Annelies полностью

Bep hiccups a slim laugh and breathes in deeply, regaining herself as best she can. “And upstairs you’re all so welcoming. You’re living in danger daily, yet your mother makes me feel so at home at the table.”

“She can do that on occasion,” Anne is willing to admit. “But it’s not us, it’s you. You and Miep. Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler. When you come upstairs, it’s a breath of freedom for us all. Believe me, the minute you leave, we all revert back to our stifled, irritable old selves and the arguments and complaints are renewed with a vengeance.” Anne says this with a smile, for Bep’s sake, though she wishes it weren’t so absolutely true.

A foot scuffs a floorboard above. “Anne?” She hears her mother calling from the top of the stairs. She doesn’t sound cross, particularly, only fretful.

“Yes, Mummy?” she answers, knowing the fun’s now over.

“Let Bep go home. It’s time to come back up and get ready for bed.”

“Yes, Mummy,” Anne replies dutifully. She hugs Bep good-bye and glumly trudges up the steps. At the top her mother shuts the door and says, “I don’t like you sitting down there. It makes me anxious.”

What doesn’t? Anne wants to reply. But she stops herself. “Mummy, I’ve been down to Papa’s office a million times. Why should you worry about me sitting on the steps all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, Anne,” her mother answers truthfully. “But I do. It’s just a feeling I’ve been having. A kind of ominous feeling. I can’t explain it. Your papa says it’s just nerves that we’re all undergoing because the end of the war could be close, and maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I only know that I feel what I feel. Do you think you can humor me?”

And for a moment Anne sees her mother without the sting of judgment. She sees the unfiltered candor in her mother’s face. “All right, Mummy,” she says. “If it makes you feel better. All right.”

In her diary Anne turns herself inside out and stares into all her inner recesses. Splashing ink on the paper, sometimes boisterously, sometimes angrily, often critically, perhaps even artfully. She has learned to depend on words to see herself more clearly. Her demands, her frustrations and furies, her unobtainable ideals, and her relentless desires, all a reflection of the lonely self she confesses only to the page, because if people aren’t patient, paper is. It is often a mess, filling line after line, until she runs out of room in her lovely red tartan daybook and has to resort to filling up whatever stray bits of paper Miep and Bep can scrounge. Then, at the end of March, they are all listening to Radio Oranje on a Wednesday evening down in the private office when the education minister from the exile government in London broadcasts a speech advising the Dutch people to keep their diaries as a record for after the war, and it strikes her: Perhaps her diary could be important to others as well. A record for the Dutch, a record for the Jews, a record for all who have felt imprisoned. The next day she begins to rewrite. Not as a child confiding her thoughts to imaginary friends but as a chronicler of wartime. A true writer. It gives her a vision of herself to broadcast. A vision of the woman she should become, molded by what she is already feeling in her heart: a terrible and ecstatic slavery to words. This is what she could never explain to anyone. Not Peter, not Margot, not Mummy. Not even Pim.

Now she finds that she zealously steals every minute she can from the daily routine of survival in order to reinvent her diary. To make it into something other than it started as, the unbosoming of a thirteen-year-old ugly duckling.

To make it a book.

By the end of the first week of revision after Mr. Bolkestein’s message, Anne has rewritten seventy-one pages by hand on loose-leaf sheets of flimsy wartime paper. She finds that the craft required in rewriting can numb her to the fear that still often seizes her, as if even the worst of the brutality swirling about them can be managed.

If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.

6 BURGLARS

“Police in building, up to bookcase . . .”

—Anne Frank, from her diary, 11 April 1944

1944

The Achterhuis

Prinsengracht 263

Hidden Annex

OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS

9 April