Annelies полностью

“No, Anne. No. Nothing can be done. Maurits has been called up, and if he resists, he’ll be sent to a concentration camp. Or maybe simply taken to the dunes and shot.” This possibility is too much for Bep, and she breaks into pieces. Immediately Anne claps her in an embrace, gripping tightly and absorbing Bep’s sobs. She can feel the tears soaking into the shoulder of her blouse as she pats Bep’s back sympathetically, cooing her name. If there’s really nothing to be done but hold Bep as she cries, then at least Anne can do that much.

When evening comes, however, she takes her first opportunity to explain Bep’s tragedy at the supper table. Pim pauses with his knife and fork over his plate and shakes his head grimly. “Terrible news,” he can only agree.

Anne presses for something more. This is her father, after all—a man of great competence. He’s kept a family of Jews safe in the middle of the Nazi occupation. Surely he can help save one gentile from labor conscription. “There must be something you can do, Pim. Can’t you?”

But it’s her mother who answers, with a sharpness that causes Anne to wince.

“Do? Don’t be absurd, Anne. What can your father possibly do? Don’t you understand this yet? We are Jews,” she reminds her daughter, eyes filling. “We have no power any longer.”

For an instant no one speaks, until Pim leans forward with an expression of eloquent sympathy. “Edith . . .” he says.

But not even Pim can stop Mummy from leaping up from her chair to make a weepy exit. “Excuse me,” she chokes out before vanishing from the room.

By now Anne feels herself on the brink of tears, too. “I didn’t mean to upset her, Pim. Really I didn’t.”

Her father nods. “Of course not, Anne,” he tells her.

Margot stiffens. “Shall I go after her, Pim?” She’s ready to leap from her chair as well. But Pim tells her no.

“She’ll be all right. It’s just her nerves. Give her a while alone.”

And this seems to be the case. By the end of supper, when it’s time to clear the table and wash the dishes, Mummy is back, dry-eyed and acting her usual self. “Anne, be more careful,” she says when Anne brings in one of the large platters. “I don’t want any chips in my china. It survived the journey from Frankfurt without so much as a nick in a saucer. Is it too much to ask that it survive handling by my younger daughter?”

That night as she’s lying in bed, Anne tries to visualize the reality of a German labor camp. She pictures Maurits hunched in a line of prisoners, clothes filthy, digging ditches as ugly Boche guards in steel helmets and hobnail boots watch over them with guns at the ready. But beyond that she draws a blank. It must be a place of pure horror, no doubt, yet what exactly pure horror looks like, what it consists of, she finds difficult to imagine.

Since they invaded the Low Countries two years ago, the Germans are everywhere. Feldgrau uniforms fill the cafés and restaurants. Caravans of Opel Blitz lorries plow through the maze of narrow city streets, crushing the pavement under their tire treads and drowning out all sound, disobeying even the most minor tenets of Dutch law and Dutch courtesy. Had packs of savage wolves been loosed across Amsterdam, it would not feel any less dangerous than after the advent of the mof. “Mof,” that complicated word. It’s a Dutch insult in a way that only the Dutch can be insulting. A sort of old-fashioned derogation with a definition akin to “grumpy and unsophisticated.” Not much of a slight for a murderous army of interlopers, but the Dutch language does not naturally accommodate rudeness, so really it’s the best, or the worst, that can be offered. The Dutch do so enjoy hurling diseases as swear words, calling a person a cancer or a canker sore. But if they wasted their most beloved insults on the Germans, then whatever would they call each other?