Anne stares at the glass and then at Mrs. Zuckert. She takes the glass but doesn’t drink. It smells strong. “What is it?”
“Brandy,” Mrs. Zuckert answers.
“Brandy?” Miep frowns with surprise.
“Drink it,” she tells Anne again. “It’ll calm your nerves.”
“Where did you get brandy?” Miep wonders aloud.
“Oh, I thought you knew,” Mrs. Zuckert replies. “Mr. Frank keeps a bottle of Koetsiertje in his office cabinet. To offer clients.”
“But Mr. Frank . . .” Miep must take a breath before finishing. “He always locks the office.”
“So he does, yes,” Mrs. Zuckert agrees, “but he gave me a key. Now drink it,” she orders Anne. And then to Miep she says, “You should take her back to your flat and put a cold press on her knee so it doesn’t swell.” She follows this order with a shrug. “Of course, that’s just a suggestion.”
Miep nods, standing. It’s clear she’s had enough. “Yes,” she agrees archly. “What a good idea. Anne, drink the brandy,” she commands. “I’ll call for a taxi.”
• • •
It does hurt. Her knee, that is. There’s a slow ache in the joint. The iodine stings under the bandage, and the brandy burns, pooling in her belly. She is planted beside Miep in the back of a bicycle taxi, bumping along the street, following the noise of the gulls. The taxi man is a large fellow, with dusty gray hair bristling from under his cap and a metal livery badge hung from his coat. The air smells of motor traffic, and the morning sun has been clouded as it drags toward midday. “How worried should I be?” Anne asks.
“About your knee?” Miep says.
“About the bureau men collecting the office files.”
Miep expels a weary breath. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“You don’t like her, do you?” Anne asks.
“Who?”
“You know who. Mrs. Zuckert.”
Miep looks directly at Anne and almost smiles. “No, I do not.”
“Neither do I,” says Anne. “So what does Pim see in her?” she complains to the air. “I shouldn’t tell you this probably, but he’s asked her to marry him.”
Miep stiffens visibly. “Yes,” is all she says.
“You know, too?”
“Yes.”
“So Pim told everyone but me?”
“No. Your father said nothing about it.”
“Ah. Then she told you. She must have taken great satisfaction in that moment. Don’t you find it all too disgusting?”
Miep lifts her sharply tweezed eyebrows. Her eyes are blue oceans. “Your father is a very good man, Anne. One of the best men I’ve ever known. He’s not perfect, as I’m sure he would be the first to admit. But he has sacrificed a great deal for the good of others. More than you know. We should not begrudge him a little happiness for a change. And if it’s Mrs. Zuckert who makes him happy, then it’s not for me or for you to criticize him. So I would advise you to bridle your anger. He deserves respect.”
“As does my mother’s memory,” Anne points out.
“Then why don’t you grant your mother’s memory respect and stop insulting her husband? Do you honestly believe that she would have wanted your father to live in misery and loneliness for her sake?”
Anne, however, is not willing to answer this question. The taxi man shouts impatiently at a cyclist, and an auto horn sounds. A swift patter of rain peppers the taxi’s canopy. Anne turns away to hide her face, pretending that it is the pain in her knee causing her eyes to well. Why should he be miserable or lonely? He has, after all, a living daughter.
• • •
It’s late when her father returns to the flat. Miep and Jan have long since retired, leaving Anne sitting on the sofa, one stocking foot extended onto one of Miep’s batik pillows, the open notebook on her lap. When the key grates in the lock and the front door opens, she can see, even in the room’s waxy lamplight, that her father is slumped with exhaustion.
“Anne,” he says with a kind of apologetic dread. A tone that matches the expression installed in his eyes. “You were injured.”
“Injured.” Anne repeats the word as if it has many sides to examine. “Yes,” she answers, then shuts her composition book and stands with an overtly discreet grimace of pain. “My bicycle went off the curb. But that’s unimportant.” Tucking the notebook under her arm, she informs him with lifeless formality, “What’s important is that Mrs. Zuckert has informed me of your plans. So let me be the first,” she says, adding the absurdity of a half curtsy on her stiff knee, “to wish you every happiness in your new life.”
“Anne,” Pim repeats, more urgently, “Anne, please. Permit me a moment to speak with you.” But Anne is making her exit with a small hobble, and shuts the door of her room behind her. Inside, she sits on the edge of her bed gripping the notebook, listening to her father’s earnestly distressed knocking and the sound of her name on his lips. But she does not move.
So you’re just going to shut him out like this? Margot asks. She is wearing the dirty pullover displaying the Lager star fashioned from yellow triangles. Her face is shrunken against her cheekbones, her glasses long gone, and her eyes popping like a starved animal’s.
“He’s shutting me out. He’s shutting us both out.”
“Please, Anne,” her father keeps saying, “please open the door.”
“I’m sorry, Pim,” Anne calls back. “I’m undressed.”
She hears him huff dryly. Disappointed in her resistance, disappointed in his inability to overcome it. “I see,” he finally breathes. “Very well. Tomorrow, then, we can talk tomorrow. Good night, my darling.”
“Good night,” Anne calls back. And then to Margot she says, “She’s got him now.”
Got him?
“Do you really imagine that a woman like Hadassah Zuckert is going to permit his memory of either you or of Mummy to intrude upon her agenda?”
So you think she has an agenda, do you?
“Are you stupid as well as dead?” Anne demands to know. “She intends to claim him as her own, Margot. She wants to wash away any trace of his former life.”
Oh, please. Margot frowns with a short roll of her eyes. How could you possibly know such a thing?
“How can you possibly doubt it? Every day it becomes harder for Pim to recall the details of Mummy’s face. By now he must see her in the same way he looks at a musty old photograph.”
And how can you possibly know such a thing?
“Because every day it’s harder for me to remember Mummy’s face. I mean, really remember it. To see it like I could touch her cheek as if she’s still alive.”
But Margot has no response to questions dividing life from death, and when Anne turns to her, the space on the bed where she sat is empty. She has not even left behind a wrinkle in the fabric of the blanket.
Late that night Anne tiptoes into the kitchen and opens the bread box. All she needs is a crust. Something to stash under her mattress. A barricade against the angel of death. She imagines Mummy for an instant, wasted to nothing in the Lager infirmary, squirreling away a stale sliver of camp bread under the fetid straw of her billet. Never forgetting her girls.