Annelies полностью

She does not want to cry in front of Pim or Kugler, so she holds back till she can shut herself up in the WC, where she releases a knotted sob and allows the tears to flow. She’s still losing people. Will that ever stop? Will she ever be able to truly count on someone’s love again? Count on people’s devotion without the fear of losing them? Without fear of their abandoning her, because even death is a kind of abandonment. How can she ever trust her own life not to crush her?

17 FORGIVENESS

Shouldn’t I, who want to be good and kind, forgive them first?

—Anne Frank,from her diary, 19 January 1944

From where do we know that it is cruel to not forgive?

—The Talmud, Bava Kamma 8:7

1946

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Amsterdam-Centrum

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

In the afternoons after school, Anne slips through the hidden door behind the bookcase to the confines of their former hiding place. Closing the door behind her, she feels as if she is shutting out the world. Shutting out the present. Up in the attic, she sits on the floor holding le chat Mouschi in her lap. They have cut a deal, she and he. Monsieur le chat Mouschi. She has cultivated his cooperation with treats of fish skin and bits of tinned tuna, and he is now a purring ball of fur for her to pet.

She breathes in and out. Once, she felt this place to be a sanctuary, but now its emptiness settles over her like the quiet storm of dust drifting in the sunlight through the window glass. The leaves flutter on the branches of the old horse chestnut. She has organized a pack of cigarettes from her father’s desk and lights one with the scratch of a wooden match. Sweet Caporals supplied by the Canadian troops who liberated the city. A superior North American product. Before the war Holland was famous for the rich quality of the tobacco imported from its colonies, but now the dark brown shag of East Indian yield has been replaced by weak, fast-burning ersatz brands, so the punch of the genuine tobacco makes Anne’s head swim. Canadian cigarette cards feature the members of the English royal family. The king, the queen, the princesses. Once those might have gone up on her wall, but now they simply go into the rubbish bin. She inhales a rush of smoke and feels it settle inside her. Once again they are depending on Miep, who has maintained her contacts in the Jordaan for essentials. Dried fish, Canadian cigarettes, potatoes, tinned meats and oats, plums and string beans, malt coffee, sugar surrogate, and even the occasional gristly beefsteak from a cooperative butcher.

Anne expels smoke and watches it waft like a thin ghost across the empty room.

Peter.

He was older than Anne but younger than Margot. Tall and solid, with a broad face and densely curly hair that often defied his comb. For a moment she remembers the feel of his body sitting beside her on the divan, up here in the seclusion of the loft. He was very male. So heavy with his strength, the inadvertent strength of his arm, its weight slung across her shoulder. At the time she’d had many girlish thoughts about the depth of his soul. On the outside he would have been a roughneck boy from Osnabrück, better at fighting than at talking. No religion beyond the work of his hands. Easily bored to laziness, ridiculous in his excuses, and absurdly morbid in his obsessions with imaginary diseases. Look at my tongue. Isn’t it a strange color? But he also possessed a sweet, curious gaze that could settle on Anne with its guileless yearning. He had a good mind; she’d been so sure of it, but maybe that was more her desire than the truth. He preferred heavy work to too much thinking, so Anne had simply inserted the deep thoughts into his head for him. His silence she had taken for buried intensity. But really it was just the silence of a boy with nothing more to say. He was at ease with her. She listened to him when he jabbered on authoritatively, as boys do, or vented steam over his father’s harsh disapproval. And with her head resting against his chest, she counted the beats of his heart after he’d run out of words, here in the gray attic.

Now she sits with his cat instead, for Peter van Pels is far beyond her touch.

I’m sure that he knew you still cared for him, she hears Margot say.

“Are you?” Anne shakes her head. She doesn’t look at her sister’s face but only hugs the cat. “I’m not.” The cat struggles, suddenly uncomfortable in her arms. She must be gripping him too tightly. She does not attempt to calm him but lets him bound away. “I wasn’t always very kind to him,” Anne confesses, breathing in smoke from the smoldering Caporal she picks up from a red Bakelite ashtray.

You outgrew him, Margot points out, and Anne does not disagree.

“I always worried that it was painful for you.”

For me? Margot sits on her heels, wearing a floral-print dress and the sweater Mummy had knit from cashmere wool. Why for me?