She swallows. When she thinks of purpose, she can’t help but think of her diary. Even if it was nothing but embarrassingly adolescent scribblings, it gave her purpose. It was the last innocent purpose that Anne had. “When we were in hiding, you remember, I had my diary,” she says. “I know everybody thought it was a silly thing. Just childish doodling. But to me it was so important. It was all I had that was truly mine.” And it’s true. When she thinks of her diary now, she still feels the loss of it physically. As if a limb is missing. An arm or a leg. “But it’s gone now, too.” All that work. All those words. She blinks at that reality and drags her fingers through her hair. “At times I feel so guilty. My mother is dead. My sister is dead. So many dead, and yet I mourn a pile of papers. What does that say about me, Bep?” she wants to know. “What does that make me?” And for an instant she is truly hoping for an answer. But all at once the gate is closed. Anne has bared too much of herself. Bep has a very odd expression patched onto her face. Her mouth is closed by a frown, but her eyes are hiding something electric.
“What?” Anne asks her. “What is it, Bep?”
Bep only shakes her head tightly. “I must get back to my filing,” she declares, and abandons the room.
Alone in the kitchen, Anne feels a thunderous wave of loss crash over her. She feels a greasy charge of nausea in her stomach and retches roughly into the sink, spitting bile over the remains of Bep’s cigarette. Anne has lost her ability to be among people. She must learn to protect herself from them better. To protect them from her. Opening the drain, she washes the mess away.
If you’re ill, you should tell Pim, Margot insists.
“Shut up,” Anne replies. “Can’t you just . . . shut up?”
Out in the corridor, Anne hears the low mumble of her father’s voice on the telephone. Mr. Kugler opens the office door and then blinks dully at the sight of her. “Anne?” is all he says, but she is on the move and does not respond. Where are you going? Margot dogs her. Anne, where are you going? Miep is depending on you to finish your work, she complains, but Anne slips past the inner office’s doors. She hears Mouschi on the stairs ahead of her. Anne, you have work to complete, her sister calls out. Mouschi glances back and then hops forward, shooting up the steep steps to a dust-shrouded landing above, where the windows are still plastered with opaque cellophane. Anne follows.
And then the bookcase confronts her.
Just a battered old thing, hammered together from scrap by Bep’s papa. A three-shelf construction jammed into the corner near the window, loaded down with sun-bleached ledgers, their labels peeling, leaving crusty glue stains. Above it an old map hangs, tacked to the floral-print wallpaper.
But what remain hidden are the latch and the iron hinge. What’s hidden is the wooden door behind it. All one need do is tug the concealed cord that lifts the latch and the bookcase will swing open, because it’s not a bookcase. It’s a gateway.
Mouschi curls around her ankle with a quiet purr as her hand reaches out. Her fingertips brush the rough wood. She stares at the shelf as if she can see through it, but then a voice startles her and her hand snaps back.
“Anne?”
It isn’t Margot, it’s Pim. Her father is frozen halfway up the steps, gazing at her with quiet concern. Kugler must have alerted him that his daughter had strayed from the office area. She glares wildly as he approaches her on the landing. “Anne,” he says again, but then stops. Something in him takes a step back, she can see it. “You know,” he tells her with a gentle distance in his voice, “there’s nothing up there any longer. The Germans stole everything. Miep says they pulled a moving van up to the door and cleaned everything out. Completely. Not a tack remains.”
Anne stares at the bookshelf, then back at her father. “Have you gone up there?” she asks.
His eyes empty. “Yes.”
Mouschi meows drowsily in front of the bookshelf. “I want to go up, too,” she says.
“No, Anne. Are you sure?”
