have I summed up the situation correctly?” he wants to know. “Those are your intentions?”

Anne sits. Her hands clenched together in her lap. Her back straight. “Yes,” she replies without blinking. “Those are my intentions.”

Pim glares silently, as if the entirety of the universe is balled up in this moment. His hands resting in fists on the tablecloth. His back straight as well. His eyes like caves. “Well, then. Who am I to stop you?” he says. “No one. Just an old man whose judgment and opinion have lost their value.” Standing slowly, his unbuttoned waistcoat hanging open, his necktie slightly askew, he seems to have aged a decade in a moment. “I think I require some air,” he informs them.

Dassah gives Anne a look from across the table. It’s a pointed look, even slightly pained, but for once it is devoid of criticism. Then she stands without a further word and follows Pim to the door. Anne watches them. Pim buttoning his waistcoat, slipping on his old tweed jacket and brown fedora from the hall tree. Helping Dassah into her cardigan, then bending forward to allow her to straighten his necktie and brush a bit of lint from his shoulders. The door opens. Light floods the threshold. And then the door closes and they are gone.

So, says Margot, who has appeared in the chair beside Anne, clad in her tattered Judenstern weeds. Now you are free?

•   •   •

That night Anne sits on her bed, her red tartan diary in her hand, tracing the pattern of the plaid cover with her fingertip, when she recognizes the knock at her door.

“Come in, Pim,” she tells him.

He opens the door and pokes in his head. “Good night, daughter,” he says mournfully. “I hope you won’t stay up too late.”

“Pim,” she says. “Wait.”

He hesitates but then pushes open the door just far enough to step in.

“Before he died . . .” Anne says. “Before he died, Mr. Nussbaum told me that I should ask you about the boy in your barracks block at Auschwitz. Do you know who he was talking about?”

Again Pim hesitates. But he slips his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown. “What exactly did Werner tell you?”

“Only that I should ask you about him. He said if I wanted to understand my father, I should ask him about the boy in Auschwitz who called him Papa.”

Pim remains silent.

“Please, Pim. Tell me. I want to understand.”

A long breath, in and out, as if resurrecting such a memory is a feat of heavy labor. Glancing to the floor, he shakes his head. “He was alone at Auschwitz, you see. This lad. Not much older than Peter, but he had no one with him. No one at all.” Then his eyes rise to hers, and he swallows. “In the best way I could,” he says, “I tried to look after the boy. I remember that the others around us, all they could talk about was food. Nothing but food, day and night, and so I said to him that we must get away from such talk or else go insane. Instead we talked of music. The great symphonies, the great composers. He was a fervent fan of the classical composers, the boy. In particular Schubert. It became a routine between us. Whenever we could, we would recall the melodies of our favorite pieces. I think we both began to depend on it, really. Then one evening in the barracks, I asked him. I asked him if he would consider calling me Papa.” Pim lifts his eyebrows over this memory, obviously returning to the barracks, returning to the moment in his mind. “I suppose I’d been thinking of it for some time, but it stunned me a bit that I actually had—if you’ll pardon the expression—that I actually had the chutzpah to ask him. He must have been a bit stunned, too, this young man, because at first he resisted. He said that he was indebted to me but had to point out that he already had a papa who was still very much alive in hiding.” A small shrug. “So I tried to explain. I tried to explain to him,” says Pim, “that I was a man who must have someone to call him Papa, or else . . . or else I wouldn’t know who I was any longer.”

Anne feels her eyes dampen. “And did he?”

“Did he?”

“Call you Papa?”