“Mr. Nussbaum?”
Nothing.
“Mr. Nussbaum?” she repeats.
And then, without breaking his trance, he speaks in a voice that is floating. Untethered. “Anne . . . have you heard?”
A dull pulse in her belly. “Heard?” She’s seen him depressed before, yes, but this is the first time she’s really seen him in the grip of despair. The first time, she thinks, that she’s really seen his Auschwitz face.
“They’re killing Jews again in the east,” he announces.
Her heart tightens. Confusion strangles any response, but Mr. Nussbaum does not appear to notice.
“It’s in the newspaper,” he says. Anne glares back down at the discarded paper’s headline. The word “Pogrom” stands out blackly. A favorite tool of the angel of death.
• • •
The blood libel. It’s an ancient excuse for a pogrom. A small town. A gentile boy claims to have been “kidnapped” by a Jew, and the old rumors start swirling—Jews abducting gentile children for ritual murder! Siphoning innocent blood to consecrate their unholy matzo bread. Nothing new there. In any case, the shooting starts when the police arrive, but soon the mob takes over the murdering and the looting. By the next day, at least forty Jews—men, women, and children—are dead. Stoned, stabbed, shot, beaten to death. Including a Jewish mother and her infant son, arrested in their own home, robbed, and then shot “while trying to escape.”
“That it still continues!” Anne laments.
Pim has finished his standard breakfast, toast and margarine with a powdered egg, and ignites his standard cigarette. He shakes his head heavily over the folded newspaper.
“Hideous,” he declares.
Anne blinks. “That’s all you have to say?”
Her father lifts his eyes to her, burdened pale things. “What else would you have me say, daughter?”
“Must I really teach you, Pim? Must I put the words in your mouth? You are a Jew who has suffered through Auschwitz. You should be outraged.”
“I am long past outrage, Anne,” he says with a sorrowful but maddening composure. “Such hateful violence. It’s horrific. But as we have learned, the world of men can be a horrific place. I cannot allow it to drag me down.”
“Really, Pim,” Anne says, burning. “This is your response? The world is bitter, but we must rise above it? That’s the type of thinking that sent Jews to the Kremas.”
Pim’s gaze grows deep. He surveys his daughter as if from a distance. “How can I help you, meisje?” he asks. “How can I help you?”
The question only makes Anne angrier. “You can help me, Pim—you can help me by waking up to reality!”
“Anne isn’t wrong,” her stepmother suddenly injects. Anne and Pim share the same surprise, turning their heads as Dassah enters the room with the coffeepot to refill Pim’s cup. “Perhaps she’s being overdramatic as usual. That’s Anne. But I must agree, it would be foolish to abandon our caution.”
Pim huffs, obviously feeling ambushed. “Hadas. Aren’t you the one who said that one should have faith in God’s intelligence?”
Pouring coffee into her own cup. “Of course. But that doesn’t mean we should go blind. We should trust in God to keep us vigilant, not to tend us like sheep. The wolves are still hungry, Otto. That hasn’t changed.”
Pim stubs out his cigarette. “No, I’m sorry, but I refuse,” he says, frowning. “I refuse to live in fear.” He taps his lips with his napkin and stands, his tone resolute. “Live a just life. Do good when you can. That’s the answer to the madness of such cruelties.” Slipping on his suit jacket, he asks, “Anne, are you coming to the office with me today?”
Anne looks at a spot on the white linen tablecloth before she meets Dassah’s cool eyes and says, “No, Pim. I promised Mr. Nussbaum.”
• • •
At the bookshop Mr. Nussbaum reaches down behind the sales desk and pulls out a large, flat magazine, slapping it on the counter. Drawing a breath, he declares, “This is for you.”
LIFE. It’s the name of an American magazine.
Anne has Mr. Lapjes in her arms, the old furry rug, purring in a bored fashion. She takes a step forward. Looks down at the photo on the cover. “I don’t understand.”
“I found it in a lot I picked up from the library sale,” he tells her. “And I’ve been saving it for you. For the right time.”
The magazine’s pages are so large, the size of America itself. She stares at it. On the cover is a jutting tower, piercing the cloud line with its steeple. The caption tells her it is the Empire State Building.
“So you see, Anne. What just happened in that village in the East? It made me realize the truth. We may pretend different, but Europe is dead. Dead for the Jews. Dead for you. America,” he tells her. “That’s where you belong.”
She looks back at him in silence.
“You should talk to your father. I know he prides himself on his faith in the future. It’s one of the things that I admire most about him. But even he must see the truth. You should talk to him. Tell him you need to emigrate.”
“Is that really what you think?”
“It’s what I believe, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum tells her.
Anne shakes her head. “He’ll never agree.”
“He won’t want to give you up. Of course he won’t. He’ll resist mightily, I’m sure. But even Otto must recognize the truth underneath it all. Even he must recognize that America is where a girl with your intellect and perception should find her future.”
• • •
Biking home, she bumps over the uneven cobblestones, distracted by the images of America in her head. She has thought about it before in the abstract. She does have uncles there, her mother’s brothers near Boston. They could sponsor her. And her father has his university friend running a big department store in New York City.
But the idea of emigration is both terrifying and gripping. She tries to picture herself in a café, ordering coffee in English. She imagines taking a bite out of a hot dog, as she’s seen in the newsreels. She imagines herself exiting a crowded elevator, crossing the concourse of Grand Central Terminal, or at the top of a skyscraper, gazing out over the vigor of a vast and animated metropolis. In America there are no memories of the dead that must be pushed aside. There is only a spotless, uncorrupted future.
She uses cellophane tape on the oversize pictures she’s scissored from the magazine and lines them up on the wall of her room.
“And what is this display?” Pim asks, failing to keep the iron in his voice from dragging this question toward criticism.
Anne looks over from her last taping job. “New York City.”
“Yes, I recognize that fact. But where did it all come from, is what I’m asking.”
“From a magazine Mr. Nussbaum gave me,” she responds with innocence.
“I see,” says Pim with a kind of neutral suspicion.
“I thought I might improve my English by reading the articles. But really, Pim, look at these pictures. Can such a place exist?”
“Oh, it exists, all right,” her father replies, and his small frown confirms it. “Though, it’s a very problematic city, New York, especially for foreigners. It’s so large and really quite impersonal.”