Pim swallows. “I won’t permit it.”
“You think I require permission? You say I have no passport, but what does that matter? This is all the permission I need,” she says, yanking up her sleeve. “This will be my passport.”
She watches a shadow fall across Pim’s expression as he gazes down at the number tattooed on his daughter’s forearm. It’s a radical transformation. His skin seems to shrink tightly across his skull. His eye sockets deepen. His mouth contracts into a straight line, and something terrible scalds the color from his eyes. She thinks perhaps this is his true face now. The face that meets him when he’s alone with the mirror.
“Anneke,” he whispers. The blunt rebuke in his voice has disappeared. He sounds hollow. “You must realize how much I need you here with me,” he tells her. “How desperate I am to have you close by. I thought I had lost you both. Both my children. You cannot possibly comprehend the pain that a parent feels. For a father to lose his children? It’s so tragic. So unbelievably tragic. But then I found you. I found you, and my heart found a reason to keep beating. Please. You’re so young still. You need a father. And a father needs his daughter. Think about this. You must.”
Anne gazes back at him. Her mouth opens, but she has no words left to speak. The air is suddenly too thin. The walls too close. She shoves past him to get out. Out of the flat, out of the prison that the past has made of her present. She bursts into the street, and the open air swallows her. She runs. Runs until she sinks down on her knees in the grassy scrub beside the sidewalk. And there she remains, breathing in the tang of an approaching storm as a stripe of thunder unrolls above the chimneys.
Is this how you’re going to behave? Margot inquires. She has knelt beside Anne, dressed in the dirty blue-and-red prisoner’s smock they were forced to wear in the Westerbork Punishment Barracks. Her glasses are broken at the left hinge and repaired with a twist of wire.
Anne gives her a stare, then shakes her head. “So now you’re judging me, too?”
No one’s judging you, Anne.
“Liar.”
Well, if I am, it’s only because you’re being selfish. Besides—since when has Anne Frank cared what other people think of her?
Gazing at nothing. “I’m not so impervious as everyone has always believed.”
Then do the right thing, her sister urges. Pim needs you. I can’t help him, but you can.
Thunder rolls through the clouds, and a sudden dash of rain starts to patter the sidewalk. Anne feels the rain as if it’s nothing. In the camps they stood on the Appelplatz for hours in driving rain during the endless roll calls. The SS guards called the prisoners “Stücke.” Pieces. Nothing human, only pieces. And pieces think nothing of the rain.
“I want so much, Margot,” Anne whispers. “I want so much. Enough for ten lifetimes. How can I stay here? How can I possibly make this my life? I want to mean something. To be someone other than just a girl who did not die. I want to be a writer!” It’s the first time she’s actually spoken the words aloud since her return, even if she is only speaking to the dead. She glares into Margot’s eyes, but the dead do not comprehend urgency. Her sister’s eyes blacken into a pair of holes. Mummy would want you to stay, Margot tells her. Think how she cared for us in Birkenau. Think how she sacrificed for us. Are you saying, she asks, that you can’t now sacrifice a little for Pim?
“Sacrifice . . .” Anne speaks the word as if it tastes of a burnt offering.
24 ENEMY NATIONALS
I love Holland. Once I hoped it would become a fatherland to me, since I had lost my own.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 22 May 1944
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
“So I hear Bep is going to be married,” Anne says.
Miep turns to her from across her desk, where’s she’s sorting through the morning post. “Yes,” is all she says. “That’s right.”
“You’re probably wondering how I found out.”
“No, not really.”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything,” Anne lies. “But Mr. Kleiman isn’t very quiet on the telephone.”
“I see.”
“I mean, it’s not as if Bep actually writes to me. Did she tell you directly?”
“She sent a note,” Miep answers. “I’m sorry, Anne, perhaps I should have mentioned it to you. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want your feelings hurt.”
“Because I’m not invited to the wedding.”
A small shrug. “I don’t think they’re doing much. Just a magistrate,” Miep tells her mildly, with a certain insouciance, as if the matter really has no great weight outside an office chat. “She’s marrying a fellow named Niemen. An electrician, I think, from Maastricht. They’re having the ceremony there, so it’s not actually close. I doubt any of us will make it.”
Anne is silent, glaring at the stack of invoices she’s been charged with ordering. She wants to be happy for Bep. She wants to forgive her for being so distant when Anne returned from Belsen. She wants to think of Bep as a sister again, but the awful question still nags at her. “Do you think it’s possible, Miep?”
“Do I think what is possible, Anne?”
“Do you think it’s possible,” she repeats, “that Bep could have played a part in our betrayal?”
Miep does not react directly. She continues sorting the post.
“Miep?”
“Why would you ask this, Anne?” Miep wants to know. Her eyes have gone sharp. “Did someone put that into your head?”
“No.” How does she explain that if it was anybody, it was Bep herself who put the idea into Anne’s head when Bep was so panicked by the thought that the police had arrived to interrogate her. “No,” she repeats.
“Good. Because anyone saying such a thing would be telling a lie,” Miep informs her. “A grotesque lie. Bep,” she begins, but then shakes her head as if mentioning the name is suddenly painful. “Bep would never have done anything to hurt you or your family. You especially, Anne. Above all people, you. You must know that. Bep is a loyal person. Right down to the bone.”
“Mr. Kugler told me that it was my fault she left. That she couldn’t stand to be around me any longer.”
Miep huffs. Shakes her head. “I won’t blame him for saying that. Mr. Kugler has faced more than his share of suffering, but he doesn’t always know when to keep quiet.”
“Are you saying that he was wrong?”
“I’m saying, Anne,” Miep tells her, “I’m saying that he doesn’t know the full story, and neither do you. Bep, after the war, she had a kind of nervous collapse. And it wasn’t just because of what happened to you. It was because of what happened to everyone. To her. Her father’s illness. The end of her romance with Maurits. There were many troubles. She couldn’t hold up under it all. It was a tragedy,” says Miep. “One of many. But it was no one’s fault, Anne. No one’s.”