1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
In the afternoons after school, Anne slips through the hidden door behind the bookcase to the confines of their former hiding place. Closing the door behind her, she feels as if she is shutting out the world. Shutting out the present. Up in the attic, she sits on the floor holding le chat Mouschi in her lap. They have cut a deal, she and he. Monsieur le chat Mouschi. She has cultivated his cooperation with treats of fish skin and bits of tinned tuna, and he is now a purring ball of fur for her to pet.
She breathes in and out. Once, she felt this place to be a sanctuary, but now its emptiness settles over her like the quiet storm of dust drifting in the sunlight through the window glass. The leaves flutter on the branches of the old horse chestnut. She has organized a pack of cigarettes from her father’s desk and lights one with the scratch of a wooden match. Sweet Caporals supplied by the Canadian troops who liberated the city. A superior North American product. Before the war Holland was famous for the rich quality of the tobacco imported from its colonies, but now the dark brown shag of East Indian yield has been replaced by weak, fast-burning ersatz brands, so the punch of the genuine tobacco makes Anne’s head swim. Canadian cigarette cards feature the members of the English royal family. The king, the queen, the princesses. Once those might have gone up on her wall, but now they simply go into the rubbish bin. She inhales a rush of smoke and feels it settle inside her. Once again they are depending on Miep, who has maintained her contacts in the Jordaan for essentials. Dried fish, Canadian cigarettes, potatoes, tinned meats and oats, plums and string beans, malt coffee, sugar surrogate, and even the occasional gristly beefsteak from a cooperative butcher.
Anne expels smoke and watches it waft like a thin ghost across the empty room.
Peter.
He was older than Anne but younger than Margot. Tall and solid, with a broad face and densely curly hair that often defied his comb. For a moment she remembers the feel of his body sitting beside her on the divan, up here in the seclusion of the loft. He was very male. So heavy with his strength, the inadvertent strength of his arm, its weight slung across her shoulder. At the time she’d had many girlish thoughts about the depth of his soul. On the outside he would have been a roughneck boy from Osnabrück, better at fighting than at talking. No religion beyond the work of his hands. Easily bored to laziness, ridiculous in his excuses, and absurdly morbid in his obsessions with imaginary diseases. Look at my tongue. Isn’t it a strange color? But he also possessed a sweet, curious gaze that could settle on Anne with its guileless yearning. He had a good mind; she’d been so sure of it, but maybe that was more her desire than the truth. He preferred heavy work to too much thinking, so Anne had simply inserted the deep thoughts into his head for him. His silence she had taken for buried intensity. But really it was just the silence of a boy with nothing more to say. He was at ease with her. She listened to him when he jabbered on authoritatively, as boys do, or vented steam over his father’s harsh disapproval. And with her head resting against his chest, she counted the beats of his heart after he’d run out of words, here in the gray attic.
Now she sits with his cat instead, for Peter van Pels is far beyond her touch.
I’m sure that he knew you still cared for him, she hears Margot say.
“Are you?” Anne shakes her head. She doesn’t look at her sister’s face but only hugs the cat. “I’m not.” The cat struggles, suddenly uncomfortable in her arms. She must be gripping him too tightly. She does not attempt to calm him but lets him bound away. “I wasn’t always very kind to him,” Anne confesses, breathing in smoke from the smoldering Caporal she picks up from a red Bakelite ashtray.
You outgrew him, Margot points out, and Anne does not disagree.
“I always worried that it was painful for you.”
For me? Margot sits on her heels, wearing a floral-print dress and the sweater Mummy had knit from cashmere wool. Why for me?
“You know why,” Anne insists.
Anne. Now it’s Margot’s turn to shake her head. Her voice is meant to sound comforting, at least as comforting as the dead can manage. I was not at all interested in Peter in that way. I told you that.
“I didn’t believe you.”
Well. Perhaps at first I was disappointed, in a minor way, when I saw the direction in which his interests were roaming. But really, he was simply not my kind of boy. Nor was he your kind of boy. The only difference was, I was old enough to realize it, while you, she says, you were so desperately romantic.
“And lonely,” Anne tells her.
Well. You didn’t have to be. I was there. Pim was there. Mummy was there. If you were lonely, it must have been your choice.
“No, you don’t understand.”
Don’t I?
“I’m not like you, Margot. I’m not like Mummy, or even Pim. I need something more in my life.”
More? Margot asks. She blinks through the lenses of her spectacles. Like what, Anne? What more do you need that none of us could supply?
Anne shakes her head. “I can’t explain.”
Oh. You mean sex.
“You don’t have to be so smug, Margot. And no, I don’t mean sex. Really, I can’t explain it.”
Her sister shrugs. If you can’t explain it, then how can it be so important?
The cat inserts a pause between them as he pounces on the cigarette pack left on the hardwood planking, but it’s enough. Margot has not waited to hear Anne’s reply and has dissolved into the gray daylight, leaving Anne with a hard itch of discontent. Or maybe it is this place. The attic. Their hiding place. The Achterhuis. Perhaps this hard itch is the only part of her former self she has recovered. The need to be something more. She had suffered so long from a secret loneliness, even surrounded by her chattering friends in the school yard, even as she laughed at jokes and flirted with the boys; there was an emptiness that she could never fill. And when they had slipped into hiding, the emptiness had followed her. Peter had been there for that. At least at first. In the small space in which they were trapped, his roughneck physique seemed manly. His boyish energy alluring. But then something changed. She changed. The satisfaction that Peter provided thinned. She realized he would never truly understand her and that, most likely, he didn’t really wish to try. So what was left to her, trapped in this cramped and drab annex? She found that when she sat down in front of a clean page with her fountain pen in her hand, the emptiness was filled.
A sigh rustles through the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside as a burst of sunshine burns through the clouds. She watches the windowpanes brighten.
Tuschinski Theater
Reguliersbreestraat 26-34
Amsterdam-Centrum
The gorgeous deco towers are still standing. The Tuschinski Theater was a favorite before the war. Pim used to take them all to the matinees on Sunday afternoons and then to the Japanese tearoom on the premises for green-tea ice cream. Once on Pim’s birthday, Mr. Tuschinski himself stopped by just to say mazel tov. When the moffen came, they called the place the Tivoli and showed anti-Semitic propaganda. But since the liberation, the Tuschinski name has been restored, though Anne heard from Pim that Mr. Tuschinski and his whole family went up the chimneys of the Kremas.