Annelies полностью

“And what did Bep have to say for herself?” Pim wants to know.

Anne pauses. The smile that has half formed on her lips stiffens.

“Anne, are you still there?”

“Yes. Yes, Pim. She said she’s lived here in America for years. She said her husband owns a hardware store. And she has two children.”

“Well,” Pim replies with a satisfied tone. “That is wonderful. Wonderful to know. I am so very glad to hear that she is happy.”

Anne’s eyes have gone damp with tears. She starts to speak, but as it happens, all she can speak is silence.

“Anne?”

“Pim. This call. It must be costing a fortune. I should let you go before you have to take out a bank loan.”

“Take out what?”

“Nothing. Nothing, Pim. I should let you go. I mean, I should say good-bye.”

“Happy birthday, meisje,” he tells her. “I think of you daily.”

“Me, too, Pim,” she says. “Me, too.”

And sets the phone’s receiver back on its hook.

•   •   •

In the bedroom she has changed into her kimono and sits in front of the vanity mirror, gazing deeply into the shadowed eyes contained in the circle of glass.

When she peels off the Band-Aid strip, her secret number is revealed. She brushes the spot with her finger. A-25063. The ink has faded to a tender shade of violet.

One beautiful thing.

Draping the pale combing shawl over her shoulders, she straightens the fringe hanging from its edges and picks up her brush from among the scattered lipsticks, eyeliners, and bits of crumpled Kleenex smudged with eye shadow. Combing her fingers through her dark curtain of hair, she applies the brush, stroke after stroke after stroke. The long ritual. And then, for a moment, she pauses. Leans forward toward the face in the glass.

Could it all be nothing but a vivid flash? Her life, she wonders. Could it be no more than a blink in the hectic desire of a dying girl’s thoughts? A moment’s hesitation before the angel of death collected her into his bundle of sticks? This life, now contained in the circumference of a vanity’s mirror, is it real? Can it be real? A life for a girl who should have had no life beyond the mudflats of Bergen-Belsen. If she blinks, will she feel her last breath constricting her body? She cannot help but test it.

A blink.

And yet she breathes.

If it is all a dream, then she is dreaming a life that did not end. A life that demands the purpose that is coloring her gaze. Why does she have such a life? Who can say? But she has it and must therefore put it to use. Where will it take her? How will she pursue it, this woman she has become, this Annelies Marie Frank confirmed by the proof of her reflection?

Tikkun olam, Rabbi Souza had told her. Her duty to repair the world.

How? By living. By putting words on paper.

She steals another breath. She steals another breath as she counts another brushstroke, just as she counts another heartbeat, alone with herself, a survivor, a beating pulse, a living inheritor of all that has passed, advancing into an unfixed future, the chatterbox, the bundle of contradictions, Anne favored by God, surrounded by the hope of the dead.

Author’s Note

In writing this book, my priority has been to honor Anne’s story with honesty and accuracy, so I have remained loyal to the facts wherever possible. I’ve read deeply, delving into Anne’s diary as well as Holocaust histories, biographies of Anne Frank, and transcripts of interviews with people who knew her. I’ve traveled to Amsterdam twice in researching Annelies. While learning about the Jewish experience in Amsterdam during the war, I’ve visited the old Jewish Quarter, the Resistance Museum, the former Diamond District, and the Jewish enclave in the Transvaal, once left in ruins by a freezing population desperate for firewood. And specifically in relation to Anne Frank’s life, I’ve seen the bookshop where she likely picked out her tartan plaid diary, the Jewish Lyceum where she and her sister, Margot, were sent to school during the occupation, and the former Gestapo headquarters where the Franks and their friends were detained after their arrest. I’ve explored the Frank family apartment in Amsterdam. And, of course, I’ve spent hours inside the Anne Frank House itself. I’ve followed Anne Frank’s path from Amsterdam to the remains of the transit camp Westerbork in the northeastern Netherlands; to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were all shipped by the Nazis on September 3, 1944; to Bergen-Belsen inside Germany, where Anne and Margot died of typhus months later. Through continued study and access to these resources, I have done my best to portray the historical backdrop against which the Franks lived with veracity and respect.