Don’t make up lies, Anne, her sister warns, and Anne feels the anger surge freakishly through her body.
“I’m not lying. I’m not lying!”
Suddenly there is someone rapping fearfully at her door. “Anne?” Miep’s voice calling. “Anne, are you all right? Anne?”
She is breathing frantically, sitting bolt upright with the blankets clutched to her chest, white-knuckled. But Margot is gone, leaving only empty space in her wake.
Anne assures Miep that there is nothing to worry about, using as few words as possible. She is oké. A word they have all adopted from their Canadian liberators. Oké.
But when she lies back down in her bed, she doesn’t feel oké. She feels robbed. She feels frustrated. She feels shamed. It makes her think that desire can be a trap. A trap that once it snaps shut on you, keeps you trapped. Never to be completely free. That, she thinks, is the truth about desire.
15 JEALOUSY
I’m not jealous of Margot; I never have been. I’m not envious of her brains or her beauty.
—Anne Frank,from her diary, 30 October 1943
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Sitting on her bed in the light of her lamp, the notebook in her lap, she writes about a day in Birkenau during the last weeks Mummy was with them. There was a woman in their barracks, a Dutch woman, who for a ration of bread might organize something warmer to wear. The woman liked Margot because she was the same age as her daughter, or something like that. Anyway, Mummy traded a bite of their camp bread for a woolen pullover and gave it to Margot. Anne remembers it because she was just so insanely jealous. Wasn’t she the sickly one? Growing up, wasn’t it Anne who caught everything there was to catch?
The sweater was ugly and ragged along the bottom hem, and Anne had always despised the color brown, but how she wanted it. Wanted it because Mummy had given it to Margot and not to her. It made her feel very ashamed to be so overlooked. Margot got a pullover, and what did Anne get? Scabies.
Soon after her mother’s trade for the sweater, there was a selection in their section of the Frauenlager, but not for the gas chamber. No, the rumor was it was for a work camp in Liebenau, far away from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and what luck! Margot and Anne and their mother were all three picked for the transport, but that’s when the SS-Lagerarzt saw that Anne had the Itch. It was hard to miss, really; greasy red and black sores had spread over her arms and hands and neck. So instead of the sanctuary of an Arbeitslager, Anne was sent to the Scabies Block. After that her mother and Margot stayed, too. They didn’t have to. They could have gone to Liebenau. There were no smoking chimneys there, just factory work. They could have survived. But because Anne had the Itch, they stayed.
Sometimes Anne can still feel the cold ground under her. Margot came with her to the Scabies Block just so Anne wouldn’t be alone, which meant it wasn’t long before both sisters were infected. They sat beside each other in the dirt, tucked under a blanket in the murky shadows of the block, not talking. Anne glared into nothing, listening to the groans of the sick and the squeak and patter of the rats. When a small scoop of light crumbled out from the ground beneath the wall, she didn’t understand what was happening. Not at first. And then she heard Mummy’s voice. “Is it working?” Mummy begged to know, and another woman answered, “Yes. It’s working.” Mummy and a lady from their barracks had managed to dig a hole from the outside. Anne heard Mummy calling their names and tried to call back, but she barely had a voice at that point, so she managed to rouse Margot, and they crawled over to the hole, where Mummy stuffed through a piece of bread. Margot tore it in two and gave her sister half. Anne can still taste the bitter roughness of that bread and remembers how desperately she swallowed it down. But even so at that moment, when she should have loved Mummy utterly, she felt a pinch of anger.
16 TRUST
I was born happy, I love people, I have a trusting nature, and I’d like everyone else to be happy too.
—Anne Frank,from her diary, 25 March 1944
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
By noon a bright sun is bluing the sky, and Anne and Griet find they have had enough of school for the day. They hurry down the stairwell at the rear of the building and steal into the street. Only the circling gulls above the canal squawk with alarm at their truancy. On their bicycles it’s twenty minutes to the movie house. The cobblestones have been lacquered silvery bright by the early rain, but Anne feels free riding her bicycle, darting and weaving in between pedestrians. She feels the thrill of the speed, the rough delight of her tires brisking along the streets. People scold her impertinence, but it only makes her laugh with a keen release, and she calls back to Griet to keep up with a wild brand of joy.
• • •
Canadian troops are occupying the newly opened pubs, dance halls, and café tables as the city slowly drowses awake. For months Canadian cigarette rations have stood as the standard currency across the town. Shopkeepers display printed signs in their windows written in English: NO CURRENCY ACCEPTED. CIGARETTES ONLY. The English language has invaded the movie houses, too, and Dutch has been relegated to the subtitles.
Anne and Griet buy their tickets and step into the dim auditorium, which is nothing but a roomful of chairs facing the whitewashed wall where the film will be projected. To advertise their freedom, their brash disregard, both girls have hooked their legs over the empty seats in front of them, causing their skirts to hike, uncovering their knees and showing off their calves.
The movie is a comedy. A short, fat man and a tall, skinny man are best pals, yet there’s always something the fat one is doing to earn him a slap or a punch. It’s easy to see that the fat one is the funny man and that his antics are driving the show. The skinny man is only there to have jokes bounced off him and to administer hilarious punishment with a seltzer bottle or a bop on the noggin. The fat man is chased by a tiny yapping lapdog. Chased by a Chinese cook wielding a cleaver. Chased by a woman whose skirt has been ripped off. Everyone laughs. Anne laughs. She laughs as if she might never stop, as if she might drown in her own laughter.
The girls are still laughing when they stagger out into the afternoon. They lean against the casements featuring the advertising placards and huff smilingly at the air.
“Jezus Christus, that was too much,” Griet moans.