Annelies полностью

Once these pictures afforded Anne comfort, but now they mean nothing. She turns to the empty spot where her writing desk once stood. A rickety wooden table with a shelf and a gooseneck lamp. She recalls the sound of the chair scuffing the floor as she tucked her knees under the desk. Recalls the hard grain of the wood beneath her paper. Recalls how the desk wobbled slightly as she leaned her elbow on it. But mostly she recalls the deeply nurturing satisfaction she felt as she wrote, netted by the yellow lamp glow. The scratching of the nib of her fountain pen. The scrambling release to spill herself onto the paper.

A floorboard creaks, and she’s back in her empty present. It’s Pim. He steps up beside her, and his arm encompasses her shoulder. For a moment she permits this false comfort.

“Anneke,” he says, as if he’s about to speak some difficult words, some disclosure of memory. “There’s something. Something I should tell you,” he begins, but whatever it is, she doesn’t want to hear it. The weight of his arm is confining, and she breaks away. Wipes her eyes. The next door leads to the washroom and the delft-blue commode in the WC. The porcelain sink with its brass taps still shiny from use. The large mirror hangs above it. She avoids its dark reflection and climbs the tall steps to the next floor, listening to the sound of her heels on the wooden steps, and enters the kitchen. There’s a deep sink with a battered copper bottom and a goose-neck faucet. A long countertop below a few tiers of shelving.

When her father appears on the threshold, she blinks wildly at him, then turns away. “Do you remember the strawberries, Pim?” she asks, her voice strained by a manic joy over the memory.

“Yes,” he replies quietly.

“Bushels of strawberries.” How they all crowded the dining-room table, laughing as they cleaned piles of vivid red fruit, popping the fresh sweetness into their mouths. “I can almost smell them,” she says, and feels herself smile. But then the smile simply floats away from her.

At night this room was where the van Pelses slept. Peter’s parents, Hermann and Auguste. Putti and Kerli. He was a businessman, Mr. van P., but there was something rough about him, like unvarnished wood. He had a talent, though. He could name any spice, no matter how exotic, blindfolded, with only a whiff. And what can be said about Auguste van Pels? She liked to flirt and argue, both. Always ready to praise Pim’s gentlemanly behavior and to go at it with Mummy about whose linen was being stained or china chipped. In hiding, she had begged so pitifully to keep her furs when her husband gave them to Miep to sell for food and cigarettes.

A short breeze clatters past the windowpanes. “We found Mrs. van Pels at Belsen,” Anne says, staring at the empty room. “Margot and I.” And for a moment she can see the woman, emaciated, all the happy conniving and farcical self-pity starved out of her. “She did her best to look after us.”

“Well.” Pim nods, his voice dropping into a pit. “For that I am grateful to her.”

“She vanished, though. It was easy to do at Belsen. Do you know what happened to her?” Anne is aware that Pim has written letters, visited many offices. Obtained copies of camp records through the International Red Cross. She knows that he has become the repository for obituaries, but she hasn’t asked for a single detail until now.

“She died,” he tells her, “probably on a forced march to a camp in Bohemia.”

Anne turns her ear to Pim, but not her eyes. “And her husband?”

She hears her father exhale.

“I was with Hermann van Pels in Auschwitz up until his death,” he says dimly. “I tried hard to keep his spirits up, but it was no good. He injured his thumb on a labor Kommando and made the foolish mistake of requesting lighter duty, but really he had already given up by then. The next day a selection claimed him. All I could do was watch as he was marched away toward the Krematorien.”

Anne nods. People who simply gave up. Her fist clenches around the dried bean in her hand. She passes through the next door to the cramped enclave where Peter van Pels made his bed. She is halted for an instant by the emptiness of the spot but then moves toward the ladder leading up to the attic. She can hear the concern in her father’s voice as he calls after her, but she does not care if the floor is unsafe or the ladder too rickety. In the attic there is nothing but dust and rot and debris to greet her. A rusty set of bedsprings, a few forgotten tins of UNOX pea soup, a pile of moldering barrel slats. Then through the dirty window she sees it. The horse chestnut tree. Its broad old branches, as tough as history, listing calmly in the breeze. A heartbeat swells in her breast. She feels, perhaps, that the tree can recognize her. That its leaves are whispering their grief, too.

The noise of Pim’s ascension intrudes behind her. “Anne,” she hears him call, but she simply gazes at the tree’s rustling branches.