• • •
The train lumbers past the carriage sheds and warehouses of the freight yard. Toward the tall, single-span glass canopy of the station. Then slots in between the concrete platforms and slows to a halt. The stink of the track grease and the coal smoke follows her down the steps of the platform and into the half dark of the drafty concourse as she grips the handle of her suitcase. The noise ringing in the station rafters is both overwhelming and comforting. People muddling about, lugging their bags. Porters pushing carts loaded with steamer trunks. Women with trailing children struggling to keep up. Off-duty Canadian soldiers, the Liberators of Holland, smoking their cigarettes and whistling after Dutch girls in their patched-up dresses.
Rows of tables are assembled in the booking hall, and glum lines of ragged people are assembled in front of them. Typewriters are clacking. It’s the Dutch Social Service Bureau trying to bring order to the chaos of returnees. Trying to manage the confusion of desperate stories by filling out forms.
A squat little clerk, seated behind his typewriter, glowers at an old man’s papers and issues a burdened sigh. “Ah, another Jew. Wonderful. And how did they forget to gas you, Uncle?” he inquires, to be polite, in an amplified voice just in case the old man is hard of hearing. Anne feels her heart shiver and fights a fierce craving to shove forward and rap the clerk across the face with her knuckles. And she may have done so, but for the fact that she is hearing her name. Someone is calling her with frantic excitement. “Anne, Anne! Anne Frank!”
Turning about, she stares, blinking, at the woman hurrying toward her. The woman with ginger hair swept back from her brow, with thinned cheeks, a heart-shaped chin, a hooded gaze. Anne forces her mouth to form around a name. “Miep,” she whispers. And feels something crack open inside of her.
“Jan, it’s Anne!” Miep exclaims in disbelief. Hearing her name shouted in public panics Anne, and she must resist the urge to run. “Jan! Jan, it’s Anne!” Miep exclaims again, as if it’s just too impossible to believe. “It’s Anne Frank!” she calls, and seizes Anne in an embrace. “Oh, Anne. To have you return. To have you return. What a miracle,” she whispers, like saying a prayer. It’s a frightening thing, Miep’s embrace. Anne has not been touched with affection for a very long time, and this embrace is so murderously joyful. Many prisoners of Belsen were killed after liberation, not by bullets but by the richness of the food the Tommies handed out. They died with their faces smeared with chocolate, Spam, and condensed milk. This is how Anne feels about the wrap of Miep’s arms. It’s so rich that it might kill her on the spot, so she forces herself free.
“Oh, my heavens, I cannot believe this.” Miep is still grinning as if the expression has been stamped onto her face permanently. “We’ve come to the station every day since your postcard arrived. And now, here you are. Jan!” she sings out again.
In answer to his wife’s call, a tall, gangly fellow with a high coxcomb of hair and glasses as round as a pair of ten-guilder queens comes trotting from the tables wearing a stunned expression. His white armband reads SOCIALE DIENST. “Anne?” he questions the air.
“Jan, can you believe it? It’s a miracle,” Miep declares again, and then she whispers with naked relief, “We thought we’d lost you.” But then she is turning away, raising her hand and waving. “She’s over here! Anne is here!” she is shouting.
At once Anne feels as if she is trying to contain an explosion. As if she is a bomb that will rip shingles from rooftops and blast bricks to powder if she is allowed to detonate. Her heart thunders at the sight of the tall, threadbare figure stepping into a stripe of sunlight from the concourse windows. With a thump the suitcase falls from her hand, and she is rushing toward him, calling out, “Pim!”
He’s so wretchedly thin, as thin as a shadow, and he appears confused, softly dazed, but then something fierce seizes his expression, and he cries out with perfect anguish, “My daughter!”
Clamping her arms around his bony body, Anne listens to the deep elation of her father’s voice as he chants her name again and again, “Anne, my Anne, my daughter, my dear, dear Annelies.”
It should be a moment of pure bliss. But even now, even as she absorbs the flutter of his heartbeats and sobs deeply in Pim’s arms, she feels something terrifying that comes unbidden and unwanted.
A bite of fury shocks her.
13 GRIEF
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
1945
Jekerstraat 65
Amsterdam-Zuid
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
“It is only the two of us, Anne,” her father says. His voice is cracked. Ragged. Smoke from the cigarette clenched between his fingers migrates upward. Of all of them from their hiding place, it is only Anne and Pim who have returned alive. “Only us.”
This confirms what she already knew without being told, but she does not tell him this. He seems not to be speaking to Anne anyway, but to a void rooted within himself. His face is tightly shuttered, and he glares at the window as if he could see through all the way to the land of death, where his wife, his daughter, his friends now reside.
The sun is sinking away, too weak to hold itself in the sky any longer. Its fleeting light pinks the walls of Miep and Jan’s kitchen. Anne discreetly surveys her surroundings. It feels so strange—so wrong—to be sitting in someone’s home. There are well-swept rugs and well-kept furnishings. Lace doilies with tulip appliqués on the arms of the upholstered chairs and the cloying scent of floor wax in the hallway. A bottle of good Dutch apple brandy has appeared from the hidden recesses of Miep’s bureau, and Jan is pouring it into short white tumblers made from hobnail milk glass.
“Otto,” he says as he splashes the brandy into a tumbler, naming each one of them. Pim is sitting beside Anne, his arm hooked over the back of her chair. The closed mask he wore only a moment ago has been replaced by an expression of manic disbelief that hangs loosely from his face.
“Miep,” says Jan as he pours.
“Only a taste,” his wife instructs softly.
“And now Miss Frank,” Jan announces with a flourish that makes Anne uncomfortable. She is the guest of honor here simply for surviving the KZs. That has been her only accomplishment: to continue breathing despite what that cost her. She watches the honey-gold of the brandy pour from the bottle. To accommodate the electricity shortages in Amsterdam, Miep has lit a paraffin candle at the center of the table. Jan allows himself a moderate splash before sitting. And then a silence takes hold. The last of the sunlight has fled, and a purpled dark spreads. Pim lingers over the silence, then hoists his tumbler, managing to speak the only word left to him. “L’chaim,” he toasts.