Annelies полностью

“Mother,” Peter complains. His hair is its usual tousled mess. But his face is growing thinner, more manly. His jaw hardening.

“All I’m saying is the truth,” his mother replies with a sly wink. She is getting thinner, too, but from twenty months of dwindling food quality. Her face sags now. Her rouged lips look waxy. “A career girl,” she says with mocking significance.

“You’ll have to learn better French if you intend to live in Paris,” Margot tells Anne with a thin whisper of superiority. “Votre français est plutôt atroce.”

Anne replies sourly, “Aller manger un escargot, s’il vous plaît.”

“Well, I for one am happy to hear that Anne has ambition,” her mother chimes in surprisingly. “Though, really, Anne. Paris? New York? Why should you need to go so far away? I don’t understand.”

“Maybe to get away from constant criticism,” Anne says, more harshly than she intends to. It’s just that she’s so easily rubbed wrong by adults. Though now the table has gone silent, except for Her Majesty Kerli van Pels, who snorts at Anne’s cheekiness.

“Well.” Mr. Pfeffer offers a snide look down his nose as he helps himself to more of Mrs. van P.’s overcooked potato casserole. “Not just a writer but a famous writer? Really?”

“You find that so difficult to imagine, Mr. Pfeffer?” Anne snaps back.

Pfeffer had been well groomed and a meticulous dresser when he first arrived. Now his collars and cuffs are frayed and his hair is a dismal swath of gray brushed carelessly back from his forehead. “Difficult?” he says mockingly. “It’s only that writers must possess talent, mustn’t they? By definition, that is, they possess talent for something other than making trouble.”

Anne shoots to her feet, ready to shriek, but her mother is quick with a reprimand.

“Anne. Sit back down,” she commands. Her face has grown tighter, her features more pronounced, as if someone has been slowly whittling away at her. “Donnerwetter, child, we’re in the middle of supper.”

“So you’re just going to allow him to speak to me like that?” Anne demands to know.

“Anneke, please. Sit back down,” Pim advises. “Let’s not upset everyone’s digestion.”

Anne scowls but plops back down in her chair, pouting. Bep is seated beside her. She has joined the gang of onderduikers this evening for supper and looks up from her plate. “Well, I for one would love to see New York City,” she says.

Mummy sounds puzzled by this. “Would you, Bep? Actually?” Perhaps she cannot imagine a young lady visiting so far from home. But Bep sounds eager.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “I’ve dreamed about standing atop the tallest building in the world and gazing out at the horizon, high up as a bird.”

“Good for you, Bep,” says Pim, always willing to be encouraging. “New York is really the most astonishing city I have ever known.”

“Pim was in New York when he was a young man,” Anne explains happily. “When he was still a bachelor. He worked for a college friend, whose father ran a big department store. What was his name, Pim?” she asks. “I don’t remember.”

“Straus. Nathan Straus. But his friends all called him Charley.”

“Maybe we should plan on going there together, Bep,” Anne says, only too keen to plan the future. “Both of us could view the world from the top of a skyscraper.”

“That would be wonderful, Anne,” Bep replies, but this draws a grouchy response from Hermann van Pels.

“When I was a lad, my old man would have whacked me good with a rod if I were ever as mouthy as this one. So now you want Bep tangled up in your silly daydreams, too?” he grumbles. “That’s—”

“They’re not silly,” Peter cuts in on his father’s grumping. “Anne is very smart. Very smart,” he defiantly declares, to which his mother responds with a snide grimace.

“There’s an old saying, Anne, and I think it applies: You are smart, smart, smart—but you are a fool.”

“Mum, that’s an awful thing to say,” Peter shoots back. “If Anne thinks she’s going to be a famous writer in New York or Paris or wherever, then that’s what’s going to happen,” he insists, prompting his father to roll his eyes.

“And who are you? Mr. Gypsy Fortune-Teller?” his father wonders loudly, shoveling some stewed onion into his big mouth. A touch on his arm from his wife.

“Kerli,” Mrs. van Pels reproves her husband lightly. “Let it go. They’re young. Let them have their folly.”

“Excuse me! But I really can’t take another breath in this company,” Anne announces sharply, pushing up from the table, feeling her eyes wet as she abandons the room.

Her mother calls after her, “Anne! Anne, come back here and clean your plate.” But Anne has no intention of following orders.

“Let Mr. Pfeffer clean my plate for me,” she calls back over her shoulder. “He can always find room for another helping!”

Mr. Pfeffer looks up innocently from his plate in mid-chew and swallows. “Now, what did I say to provoke that?”

•   •   •