“Why don’t you want to know, Pim?” she whispers, her voice a thin knife blade.
“Anne,” Miep breaks in again, but Pim raises his hand. He swallows and stares sharply into the hollow air.
“It will do no one any good,” he says finally. “Vengeance? Reprisal?” His eyes lift to Anne’s. They are heavy and darkly magnetic. “They only cause pain, Annelies. More pain.”
“So the guilty deserve no punishment? The dead deserve no justice?” Anne asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying that I will not devote a single moment of the life I have remaining to retribution. And as for the dead? We live well, we love each other, and we keep them alive in our hearts. That is the justice they deserve, in my opinion.”
Anne stares.
Margot is standing behind Pim, wearing her glasses, ready for bed, her hair brushed, dressed in a white, freshly laundered nightgown, just as their father must remember her.
That night Anne takes the Montblanc she had organized into her hand and touches the nib to the blank paper, producing a small dot of ink. But then the dot becomes a word, and the word becomes a sentence.
She once believed that being a writer would make her famous and that she would travel to the capitals of the world and be adored. Now she knows that this future is nothing but a fantasy. She will never be famous. She will never be adored. Her story is too badly poisoned by pain and death. Who could stand to read it?
14 THE TRUTH ABOUT DESIRE
I’m in a state of utter confusion: on the one hand, I’m half crazy with desire for him, can hardly be in the same room without looking at him; and on the other hand, I wonder why he should matter to me so much and why I can’t be calm again!
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 12 March 1944
1946
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Six months since Anne’s return
The snow comes, the snow goes. Anne watches the frost dissolve from the windowpanes as a weak, sickly spring arrives. The weather warms, and the grass greens. Amsterdam rumbles along with the clumsy efficiency of one broken wheel on the wagon, patched too many times.
At Pim’s insistence Anne is scheduled to appear at the office to help with the clerical work three afternoons a week. Also at Pim’s insistence, she has begun attending the De Keiser Meisjeslyceum, a school for girls in the Oud-Zuid. It’s not much more than an old brick pile, this place, with many of its windows cracked or boarded over, but Anne doesn’t care. She is indifferent to her studies. Sometimes Margot appears in class to set a good example with her attentive posture, but her lice-infested rags and boiling sores spoil the intent. In Anne’s mathematics class, her teacher is Miss Hoebee, a skinny Dutch mouse chalking numbers across a slate. But numbers make no difference to Anne. Algebra cannot hold her attention. At thirteen she was the Incorrigible Chatterbox who couldn’t keep from gabbing and had to write an essay entitled “Quack, Quack, Quack! Went Mrs. Quackenbush.” Now she simply falls into silences. To her, school is just another kind of prison camp.
There’s a Jewish girl in her class. Griet, who was passed off as Christian during the war. She can astonish Anne by reciting the Apostle’s Creed without a slip. Anne applauds as if Griet were performing a magic trick, which in a way she is. In the classroom Griet is as bored as Anne, but for different reasons. Griet has always hated school, she says, whereas Anne once loved it. After Birkenau, however, what is the importance of oblique angles? After Belsen what can the Pythagorean theorem mean to her? Anne watches Griet lazily doodling in her exercise book. Griet is not exactly brilliant, but Anne appreciates the girl’s instincts to change one’s nature when circumstances dictate.
• • •
Anne has organized a shell-shaped compact from one of her classmates, Hildi Smit, that obnoxious kattenkop, and used its soft pink puff to powder over the number on her forearm. She has considered more drastic solutions, such as staging an accident while cooking. But she also has no doubt that even as she might try to explain to Pim how the hot pan slipped and burned her skin, he would guess the truth and gaze at her with that sorrowful expression of sympathetic disappointment of which he is the master. And it doesn’t help that he treats his own tattoo as a kind of shrine, which he folds back his cuff to reveal as the holy relic of his survival.
• • •
“What are you doing?” Griet wants to know.
“Nothing,” says Anne, the notebook in her hands, finishing off a sentence with her Montblanc. They are outside, sitting on the short stone wall after dismissal.
“You’re always writing in that thing now,” Griet complains.
“Am I? Not that much.”
“Yes you are. All the time.” Griet does not like to write. She says it only makes her hand hurt. “What is it anyway?”
“It’s just . . .” Anne hesitates. Since she began to commit words to paper again, she’s been driven. Every night before sleep, every time she can steal a moment to herself, she is writing. Writing simply to write. “It’s just a diary. Nothing important.”
“And what are you writing about? Sex?” Griet inquires hopefully.
“Ha! Yes, since I’m such an expert on the subject,” says Anne, closing the notebook. Then she squints at Griet. What she likes best about her new friend is that she makes no demands on Anne. Griet does not require her to be thoughtful or patient or grateful. Their conversations are relaxing, mindless, curious.
“Have you ever?” Griet asks her.
“Have I ever what?”
“You know. Done it with a boy?”
“Nope,” Anne replies, closing her notebook and leaning forward on her knees. Sometime it’s so pleasurable to be frivolous. To pretend that she’s a young Dutch girl like any other. “Never even come close,” she says, thinking of Peter up in the attic. His damp lips, their clumsy touching, all very tame. But the memory stings her so strongly that she dismisses it. She knows there is a boy named Henk whom Griet has taken up with. She’s seen the two of them necking. “Have you ever?”
Griet frowns sheepishly. “Only sort of,” she confesses. “I’ve let Henk do some things. Touch me places. But that’s all.” Henk’s given her cigarettes and chewing gum and has even promised her a lipstick, since he claims that his older brother is in the black market. Also, he’s a goy! Maybe Griet’s become so accustomed to playing the role of a gentile that it’s hard to go back to being a Jew in this world.