“You think I’m being ludicrous?”
“No. I think you’re being you.” Silence. And then Margot closes the file drawer. “So what kind?”
“What kind of what?”
“What kind of famous writer?”
“Oh, you know. The kind the world adores.”
“Oh. That kind.”
“Maybe a novelist,” Anne says with a more thoughtful tone. “Or a journalist. Who knows?”
“An international success.”
“That’s right. An international success, with flats in Paris, London, and New York, all three.”
“Famous writers can’t live in the Netherlands?”
“Not me. I intend to see some of the world.”
“Mm-hm. Hand me that file folder, would you?”
“Hand you?”
“The file folder, Anne. You have the stapler on top of it.”
“Oh,” says Anne. She removes the stapler and hands over the file.
“Thank you.”
A beat before Anne asks, “So what about you?”
“Me?”
“What are you going to do?” Anne doesn’t really expect her sister to answer this. Normally Margot is not one to pursue these what-if types of games. But to Anne’s surprise, Margot pauses in her work, at least long enough to give it a thought.
“I think,” says Margot, “I think I would like to go to Palestine and study to become a maternity nurse.”
Anne stops short. “Really?”
“I haven’t said that before?”
“If you have, I didn’t think you were serious. You want to go to the desert?”
“Not all of Palestine is a desert, Anne.”
“More of a desert than New York or London.”
“So? Maybe I’m more interested in doing something for the good of our people.”
Silence. Anne frowns at a stack of wrinkled invoices.
“What?” says Margot.
“Nothing,” Anne tells her. “It’s only, as usual, you’re the selfless one. Delivering babies in Zion for the good of the Jews.”
“I’m not always the ‘selfless’ one.”
“Compared to me you are.”
“Well, maybe you can be a writer for the good of the Jews,” Margot suggests.
Anne blinks, frowns slightly at the paperwork. A writer for the good of the Jews. To lift the Jews from the depth of their suffering and show them in the light that God has always intended them to be seen, as examples of goodness. Is that too grand a thing for a girl to imagine? “Maybe I can be,” is all she says.
• • •
At supper she tests out her desires on the assembled onderduikers. That is, to live in a far-flung capital. To become a famous writer of some sort, adored by the world.
“Oh, my,” Mrs. van Pels comments wryly. “Doubt she’ll be finding a husband anytime soon.”
“Mother,” Peter complains. His hair is its usual tousled mess. But his face is growing thinner, more manly. His jaw hardening.
“All I’m saying is the truth,” his mother replies with a sly wink. She is getting thinner, too, but from twenty months of dwindling food quality. Her face sags now. Her rouged lips look waxy. “A career girl,” she says with mocking significance.
“You’ll have to learn better French if you intend to live in Paris,” Margot tells Anne with a thin whisper of superiority. “Votre français est plutôt atroce.”
Anne replies sourly, “Aller manger un escargot, s’il vous plaît.”
“Well, I for one am happy to hear that Anne has ambition,” her mother chimes in surprisingly. “Though, really, Anne. Paris? New York? Why should you need to go so far away? I don’t understand.”
“Maybe to get away from constant criticism,” Anne says, more harshly than she intends to. It’s just that she’s so easily rubbed wrong by adults. Though now the table has gone silent, except for Her Majesty Kerli van Pels, who snorts at Anne’s cheekiness.
“Well.” Mr. Pfeffer offers a snide look down his nose as he helps himself to more of Mrs. van P.’s overcooked potato casserole. “Not just a writer but a famous writer? Really?”
“You find that so difficult to imagine, Mr. Pfeffer?” Anne snaps back.
Pfeffer had been well groomed and a meticulous dresser when he first arrived. Now his collars and cuffs are frayed and his hair is a dismal swath of gray brushed carelessly back from his forehead. “Difficult?” he says mockingly. “It’s only that writers must possess talent, mustn’t they? By definition, that is, they possess talent for something other than making trouble.”
Anne shoots to her feet, ready to shriek, but her mother is quick with a reprimand.
“Anne. Sit back down,” she commands. Her face has grown tighter, her features more pronounced, as if someone has been slowly whittling away at her. “Donnerwetter, child, we’re in the middle of supper.”
“So you’re just going to allow him to speak to me like that?” Anne demands to know.
“Anneke, please. Sit back down,” Pim advises. “Let’s not upset everyone’s digestion.”
Anne scowls but plops back down in her chair, pouting. Bep is seated beside her. She has joined the gang of onderduikers this evening for supper and looks up from her plate. “Well, I for one would love to see New York City,” she says.
Mummy sounds puzzled by this. “Would you, Bep? Actually?” Perhaps she cannot imagine a young lady visiting so far from home. But Bep sounds eager.
“Oh, yes,” she says. “I’ve dreamed about standing atop the tallest building in the world and gazing out at the horizon, high up as a bird.”
“Good for you, Bep,” says Pim, always willing to be encouraging. “New York is really the most astonishing city I have ever known.”
“Pim was in New York when he was a young man,” Anne explains happily. “When he was still a bachelor. He worked for a college friend, whose father ran a big department store. What was his name, Pim?” she asks. “I don’t remember.”
“Straus. Nathan Straus. But his friends all called him Charley.”
“Maybe we should plan on going there together, Bep,” Anne says, only too keen to plan the future. “Both of us could view the world from the top of a skyscraper.”
“That would be wonderful, Anne,” Bep replies, but this draws a grouchy response from Hermann van Pels.
“When I was a lad, my old man would have whacked me good with a rod if I were ever as mouthy as this one. So now you want Bep tangled up in your silly daydreams, too?” he grumbles. “That’s—”
“They’re not silly,” Peter cuts in on his father’s grumping. “Anne is very smart. Very smart,” he defiantly declares, to which his mother responds with a snide grimace.
“There’s an old saying, Anne, and I think it applies: You are smart, smart, smart—but you are a fool.”
“Mum, that’s an awful thing to say,” Peter shoots back. “If Anne thinks she’s going to be a famous writer in New York or Paris or wherever, then that’s what’s going to happen,” he insists, prompting his father to roll his eyes.
“And who are you? Mr. Gypsy Fortune-Teller?” his father wonders loudly, shoveling some stewed onion into his big mouth. A touch on his arm from his wife.