Annelies полностью

The air is thick with humidity. She ducks out of school and bikes to the secret den in the Transvaal. Bumping across the Skinny Bridge. Sweaty by the time she turns onto the Louis Bothastraat. It’s shocking to see the ruined buildings so overgrown, life insisting on life even in a graveyard.

When she enters Raaf’s castle, she finds that the king is not in residence. Seized by an urge, she begins to search through the blankets, then raises the mattress, searching for some bit of evidence. Some connection to the Grüne Polizei. To betrayal.

Keep looking, Margot prods, appearing in her lice-ridden rags. Her skin ruddy with sores. Keep looking. There must be something here to find. Some evidence.

But Anne’s afraid suddenly. Afraid that she will find something. Some evidence of guilt. Yet she can’t stop searching. If the truth is ugly, then she must know it. She remembers the death’s-head on the SD man’s cap the day they were arrested. Is it still following her? Still watching her? Some nights she dreams it is. The Totenkopf keeping an eye on her. She feels her heart banging away in her chest.

“If you’re digging for treasure, you’re gonna be outta luck,” she hears, and swings around with guilty alarm. Raaf is standing in the threshold, hands stuffed into his pockets.

She whips about but then straightens. Staring. “I was looking for matches,” she claims.

Raaf points to the box of wax tips sitting in plain sight. “Matches,” he says.

Anne frowns at them. Her belly churns, and she takes a step forward. Really, she is beyond pretense. The idea of continuing it is sickening. She will strike him with the truth as hard as she is able. “Your father was an NSBer,” she declares.

The muscles along Raaf’s jaw contract, and he turns his eyes away from her. “Who told you that?”

“It doesn’t matter. But it’s true. He was a Nazi.”

Shaking his head with a frown. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Too bad. Because unless we do, I’m walking out and you won’t see me again.” She stares at him until he meets her eyes.

The boy looks cornered. Trapped. Finally he kicks the concrete with the toe of his shoe and huffs out an answer. “He needed a job,” he says. Then seems to shake his head at the painfulness of what he’s about to confess. “He used to be a real labor-pillar man, ya know? Always for the trade unions. Always. Even when I was just a little kid, he used to take me to the rallies and stick me up on his shoulders so I could see all the flags. Things were easier then. Pap did a lot of metalwork. For a while he was a welder for this shop in the Jordaan, but then he had some sort of trouble with the shop steward. I don’t know what it was—maybe it was the drinking—but however it started, he made a grudge out of it. You were either with Pap or against him. Those were the only two choices he ever gave anybody. Anyhow, he lost his temper, the old dope, and ended up socking the steward in the snoot. Not only did he get the ax, but they put him on a list so he couldn’t get a union job anyplace else. For a long time, he just kicked around. Doing one shit job or another, but there was never much food on the table. Then the war started and the moffen came. I guess he saw a way back to a payday.”

“And my father was forced to hire him.”

Raaf tilts a frown. “He wasn’t a bad worker, Pap,” he insists. “Most of the time. Sure, maybe he drank, but it’s not like he was lazy or stupid just because he’d become a party man.”

“But it must have been so . . . so ‘unbearable’ for him,” Anne says. “So unbearable. A National Socialist working for a Jew?”

“He just needed to make a living,” the boy repeats. “That’s all. It’s not like he wore the uniform or anything, or went around shouting ‘Hou Zee!’ to everybody on the street. He just went to meetings here and there. Why not? They had free beer. And I never heard him complain about working for a Jew.”

“But you said he called the Jews ‘bloodsuckers,’” Anne reminds him. “Those were your words.”

“What are you trying to prove here anyway?” the boy demands.

“I just want to know the truth, Raaf. If your father was a Nazi, then I think I have the right to know. Was he a Jew hater? If he was still alive, wouldn’t he be beating you for polluting yourself with a filthy yid?”

“Anne, you’re starting to sound kinda crazy.” He tries to put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugs off his touch.

“He was a party member. I heard that he bragged about having connections to the Gestapo. That he had a pass from an SD man in the Euterpestraat.”

Ask him now many Jews his father denounced, Margot proposes.

“How many Jews do you think he denounced?”

“Pap liked to feel big, but it was mostly all bullshit. That ‘pass’ he bragged about? He won it from some canker playing dice. He didn’t know the goddamned toilet cleaner in Euterpestraat.”