Annelies полностью

Prinsengracht 263 has suffered through a long war, too. Its paint is peeling in shreds. The sleek layered finish on the doors has been scoured away by five years of Dutch weather and five years of German occupation without paint or varnish for repair. She waits for her father to step into the building first. “They’re all so thrilled to have you here. Really quite thrilled,” he assures her as they climb the leg-breaking Dutch stairs, her father having assumed the role of the Unblinking Optimist. He opens the door, its frosted window stenciled with the word KANTOOR. Anne hears the chairs scrape and the voices rise happily in the light and airy space. Mr. Kugler lopes in from his office on the other side of the alcove. He is a tall man, Mr. Kugler, with sloping shoulders, a jar-shaped head, and valiantly melancholy eyes. He clasps Anne’s hand in both of his and kisses her like an uncle on the cheek. “So wonderful,” he tells her in a heavily heartfelt voice. “So wonderful.” Anne feels oppressed. But then she sees Bep. Bep—Anne’s darling Bep. She is thinner, her face sharper. She offers Anne a short, timid hug and a smile weighted by trepidation, eyes widened by the pair of rounded eyeglasses she still wears. Anne is confused. Is she now so frightful that her friend cringes at the sight of her? Miep’s earnest embrace, on the other hand, is still too dangerous, still too alarmingly maternal, so Anne quickly breaks it off. A dusty light is filtering through the high, unwashed window marked with adhesive patterns from the tape used as protection against flying glass after a bomb blast. The room smells of the cast-iron coal stove in the corner, which, starved of coal, only whispers a rumor of heat.

Throughout this scene Pim has been standing aside clutching his briefcase, his wide-sweep fedora on his head, his baggy raincoat hanging on him as if he were a scarecrow, gently beaming with approval. But he takes his first opportunity to retreat, withdrawing to his private office down the corridor past the coal bin. A moment of awkwardness ensues as Miep sets Anne down at a desk with instructions about how to evaluate piles of papers. Office work after Auschwitz. The dry little details. Anne must struggle to focus. Really, she’d rather be breaking up greasy batteries, sticky with silver oxide. Really, she’d rather be hauling the barracks shit bucket. This is too clean. She repeats the details of her instructions back to Miep, who nods. “Yes. Absolutely correct,” Miep tells her with obvious satisfaction.

Anne catches Bep’s gaze for an instant, but Bep’s eyes quickly drop.

•   •   •

Throughout the afternoon Anne crinkles papers. She wonders if the person who denounced them worked for the company, or even works there still, the name of the betrayer printed on one of these sheets she’s pushing around the desk, secretly mocking her. Mr. So-and-So the wholesale spice trader or Mr. Such-and-Such the freight master. Maybe him, maybe not. She sorts invoices this way and that way and makes a stack here and another one there. But then she gets lost in the blunted light streaking the dirty windowpanes. Unlike the Germans, the Dutch do not believe in shutters. They believe in open windows that speak to the world. Honest citizens have nothing to hide and have no need to shutter their windows. But the grime of occupation has made Dutch windows opaque.

Don’t rush so, you’ll make mistakes, Margot tells her.

Anne ignores her.

I’m sure those invoice copies are not in the proper order.

She hears a long, plaintive mew and looks down at a scrawny black tomcat. “Mouschi!” she exclaims in utter amazement, and scoops up the slinky little thing in her arms with a desperate pulse of need. Peter’s cat alive, alive. “Mouschi,” she purrs against the soft peak of the cat’s ear. “Mouschi, little Mouschi, you sweet, sweet boy . . .”

“For a while one of the salesmen took him home for his wife,” Miep says, and gives the skinny tom a playful rub on his bony cat noggin. “But she sent him back because he wouldn’t stop scratching the upholstery, the little devil.”

“Of course he was scratching the upholstery. He knew that it wasn’t really his home.” Anne squeezes Mouschi against her breast and rests her cheek on his head, but she must be squeezing him too tightly, because the cat suddenly squirms free and pounces to the floor, padding away, leaving Anne with a sickly feeling of loss. Anne thinks of her own little Moortje, her beloved tabby, to whom she was so devoted. But Pim had insisted that she leave Moortje behind when they went into hiding. Anne had sobbed but had done as she was told. And then Anne was so livid when she found that Peter had been permitted to bring his cat to the hiding place that she absolutely hated the boy. But now here is Mouschi again. At least God has deigned to spare a sooty black little mouser.

•   •   •