Annelies полностью

“You know why,” Anne insists.

Anne. Now it’s Margot’s turn to shake her head. Her voice is meant to sound comforting, at least as comforting as the dead can manage. I was not at all interested in Peter in that way. I told you that.

“I didn’t believe you.”

Well. Perhaps at first I was disappointed, in a minor way, when I saw the direction in which his interests were roaming. But really, he was simply not my kind of boy. Nor was he your kind of boy. The only difference was, I was old enough to realize it, while you, she says, you were so desperately romantic.

“And lonely,” Anne tells her.

Well. You didn’t have to be. I was there. Pim was there. Mummy was there. If you were lonely, it must have been your choice.

“No, you don’t understand.”

Don’t I?

“I’m not like you, Margot. I’m not like Mummy, or even Pim. I need something more in my life.”

More? Margot asks. She blinks through the lenses of her spectacles. Like what, Anne? What more do you need that none of us could supply?

Anne shakes her head. “I can’t explain.”

Oh. You mean sex.

“You don’t have to be so smug, Margot. And no, I don’t mean sex. Really, I can’t explain it.”

Her sister shrugs. If you can’t explain it, then how can it be so important?

The cat inserts a pause between them as he pounces on the cigarette pack left on the hardwood planking, but it’s enough. Margot has not waited to hear Anne’s reply and has dissolved into the gray daylight, leaving Anne with a hard itch of discontent. Or maybe it is this place. The attic. Their hiding place. The Achterhuis. Perhaps this hard itch is the only part of her former self she has recovered. The need to be something more. She had suffered so long from a secret loneliness, even surrounded by her chattering friends in the school yard, even as she laughed at jokes and flirted with the boys; there was an emptiness that she could never fill. And when they had slipped into hiding, the emptiness had followed her. Peter had been there for that. At least at first. In the small space in which they were trapped, his roughneck physique seemed manly. His boyish energy alluring. But then something changed. She changed. The satisfaction that Peter provided thinned. She realized he would never truly understand her and that, most likely, he didn’t really wish to try. So what was left to her, trapped in this cramped and drab annex? She found that when she sat down in front of a clean page with her fountain pen in her hand, the emptiness was filled.

A sigh rustles through the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside as a burst of sunshine burns through the clouds. She watches the windowpanes brighten.

Tuschinski Theater

Reguliersbreestraat 26-34

Amsterdam-Centrum

The gorgeous deco towers are still standing. The Tuschinski Theater was a favorite before the war. Pim used to take them all to the matinees on Sunday afternoons and then to the Japanese tearoom on the premises for green-tea ice cream. Once on Pim’s birthday, Mr. Tuschinski himself stopped by just to say mazel tov. When the moffen came, they called the place the Tivoli and showed anti-Semitic propaganda. But since the liberation, the Tuschinski name has been restored, though Anne heard from Pim that Mr. Tuschinski and his whole family went up the chimneys of the Kremas.

Inside, the palatial Grote Zaal is nicknamed the “Plum Cake,” and even though the war has taken its toll on maintenance, it still looks rather scrumptious. The plush velvet, the confectionary swirls of the bric-a-brac. In the rear of the auditorium, Griet has just passed Anne a cigarette, but she draws a puff slowly, totally captivated by the screen as an American newsreel trumpets into the space. “This is New York,” a narrator declares as an aerial view of soaring building spires circles in the reflection of Anne’s eyes. “The greatest city the world has known!”