Anne stares back, above her plate of fried mush. She’s relieved, but also a little miffed. “That’s all? He’s returned and expects me? No further explanation?”
Pim raises his coffee cup to his lips and takes a sip. “Anne, I’m sure you will interrogate the man when you see him,” he says coolly. “For now eat your breakfast, please.”
Nussbaum
Tweedehands-Boekverkoper
The Rozengracht
Mr. Nussbaum is pale. Thinner than he was. His smile looks waxy as Anne rolls her bike into the shop, leaning it against the wall. “And here she is,” he announces with a brittle joviality. “The future of literature.”
Somehow Mr. Nussbaum’s friendly exclamation rubs her wrong. It sounds just too ridiculous. “I was afraid something had happened to you, Mr. Nussbaum,” she tells him with undisguised reproach. “When I came to the shop and it was completely locked up.”
The smile on Mr. Nussbaum’s lips slips a notch. “Yes, well, I’m sorry about that, Anne. I am. I had to travel to the Hague, unexpectedly. Apparently the government has determined that while I was imprisoned in Auschwitz, I was also accruing a substantial sum of unpaid taxes.”
Anne feels her face heat. “That’s obscene.”
A shrug as he sets the kettle on the small hot plate. What else can be said?
“Is the same thing happening to Pim?”
“Isn’t that a question for him to answer?”
A frown. “We’re not exactly talking much these days.”
“I see.” He blows a spot of dust from the bowl of a china cup. “Will you have some coffee? It’s only ersatz, I’m afraid.”
“No, thank you,” Anne replies, her voice subdued, thinking of Pim’s chilly expression at breakfast. “It upsets my stomach.”
Mr. Nussbaum nods. Begins measuring the ersatz blend into the tin coffee press. “I understand that you have a birthday approaching,” he says. “You’ll be seventeen?”
Anne has picked up the broom to sweep the grit from the front entryway. “Yes,” is all she says.
“And there’s a celebration scheduled?”
“Not my idea. But yes.”
Mr. Nussbaum seems puzzled. “You’re not looking forward to it?”
“So I’m seventeen, so what? It’s not exactly an accomplishment. How many girls never lived that long?” she hears herself say. “Why am I owed a celebration?”
“Anne. You must never say that,” he instructs her. “You don’t have the right to say that.”
Anne stops sweeping and looks up at the ghastly emptiness of Mr. Nussbaum’s face.
“All those girls who didn’t live?” he says. “You owe it to them to celebrate. Don’t be so selfish.”
She parts her lips but has no words to speak.
The kettle whistles a low note. Mr. Nussbaum removes it with a rag over the handle and pours the steaming water into the press. “I’m sorry. Perhaps that was uncalled for.”
But Anne shakes her head with a twinge of humility, gripping the broom handle. “No. No, I can be selfish. Pim continues to remind me of that.”
Another small shrug. Mr. Nussbaum sets the kettle back on the hot plate. “Everybody can be selfish, Anne. But if you’re finding it so difficult to communicate with your father,” he suggests, “perhaps you don’t understand his needs very clearly. Perhaps his life has been more difficult than you’re aware of. Can children ever properly comprehend their parents’ hardships? I don’t know. But I do know that regardless of the past he does his best to remain positive and to concentrate on what’s beautiful in life.”
Anne feels herself go still. One beautiful thing, she hears Margot whisper in her ear.
“And what’s the most beautiful aspect of life to Otto Frank? The most important? Family. Being part of a family.” The melancholy in Mr. Nussbaum’s eyes is as dry as dust. “Maybe I shouldn’t say,” he tells her, “but if you want to learn something essential about your father, you should ask him sometime about the boy in our block in Auschwitz who called him ‘Papa.’”
Anne feels an odd sting. “Papa?” How dare he ask someone else to call him that?
“I won’t say more about it, but you should ask him.”
Anne takes this and files it in the back of her brain, trying to swallow her jealousy. Can’t she forgive Pim for finding a way to survive Auschwitz? But then that’s the question, isn’t it? Can she forgive him? Can she forgive anyone, Annelies Marie Frank included?
Wednesday, 12 June
Anne’s birthday arrives, and a small party has been organized. Her chair at the dining table is decorated with crepe-paper streamers and ruby-pink dahlias that Miep brought from her window boxes. Dassah has taken a slagroomtaart from the oven, baked with sugar surrogate and dried fruit, and Mr. Kugler has hung up a handmade banner reading GELUKKIGE VERJAARDAG! Anne smiles, feeling on display, when, God knows why, Mr. Kleiman decides to lead the small assembly in a mortifying exhortation of “Hieperdepiep hoera!” in her honor. Swallowing a bit of panic, she accepts hugs and kisses from Miep and Jan and hearty handshakes from Kleiman and Kugler and three-cheeked kisses from their wives, though Anne and the new Mrs. Frank assiduously avoid any such tactile exchange. Pim, as always, reads a poem to the room, composed of the usual sugary paternal sentiment and daffy, awkward rhymes, all written on a scrap of paper he had to unfold several times and then peer at closely with his reading glasses on his nose. Applause follows. Anne permits Pim a peck on the cheek. But through it all she feels empty. She smiles as required, yet secretly there is nothing to fill her heart. Pim’s pride in her, which had once been a gift in and of itself, has lost its value. It is all a charade.
Anne retreats to the kitchen to help her stepmother make the coffee. As a wedding gift, Miep and Jan have given Pim and his new wife a Kaffeegedeck-Set of good Meissen Zwiebelmuster with a delft-blue floral pattern. Dassah examines a small chip she’s already made in a saucer. “I’m not used to owning such delicate things,” she confesses. “My mother had an iron kettle she used for brewing and serving alike. To pour you had to place a piece of cheesecloth over the cup to filter the grounds.”
Measuring the ersatz coffee makes Anne think of her mother as she fills the stainless-steel percolator from the tap. How particular Mummy was about the proper ritual, insisting the water always be cold. Screwing shut the tap, Anne releases a breath. This snag of memory, she finds, is like smelling a rose while being pricked by the thorny stem. She clutches it even as it wounds her. She watches the new Mrs. Frank slicing the tart into sections with a cake knife. How is this woman her mother now?
For a moment she is transported back into the past.
In the Achterhuis. It’s another birthday celebration, but Mr. Pfeffer is complaining to Miep about the recent decline in the quality of vegetables. “I really don’t mean to find fault. I’m sure it’s very difficult, but really, it’s often barely edible these days,” he declares. The contingent of helpers from down below have been rather quiet throughout the party. Miep, Bep, Mr. Kleiman, and Kugler. It’s as if they are clustered together as a visiting delegation from a foreign land. Miep clears her throat of whatever she would really like to say to old Pfeffer and replies in a well-managed tone, “Yes. It’s barely edible everywhere,” she informs the good dentist. “The Germans are shipping all decent food into the Reich.”