Annelies полностью

“I know it’s not much.” He shrugs at the truth. “I started coming here when my pap went on a bender. Or just when I kinda needed to get away from everything.” Lighting one of the paraffin candles with a match, he then lights a cigarette. “So are you just gonna stand there?” he asks, and blows out smoke.

“I’m not going to do it with you,” she assures him flatly.

Raaf sniffs. “Do what?”

“You know what.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Raaf says simply. “So you still haven’t come in,” he points out.

•   •   •

Lying with her head resting on Raaf’s chest, gripping his body like this, she feels as if she is holding on to a lifesaver in the middle of a flood. She listens to the slow bellows of his breathing. Listens to the unembarrassed thump of his heart. There are two buttons at the back of her blouse, just two below the neck. She feels him absently tug at the top button till it comes loose. One button and then the second.

“What are you doing?” she wants to know.

“Nothing.”

“No, that’s not true. You are very definitely doing something.”

“I just want to feel your skin, that’s all.”

“You can feel the skin on my arm,” she informs him, but doesn’t complain any further when he continues to stroke the small patch of bare skin on her back.

“So it was two whole years?”

Anne does not move. She opens her eyes and glares at a crack in the plaster wall. “Was what two whole years?”

“You hid out from the moffen for two years.”

“Did I say that?”

“I don’t think I made it up.”

“It was twenty-five months,” Anne says without emotion. “Until the Grüne Polizei came.”

“And you know who did it?” he wonders. “Who tipped ’em off?”

Anne lifts her head to look at him. To examine his face. His expression is blank.

“Why are you asking these questions?”

“I dunno. You ask me stuff all the time.”

A blink before she lowers her head back to his chest. “There are theories,” is all she tells him. She is surprised at how painful it is to discuss the subject. She is surprised that she feels not just the anger of the betrayed but also the shame of a victim. She rolls over on her elbow and gazes at Raaf’s face. He’s never been too curious before about what happened or how she survived the war. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t really want to know,” he answers. “I’m just trying to . . . to, I don’t know. Be closer to you. To find out what you’re thinking. It’s not easy. I’m sorry I ever opened my trap,” he says, and huffs out a sigh.

She looks at him, then lowers her head to his shoulder. “No. I’m sorry. I’m happy that you want to know more about me. I am. There are just some subjects . . . It’s hard for me,” she says.

The boy says nothing for a moment. And then when he speaks again, his voice is numb. “She starved,” he says.

Anne raises her eyes.

“My mam. That’s how she died. She starved.” For a moment the boy holds on to a deep silence, then shakes his head. “It was like she shrank. Her body was just a bunch of sticks, except her belly was all bloated up. And her eyes,” he says, “they looked like they might pop out of her head.”

Anne feels her heart contract. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeats. Tears heat her eyes. She can feel his grief. She can feel the great weight of sadness he must carry, because she feels it herself. But her sadness is also bitter. She has refused to picture this moment of her own mother’s death before, but now she sees it. The fragile body of sticks. The swollen belly, flesh tight against the bone. The popping eyes. And her mother’s face.

The tears stain her cheek. She does not wipe them away. She feels the boy gently stroke the patch of bare skin at the base of her neck. She breathes in and out. Pigeons coo, a strange, hushed lullaby. An ersatz peace of a kind descends. More physical than spiritual, like a blanket for a pleasantly sleepy dip in the temperature. Anne presses her ear closer to his chest. He smells of toasted shag, of maleness. A heaviness that she can cling to. The beat of his heart, slowly descending into her subconscious, as her eyes drift shut. . . .

•   •   •

And then she is bolting upright on Raaf’s lumpy mattress, smelling the stink of pigeon shit. Her skin is chilled, and a heavy shiver weakens her body. The light is drifting toward dusk as a drizzle of rain patters through the hole in the ceiling.

“Raaf!” She punches him in the shoulder with her balled-up fist, as hard as she can, and he bolts up beside her in confusion.

“Oww! What? What is it?”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” she answers furiously, wiping her eyes. “The sun is setting. The Sabbath’s about to start, and you let me fall asleep! My father’s going to be livid!”

•   •   •

The cloudy afternoon sky has given way to a leaden gray twilight, wet with rain. She is out of breath when she reaches the Herengracht, bangs in the front door, her clothes damp, her hair in wet ringlets on her brow as she stows her bicycle in the foyer. “Pim?” she calls, but what she finds is a shadow nested in the Viennese wingback.

“Hello?” she tries.