BRITISH-OCCUPIED GERMANY
It’s still shocking. Every time she wakes from a fitful sleep and finds herself lying in an actual bed with actual sheets that are clean and bleached white, it’s
There is a bottle of clear saline solution hanging from a rack dripping down through a tube into a needle that’s inserted into Anne’s arm. The needle is held in place with strips of white tape. Sometimes the bottle will capture the sunlight in the morning, and Anne will watch, in awe, as the silvery light is distilled into her veins. It is on such a morning, as the daylight invades the ward, that Anne Frank manages to make a request of the British Red Cross nursing sister, who has recently changed her linen after she inadvertently shit herself, since diarrhea is still such a close friend. The nurse is a small, compactly built young woman, wearing a triangular cap on her head and dressed in trousers and army boots under her white smock. Her face is plain, no cosmetics, no expression beyond that of blunt detachment, except for the brief moment when she was changing the bedding and Anne had glimpsed a flash of something like pity in the woman’s eyes. Perhaps even something like compassion.
“Please, there is a mirror?” Anne asks. She knows that much English at least, enough to ask this question. The first time she speaks, however, the nurse does not seem to hear her, and could she really be blamed for going deaf to the constant drubbing of demands coming from her patients? Schwester, Schwester, Fräulein, bitte! A bowl. Sister, please, eine Pfanne. Ich brauche eine Schüssel geben, bevor ich mich scheißen. I must have medicine. Medycyna. Siostra, medycyna. My dressing must be changed. No, change
So the next time, Anne must strain to speak up. “Please, a
The nurse frowns back at her. Says nothing, only stares. Holding onto her frown, she swats blankly at a fly, and then, with a thump of her army-issue boots, she turns and marches away. Well, that’s it, Anne thinks. That’s it. No mirror for me. I must now imagine my face. There were a few girls with mirrors at Auschwitz, but Anne never had the clout required to obtain such an item. Even a glance into the glass was too expensive. A half crust of bread was the price. Four potato peels. A contraband cigarette. Who could afford it? Anne must stick to her memory of herself: the young girl in the mirror she remembers from their days in hiding. The dark-haired, ugly-duckling type who showed up in the glass above the lavatory sink. Though she knows that such a girl and such a face no longer exist.
A party of flies light on her blanket, while one more hops onto her forehead and then her nose, though she doesn’t bother to brush it away. German flies, of course. The führer’s flies, here to torment Jews. But really, flies are like dead bodies. She no longer takes note of them. In the barracks blocks, the flies were as thick as paste, even in the cold. Hundreds of women packed together, spilling shit and blood and fluids: it was a fly paradise.
Anne turns her head at the surprise of the tromping of boots. The Red Cross sister has returned. She has preserved her frown, of course, but perhaps because she is still young herself, this nurse, she knows the value of the small pocket mirror that she bears, even if it is split by an awful crack down the middle.
“Mirror,” the nurse declares, as if confirming the definition of the word. But now Anne is hesitant to take it. A flash of fear sours her belly. How foolish of her to ask. How stupid! Why on earth should she want to see her face, when it can only be the face of a corpse? She should simply turn away. She should simply turn away and glare into dead space, and she is about to do just that when the Red Cross sister decides to help her out. Opening Anne’s bony hand with her own, the young nurse places the cracked mirror in Anne’s palm.
The split reflection that Anne meets in the broken glass is haunted. Skin blotchy with disease. Dark cauldron eyes retain the cruel hunger she no longer feels in her belly. Her head was shaved by the English this time, and lice scabs dapple her skull. Whatever beauty she might have grown into is gone. Stripped away. She is hideous. If she had the strength, she would fling the mirror to the floor and let it crash to pieces. But since she doesn’t, she simply lets it drop from her palm and stretches her neck with a muted moan of disgust, oblivious to the buzzing squadrons of the führer’s flies.