19 BETRAYAL
By the way, speaking of Jews, I saw two yesterday when I was peeking through the curtains. I felt as though I were gazing at one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It gave me such a funny feeling, as if I’d denounced them to the authorities and was now spying on their misfortune.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 13 December 1942
Dearest Kitty,
I’m seething with rage, yet I can’t show it.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 30 January 1943
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
A modest celebration is held at the official announcement of Pim and Dassah’s engagement to wed. Pim has arrived in the front office with a bottle of Maréchal Foch. Everyone cheers at the pop of the cork. Everyone but his daughter. Wine burbles into the set of newly procured matched lead-crystal ware. Royal Leerdam, Pim laughs with a pleasantly incredulous note. How does she lay her hands on such things? he inquires of the air. He is referring, of course, to Mrs. Zuckert, his newly declared fiancée, who is standing beside him. He now continually calls her by his special nickname for her, Hadas, or, worse, sometimes the painfully more intimate Hadasma, as when he says, “Hadasma and I are so pleased that the people here in this room are the first to know of our intentions.”
Anne sits and glares at the color of the wine that fills the glass on the desk in front of her. A dark purple with a tinge of pinkish light. One beautiful thing. But when the room toasts the happy couple, Anne does not move.
Mrs. Zuckert smiles at her. “Anne, you don’t care for your wine?”
“Wine is too bitter for me,” she answers with a blank tone. “It’s my stomach, you see. I’ve always had a weak stomach—haven’t I, Pim? Didn’t Mummy always insist I had a weak stomach?”
Pim releases the thinnest sigh as he shifts a hand into the pocket of his trousers. “She did, Anne,” he confirms. “That is true, she did.”
A stumbling silence follows, until Kleiman pipes up. “So have you set the date?” he asks brightly, and Pim immediately offers him a pleasantly questioning blink.
“A date? Well. I’m not sure we have. Have we set a date?” he asks his fiancée.
“Soon,” Mrs. Zuckert replies as a joke, gripping Pim’s arm. “Before he tries to escape,” she says, and everyone laughs. Everyone but Anne Frank.
On a graying day, hectored by rain in the hour before sunset, Anne sits in a chair with her pen in her hand and writes that today Mr. Otto Heinrich Frank wed Mrs. Hadassah Zuckert-Bauer by civil procedure in the marriage hall of the Hotel Prinsenhof. The brief ceremony was held approximately one year and four months from the date of the death of Mr. Frank’s first wife of blessed memory, Mrs. Edith Frank-Holländer, who perished of starvation in the infirmary of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank are now slated to occupy a modest flat on the Herengracht, six days hence, where a single room, as adequate as any prison cell, will be provided for the new Mrs. Frank’s freshly acquired stepchild, one A.F.
20 A KISS
Isn’t it an important day for every girl when she gets her first kiss?
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 16 April 1944
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
There’s a brewery house off the Brouwersgracht, a dilapidated four-story canal house, chalky with decay, its ancient whitewash peeling from the bricks. Dingy houseboats bump against the canal walls, leaving paint scrapes like a little child left to color the walls with crayons. It’s here she waits, leaning on her bicycle after school has been dismissed, smoking a cigarette, inhaling the odor of hops that drifts heavily on the humid air.
A breathy warmth floats above the canals, and the sun is thrust high into the sky like the eye of heaven. The brewery’s rickety old lorry rumbles into view and shudders to a halt. A crew of workmen appear hustling out of the warehouse doors and start rolling out hefty ironbound kegs, which they proceed to usher up a ramp and stack onto the lorry’s bed. He is wearing a stained canvas apron like the others, his blond hair bristling, uncombed. When he stops, he stands up straight and stares back at her until he gets a friendly elbow from one of the other workers. The keg in place, he hops down to the pavement and breaks into a trot, coming to a halt where only a meter or so separates them. His face is smudged with a half smile.
“You smell like beer,” she says.
He shrugs. “You got your bike fixed.”
“Yep.”
“And your knee works.”
“Can you take a walk with me?” she asks.
“A walk.”
“Just a walk.”
“Why?”
She swallows. “You know why,” she answers, looking at him.
“I dunno,” he considers, “you’re kinda dangerous.”
She doesn’t disagree. “Does that mean you’re too afraid?”
“No. But I can’t. Not right now.” One of the older workmen is already whistling for him to return to the job of loading the lorry. “I gotta work. But tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“You’ll be here?”
Anne gazes at him. Sweat makes his shirt stick to his skin. “Possibly,” she says. And then she advances on him. Grabbing a handful of his shirt, she presses her mouth against his, attacking with a kiss, before breaking off with a pop of her lips. She feels her glare shove him onto his heels. “You’d better get back to work,” she informs him as she mounts her bike, stabbing the pedal with her foot and pumping away.
The word she is not thinking, not admitting to thinking, is retaliation.
• • •
After supper her father springs his trap for her in the kitchen. She is washing the dishes and Miep is drying and setting them on the shelves when in comes Pim trailing the smell of Heeren-Baai pipe tobacco. “I’ll finish up with Anne,” he informs Miep, and Miep does not resist as she usually might when a man offers assistance in the kitchen.
Anne concentrates on dunking the supper dishes into the tub of soapy water, addressing them with a sponge. She brushes a strand of hair from her face with her wrist. Only after she plunges a soup bowl into the rinsing tub and then lifts it from the greasy rainbow of water does she glance at Pim. “Since when do you do kitchen work?” she wants to know.
“Oh, now, that’s not very fair,” her father responds amiably as he wipes the bowl with a faded cotton rag. “I used to help your mother quite often with the dishes. Don’t you recall?”
Anne only shrugs and sponges another bowl.
“Can we discuss this, Anne?” Pim asks her, his tone dipping but still hopeful.
“Discuss what?” The bowl clinks against the rim of the pot as she rinses it and then hands it over. “Discuss supper dishes?”