Anne stares back at him. “You’re a gentile,” she says, “and I’m Jewish.” She says this and waits for his response. Waits to judge his response. But all he gives her is a lazy exhale. “That doesn’t mean something to you?” she must demand.
“Well. My pap always said Jews are bloodsuckers. But my pap hated everybody. Me? I don’t care if you’re from the moon. I just want to touch your face.”
Anne breathes in and then breathes out. The boy is so close to her. The maleness of him. She feels tension in the simple proximity of their bodies. She can smell his bitter sweat. Is it guilt that stings her? Margot is never going to stand so close to a rough-edged boy like this, with nothing but a heartbeat between them. Anne feels her attraction as if it’s a type of pain.
“That’s all you want?” she asks. “Just to touch my face?”
The boy’s expression bends as he turns his head, unsure if he is being baited. She can see the hurt in his eyes. The uncertainty.
“Well, then,” Anne prompts. “I’m standing here.”
And now the boy straightens. His posture perks up, but his eyes are still hunted. “You mean . . .
The carillon of the Westertoren chimes the quarter hour. The boy glances around, but the bustling Dutch citizenry are more interested in their own business than in how close together the two of them are standing. So he takes another step forward. She watches his hand rise and notices the dirt under his fingernails, but then she looks into his face as, ever so gingerly, his fingertips brush the skin of her cheek. It’s just a whisper of a touch, but she feels it root her to the spot. For an instant the pain in his eyes has lifted. She swallows.
“Can I do it again?” he asks, but doesn’t really wait for an answer. His fingers rise, and he strokes her cheek with a sudden intimacy that causes her heart to clench. Her lips part and her body moves, and in the next instance she seizes him, smothers her mouth against his. It is not a kiss, it’s an attack. She wants to devour him at a single gulp. She snatches his hair as if she might rip it out. She wants to inhale him. She wants so much more than Peter’s wet mouth could ever have offered her in the attic of the Achterhuis. She wants the boy’s breath. She wants his blood. And when she bites his lip, she tastes it.
He yelps painfully as he breaks away from her. His eyes blinking with shock, he wipes his lips and glares at the stain of blood and lipstick on his fingers without comprehension. Anne gives him a wild gaze, her eyes flooding with tears, as she mounts her bicycle and launches her frantic escape.
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
When she reaches the doors of her father’s building, she is out of breath, still wiping away the tears as she rolls her bicycle into the warehouse. The air is thick with coriander, and a powdery haze hangs in the heavy sunlight. The men ignore her, too busy to bother with hellos, which is a relief. She climbs the steep stairs slowly and then pauses outside the office door, trying to compose herself. Wipes the lipstick onto a handkerchief, trying to compose a face to wear. She was once well known among her friends for her expressions of careless insouciance. But now her heart is a deep drumbeat in her chest, and she feels a terrible thrum of rage and hunger. She breathes in, she breathes out, her eyes shut tight, trying to suppress the painful surge of desire that she tastes in her mouth like the tang of the boy’s blood.
“Sorry I’m late,” she announces, breezing into the front room, her voice a panic of nonchalance. Miep looks up at her with blank anxiety.
“Late? Oh,” says Miep, and then she shakes her head dismissively. “I hadn’t even noticed. I think Bep has a stack of correspondence that needs filing.”
Anne looks up, slips her book sack from her shoulder. Bep is watching her nervously from the opposite desk, then staples a selection of papers together with a quick bang.
“Where is everybody?” Anne wants to know. She noticed that her father’s office door was closed when she climbed the steps from the warehouse, but it meant nothing. Pim has people in the private office all the time. Salesmen, advertising-agency people, spice distributors, a steady flow of municipal functionaries, all with their own particular rubber stamps that require inking. But now Anne wonders, “Where is Mr. Kugler? Where is Mr. Kleiman?”
A half glance from Miep. “They’re in your papa’s office.”
Something about the sound of this is odd. The small intimacy softening Miep’s voice. In the flat they share, Miep calls Pim by his given name, “Otto,” but at the office it is always and only “Mr. Frank.” Now it’s suddenly “in your