“Good morning, child,” the gnädige Mrs. Lipschitz replies with disapproval, a shopping bag looped over her arm and a scowl stamped onto her face as she passes.
“Oh, now I’m really in for it,” Anne predicts with dread when they’re a safe distance away.
“Who was
“
She’s spotted an old fellow with a pushcart across the street. “The town’s most delicious pickle!” he claims, calling out to all who pass. The girls laugh as their pickle halves crunch satisfyingly in their mouths, tasting nutty-sweet from a hint of mace. Anne parts with Lies at the Zuider Amstellaan, indulging a sudden urge to hug her good-bye for no other reason than just because. Lies does not seem to mind.
But traveling up the Deltastraat with her schoolbag on her shoulder, Anne feels the light flush of joy drain from her heart as a stinging loneliness, unbidden and enigmatic, creeps over her. She tries to cheer herself with another crunching bite of her pickle, but she really only wanted it to mask the smell of tobacco on her breath, so she tosses it down a storm drain when she crosses the street. It’s this loneliness that often makes her cry for no reason. If her parents catch her, she pretends to have a stomachache, because they’ll readily fall for that one. Mummy is always saying how sickly she is. What a weak constitution she has, catching everything there is to catch. But really it’s an ache like a hook that threatens to drag her into a dark hole. Maybe it was the puff on the cigarette. The dizziness that seized her and the bitter choking. She stops and hugs a lamppost, her breath rising. This is the Anne she keeps secret from others. The panicked Anne. The helpless Anne on the edge of a lonely void. It would not do for such an Anne to show up in the world. Grabbing her wrist, she thumbs her pulse and tries to calm its speed. Mummy will say she’s just a nervous child, like so many girls, and dose her with valerian. But Anne knows it’s something more than a twitch of girlish nerves. When it arrives in force, she feels as if there’s a black fog coming for her. It’s a fear that has clutched at her since she was too young to define it. A fear that beneath her smiles and jokes and know-it-all antics, she is simply a fraud. That she will live her life with nothing to offer but her shadowboxing frolics and leave not a single lasting mark, because no one will ever truly love her or truly know her, and that her heart is nothing but dust that will return to dust.
She has taught herself tricks when the panic overtakes her. Focusing on the clouds floating above like grand barges. Counting backward from a hundred. Or simply bawling her eyes out. She could easily do that now, but she does not wish to sob in public, so instead she chooses to concentrate on the progress of a long-legged spider up the lamppost. Spinning his silky filament, Mr. Longlegs. Higher and higher on a silvered thread. Anne breathes in deeply and exhales slowly. She swallows hard, and the clutch of dread begins to loose its grip. Her pulse retrieves its usual tempo. Wiping a clammy sheen from her brow, she slings her schoolbag back over her shoulder. Like the clouds above her head, she is on the move, herself again. The emptiness safely locked away.
• • •
The rows of modern sandstone apartment buildings radiate in symmetry from the central star of a tall yellow tower called the Wolkenkrabber. The Cloud Raker. A twelve-story jut of concrete masonry, steel, and glass scraping the cloud bellies as it anchors a commons of well-groomed turf. The afternoon smells of the bread in the ovens of the Blommestein bakery with a trace of pithy river air. This is the Merwedeplein, which Anne likes to call “the Merry.”
Her home is number 37. Four rooms, a kitchen, a bath, and a water closet, plus a room upstairs, which they rent to a bachelor tenant. It’s an airy flat, with a wonderful little platje—their narrow, tar-pebble terrace that’s as good as any lakeshore for sunbathing in the summer. Anne bounds up the stairwell from the doorway and meets her mother, who’s dressed in her housecoat, a look of glum disappointment on her face. She is a stolidly built lady, her mother, with a broad brow and the easy smile of the Holländer family, though she seldom smiles these days.