Her jaw clenches as she steps forward. The hinge behind the bookcase still works. She hears the drab clank of the latch as she tugs the cord. Then the case swings forward as if it’s floating, and she stares at the door hidden behind it. Slate-green paint. Her hand is on the doorknob, and as the door opens, Mouschi peeks in but then shoots away, retreating down the stairs, leaving Anne alone to peer into the short hallway. She bends quickly to snatch a small bean from a crack in the floorboards, clutching it in her fist. It was always Peter’s job to haul the heavy sacks of dried beans they stored here up to the kitchen, and she’d been pestering him about something, just for fun, as he huffed away, when the seam split on a forty-five-kilo sack. It sounded like thunder as a tidal storm of brown beans came roaring down the steps, scattering into every crevice. Anne was standing at the bottom of the stairs, up to her ankle socks in dry beans, blinking back at the shock stamped on Peter’s long, boyish face. Then suddenly he erupted into a gale of pure, unsullied laughter. It became a house sport afterward to find one or two slippery beans left behind after the cleanup.
Stepping into the hallway, she approaches the room to the left of the stairs. Hand on the doorknob, she shuts her eyes as she opens it. With her eyes closed, she can see it as it was. The mash-up of furnishings. The patchwork curtains that Pim and she had sewn by hand. The worn throw rug. This was the communal living room during the day and the bedroom for Mummy and Pim at night. For Margot, too, after the great tooth yanker Pfeffer arrived to steal her sister’s bed and force her to sleep on a folding cot. On one side stood their mother’s bed with the pale cream crocheted throw under the heavy walnut shelving. Mummy always kept her shoes under the bed, and Anne would have to crawl under to fetch one when it was accidentally kicked back too far. After Mummy’s bed came the black stovepipe, followed by the table near the window with the embroidered cloth and mismatched chairs. And then came the wobbly old bed where Pim slept, its brass reddened with tarnish. When the English bombers arrived, Anne would run to Pim’s bed in terror, a child in search of sanctuary. Never to Mummy’s bed. She can see Mummy now in her mind’s eye, arranging the bedclothes in the morning, her pine-green cardigan threadbare at the elbows, her hair dulled by wisps of gray pinned into a bun at the back of her head. Anne feels a surge of joy at the memory, but a joy contaminated by loss and guilt. How blind she was to her mother’s true courage and love. How foolish she was to have wasted so much time arguing. She had written such terrible, critical things in her diary in anger but had never thought to ask for Mummy’s forgiveness, not even in Birkenau. In Birkenau it was hard for her to think of forgiveness, only survival. If only she had the chance now to open her eyes and find Mummy looking back at her.
But when Anne’s eyes open, no one is there. There is nothing left. Only unswept floorboards, peeling paint on the window frames. She can hear the mice skittering away from her intrusion. Gloom drapes the room. The rags she and Pim had patched together those first days in hiding still shroud the windows. With a sweep she pulls them down, permitting the daylight to penetrate the room for the first time in years. She lets them fall to the floor and brushes off her hands.
The door to the next room stands open. This was her room. The room she shared with the eighth member of their household of onderduikers: le grand dentiste Pfeffer. Two lumpy beds, a meter apart, hers extended by a chair so her feet wouldn’t stick out. A hook on the back of the door for her robe and nightclothes. A chair and a narrow wooden desk, and oh, how she had battled with that stuffy old bag Pfeffer for the privilege of that desk. It was one of the ongoing wars of the household. A battle so frustrating that she cannot seem to spare sympathy for Mr. Pfeffer’s shadow in the crowd of dead memories that trail her. She thinks of the smirk of disapproval on the old fart’s face and wants only to smack it away. When he wasn’t shushing her or criticizing her, he was commandeering her precious desk space for his so very essential “work,” the study of the Spanish language. Anne can still see him, his trousers yanked up to his chest, wearing a red dressing jacket and black patent-leather slippers, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose as he frowned, hunched over his orange-and-white-striped Spanish grammar, Actividades Comerciales, in the shrunken pool of light from her desk lamp. His lips moving in a whisper as he conjugated verbs. Me gusta el libro. Te gusta el libro. Nos gusta el libro.