That’s not true, Anne.
“No? Well, if it’s not, then why can’t you just leave me alone? Why can’t you just quit interfering and butt out?” A bell dings over the door as a stiff-faced Dutch matron steps out of the shop and shoots Anne a suspect frown before walking on.
Anne shakes her head. “Wonderful. Now I look like a lunatic thanks to you, talking to no one,” she says, but Margot’s reflection has vanished from the window glass.
When he appears from inside the brewery, Anne is waiting beside her bicycle. He comes trotting toward her again with his hands in his pockets, then stops as if an invisible wall divides them. “You look different,” he tells her. His eyes are hooded and rather cautious, like a sleepy animal’s.
“You don’t,” she replies. “And you still smell like beer.” Maybe she overdid it, dressing up this way, trying to appear beautiful. Raaf is not exactly one of her beaux from school taking her out for ice cream. Maybe it’s too much for him, this “beautiful” Anne, so she disguises any disappointment she might feel that he seems more confused than enchanted. But she doesn’t disguise the fact that she is pleased to be standing so close to him, and she takes his hand. “Come with me,” she says.
They walk to the spot Anne has mapped out in her head: the center of the Skinny Bridge off the Kerkstraat, straddling a narrow stripe of the sun-dappled water where leafy branches float calmly. She asks him for a cigarette as an excuse to stop, to anchor them to this spot, and is amazed to watch him hand-roll a pair of smokes so efficiently from a pouch of stringy black shag. He solders each into a tight little cylinder with a swipe of his tongue, offering her a light from a match that he ignites with a flick of his thumb. Halfzware, he calls the tobacco. She inhales its bitter tang that tastes like fireplace ashes cured in shoe polish. She says something to this effect, and he looks surprised at the sound of his own laughter.
She stands with the boy, sharing his hand-rolled shag, watching the smoke from it drift in the breeze that tousles their hair. This close she can’t help but see that his face is caged. As if he’s bracing himself for pain. He leans forward onto the railing, and she follows his lead so that their shoulders brush together. She presses her elbow against his and lets it stay. When he turns, she sees that the light has sharpened to points in the lazy blue of his eyes. His hand touches her cheek. And then his hand is slipping past her cheek, caressing her neck, and he is guiding her forward toward his mouth. Pressing her lips against the sudden dampness, she feels a shock of joy. In that moment the soft squish of their kiss quells the pang of her loss, releasing her from herself. Gentling the anger of her incompressible desire. In that moment her heart beats in a clean, strong pulse, as she seizes the uncombed hair at the back of his head and presses herself into him, absorbing his heat. Her need fusing with his. Losing herself in a deep swim of stunningly guiltless pleasure.
When their lips separate, she gazes into the light of his eyes. It’s steady and clear. His face is unlocked. “Raaf,” she pronounces quietly.
“What?” His voice is close.
“Nothing,” she replies. “I wanted to speak your name aloud.” Raaf. Not Peter. A boy named Raaf with a thatch of straw-blond hair. She feels herself drawing him toward her, her arms slipping over his neck—she, opening her lips, opening herself to the messy, blissful invasion of human craving.
21 THE TRANSVAAL
And behold, thistles had grown all over it; nettles had covered its surface, and its stone fence had been torn down.
—Proverbs 24:31
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Her new room in the new flat has striped blue-on-white wallpaper and a creaking hardwood floor. With the window open, she can see the traffic passing on the canal—and often smell it as well. New furnishings have arrived for her father’s new life, including a velveteen sofa and a tall Viennese wingback chair, plus a double bed for the newlyweds. Anne’s lumpy old thing, however, has simply been transferred from her former room in the Jekerstraat. And her mother’s French secretaire, which once adorned the corner of her room in the Merwedeplein, has remained behind with Miep. When Miep resisted this gift, Anne whispered, “Keep it, Miep. Please. I’d rather you have it than her.”
De Keiser Meisjeslyceum
Reinier Vinkeles Quay
Amsterdam Oud-Zuid
After classes are dismissed, she initiates a shoving match by the bike shed with one of the other girls, a girl named Clare Buskirk, that scrap of carrion. But before it escalates, the normally all-too-jovial nature and health teacher, Mrs. Peerboom, comes galloping over to separate the combatants, her face two shades redder than a beet. “Goeie hemel!” she calls out righteously, with deep astonishment. “This is indecent. You’re supposed to be ladies!”
“She’ll never be a lady, Mrs. Peerboom,” Clare spits, her ugly little face on permanent display. “She’s just a Jewess.”
“And you’re just a pile of shit!” Anne shouts back.
“Quiet!” Mrs. Peerboom barks. “Now be on your way, both of you, unless you want to explain yourself to the headmistress.”
Anne goes silent, but her hatred is still loud in her ears. “I should have bashed her in the mouth,” she tells Griet later, sharing a cigarette behind the school. “I should have squashed her like a bug.”
But Griet is preoccupied, it seems. She is busy looking off in another direction.
“What?” Anne wants to know.
“What?”
“You’re barely listening to me.”
A shrug as Griet frowns at the cigarette between her fingers. “I have to tell you something.”
Anne feels a sharp and immediate pinch of anxiety in her belly but tries to hide it with her impatience. “Tell me? Tell me what?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Tell me, Griet,” Anne now commands. “You can’t just announce that you have something to say and then say nothing.”
Griet raises her eyes and stares.
“Griet?”
“I’m leaving school,” the girl says.
Anne feels another pinch. “What? That’s ridiculous.”
“Why? You’re always saying that it’s such a waste of time.”
“For me, not for you,” Anne answers, trying to make a joke. “You need educating, lieveling,” she says, rubbing Griet’s mop of curls.
Griet smiles faintly and without mirth. “I’m getting married,” she says.
Anne swallows. Repeats the word. “Married.”
“Yep.”
“Married,” Anne repeats again, feeling a buzz of anger return. “To whom?”
“To ‘whom’? To ‘whom’ do you think, Anne?”
“I don’t know.” Plucking the cigarette from Griet’s fingers, she says, “Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the boys you’re doing it with.”