“Who were you talking to?” Her voice is neutral.
“When?”
“Just now on the telephone.”
“Mr. Rosenzweig. My attorney.”
“Why do you need an attorney?”
“Anne. Darling. I’m really rather busy.”
“Why didn’t we go to America?” she asks bluntly.
Pim blinks. Appears mildly stricken. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mummy’s brothers were already there. You knew people in New York City. Mr. Straus,” she says. “Why didn’t we go there when we left Germany?”
“Why?” Pim lifts his eyebrows. “Well, it didn’t seem necessary at the time. You must understand, Anne, when we emigrated, Hitler had only just been appointed Reichskanzler. It was years before any danger of war. And my first responsibility was to make a living and support the family. You and Margot were still so young. You were just a toddler then. So when your uncle Erich had an opportunity for me here in Amsterdam with Opekta, I took it.” He curls his lower lip, staring for an instant at nothing. “We actually did consider the States, your mother and I, but it was so far away, an ocean away. Also, the Americans,” he says. “They had very strict immigration quotas.”
“For Jews,” she says.
“Yes. For Jews.” He doesn’t deny it.
She swallows. Feels a rise of heat in her breast. “Do you ever hate the world, Pim?” It’s a simple question to her, but it appears to shock her father. He shifts back in his chair as if to distance himself from it.
“The world? Of course not. How could I?”
“I do,” Anne tells him. “Sometimes I do.”
Pim looks back at her, pained. “Anneke,” he whispers. “Please, it would break my heart if I thought that were true.”
Biking over the Singel Canal bridge to the Rozengracht, Anne remembers the vulgarities once slopped in paint across the bridge wall. DOWN WITH THE JEWS! THE JEWS ARE OUR PLAGUE! They’ve since been whitewashed over, like many things, but they’re still visible in her mind. However, she concentrates on other things. The stretch of her muscles as she pedals. The cool breeze ruffling her hair. The boy with the straw-blond hair. The touch of his fingers on her face. The salty taste of his mouth before she bit him. Another cyclist dings his bell as he passes her, breaking her reverie, and in the next instant she is skidding to a halt, gripping the handlebars, her knuckles bleaching white.
It’s as if she has accidentally bicycled backward in time.
There’s a man, rather scrawny, hatless, with a balding head and untrimmed chin whiskers, hard at work scraping yellow paint from a door, colored chips dusting his shoes, but the obscenity he’s attempting to eradicate is still quite legible: KIKES PERISH!
Anne can only stare, rooted in place. She grips the handles of her bicycle, her palms going sweaty, her heart drumming in her chest, and she tastes a sickly-sour kind of fear in her mouth. How could this be? How can she still be confronted by such filthy scrawls?
The sign above the shop reads NUSSBAUM TWEEDEHANDS-BOEKVERKOPER. Nussbaum Secondhand Book Handling. A dowdy little place, the windows papered over with newsprint or boarded up. The scrawny man quits his scraping to take a breather and must notice her, because he turns about, still swallowing to catch his next breath. “I’m, sorry.” He smiles. “May I be of assistance?”
No response.
“Are you a reader,” he wonders, “looking for a good book?”
Her eyes blink from the door to the man, back to the door.
“Ah. Yes,” he says. “Just removing an unfortunate eyesore. Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose.” He says this with a slight frown but then returns to his smile, though his eyes are studying her now. “If you’re looking for a book, you should come inside. I’m happy to make recommendations.”
“Shouldn’t you do something?” Anne demands.
“Do something? Well, as you can see I’m scouring off the paint.”
“No, I mean, do something. Call the police.”
A shrug. The police? “And what would they do, really?”
“You mean because you’re a Jew.”
A smile remains, but a bit of the life in his eyes goes slack. “I think I’ve had enough of scraping for now. My arms are getting tired. Why don’t we step inside? We can share a pot of tea, and you can have a look at the shop. It’s really much nicer on the inside,” he confides.
• • •
A bell jangles above them as they enter. The shop has the comfortably musty smell that some bookshops develop after years of too many books packed into too small a space. The man is rubbing his arm as he goes to the hot plate sitting on a table behind the wooden sales desk. “I have no sugar or milk, I’m afraid. Not even surrogate.” He speaks in Dutch to Anne, but she can quite definitely recognize the clipped accent of a Berliner.
“Is it because you’re Jewish that you won’t call the police?”
“No, it’s because I see no point.”
“So you should let them get away with it? Defacing your property.”
“Someone slapped a door with a paintbrush.” He shrugs. “Not exactly a capital offense.”
“I’m sorry, it’s only that—”
His eyebrows lift. “Yes?”
“I’m Jewish, too,” she informs him.
The man shows her that smile again. “Yes, I rather surmised as much. But you needn’t be sorry about it. It’s not a crime any longer,” he assures her, and then he observes Anne with a kind of gentle appraisal. “I’m Werner Nussbaum,” he tells her, and leans across the sales desk to offer his hand. Anne stares at the hand for an instant, then steps forward and takes it.
“Mr. Nussbaum,” she repeats, and examines his face more closely. A long, aquiline nose, slightly bulbous. A powerful forehead, balding across the crown, close-cropped curls, and a scraggly gray-white mustache over a vandyke beard. One eye droops as if it is simply too exhausted to open at full mast, though the core of his gaze is still probing, still eager.
“And you are?” he inquires.
“My name,” she says, “is Anne Frank.”
Mr. Nussbaum cocks his head slightly to one side, as if a thought has knocked it a bit off balance. “Frank,” he repeats. “Well, that’s a coincidence. I knew a man named Frank. German originally.”
“We came from Germany,” Anne admits. “Frankfurt-am-Main.”
“Oh, no—this is too impossible,” the fellow insists. “By any chance in the world,” he wonders, “could you be related to an Otto Frank?”
Anne straightens. “Otto Frank is my father.”
“Otto Frank. Who ran—what was it?—a spice business, I think, here in Amsterdam?”
“He still does,” Anne answers.
“So you’re saying . . . he lives?”
Now it’s Anne who’s feeling a bit off balance, thrown by this question that Jews must now ask one another. All she does is nod her head to answer, and she watches the man slump at the shoulders as if he had been working hard to keep his spine straight till this very moment.
“So miracles do persist. The mensch still lives,” he declares, then looks back at Anne. “You must be confused. But I came to know your father quite well,” Mr. Nussbaum explains gently, as he bares his forearm, revealing a tattooed number, “while we were guests at the same hotel.”