The vice-consul unhooks his wire-rimmed glasses and lets them hang from his fingers. “You understand, Miss Frank, that the application for emigration is quite demanding. The rules are very clear. There are police reports required, references, sponsorships, not to mention the fees involved, which are not insignificant.”
Anne stares.
Anne, what are you doing here? her sister suddenly demands. Just apologize for wasting this man’s time and go home.
But Margot’s admonishments only serve to agitate Anne further. They only serve to push Anne to the limits of her desperation. She has no required reports, no references or sponsorships, no money for fees. But she does have this single piece of evidence proving the profundity of her suffering, proving the righteousness of her appeal. She has yanked up the sleeve on her dress and is rubbing furiously at the smudge of powder there on her arm. “Please, look,” she insists as she shoves out her arm to display the indelible number now visible. A-25063. “You must know what this means.”
The frown crimping the man’s features deepens, but her desperation does not produce any more noticeable effect. The bureaucrat only shakes his head. “Miss Frank,” he says to her in English, “I’ll need some time. Please wait outside.”
• • •
Back in the crowded hall, Anne waits. She feels rather hollow. Rather emptied. Across the room a skinny Dutch mother is trying to amuse her bored children by singing to them.
“All the ducklings swim in the water,
Falderal de riere, Falderal de rare.”
She has closed her eyes but opens them when she hears the creak of the door leading from the lobby. When the door opens, she feels a sharp whip of both anger and shame. Standing there in his baggy suit and his fedora raked to the side of his head is her father. The look of pity in his eyes is unmistakable as he removes his hat and speaks to her with weary patience. “Come, daughter. Shall we go home?”
• • •
The tramlijn is crowded. No seats vacant, so they stand as the carriage rattles down the track. Neither of them speaks. She did not toss a fit at the consulate when Pim arrived. What would have been the point? So she had gathered herself together and waited by the door as Pim spoke a few words to the vice-consul. Waited in silence as the two men finished with a handshake, the pair of conspirators in her entrapment. At the Rooseveltlaan stop, the tram creaks to a halt. In the midst of the jostling on and off of passengers, she feels Pim take her arm. Perhaps it’s a fatherly thing to do. Perhaps he’s hooking onto her in case she is tempted to escape. It makes no difference. Pim may think he is keeping her in her cage. But in her mind Anne Frank has already broken free.
When they return to the flat, Pim stays only long enough to drink a glass of water from the tap and turn Anne over to Dassah’s charge.
Anne says nothing. She drops her bag and flops down into the Viennese wingback like a sack of rags, glaring. Dassah stands in the threshold to the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, evaluating the scene, her eyes as sharp as a fox’s.
“I have to go back to the office,” Pim announces numbly. “And I may be late coming home. Please don’t hold supper for me,” he tells the new Mrs. Frank, and gives her a distracted peck on the cheek. When Pim leaves, she turns to Anne and says, “Why don’t you change out of those clothes? I could use some help with the potatoes.”
Anne glares. But then pushes herself up from the chair.
• • •
Scrubbing the skin of the potatoes with a brush, she feels herself travel back in time. Standing beside Mummy, cleaning the potatoes for supper, listening as Mummy remembered doing the same thing with her own mother when she was young. The smile on Mummy’s face at the memory. At the continuing thread.
Anne feels a tear slide slowly down her cheek.
Dassah does not acknowledge the tear. But as she picks up the paring knife to start peeling, she says, “He loves you. He does. But he’s also terrified of you. Terrified that he’ll lose you again.”
Anne looks up from the scrub brush in her hand. Wipes the tear away with her wrist. “I’m not his to keep,” she says.
26 THE FOURTH OF AUGUST
I was pointing out to Peter his mistakes in the dictation when someone suddenly came running up the stairs. The steps creaked, and I started to my feet, for it was morning when everyone had to be quiet—but then the door flew open and a man stood before us holding his pistol aimed at my chest.
—Otto Frank, quoted in Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage by Ernst Schnabel, 1958
1946
The Achterhuis
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
4 August
The day has come. That date that has been blackened on the calendar. Up in the attic, she remains a prisoner of the Achterhuis, smoking a cigarette. Craven A brand from the Canadians. The smoke is soft in her throat, which she finds disconcerting. She misses the small punishment of bitter shag. To be so comfortable inhaling smoke feels like a sin.
Mouschi is sulking somewhere belowstairs, so she has tried to capture the second warehouse cat, a brutish, hulking old mouser without a name until she called him Goliath. But Goliath is uninterested in affection. It is not his job to comfort Anne Frank, and he refuses to indulge any notions of cuddling that might interfere with his day. So she sits alone. A swift breeze wrinkles through the thickly leafed branches of the chestnut tree, and she listens to the familiar, untroubled rustle, closing her eyes. There are times when she wishes she could become a breeze. To be carried away into the sky. No memories. No past. No future but the open, endless air.
A waxy squeak of wood comes from the floorboards below. She recognizes the tread of Pim’s footsteps; each step forward sounds a certain cautious optimism. She watches the leaves brush the window glass as he climbs the ladder and stands behind her.
“Anne?”
Anne says nothing, but her father doesn’t seem to notice. “Anne, I’m happy to have found a moment alone with you. I’m happy because there’s something I must tell you. I’m happy,” he repeats, “but also unhappy, because the something I’m about to tell you is both good and bad.” He shrugs, shakes his head at nothing. “I don’t even know how to begin. So I suppose the only way forward is just to say it. Just to say it aloud.” His voice is dense.
Anne looks at him stiffly, burying a secret and sudden desire to panic.
Pim turns, his head stooped, his hands hung on his hips, causing his elbows to stick out like wings. His face is a stone. “I have misled you.”
He says this, but then further words on the subject are caught in a logjam. He must clear his throat roughly. A deep frown furrows his expression, and he blinks at the floor. “That’s the bad part. But the good part is . . .” he tells her, “the good part is that your diary—the diary you kept all those many months while we were in hiding here . . .”
A chilly anxiety climbs lightly up Anne’s spine.
“It was not . . .” he manages to say, his posture clenched. Blinking again, he forces his eyes to meet hers. “It was not lost,” her father declares. “I have it.”