“Anne.” She hears again this voice from a far distance, only now it’s closer, and her eyes pop open. It’s Dassah in her pine-green office frock, standing in the threshold of the room, her hand resting on the doorknob as if she’s prepared to slam it shut if required to protect herself.
Anne blinks roughly, bent into a jackknife on her knees; she shakes her head and glares at the floorboards. “Go away.”
“Anne, are you ill?”
“Go away, please,” she half commands, half begs.
“If you’re ill, we should call for the doctor.”
“Just . . . go away.”
Dassah steps forward. She spreads a handkerchief on the dusty floor and carefully kneels down beside Anne. “These are the rooms where you lived, correct?” she asks, but she does not seem to expect an answer. “Incredible,” she says. “This would have been considered a palace by most Jews in hiding.”
But Anne is not interested in her stepmother’s appraisal of the Achterhuis. “If you don’t mind, please go to hell,” she requests, and is surprised by the snort of Dassah’s laugh.
“Well.” The woman sighs. “I think I’ve already been there once, Anne,” she says. “Have you forgotten?” And then she does something even more shocking. Gently, she turns back the cuff of Anne’s sweater, exposing Anne’s tattoo to the ghosts inhabiting the air. A-25063. Dassah lightly brushes her fingertips over the number as if she can feel it raised on Anne’s skin. “This ink,” she says, “is a poison. We have all been poisoned by it. Your father, you, me. But it has failed to kill us.” There is something so lonely in her voice when she says, “You should remember that. We are alive. Not dead.”
Anne gazes. Slowly, she draws her arm away from Dassah’s hand. The woman takes a breath. Blinks a sheepish pain from her eyes. Her face has taken on a shadow of loss, but then she is Dassah again, her eyes shut off from pity. “Yet maybe you know that you’re alive. At least maybe your body knows. Are you having intercourse?”
Anne glares.
“It’s a question, Anne. A question that needs to be asked.” Dassah frowns. “I hope not. I hope you are not so stupid. But if you are, please tell me that you are using the proper precautions. A condom,” Dassah says to be blunt. “If you wish to live as a whore with that boy—” she is saying when Anne cuts her off.
“That’s over.”
A pause. “Is it?” She doesn’t bother to ask why but only says, “So you finally came to your senses. Well, let us thank God for that.”
Anne gazes at her blackly. “Why are you so horrible to me?”
“Oh, is that what I am? Horrible? You’ve already called me a ‘monster,’ so I suppose I shouldn’t expect any charity from you. The truth is, Anne, you were terribly spoiled when you were a child. That much is obvious. It’s made you weak and self-centered and eager to blame others for your shortcomings. Honestly, it’s a wonder you survived at all. But since you have, you think that the world now owes you tribute. You’ve been twisted by your experiences into a kind of morose, self-absorbed little tyrant who demands that everyone worship her pain and loss as much as she does. And if they don’t—if they refuse to give in to your egotism—then they are labeled ‘a monster.’”
Anne smears at her eyes, glaring at the corner of her room where her desk once sat. “I hate you,” she whispers bitterly.
“I can live with that,” Dassah informs her. “But whether you can believe it or not, I am only trying to help you, Anne. I am trying to help you look in the mirror and see yourself as you are, because I have some very bad news for you. The world owes you nothing. You survived? So what? Millions didn’t. Your sister didn’t. Your mother didn’t. But all your tears are for yourself, Anne Frank, the poor victim. And nobody loves victims. Victims are resented. Victims are reviled, that’s the way things are. You must earn love, just as you earn respect. That is what I’m trying to teach you.”
“If I’m such an awful human being, such a black spot, then why don’t you help me get out of your hair? Convince Pim to let me go. He listens to you.”
“Oh, you think so? Well, in some matters, perhaps. But Otto is still bent on keeping you sheltered. He is disinclined to give up on his sentimental attachment to you as a child. Disinclined to give up the memory of love that once bound you two together.” Standing, Dassah retrieves her handkerchief from the floor and folds it into a square. “But what your father really requires from you now isn’t love. It isn’t even gratitude or respect, though he deserves all those things. It’s cooperation. He won’t admit it, but he’s facing some serious trouble with the government, and the last thing he needs is your unrelenting attacks.”
Anne only stares.
“Do you know how often I awake to find him standing in the threshold of your room, watching over you as you sleep? You are the star in his eyes, Anne,” Dassah tells her. “I am his wife. We are partners now in this life, and he will always take my part. I know this. But no one has ever filled his heart like you.”
Miep has been the victim of a most common crime—a thief stole the tires from her bicycle—so she arrives on foot to pick Anne up for an afternoon movie matinee. A rain scarf covering her head, ginger bangs fringing her forehead. They board the Tramlijn 5 at the Koningsplein as it begins to drizzle. Anne watches people on the street convinced by the rain to pop open their umbrellas. Along the Leidsestraat many windows are still taped against air-raid bombs.
“Has he told you?” Anne asks.
Miep turns her head. “Has who told me what?”
“Pim. Has he told you what I did? That I went to the American consulate? Has he told you that I attempted an escape?”
A short intake of breath. “Well. That’s a very harsh way of putting it.”
“So he has told you. And what do you think, Miep? Do you think I’m a childish, self-centered bitch?”
“Anne, please. Language. It’s not necessary.”
“Do you think I’m a coward, wanting to desert him?”
Miep shakes her head. “No, neither of you is being cowardly. You’re both being very brave, in my opinion. Trying to set things right. I’m only sorry that . . .”
Anne raises her eyebrows. “Sorry that what?”
“I’m sorry, Anne,” she hears Miep say plainly, “that I kept your diary a secret from you. I haven’t said that aloud to you, and I think I must. I’m sorry,” she repeats. “It was against my better judgment, and I shouldn’t have done it.”
Anne swallows. Looks away. “You were only doing as my father asked.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Maybe not,” Anne agrees. “But, Miep, if it wasn’t for you, it would have all been lost. Actually lost. Forever. So you don’t need to apologize to me.”
Miep blinks away a gleam of tears and swallows. “Thank you,” she whispers.
Anne allows silence to separate them until, “You know, Miep, at first when I was writing in my diary—when I was thirteen—it was a kind of game to me. A fun way to pass the time. But then in hiding . . . in hiding, it became something very different,” she says. “Do you remember the cabinet minister’s broadcast over Radio Oranje? About all of us keeping wartime writings?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I took it to heart. I started to rewrite what I had already put down. All of it. I changed people’s names. Gave them, you know—schuilnaamen,” she says. Hiding names. “I thought I would sew it all together into a story I could tell.”