“So Pim sits at his desk shuffling papers?” says Anne. “He sits there using the telephone and giving dictation, just as if nothing has happened?” Why does she sound so incensed by this?
Miep only shrugs again. “What else would you have him do, Anne?”
“What would I have him do?” Anne frowns, her eyes rounding. “I would have him shout, I would have him pound his fist, I would have him rattle the windows till they shatter. I would have him, Miep, demonstrate his outrage.”
Miep exhales a breath. “Well,” she says, “outrage. You know, Anne, that has never been your father’s way.”
• • •
Anne’s eyes fly open. “Margot!” she calls aloud, her heart thumping against her ribs and her flesh chilled. Blinking at the silver of morning, she shakes her head back into the present. She must have fallen asleep on Miep’s sofa. Her clothes feel rough against her skin. A blanket, which has been draped over her, sags onto the floor. Pim is slumped in a chair a few steps away, dozing, his head lolling with a rhythmic snore. For an instant he stirs, and his expression contracts as if he’s been pinched. His face is paled by the daylight glazing the windows. Only the ruddy patches under his eyes retain color. He is dressed in overlaundered pajamas with faded blue and white stripes and a too-large flannel robe, his feet hooked into a pair of worn leather slippers. She blinks again. Around her the flat is as hushed as an empty room. “Pim,” she says with more intention, and watches him shudder into consciousness, blinking back at her with a hint of the same brand of empty panic she feels in her chest.
“Ah.” He whisks a breath into his lungs. “So you’re awake.”
Anne sits up further, plants her feet on the floor, and sifts her fingers through her hair. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? The doctor,” she says.
“The doctor said rest, so I’m resting. But really there’s no need to worry. I’m fine. Just a bit of excess excitement, that’s all.”
Anne looks at him, and he takes this opportunity to beam back at her in a fractured sort of way. “Ah, my Annelein. How wonderful it is simply to gaze upon your face. Thank God that you have been returned.”
But Anne shakes her head. Lets her hair fall back across her face. “Miep said you just showed up at her door one day after the liberation.”
Pim nods at this as if it is only too true. “I did. It was a long journey back from Poland. The Russians liberated Auschwitz in winter, but it wasn’t till May that I could begin the journey home. I had to travel to Odessa and then board a boat for Marseille. And there was the matter of the French documents required. A Repatriation Card and other such nonsense,” he says, and bats away the memory with his hand. “All in all, I didn’t return to Amsterdam till June. Of course, others had long since occupied our flat in the Merwedeplein, and even if they hadn’t, I could never have gone back there. Not to live. So what choice did I have but to show up like a beggar at Miep’s door? She and Jan have been very kind to take me in. We owe them quite a lot, Anne.”
“How did you do it, Pim?” she asks. “How did you manage to . . .” But the words won’t form. Her father, however, can sense the question.
“How did I manage to stay alive in Auschwitz?” His expression drifts into a hollow spot. “How? It’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again. And again and again, I come to the same answer,” he says, and his eyebrows lift. “It was love.”
Anne glares.
“Love and hope. Love of my family and hope that I would see them all again. That’s what kept me alive, I believe.” A shrug. “That is my only explanation.”
“I was told,” Anne says, and though speaking the next words is worse than dragging thorns through her throat, she forces out a clenched, almost shameful whisper. “I was told. I was told in Bergen-Belsen, by a woman who knew her, that Mummy died in the Birkenau infirmary. Of starvation.”
A bleak nod of her father’s head. “Yes. That is what I was told also.”
“She was hoarding her bread for Margot and me.”
“She was devoted to her girls,” Pim concludes. But something in his voice betrays a reluctance to continue down this road. A small fidget runs through his body, and his hands tap restlessly against his knees. “Now come,” he says, pushing up from the chair. “Let’s have a cup of tea, the both of us.” And as he advances on the kitchen, he tells her, “Tonight you will move into the sewing room. A young lady, I think, needs her privacy.”
“But I’ll be taking your bed, Pim. Where will you sleep?”
“Me? Oh, don’t worry about the old man. There’s a closet bed in the wall, which will be quite adequate for this old sack of bones.”
And so it goes. That night Anne moves her suitcase into the sewing room. It’s small, really just a closet with barely enough space to yawn between the four walls, yet to her it seems quite cavernous. Anne has never in her life had a room to herself. When the door is shut, the privacy feels soothing in a way, a spot where she can breathe. But also it’s deep water. When she is alone, who knows where her displaced heart will lead her? She opens her suitcase and removes her contraband. A cardboard notebook of the world’s cheapest and flimsiest paper and a fountain pen that has learned how to cooperate.
She wonders if she might not drown in her own privacy. In hiding she would run to Pim’s bed when the English bombers came or when she was terrorized by her own dreams. But that’s impossible now. Now when she feels the loneliness overcome her, she can only sink into it.
That’s when I think of my diary, she writes on the page of her journal.
It is lost, of course. She remembers the pages scattered on the floor on the day of their arrest, but at the time she could not make sense of what she was seeing. Nothing seemed to matter in that instant. The Gestapo had breached their hiding place, and they were doomed. The shock was so horrific that even Anne’s precious diary meant nothing to her. All her years of work were no more than scratches on paper, and she barely gave it a look. It wasn’t until they reached Kamp Westerbork in Drenthe that she began to feel its loss. She remembers it now, she writes, as she might remember the closest of friends whom she has lost for good. But isn’t it folly for her to mourn the loss of a possession? She should be spending her tears on the memory of her mother, of Margot. She should be weeping over the loss of Peter, and of his parents, and even that stuffy old mug Mr. Pfeffer.
But her eyes remain dry at the thought of them. What does that say about her, this Anne Frank, whose tears are for herself and no one else?
On the page she writes, Please do not answer that question.
1945
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
This much Anne has discovered by opening her ears: Most Amsterdammers think of themselves as the true survivors. They have survived five years of occupation by the moffen. They have survived the tyranny of the Nazi Grüne Polizei and the NSB collaborators. They have survived losing their bicycles, their radios, their businesses. They have survived losing their husbands and sons and brothers to prison camps and labor conscription. They have survived the Hunger Winter by scraping the scum from the bottoms of milk tureens or by swallowing a few spoonfuls of thin broth at a crowded emergency kitchen. And when the roads into the town were barricaded, when the moffen disconnected the propane lines and cut off all food supplies, when the bread and the beets ran out, they survived by boiling tulip bulbs for supper over wood fires. And when the tulip bulbs were gone, they survived losing their friends and their families and their babies to slow starvation. They are certainly in no mood to sympathize with a lot of bony Jews who babble on about cattle cars and gas chambers and God knows what kind of atrocities. Who could believe it all? Who would wish to believe it all?