• • •
The fourth of August—Anne can feel the date looming like a ghost. It will mark two years since the day the Grüne Polizei entered the hiding place. Two years since they were arrested like criminals and force-marched toward the moffen slaughterhouses. The office at the Prinsengracht has grown silent. Miep barely speaks. Kleiman has gone home with a bleeding stomach. Kugler has started smoking in the kitchen. Abovestairs in the House Behind, the past waits like a dreadful ghost. Pim grows tense. Easily aggravated. He’s snappy on business calls, and for the first time Anne hears him argue with the new Mrs. Frank. Spats of temper over small things. Where has she put his shoes? His pipe tobacco? Why must she use so much starch in laundering his shirts? Tiny, petty accusations to exorcise his own guilt at marrying her? This is how Anne sees it.
At breakfast Pim announces that the best possible solution to the question of Anne’s future is to send her to a school in the Oosterparkbuurt for a teacher’s certificate.
“I don’t want to be a teacher,” is Anne’s response.
“You would make a wonderful teacher, Anne,” her father assures her briskly.
“No, you’re not listening.”
“I am listening. As a teacher you could make a life for yourself.” His coffee cup clinks against the saucer as he sets it down. “As a teacher you could have a real impact. That’s why you must study harder next term. Get better marks.”
“That was Margot’s fixation. Not mine.”
“Anne.” Pim glowers, his gaze bruised. You should speak more respectfully of the dead is the message in his eyes, but she knows he cannot bring himself to speak the words.
“School means nothing to me. It’s all pointless.”
“Pointless? That I should hear you say such a thing, Anne. It is not pointless. It is essential,” her father retorts, and ignites a cigarette with a small nervous tic of his chin. He’s started smoking day and night, she has noticed, blackening ashtrays wherever he goes. “Anne, you must understand,” he insists. It’s obvious that he’s cross, but he’s also simply perplexed by this unrecognizable Anne. What happened to the child he knew, the daughter who begged to be sent to school, who pined for it? “You must understand that I am still responsible for your future. You must trust me to make the correct decisions for you.”
Anne stares blankly at him. “I cannot pretend, Pim, to be the person you thought I was. I cannot be like you. I can’t sit behind a desk tidying papers into piles and pretend to myself that nothing has happened.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” he asks. “Pretending?”
“Aren’t you? This town is a haunted place. It might as well be a graveyard, and I simply can’t live in a graveyard. It’s too much, Pim. I don’t belong here any longer,” she insists. “Why can’t I go to America?”
Her father releases the breath he holds in reserve for every time he hears her say this. “Again with this,” he mutters. “Anne,” he tells her forcefully. “This is your home. This is where you belong. And in the fall you will return to your classes. It’s my responsibility to see to your education. It’s what your mother would expect.”
But Dassah suddenly offers a differing opinion: school isn’t necessary for girls. “If she doesn’t want to go, then let her get an actual job. By her age,” says Dassah, “I was on my own. Nobody paying my way but me.”
Anne is wary of this. Why is this woman coming to her aid? Not out of kindness, certainly. Perhaps only out of a desire to be rid of Anne, to be rid of the competition for Pim’s affection. But whatever the reason behind Dassah’s interjection, Pim has no desire to be trapped by this assault from both sides. He stands abruptly. “Excuse me. But I’m late for the office.”
• • •
Outside, Anne pedals through the daily heat. The air stinks of canal trash. But when she arrives at the bookshop, she finds Mr. Nussbaum morosely engaged in a telephone conversation. He glances dark-eyed at her but makes no gesture of greeting. His tie is crooked and his shirt sweat-stained. The shop is airless. It reeks of old rot, old cat piss, and old pain. She tries to find comfort in Lapjes, scooping up the bulky bag of bones.
But then Mr. Nussbaum rings off. At first he simply glares into an invisible pit, his hand resting on the receiver.
“Mr. Nussbaum?” she asks, hugging the cat against her. “Is something wrong?”
His eyes flick to her. His face is as pale as soap. “What has your father told you?”
A swallow. “Told me?”
“About what’s happening. Here. In our adopted country.” His tone is bitter. Barren. “What has he told you?”
“Practically nothing,” Anne answers. “He still pretends to be sheltering me from the ugly truths of the world.”
“But that’s not what you want any longer, is it? To be sheltered from the truth?”
“No,” Anne says. Though suddenly she’s not so sure that’s true. The desolation in Mr. Nussbaum’s face is frightening.
“Very well, then. You should know,” says Mr. Nussbaum. “The sooner you get out of this country, the better, Anne. The Dutch have started deporting Germans. Even if they’re German Jews.”
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
The door to the private office bangs opens. Pim and Kleiman look up as if she is a hurricane just blown in. “Anne!”
Anne glares. “How can I trust you when you don’t tell me the truth?”
Silence strangles her father’s voice for a moment. Then he forces out a breath and turns tightly toward Mr. Kleiman, who looks at her in a sickly way. “Mr. Kleiman, would you mind excusing us for a moment?” he asks.
Kleiman doesn’t answer but stands with a dubious expression and slips past Anne.
“Close the door,” Pim instructs her. “There’s no use in the whole world hearing our business.”
Anne keeps up her glare but closes the door. “I know everything,” she says.
A terse swallow. The back of Pim’s neck has gone stiff as he straightens a pen on his blotter. “Everything? And what does that entail?”
“When were you going to tell me?”
A strong frown at the desktop before he pronounces her name. “Annelies . . .”
“Is that what the bureau men are investigating? When were you planning on telling me, when they’re at the door about to drag us away?”
An odd spark of confusion enters her father’s expression. He blinks, and his eyes narrow. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘drag us away’?”
“What do I mean? I mean when they come to stuff us into the cattle cars and deport us back to Germany.”
“Anne, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“And how can that be true, Pim? Mr. Nussbaum respects me enough to tell me what’s happening.” And she repeats what she was told in the bookshop. How the government has done something “clever,” as Mr. Nussbaum called it. In denouncing the Nuremberg racial laws, they have converted all German-born Jews back into German citizens—thereby branding them “enemy nationals.” Enemy nationals subject to deportation back to Germany. “Don’t pretend that this is a revelation to you, Pim,” she says.