Her father leaps to his feet. “I will not have this!” he shouts, his face bleaching. “Don’t you dare say such a thing!”
“She bore you two children. She made a home for us all. Even in a cramped hideout above a dirty warehouse, she made a home for us, and this is how you repay her? This is how you keep her memory? By chasing another man’s wife?” Anne feels a surge of elation, as if provoking her father has proved that Pim is not so invulnerable to his own anger.
“Your mother and I,” he breathes, and then he must swallow a heavy rock, blinking at the sharp tears in his eyes. “Your mother and I had a long and very loving relationship. No matter what you think, Anne. No matter what you’ve so precociously surmised. I did everything I could to make her happy, and she did the same for me. In fact, if you recall, it wasn’t me who criticized her. It wasn’t me who always had a sharp tongue in his head for your mother. It was her younger daughter who so often left her crying,” he says. “It wasn’t me who complained so constantly and so vociferously about being so very misunderstood. It wasn’t me who sought no value in your mother’s solace—it was Annelies Marie Frank! How did you put it?” he demands suddenly of the air. “Let me see—it was something like, ‘She means nothing to me. I don’t have a mother! I must learn to mother myself!’”
Anne glares. A bright electric shock of realization has pulsed through her body at what Pim, in his anger, has just let slip. “How,” she asks, “do you know that?”
“How do I know what?” her father demands, still quivering with anger.
“How do you know,” she asks thickly, “how I put anything?”
And now a thin sliver of alarm inserts itself into her father’s jagged expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” Anne says.
“I think I’ve had enough. Enough accusations from my own daughter for one evening.”
“You read it,” Anne says with a heated mixture of indignity and mortification. “You read my diary. Otherwise how could you have known?”
Pim’s mouth closes and is drawn into a straight line.
“When?” she demands. “I put it in your briefcase. For safekeeping. You promised me that no one would dare touch it there. I remember! But what you meant to say was no one but you.”
Pim still has nothing to say. Only stares painfully.
And then an even more horrible thought strikes her. “Did you show it to Mummy, too?” she asks darkly. “Did she read it?”
“No.” Her father speaks the single word.
“No? Are you sure? Perhaps you passed it around? Passed it around to the van Pelses? To that old fart Pfeffer? God, they were all such snoops, weren’t they? Always prying. I bet they had such a good laugh at my expense. The tragic unbosoming of a know-it-all adolescent!”
“No, Anne,” Pim protests. “No one else read a word. I can assure you of that. No one else.”
“No one else but my father.”
Pim swallows. His hands are squeezed into fists. His eyes wet.
And then suddenly, “Anne,” he whispers desperately, but before he can say another word, the front door to the flat opens and in come Miep and Jan, home from their evening walk. They are chatting and smiling until they freeze at the threshold of their own home, gazing in at the expressions of father and daughter. Miep sums it up quickly. “We’re interrupting,” she declares apologetically. But Pim steps forward, suddenly relieved.
“No,” he corrects her. “No you’re not. Not at all. Excuse me,” he says, and yanks his fedora and raincoat from the rack. “I think I’m in need of some exercise.” And with that he bolts from the flat.
1945
Konzentrationslager (KL)
BERGEN-BELSEN
Kleines Frauenlager
The Lüneburg Heath
THE GERMAN REICH
Final months of the war
