Annelies полностью

After classes are dismissed, she initiates a shoving match by the bike shed with one of the other girls, a girl named Clare Buskirk, that scrap of carrion. But before it escalates, the normally all-too-jovial nature and health teacher, Mrs. Peerboom, comes galloping over to separate the combatants, her face two shades redder than a beet. “Goeie hemel!” she calls out righteously, with deep astonishment. “This is indecent. You’re supposed to be ladies!”

“She’ll never be a lady, Mrs. Peerboom,” Clare spits, her ugly little face on permanent display. “She’s just a Jewess.”

“And you’re just a pile of shit!” Anne shouts back.

“Quiet!” Mrs. Peerboom barks. “Now be on your way, both of you, unless you want to explain yourself to the headmistress.”

Anne goes silent, but her hatred is still loud in her ears. “I should have bashed her in the mouth,” she tells Griet later, sharing a cigarette behind the school. “I should have squashed her like a bug.”

But Griet is preoccupied, it seems. She is busy looking off in another direction.

“What?” Anne wants to know.

“What?”

“You’re barely listening to me.”

A shrug as Griet frowns at the cigarette between her fingers. “I have to tell you something.”

Anne feels a sharp and immediate pinch of anxiety in her belly but tries to hide it with her impatience. “Tell me? Tell me what?”

“I don’t want to say it.”

“Tell me, Griet,” Anne now commands. “You can’t just announce that you have something to say and then say nothing.”

Griet raises her eyes and stares.

“Griet?”

“I’m leaving school,” the girl says.

Anne feels another pinch. “What? That’s ridiculous.”

“Why? You’re always saying that it’s such a waste of time.”

“For me, not for you,” Anne answers, trying to make a joke. “You need educating, lieveling,” she says, rubbing Griet’s mop of curls.

Griet smiles faintly and without mirth. “I’m getting married,” she says.

Anne swallows. Repeats the word. “Married.”

“Yep.”

“Married,” Anne repeats again, feeling a buzz of anger return. “To whom?”

“To ‘whom’? To ‘whom’ do you think, Anne?”

“I don’t know.” Plucking the cigarette from Griet’s fingers, she says, “Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the boys you’re doing it with.”

Griet’s mouth hardens. “That’s a shitty thing to say.”

“Sorry,” Anne says, without meaning it. “I guess you just took me by surprise. So it’s the Canadian?”

“His name is Albert.”

“Did he get you pregnant?”

“No. He just asked me, and I said yes. Why are you being so nasty? I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Griet mutters to herself, standing and snatching up her book satchel. “I knew you’d react like this.”

And suddenly Anne feels a bleak stab of remorse. “Griet. I’m sorry,” she says, meaning it this time, but too late. Griet is already retrieving her bicycle.

“Griet, please.”

The girl stops, wiping away tears but refusing to look in Anne’s direction. “Good-bye, Anne,” is all she says. Then she mounts her bike and pushes off into the street. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

Dejected, Anne arrives at the bookshop, only to find no sign of Mr. Nussbaum. The door is bolted, shades drawn. She knocks tentatively and can hear Lapjes meowing like a big grump on the other side, but no Mr. Nussbaum. No note on the door, only the faint scour marks and chipped-paint reminder of the anonymous request for Jews to perish.

So now she is riding her bike, going nowhere, trailing the canals to let her mind drain to empty. No thought, no ambition, no feeling. But when she stops near a short metal bridgework to light a cigarette, it’s Bep she spies stepping out of a sadly dilapidated old canal pub. Bep! She wants to call out the girl’s name. She wants to run to her and hug her tightly. She wants to pour out the surge of affection she feels, but some internal drag of caution stops her. She thinks of what Kugler told her. That Bep could not tolerate the burden of Anne’s friendship.

Bep buttons her jacket in the doorway and steps away. Anne considers following her, but then there’s someone else stepping out of the pub. A lean-eyed girl wearing a kerchief over her short, stubby hair. She’s gained a hard angle to her face since the time Anne spotted her on a tram on the arm of a mof soldier. And when she catches Anne’s glare for an instant from across the cobblestones, all she offers is a hard blink before she turns in the opposite direction from Bep and walks away, head down.

“That’s Bep’s sister,” Anne says to Margot, who is standing beside her in her Lager rags, her face livid with sores.

Really? Are you sure?

“Yes, I’m sure. You think I’m blind? That’s Nelli.”

She looked so broken, Margot observes. Poor thing.

“Poor thing? You expect me to have sympathy for her?”

Don’t you?

“She was a bitch, Margot. A mof prostitute.”