Stepping into the hallway, she approaches the room to the left of the stairs. Hand on the doorknob, she shuts her eyes as she opens it. With her eyes closed, she can see it as it was. The mash-up of furnishings. The patchwork curtains that Pim and she had sewn by hand. The worn throw rug. This was the communal living room during the day and the bedroom for Mummy and Pim at night. For Margot, too, after the great tooth yanker Pfeffer arrived to steal her sister’s bed and force her to sleep on a folding cot. On one side stood their mother’s bed with the pale cream crocheted throw under the heavy walnut shelving. Mummy always kept her shoes under the bed, and Anne would have to crawl under to fetch one when it was accidentally kicked back too far. After Mummy’s bed came the black stovepipe, followed by the table near the window with the embroidered cloth and mismatched chairs. And then came the wobbly old bed where Pim slept, its brass reddened with tarnish. When the English bombers arrived, Anne would run to Pim’s bed in terror, a child in search of sanctuary. Never to Mummy’s bed. She can see Mummy now in her mind’s eye, arranging the bedclothes in the morning, her pine-green cardigan threadbare at the elbows, her hair dulled by wisps of gray pinned into a bun at the back of her head. Anne feels a surge of joy at the memory, but a joy contaminated by loss and guilt. How blind she was to her mother’s true courage and love. How foolish she was to have wasted so much time arguing. She had written such terrible, critical things in her diary in anger but had never thought to ask for Mummy’s forgiveness, not even in Birkenau. In Birkenau it was hard for her to think of forgiveness, only survival. If only she had the chance now to open her eyes and find Mummy looking back at her.
But when Anne’s eyes open, no one is there. There is nothing left. Only unswept floorboards, peeling paint on the window frames. She can hear the mice skittering away from her intrusion. Gloom drapes the room. The rags she and Pim had patched together those first days in hiding still shroud the windows. With a sweep she pulls them down, permitting the daylight to penetrate the room for the first time in years. She lets them fall to the floor and brushes off her hands.
The door to the next room stands open. This was her room. The room she shared with the eighth member of their household of onderduikers: le grand dentiste Pfeffer. Two lumpy beds, a meter apart, hers extended by a chair so her feet wouldn’t stick out. A hook on the back of the door for her robe and nightclothes. A chair and a narrow wooden desk, and oh, how she had battled with that stuffy old bag Pfeffer for the privilege of that desk. It was one of the ongoing wars of the household. A battle so frustrating that she cannot seem to spare sympathy for Mr. Pfeffer’s shadow in the crowd of dead memories that trail her. She thinks of the smirk of disapproval on the old fart’s face and wants only to smack it away. When he wasn’t shushing her or criticizing her, he was commandeering her precious desk space for his so very essential “work,” the study of the Spanish language. Anne can still see him, his trousers yanked up to his chest, wearing a red dressing jacket and black patent-leather slippers, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose as he frowned, hunched over his orange-and-white-striped Spanish grammar
But stepping into the narrow oblong space, she feels tears chilling her cheeks. The wallpaper is brown with water stains, and dust floats in the light that penetrates the filmy windows. In hiding she had pasted her postcard collection on the wall alongside the pictures of film stars she’d scissored out from issues of