Annelies полностью

Inside, daylight whitens the lace of the tablecloth as the adults cluck over their coffee cups and slices of Mummy’s chocolate cake, eggless, baked with flax meal instead of flour, surrogate sugar, surrogate cocoa, and two teaspoons of precious vanilla extract, but still not so bad. Nobody has ever said Mummy isn’t a resourceful cook. Anne has already gobbled up her slice and is sitting at the table hugging her beloved tabby, Moortje, while her parents converse in the muted, apprehensive tone they’ve adopted since the occupation.

“And what about those poor souls who have been sent to the east?” Mummy wonders. “The horrible stories one hears over the English radio.”

Anne holds her breath and then exhales. For once she is only too happy to be left out of the adult discussion. She’s often informed about how terribly unreasonable she can be, but would it be so unreasonable at this moment to go hide in her bedroom and stick her fingers in her ears? She does not want to hear any more about the conquering Hun and his atrocious behavior; she wants to pick out her birthday present.

She feels the excitement twitching in her body, so it’s hard to keep still and sit up straight at the supper table. “Mother, can we use Oma Rose’s sterling ware for my party?”

“Excuse me, Anne,” her mother answers, frowning, “please don’t interrupt. It’s rude. Your father and I are having an important conversation. Unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary.”

Pim, however, seems to be happy to remind them all in his gently pointed manner that one should not believe every rumor one hears. One must recall that there were stories of all manner of atrocities fabricated by the English about the kaiser’s army in the last war. “Propaganda,” he calls it. And shouldn’t Mummy admit that he’s the expert on this subject? He was, after all, a reserve officer in the kaiser’s field artillery.

Mummy is not dissuaded. She is not convinced that the talk she has heard is all English fabrication. She believes that the Nazis have made Germans into criminals. “Look how Rotterdam was bombed,” she offers. A defenseless city. And must she continue to enumerate the horrid slew of diktats imposed upon Jews since that Austrian brute Seyss-Inquart was installed as Reichskommissar, the high, almighty governor of the German occupation?

Anne’s father shrugs. Certainly it’s no secret that since the occupation, Germans have been happy to treat Jews abominably. Decrees are enshrined weekly in the Joodsche Weekblad, the mouthpiece of the Nazi invader, published by what the Germans call the Jewish Council. Within its pages are the details of their persecution. Jews are forbidden this and Jews are forbidden that. Jews are permitted to do their shopping only between such and such times. Jews must observe a curfew; they are forbidden to walk the streets from this hour to that hour. Jews who appear in public are required to wear a yellow star of explicit dimensions sewn to their clothes. Pim, however, harbors sweeter memories of the good old Fatherland and makes allowances for Good Germans as opposed to Hitler’s hooligans. “Edith,” he says to his wife, pronouncing her name with a calm, intimate authority. A standard tone. “Perhaps we can table this,” he wonders, indicating the children. But Pim is incorrect if he thinks that the mere presence of the children is enough to dissuade Mummy from her favorite subject: how she was robbed of the life she once led. She wants to know if it has slipped her husband’s mind how much she was forced to give up, and she doesn’t just mean visiting Christian friends in their homes. She means how much she’s been forced to leave behind. The lovely furniture made from fruitwoods. The velvet drapes. The carpets handwoven in the Orient. The collection of Meissen figurines a century old.

According to the story she’s so fond of repeating, their family once had a big house in the Marbachweg in Frankfurt and Mummy had a housemaid, though Anne remembers none of it. She was just a toddler when fear of Hitler caused them to flee Germany for Holland. To Anne their flat here in Amsterdam South is her home. Five rooms in this perfectly well-respected bourgeoisie housing estate in the River Quarter, occupied by perfectly well-respected bourgeoisie refugees of the deutschen jüdisches variety. The children have started gabbling away in Dutch, but for most of the adults settled here German is still the daily conversational vernacular. Even now the Frank household speaks it at the table, because heaven forbid Mummy be required to learn another word of Dutch, even though German has become the language of their persecutors.