Annelies полностью

He’s so wretchedly thin, as thin as a shadow, and he appears confused, softly dazed, but then something fierce seizes his expression, and he cries out with perfect anguish, “My daughter!”

Clamping her arms around his bony body, Anne listens to the deep elation of her father’s voice as he chants her name again and again, “Anne, my Anne, my daughter, my dear, dear Annelies.”

It should be a moment of pure bliss. But even now, even as she absorbs the flutter of his heartbeats and sobs deeply in Pim’s arms, she feels something terrifying that comes unbidden and unwanted.

A bite of fury shocks her.

13 GRIEF

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

—Ecclesiastes 1:18

1945

Jekerstraat 65

Amsterdam-Zuid

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

“It is only the two of us, Anne,” her father says. His voice is cracked. Ragged. Smoke from the cigarette clenched between his fingers migrates upward. Of all of them from their hiding place, it is only Anne and Pim who have returned alive. “Only us.”

This confirms what she already knew without being told, but she does not tell him this. He seems not to be speaking to Anne anyway, but to a void rooted within himself. His face is tightly shuttered, and he glares at the window as if he could see through all the way to the land of death, where his wife, his daughter, his friends now reside.

The sun is sinking away, too weak to hold itself in the sky any longer. Its fleeting light pinks the walls of Miep and Jan’s kitchen. Anne discreetly surveys her surroundings. It feels so strange—so wrong—to be sitting in someone’s home. There are well-swept rugs and well-kept furnishings. Lace doilies with tulip appliqués on the arms of the upholstered chairs and the cloying scent of floor wax in the hallway. A bottle of good Dutch apple brandy has appeared from the hidden recesses of Miep’s bureau, and Jan is pouring it into short white tumblers made from hobnail milk glass.

“Otto,” he says as he splashes the brandy into a tumbler, naming each one of them. Pim is sitting beside Anne, his arm hooked over the back of her chair. The closed mask he wore only a moment ago has been replaced by an expression of manic disbelief that hangs loosely from his face.

“Miep,” says Jan as he pours.

“Only a taste,” his wife instructs softly.

“And now Miss Frank,” Jan announces with a flourish that makes Anne uncomfortable. She is the guest of honor here simply for surviving the KZs. That has been her only accomplishment: to continue breathing despite what that cost her. She watches the honey-gold of the brandy pour from the bottle. To accommodate the electricity shortages in Amsterdam, Miep has lit a paraffin candle at the center of the table. Jan allows himself a moderate splash before sitting. And then a silence takes hold. The last of the sunlight has fled, and a purpled dark spreads. Pim lingers over the silence, then hoists his tumbler, managing to speak the only word left to him. “L’chaim,” he toasts.

To life.

A few minutes later, he is on his way to the toilet when he collapses. A dull thud in the corridor, and Miep is calling, “Anne! Anne, your father!”

The doctor who arrives an hour later is a Dutchman known to Miep for his reputation as one who had provided medicine for onderduikers who’d fallen ill during the occupation. He has the troubled face of a ragged old lion. Miep and Jan have managed to haul Pim up from the floor and have carried him to the long velveteen sofa. “Help me with his shirt, please,” the doctor instructs Miep. And Anne sees how thin, how transparently birdlike Pim’s chest has become. She thinks she might see his beating heart, a bluish tint beneath his ribs. Her father’s eyes are open, but he is staring blindly up at the ceiling as the doctor jumps the bell of his stethoscope about as if playing a game of checkers.

Suddenly Anne can’t breathe. A ferocious terror is burning the oxygen from the room, and she must get out. She must flee to the street, where a greasy white light glows from a lone streetlamp. Her hands are clenched, her body is clenched, she is breathing in and out, fighting the urge to run until she drops. So she squats against the wall of the building, closing herself up in a ball.

“You must understand that I can’t tell him,” she says.

Can’t you? Margot is beside her in her dirty Lager rags, wearing the pair of wooden clogs she was issued.

“Don’t you see? He’s so fragile. If I tell him,” Anne says, “if I tell him what I did, it could kill him. His heart might give out.”

But Margot vanishes when the door to the flat opens. The doctor trudges out onto the sidewalk, and Anne hurries to her feet.

“How is he?”

In reply the doctor proffers a thick frown. Is this the same face he wears whether the news is good or bad? “Your father should be fine,” he informs her grimly.

“But. What happened?”

“What happened?” A shrug as the man mounts his rickety Locomotief bicycle.

“Was it his heart?”