I’m simply saying that as they judge one, they judge all.
“That’s Mummy talking,” Anne points out, and then glares deeply into her sister’s reflection. “Maybe it should have been you,” she whispers.
Margot gazes back from the thinness of the mirrored glass.
“I see the way people look at me,” Anne breathes. “Those glances over my shoulder to the empty spot where you should be standing. You wanted to be a nurse, Margot. You wanted to deliver babies in Palestine. What am I doing with a future?” she asks, but no answer is forthcoming. Margot has vanished from the mirror’s surface as their father knocks politely on the door.
“Anne? May I?”
“Yes, Pim,” she answers, and gazes at her father’s reflection that has replaced Margot’s. He’s wearing his wide-brimmed fedora raked at an angle, the brim shadowing his eyes. After his liberation from Auschwitz, her father resembles a poor artifact of himself. He wears a putty-colored raincoat that hangs like a sack. His mustache and the fringe of hair around his ears are well barbered but have lost most of their color. He stares into the mirror’s reflection, catching Anne’s eye until she turns away from him, feeling oddly embarrassed.
“So,” he begins with a vigorous note inserted into his voice. “Are we ready to go to work?” Work. Over the gate to Auschwitz, there was a legend wrought in iron: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work Will Make You Free. But this is not bloodied-knuckle slave labor she is headed for. Not digging trenches in the muck or hauling backbreaking stones. It’s freedom through office work. Pecking out words on Miep’s typewriter. Sorting index cards. Shifting papers into files at the Prinsengracht office, and all the while the upper floors of the annex, which housed them in secret for so long, concealed them from the moffen enemy for more than two years, sit vacant. Their hiding place, once the nave of their existence, now just empty space. She thinks of the lumpy cot where she slept, the wobbly table where she wrote. Her picture collection plastered across the walls—Shirley Temple, Joyce Vanderveen, Ginger Rogers—all part of their secret fortress above the spice warehouse. It often felt like a prison while she was in it, a young girl in love with glamour and talk. With boys and biking, swimming and skating. With freedom and sunlight.
“I’ve lost everything, Pim. Everything there is to lose.”
An airless beat separates them.
“Anneke.” Her father pronounces her name as if it’s a lead weight, his gaze thinning as he shakes his head. For a moment he breathes unevenly. His carefully crafted expression crumbling. “I can only imagine,” he says, “how you and your sister suffered.” His eyes drop, no longer part of his reflection. “Alone. Without your mother. Without me.” And now he turns his face away to wipe his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes for the tears. Then stretches a lifeless smile across his face as he shakes his head at the mirror. “You are so strong, Anne. I must learn from you.”
Anne stares. She feels herself go quietly rigid.
“What I want to say,” her father tells her tremulously, “what I think is important to say, is . . .” He damply clears his throat. “Grief.” The word cracks as he speaks, but he clamps down on it with a frown. “Grief,” he says, “is natural. But we cannot allow ourselves to be crushed by it. God has given us life, Anne. For reasons that only he can understand.”
Anne stands motionless, but she feels a rising boil inside. “You think,” she asks with a biting precision, “it was God?”
Her father blinks.
“You think,” she repeats, “it was God who has given us life?”
“Anne.” Her father tries to interrupt, but she won’t allow it.
“If it was God who has given us life, Pim, then where was he at Birkenau?” she demands. “Where was God at Bergen-Belsen?”
Her father raises his palm as if to deflect her words. “Anneke.”
“The only thing God has given us, Pim, is death.” She feels the horror erupting inside her. “God has given us the gas chambers. God has given us the crematoria. Those are God’s gifts to us, Pim. And this,” she declares, exposing her forearm to the mirror’s reflection. This is his mark.” The indelible blue defilement stains her forearm. A-25063. The number that replaced her name. Sometimes she still feels the sting of the tattoo needle that etched it into her flesh. Sometimes she can still feel the ink burn under her skin. It was so obscene. A woman in stripes with a green triangle wielding the needle. So impossible to believe in what was actually happening to her. “God has taken our lives away, Pim. He’s stolen them like a thief.”
And now her father is only nodding rhythmically, eyes shut tight. When he opens them, he takes a gulp of air as if he has just escaped drowning. His face in the mirror pales with loss and fear. “Yes, Annelies,” he says, “it is impossible to believe that God has chosen life for us. Chosen you and me among so many others who died. It’s utterly impossible to comprehend, yet that is precisely what we must believe,” he tells her, “if we are to survive.”
Silence is all Anne can offer him.
• • •
The morning is bright and sharp as glass as they travel to the office. Her father keeps up a brisk pace as they walk to the tram. He is carrying a leatherette portfolio under his arm, a gift from Miep and her husband, Jan, as a replacement for the one stolen by the SS Grüne Polizei. They walk quickly and silently up the Waalstraat to the broad lanes of what had been the Zuider Amstellaan but is now the Rooseveltlaan, the new name painted across a large wooden signboard. People swarm the sidewalks with the quick pace standard to the Dutch, but many of them have their heads bent downward.
Pim’s companies survived the war through a bit of a bureaucratic shell game, so now, after returning from Auschwitz barely more than a bag of bones, he can still sell pectin to housewives to make jam and spices to butchers for making sausages. Sales have plummeted, but Pim is not pessimistic. Oh, no, not Pim. Housewives may not yet have fresh fruits to preserve, but there’s always a market for spices, and in any case it’s only a question of time before the economy picks up. A year. Maybe two. “We can survive a year or two, don’t you think?” he asks Anne, but does not appear to expect her to answer. “A year or two is not so bad.”
There’s a crowd of people waiting on a traffic median in the center of the Rooseveltlaan. Some of the town’s trams are actually up and running again. The new GVB has managed to scrape up enough functioning cars to run limited service, in the mornings and afternoons, though the carriages are appallingly overcrowded and slow. Tramlijn 13 grumbles to a halt in front of the solemn crowd that’s gathered. Anne and her father must elbow their way aboard, but shoving is a lesson learned at the camps by young and old, and she finds some eerie comfort in the jam of people. All those tram riders crammed together. Her body is used to that kind of human packing from the cattle cars and barracks blocks and accepts it, going loose, boneless. Offering the crush of bodies no resistance. Her mind hangs blankly in her head like a stone. No thought as she inhales the smells of human grime and routine exhaustion.
Pim has begun a miniature lecture on the subject of food. How expensive it has become. “Miep and Jan have been very generous with us. But food is still quite overpriced. Just look at the cost of beans, simple beans. I will contribute, of course, when Mr. Kleiman agrees that the business is strong enough for me to take a salary again. But until that time we must be careful not to consume more than our fair share, Anne.”