Anne says nothing. She glares at the buildings as they pass in a flat conveyor belt of tall brick façades and ornate masonry. Terra-cotta red striped with ocher or white ermine like the sleeves of royalty.
Maybe it’s her body that remembers. The rumble under her feet of wheels on a track. The mob of humanity compressed. She is suddenly reliving the transport that carried Margot and her to the heathland of Bergen-Belsen without their mother. She can smell the septic odor of boxcar transport, feel the cold sickness in her belly. Margot’s face was sticky with tears as they clutched each other. They had been separated from the men on the ramp in Birkenau, and the women were on their own now, utterly. But instead of their mother collapsing in despair, all of her fragilities had simply fallen away. She became a lioness, protecting and caring for her girls, even as starvation and exhaustion racked her body. Anne was shocked at the pride she felt for her mother. And the love. But now Mummy had become so sick that she’d been taken to the Women’s Infirmary Barracks, so that when the selection was made by the SS doctors, Anne and Margot had been herded without her into the boxcars to be transported deep into Germany.
We’ll see her again, Anne kept repeating to her sister. After this is over, we’ll see her again.
But even as she spoke the words, she could not believe them. Somewhere in the car, a woman was chanting the kaddish in a croaking voice. A prayer of affirmation and a prayer for the dead. The cadence of the woman’s voice merged with the clunking rhythm of the train wheels, and Anne knew that they had seen their mother for the very last time.
Leaving the tramlijn, she trails her father’s pencil-thin shadow. They follow the path of the canal that flows between the tall, narrow brick faces of the old merchant houses. The street is lined with the skinny iron bollards bearing the trio of St. Andrew’s crosses. Little Ones from Amsterdam, they’re called. Amsterdammertje. When they were small, she and Margot would play a game, chasing each other through the rows, pretending that they were dodging a mouthful of teeth owned by some great dragon about to chew them up. She thinks of this as if she is remembering a fairy tale she once read, instead of a piece of her life.
Pim natters on about the length of the walk, tapping the dial of his wristwatch. She has noticed that on those occasions when they’re alone, her father drums up some sort of efficient chatter about the schedule of street trams, the scarcity of spices, or the price of substitute ingredients. Anne tastes something foul at the back of her mouth.
“I can’t do this, Pim,” she says.
“Anneke, please. It’s all right. It’s only a building. Just an old building. You’ll be fine once you get inside.”
But Anne is shaking her head. “No. No, I won’t be.”
“Anne.” Her father speaks to her softly. “Think of our friends. Our friends who cared for us so well while we were in hiding. Think of Bep and Mr. Kugler, not to mention Miep. They’re all there waiting for you, Anne. They’re all so excited to have you back with them. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you?”
Anne stares darkly, as if their disappointment might be something to see hanging in the air. The truth is, she fears that they will all smell death on her the moment she steps into the office.
“Shall we go on, then?” her father wonders.
Tightly, she nods her acquiescence.
“That’s my girl,” Pim tells her. “That’s my Annelies.”
It rained the night before. A drenching downpour, drumming against the window glass and the roof tiles. But the sky is clear this morning and crisp. Sunlight lifts the faces of the old Grachtengordel canal houses into sharp, clean relief against the blue, rain-scrubbed sky. Those neat façades of pastel brick take the sunlight like paint. Anne gazes at them as she walks. Their scrolls and flourishes still stolidly thrifty in their adornments after three hundred years.
Closer. They’re getting closer to the last home she’d known. Crossing the bridge arching the Leliegracht, Anne feels her stomach lurch, and a passing cyclist scolds her when she vomits greenish bile into the gutter. Pim hurries back with a handkerchief for her to wipe her mouth. “Only a little way farther. A few more minutes,” he tells her. “Breathe deeply,” he instructs, and she does. “Are you ready to keep going?”
Anne swallows. But she nods again, though she knows quite well that she is not ready. A few minutes pass until her father slows and removes a key from his coat pocket. Anne steps to the edge of the pedestrian walk and stops. Facing the set of battered and dingy wooden doors, her feet stick to the brick pavement. There is nothing extraordinary about the face of Prinsengracht 263. It is modest, unembellished. The address placard is still in place. The names of the businesses are stenciled on one of the warehouse doors in block letters. A board has been tacked over the hole that was kicked in by burglars while they were still in hiding.
The restored carillon of the Westertoren chimes clearly. The same clang that punctuated their days in hiding. She had come to rely on them for their continuity, until the Germans removed the bells and melted them down for their bronze. On the sunny morning of their arrest, the belfry was silent as they were loaded into the rear of a dark green police lorry. No clarion chime as eight fugitive onderduikers were hauled away. The Gestapo had placed a bounty on Jews in hiding. Seven and a half guilders a head, half a week’s pay for most Dutch workers, though Miep says that by the war’s end the bounty had risen to as high as forty a head, paid to anyone willing to repeat a rumor or betray a secret. Anne wonders, rather distantly, about who betrayed them. How much they were paid? Was it someone they knew? Before this moment their betrayal had felt fated to her, part of an inescapable outcome. This is the first time she has wondered about a person with motives. But then her mind jumps, as it often does now, as her father has opened the door to the high office stairwell and is peering with concern in her direction. “Anneken?”
Anne stares at the impossibly steep steps leading upward from the open door and then asks a question that feels both terrible and matter-of-fact. “When you thought I was dead, Pim, were you relieved?”
Her father flinches as if she has struck him in the face. “Anne,” he manages to say. She is pleased to have hurt him, as if inflicting this wound can in a small way compensate for all the wounds she herself has suffered.
“I think you must have been a little relieved. I know I was never easy. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if Margot had lived instead?”
Her father continues to stare at her with blank alarm. “Anne, that you could say such a thing.”
But Margot, too, seems to be interested in an answer to Anne’s question, for she has appeared beside the open door, dressed in the pastel blue shift that she so often wore during their years in the hiding place. Mummy had taken it in so that Margot could fit into it, which made Anne jealous, because everyone knew that particular shade of pastel blue looked much better on her than on her sister. She tries to forgive Margot for wearing it now. “Isn’t it true, Pim?” she asks.
Her father advances on her. For a moment he glowers, gripping his briefcase, and then his finger pokes the air sharply. “Never say this,” he commands, his eyes flooded by a terrified fury. “You must never ask such a question again. Do you understand me, Anne? Never.”
Anne gazes back at him. She feels empty. Her father’s anger sags, and his eyes are awash with pity. He grips her tightly enough to squeeze the air from her, and slowly she returns the embrace. He smells of a dab of cologne. She can feel the light stubble on his cheek, after he’d shaved with a dull razor blade. She can feel his bones through his coat. Margot maintains her questioning gaze, asking Anne when she will tell him the truth.