Annelies полностью

Margot and Anne, that is. Find one beautiful thing. It was a day when the rain had churned the Women’s Camp in Birkenau into a quagmire. Soaking wet, they’d been lugging chunks of broken cement on a work detail, and when Anne fell, the Kapo had slashed her viciously with a hard rubber truncheon. Every day find one beautiful thing, her mother told them. Margot approached it like a lesson to learn. Assignment: Find one beautiful thing. But Anne tied her last knot of hope around her mother’s words. And that night in the barracks, she gazed at her skin, purpling from the Kapo’s blows, and found beauty in the colors, like a bouquet of violets.

Find one beautiful thing every day, and they would survive even Birkenau.

Except they didn’t survive. Only Anne is alive.

Her hair is growing back so thickly; it already hangs down onto her neck. In the mirror she can see that she is dressed not in lice-ridden camp rags but as a human being. The red cloth coat only slightly frayed at the hem. A skirt, a blouse. Even undergarments beneath. Actual undergarments. A shadow passes across the mirror’s glass. Margot is peering over her shoulder in the reflection. Even after her death, her sister’s cough is deep and corrupting. She gazes out from the glass, dressed as she was the last time Pim photographed them in hiding, wearing her ivory knit sweater with the short sleeves that Bep had given her and the green porcelain barrette she received from Mummy on her birthday clipped in her hair.

You have a spot on the collar of your blouse, her sister is compelled to comment.

Anne frowns. Absently rubs her thumb over the pale stain on the material. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

So you don’t mind looking like a ragamuffin?

“It’s a spot. It doesn’t matter.”

No? You don’t think so? You don’t recall that the Nazis said Jews were slovenly?

“So now my spot is a mark against the Jews? It’s a bleach stain.”

I’m simply saying that as they judge one, they judge all.

“That’s Mummy talking,” Anne points out, and then glares deeply into her sister’s reflection. “Maybe it should have been you,” she whispers.

Margot gazes back from the thinness of the mirrored glass.

“I see the way people look at me,” Anne breathes. “Those glances over my shoulder to the empty spot where you should be standing. You wanted to be a nurse, Margot. You wanted to deliver babies in Palestine. What am I doing with a future?” she asks, but no answer is forthcoming. Margot has vanished from the mirror’s surface as their father knocks politely on the door.

“Anne? May I?”

“Yes, Pim,” she answers, and gazes at her father’s reflection that has replaced Margot’s. He’s wearing his wide-brimmed fedora raked at an angle, the brim shadowing his eyes. After his liberation from Auschwitz, her father resembles a poor artifact of himself. He wears a putty-colored raincoat that hangs like a sack. His mustache and the fringe of hair around his ears are well barbered but have lost most of their color. He stares into the mirror’s reflection, catching Anne’s eye until she turns away from him, feeling oddly embarrassed.

“So,” he begins with a vigorous note inserted into his voice. “Are we ready to go to work?” Work. Over the gate to Auschwitz, there was a legend wrought in iron: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work Will Make You Free. But this is not bloodied-knuckle slave labor she is headed for. Not digging trenches in the muck or hauling backbreaking stones. It’s freedom through office work. Pecking out words on Miep’s typewriter. Sorting index cards. Shifting papers into files at the Prinsengracht office, and all the while the upper floors of the annex, which housed them in secret for so long, concealed them from the moffen enemy for more than two years, sit vacant. Their hiding place, once the nave of their existence, now just empty space. She thinks of the lumpy cot where she slept, the wobbly table where she wrote. Her picture collection plastered across the walls—Shirley Temple, Joyce Vanderveen, Ginger Rogers—all part of their secret fortress above the spice warehouse. It often felt like a prison while she was in it, a young girl in love with glamour and talk. With boys and biking, swimming and skating. With freedom and sunlight.

“I’ve lost everything, Pim. Everything there is to lose.”

An airless beat separates them.