Annelies полностью

Anne swallows. But she nods again, though she knows quite well that she is not ready. A few minutes pass until her father slows and removes a key from his coat pocket. Anne steps to the edge of the pedestrian walk and stops. Facing the set of battered and dingy wooden doors, her feet stick to the brick pavement. There is nothing extraordinary about the face of Prinsengracht 263. It is modest, unembellished. The address placard is still in place. The names of the businesses are stenciled on one of the warehouse doors in block letters. A board has been tacked over the hole that was kicked in by burglars while they were still in hiding.

The restored carillon of the Westertoren chimes clearly. The same clang that punctuated their days in hiding. She had come to rely on them for their continuity, until the Germans removed the bells and melted them down for their bronze. On the sunny morning of their arrest, the belfry was silent as they were loaded into the rear of a dark green police lorry. No clarion chime as eight fugitive onderduikers were hauled away. The Gestapo had placed a bounty on Jews in hiding. Seven and a half guilders a head, half a week’s pay for most Dutch workers, though Miep says that by the war’s end the bounty had risen to as high as forty a head, paid to anyone willing to repeat a rumor or betray a secret. Anne wonders, rather distantly, about who betrayed them. How much they were paid? Was it someone they knew? Before this moment their betrayal had felt fated to her, part of an inescapable outcome. This is the first time she has wondered about a person with motives. But then her mind jumps, as it often does now, as her father has opened the door to the high office stairwell and is peering with concern in her direction. “Anneken?”

Anne stares at the impossibly steep steps leading upward from the open door and then asks a question that feels both terrible and matter-of-fact. “When you thought I was dead, Pim, were you relieved?”

Her father flinches as if she has struck him in the face. “Anne,” he manages to say. She is pleased to have hurt him, as if inflicting this wound can in a small way compensate for all the wounds she herself has suffered.

“I think you must have been a little relieved. I know I was never easy. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if Margot had lived instead?”

Her father continues to stare at her with blank alarm. “Anne, that you could say such a thing.”

But Margot, too, seems to be interested in an answer to Anne’s question, for she has appeared beside the open door, dressed in the pastel blue shift that she so often wore during their years in the hiding place. Mummy had taken it in so that Margot could fit into it, which made Anne jealous, because everyone knew that particular shade of pastel blue looked much better on her than on her sister. She tries to forgive Margot for wearing it now. “Isn’t it true, Pim?” she asks.

Her father advances on her. For a moment he glowers, gripping his briefcase, and then his finger pokes the air sharply. “Never say this,” he commands, his eyes flooded by a terrified fury. “You must never ask such a question again. Do you understand me, Anne? Never.”

Anne gazes back at him. She feels empty. Her father’s anger sags, and his eyes are awash with pity. He grips her tightly enough to squeeze the air from her, and slowly she returns the embrace. He smells of a dab of cologne. She can feel the light stubble on his cheek, after he’d shaved with a dull razor blade. She can feel his bones through his coat. Margot maintains her questioning gaze, asking Anne when she will tell him the truth.

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