Raaf gazes damply at her.
“Was it your father who denounced us, Raaf?”
His gaze is unchanged. “What if I say no?”
“Is that the truth?”
The boy stares at her. “The last summer of the war. He wasn’t drunk. He came home and wasn’t drunk. Not that night,” the boy says. “Instead he was talking to me like . . . like, I don’t know. Like I was somebody important to him for once. Somebody to count on. He told me that he was going on a job. That he was going on a job and needed me along. Course I knew, I guess, what sort of job it was gonna be, but back then who wasn’t pinching what they could? He said there was this place where he’d worked in the Prinsengracht that stored spices. Kegs full of spices worth plenty of poen. But that he couldn’t do the job on his own.”
Anne’s eyes sharpen at this.
“My mam was still alive. There was nothing in the pantry, so I thought . . . who cares? Money’s money. Who cares how you get it? It only matters what you use it for, and I thought I could use it for Mam. There were still half-decent pork shanks to be had on the black market then, if you had the cash. So I said who cares what I do in this klootzak of a world, you know? Who the hell cares what I do or how I do it?” He says this and stops. “Maybe I don’t have to finish this story?” he says.
Anne does not speak, but perhaps the boy does not really expect her to.
“I mean, you know what happened next,” he tells her. “You were there.”
Anne gazes at him. “You smashed out a panel in the warehouse door,” she answers.
“We brought the tools on a sledge. I used a pry bar at first and then just kicked in a plank. That’s when I heard somebody yell for the police from inside.”
Anne swallows. “That was Mr. van Pels. He was a spice merchant. After we were arrested, he was gassed.”
Margot appears in her death rags to whisper in Anne’s ear. Now you must ask him the real question.
Anne’s mouth goes bitter. She would like to be sick. That’s what she would like. But instead she looks at him and asks, “Was it you, then?”
Raaf gazes back at her with a drift of pain in his eyes.
“Was it you,” she says, “who went to the Gestapo?”
He blinks, but the pain remains.
“Money’s money. You said so. Who cares how you get it? Jews were worth forty guilders a head.” Anne feels a flame ignite inside her chest. It burns up the oxygen in her lungs and leaves her searching for a breath.
“I would never do anything to hurt people. Not on purpose. You gotta believe me.”
Slapping her hands over her eyes, she bursts into tears and collapses into herself, but when she feels Raaf’s hands on her shoulders, she tears away from him. She hears a crack, feels a jolt in her palm, and it isn’t until after the boy blinks at her with dumb shock and she feels the sting of her palm that she realizes she’s struck him. A full-handed slap across the face. When she strikes him again, however, it’s with real intention, her fists balled up with the force of her fury. The boy does not attempt to defend himself or deflect her rage, only allows himself to stand as her punching bag while she hits him again and again, until she’s spent. Stumbling over the masonry lip of a doorway, she rips the knee out of one of her stockings as she falls and pukes. Pukes up the desire, the rage, and the poisonous grief being wrenched up from her belly, splattering her sleeves until she retches dryly. For a moment her hand trembles as she wipes her mouth with the palm of her hand. The boy is down there with her, but she bats his hand away. “Don’t touch me!” she shouts, and then she is up, pushing herself clear of him. By the time she hits the street on her bicycle, she’s pedaling with her blood pounding in her ears.
“Wait!” Raaf calls. He’s shouting her name, but she is deaf to him. Deaf to him, deaf to her name, deaf to everything. The town passes by her in a welter of tears, the wind stinging her eyes. The door to the warehouse is open when she reaches the Prinsengracht. The men are loading up a lorry with barrels as she rushes past, abandoning her bike and banging up the ankle-breaking stairs, up, up, up, straight to the landing, the panic of her footsteps ringing in her ears. The bookcase squeals painfully as she swings it open and thumps up the steps into the embrace of the past. If her mother were there still, she would collapse into her arms, but her mother is at the bottom of an ash pit, so there is nothing and no one left to embrace her here in the dusty remains of her life. She lurches into the room where her desk once stood, finding nothing but the dry rot and the peeling magazine pictures stuck to the wall, and she drops to her knees and curls into a ball.
There the bells of the Westertoren summon her sister. Margot with her hollow eyes and her filthy pullover. Yellow triangles forming a star on her breast.
“Are you happy now?” Anne demands to know.
Am I happy?
“Isn’t this what you wanted? Me, all to yourself. Never with a chance to be with someone else. Just stuck to you forever! Isn’t that your plan?”
Anne. I don’t have a plan. You know that.
Anne coughs miserably. Sniffs back her tears and wipes her eyes with her palms. She feels like she has fallen to the bottom of a deep well. “So now,” she breathes, “so now I’m alone again.” She shoves her hair from her face. “I think maybe I’ll always be alone as long as I am here. It’s why I want so badly to go to America. If I stay for Pim, I’m afraid I’ll never leave this room. I’ll be a prisoner here forever,” she says, staring into the air. Then she meets Margot’s eyes. “Do you think Peter ever thought of me?” she asks.
Peter?
“After we were separated on the ramp.”
I think he must have.
“Do you?” A soft shrug to herself. “I didn’t think of him that much,” Anne confesses. “Hardly at all, until I came back to Amsterdam. Only then,” she says. And then her eyes deepen. “Sometimes I think it would have been so much easier if I had just died with you, Margot. If neither one of us had ever left Bergen-Belsen. Is that so terrible?”
She asks this question, but no answer comes. The spot where her sister crouched is now empty. She is alone.
22 ANOTHER BIRTHDAY
Dearest Kit,
Another birthday has gone by, so I’m now fifteen.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 13 June 1944
1946
Leased Flat
The Herengracht
Amsterdam-Centrum
The Canal Ring
At breakfast the telephone rings and Dassah answers it, but only to hang up a moment later. “Werner Nussbaum has returned,” she announces to Anne and Pim at the table, pouring Pim a second cup of coffee. “Anne, he’ll be expecting you at the shop this afternoon.”