Annelies полностью

“But you don’t know, Anne,” Bep insists sharply now. “You don’t know. You think that you were strong lying there in that hideous place? Do you really? If Margot rolled off the pallet and died, then it was because she was coughing so violently. Not because of any kind of pitiful shove on your part. Not because of you.”

Anne can’t find any words. All she can do is concentrate on drawing in a breath against the tears and grip the flat package against her breast until it’s Bep who embraces her.

With forgiveness.

With love.

Like a sister.

35 REPAIRING THE WORLD

If God lets me live, I’ll achieve more than Mother ever did, I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind!

—Anne Frank, from her diary, 11 April 1944

1961

Waverly Place and Mercer Street

Greenwich Village

NEW YORK CITY

The apartment is dark but for a yellowish glow from the street that defines the edges of the room and the furniture. So Anne doesn’t bother turning on a lamp till she reaches the kitchen table by the fire-escape window. Miep’s portable typewriter is stationed there. A battered old thing by now, with a sheet of onionskin cranked around the rubber platen.

She keeps photographs on the wall.

When her diary was published in Hebrew, a letter came from Tel Aviv. In it was a picture of Hanneli and her husband with a baby on her lap. Both had thought the other dead, but now there is this photo of life. Beside it a small frame from B. Altman’s encloses a snapshot of Miep posing with Anne in her cap and gown after she was graduated from Barnard. Then there’s the fading color shot of Pim with his arm around Dassah, the ancient architecture of Jerusalem behind them. Pim is squinting, smiling into the desert sun, and Dassah is shading her eyes.

And Margot? The photo of Anne and Margot on the beach at Zandvoort more than twenty years before is locked in a sterling silver frame. Locked in time.

She opens her purse, plucking out the combing shawl. A flag of silk unfurls, and she feels her pulse quicken. Pale beige fabric decorated with roses and small figures. She gathers it to her nose to see if she can still smell the past clinging to it, but the sachet of her adolescence is long gone and she can only smell a musty trace of memory.

Sitting at the table, she lights a Camel. Her tawny cat, Mina, curls around her ankles and then struts away. “Odd after all these years, to know the truth,” Anne says, and stares into Margot’s eyes. “I thought I would feel something more. But really I don’t.” She nearly laughs. “I find,” she says, wondering if this could really be true, “that it makes no difference. So it was Nelli who betrayed us. So what? Even if it’s true, no one comes back to life.”

Margot is sitting beside her at the table, a young schoolgirl with a yellow Judenstern sewn neatly to the breast of her sweater. Resting her cheek against her hand, she observes Anne from behind the lenses of her glasses with half a smile. Anne gazes back at her. She realizes just how young Margot still is. Just a teenager, never to be any older.

Do you feel unburdened?

“Unburdened?” Anne considers this. “Bep made her confession. I made mine. But I doubt I will ever feel unburdened.”

But she could be right, you know. Bep. Belsen was so hellish, Anne. We were both so sick. We were both so weak. I fell from the pallet. Maybe it wasn’t your fault at all.

A shrug. Who knows? Who will ever really know? “There are times when I feel so lonely, Margot. So separate from the rest of the world. As if I don’t actually exist. As if I’m just a shadow,” she says. “Like you.” Exhaling smoke, she watches Margot dissolve quietly in its cloud.

The telephone gives a chilly ring, and she crosses the room to snap the receiver off the wall. On the other end, she hears the voice of an old man. “Er is er een jarig, hoera-hoera. Dat kun je wel zien dat is zij!” An old man’s happily croaking birthday song. “Zij leve lang, hoera-hoera, zij leve la-ang hoera!”

“Hello, Pim,” she says. “You know it’s actually tomorrow.”

“Oh, yes, I know that.” He speaks to her now in English. “Of course I know. But waiting for another day was too much. Hadas said I must wait, but I thought, ‘No. I must sing my daughter her birthday song right this moment.’”

“Pim,” Anne says. “Pim, you’ll never guess who appeared today.”

“Who appeared?” he asks, as if perhaps his daughter is describing a magic trick.

“Bep,” Anne says, swallowing quietly.

“Bep?”

“Yes.”

“Our Bep?”

“Yes. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. Just as planned when we were in hiding. Do you remember?”

“Of course. Of course I remember,” he says, though a slight vacancy in his tone makes her doubt that he really does.