Griet’s mouth hardens. “That’s a shitty thing to say.”
“Sorry,” Anne says, without meaning it. “I guess you just took me by surprise. So it’s the Canadian?”
“His name is Albert.”
“Did he get you pregnant?”
“No. He just asked me, and I said yes. Why are you being so nasty? I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Griet mutters to herself, standing and snatching up her book satchel. “I knew you’d react like this.”
And suddenly Anne feels a bleak stab of remorse. “Griet. I’m sorry,” she says, meaning it this time, but too late. Griet is already retrieving her bicycle.
“Griet, please.”
The girl stops, wiping away tears but refusing to look in Anne’s direction. “Good-bye, Anne,” is all she says. Then she mounts her bike and pushes off into the street. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
Dejected, Anne arrives at the bookshop, only to find no sign of Mr. Nussbaum. The door is bolted, shades drawn. She knocks tentatively and can hear Lapjes meowing like a big grump on the other side, but no Mr. Nussbaum. No note on the door, only the faint scour marks and chipped-paint reminder of the anonymous request for Jews to perish.
So now she is riding her bike, going nowhere, trailing the canals to let her mind drain to empty. No thought, no ambition, no feeling. But when she stops near a short metal bridgework to light a cigarette, it’s Bep she spies stepping out of a sadly dilapidated old canal pub. Bep! She wants to call out the girl’s name. She wants to run to her and hug her tightly. She wants to pour out the surge of affection she feels, but some internal drag of caution stops her. She thinks of what Kugler told her. That Bep could not tolerate the burden of Anne’s friendship.
Bep buttons her jacket in the doorway and steps away. Anne considers following her, but then there’s someone else stepping out of the pub. A lean-eyed girl wearing a kerchief over her short, stubby hair. She’s gained a hard angle to her face since the time Anne spotted her on a tram on the arm of a mof soldier. And when she catches Anne’s glare for an instant from across the cobblestones, all she offers is a hard blink before she turns in the opposite direction from Bep and walks away, head down.
“That’s Bep’s sister,” Anne says to Margot, who is standing beside her in her Lager rags, her face livid with sores.
Really? Are you sure?
“Yes, I’m sure. You think I’m blind? That’s Nelli.”
She looked so broken, Margot observes. Poor thing.
“Poor thing? You expect me to have sympathy for her?”
Don’t you?
“She was a bitch, Margot. A mof prostitute.”
Why must you judge people so harshly? Mummy would never have called anybody such names. Didn’t she always try to have a good opinion about people? Didn’t she teach us to keep a good opinion of people, no matter what?
“Maybe. But Mummy has no opinions any longer about anyone,” Anne answers. “She can’t teach us a thing. She’s dead.”
So am I, Margot reminds her. And yet here I am.
“Yes,” Anne must admit. “You’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me.”
• • •
The following day Griet is not at school, leaving Anne sitting beside an empty spot.
The next day she pedals to the bookshop again, hoping this time to find it open, but the door is still locked tight. She raps on the window, cups her hands around her eyes to blot out the glare, and peers through the glass, but there’s nothing to see except shadows. Back at the Prinsengracht, she knocks on the door to the private office and pokes in her head. “Pim?”
Her father is on the telephone, looking harried, but he waves her in anyway. She sits.
She’s hesitant to involve Pim. She feels that the bookshop is her realm now. A small sanctuary, where, surrounded by books, she is insulated and protected by its quiet space. In the shop she can pretend to share the soul of the cat, that old calico rug, who lazes in the sunlight with a headful of cat dreams. Does she really want to open the door of that sanctuary to her father? Yet she’s worried.
“When I arrived at Mr. Nussbaum’s shop yesterday to work, it was completely locked up,” she says. “No note. Nothing. I’m afraid that something’s happened to him.”
Is that a small flicker of caution she spots in Pim’s eyes? “I’m sure he’s fine, Anne. We spoke a few days back on the telephone, he and I. And now that you mention it, I do believe he said he had to do some traveling.”
“So why didn’t he tell me that? Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“It didn’t occur to me, Anne. Perhaps it should have,” he is willing to admit, but meanwhile he’s started slitting open the mail on his desk with a letter opener. Obviously attempting to send her the message that he’s too busy to continue this discussion.
“Where is he traveling to?” Anne wants to know.
“I don’t know, and he didn’t say. Doesn’t he travel for business on occasion? Estate auctions? That sort of thing?”
A spasm of paranoia strikes Anne. Pim and his barracks-block comrade. What else does Pim know that Anne doesn’t? What else has Mr. Nussbaum been discussing with him? What sort of intelligence does he provide her father about the girl who works in his bookshop? “How often do you speak on the phone, the two of you?”
“How often? Not often,” Pim answers.
“He’s not giving you reports on your daughter’s behavior? On her mental state?”
“Anne.” Her father exhales. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” She feels willing to believe this.
“Yes,” he informs her in no uncertain terms. “Now, please, I’m busy. Aren’t you? Doesn’t anyone have work for you?”
Anne frowns. Her paranoia suppressed for the moment, her voice becomes lightly petulant. “There is nothing for me to do here. Miep’s out on a sales call with Kugler. Mr. Kleiman went home with a sick belly.”
Browsing through his correspondence. “Well, if you truly have nothing to do, then you can find something to clean. Isn’t that what your mother would always recommend?”
The mention of her mother hardens Anne’s expression. “I’d rather go out and have a bicycle ride,” she says.
“Fine. Then do that if you must,” her father concedes. “Only be sure you’re not late. Remember your promise to help Hadas prepare for Shabbat supper.”
“And since when do we observe the Sabbath anyway?” she asks with faint accusation.
Eyes lift from the letter in his hand. “So now you have an objection to the Shabbat?”
“No, of course not. Just curious. Are you becoming pious, Pim?”
“Please don’t be rude, Anne. All I’m asking is that for once you do as I ask without argument.”
“I’m not arguing. I was just wondering if maybe this is your new wife’s influence.”
“Anne, really,” her father says irritably. “Why must you be so intentionally provocative? Is it so hard to accept that your stepmother should wish to celebrate the Sabbath in our new home?”
Home. Anne thinks about the word. What a weight it suddenly carries. Leaving the private office, she clambers down the steps to the warehouse, making an escape.
“Going out, miss?”
She takes hold of her bicycle. The door to the warehouse stands wide open for ventilation, and the scented air smacks of ground cumin. But old Mr. Nobody Lueders is looking up from one of the milling machines, his face grimy from the work but stretched out in anticipation of her response.