“We all believed you had talent, Anne. I remember how you would read us bits and pieces. We all believed you had talent.”
“Really?” Hearing Miep say this makes it sound true.
“Oh, yes.”
“Even Mummy?” she asks.
“Of course. You think because she scolded you here and there that she wasn’t proud of you? She was. She was immensely proud. It was only that . . .” Miep starts to say, but then she can’t seem to finish the sentence. “She was so burdened. Her mind was so burdened.” Miep frowns at her knuckles and shakes her head. “I tried so hard to help her, your mother. I couldn’t blame her for feeling so pessimistic, of course. The world had become so brutalized.”
Anne remembers her mother’s eyes. The dim lights they had become after they went into hiding. Then their sharp, darting hunger, suddenly brightly displayed at Birkenau.
“So I tried to keep her focused on what was good and hopeful for the future,” Miep says, and she must dig her handkerchief from her purse to dab at the tears she is obviously trying to resist. “But. To no avail,” she can only conclude. “To no avail at all.”
Anne recognizes the black onyx ring Miep has on her finger. A jet-black stone with a tiny gleam of white diamond. “You’re wearing the ring from Mrs. van Pels.”
“I am.” Miep nods. “I thought I should begin to. It’s such a lovely thing, you know. I can’t help but think of what it would have been worth to the van Pelses on the black market. Yet they chose to give it to me as a birthday gift. It was really quite a beautiful gesture,” she says, looking out at the rain. Then she turns her face back to Anne. Her mouth straightens. “If I may tell you something honestly, Anne, it was so hard for me sometimes. When you were all in the hiding place, it was so hard to climb the stairs and find everyone lined up, waiting for me. So desperate. So confined and so needy. There were days I wanted to scream. But then I knew I could always count on you to break the tension. Do you remember what you’d say to me every time I arrived?”
Anne reclaims a hollow brightness in her voice. “Say, Miep—what’s the news?”
“That’s it.” Miep grins through her tears. “That’s it exactly. It was always such a tremendous relief.” Then the grin fades. She purses her lips and examines the frittering rain. “Impossible to believe that they’re all gone. That only you and your father . . .” she says, but doesn’t finish her sentence. “Impossible to believe that there could be such evil in people’s hearts.”
“People do wicked things,” Anne replies. “Commit terrible crimes.” In the reflection of the tram’s rain-splattered window glass, she meets Margot’s desolate gaze, glazed over by death. She stares at Anne with sad accusation. The conductor calls out the coming stop, and the tram hums to a halt. Passengers climb down; new passengers climb aboard with a routine jostling of shoulders. The bell rings, and the conductor sings out the name of the next stop.
“That’s us,” Miep says, obviously still disturbed.
“I killed Margot, Miep,” Anne hears herself whisper.
But Miep is busy returning her handkerchief to her purse, sniffing back her sadness. Reassembling herself. “I’m sorry, Anne, but I didn’t hear what you said.”
Anne is glaring hard at the dirty floor of the tram. Staring at her scuffed saddle shoes. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”
De Uitkijk Bioscoop
Prinsengracht 452
The Canal Ring West
By the time they’ve exited the tram, the rain is coming heavily, settling into a solid drubbing of a downpour, so they must dash across the slippery cobbles from the tram to the cinema. Inside, some of the last remaining Canadians, still waiting to be shipped back to their homeland, lounge at the bar, off duty, bored with the Netherlands by now since nobody’s shooting at them any longer. Their empty expressions say it. Bored of wooden shoes and windmills, of delft-blue chinaware and smelly summer canals. One of them is searching through the pages of a booklet entitled All About Amsterdam. He glances up and offers Anne a routine wink. She stares back at him without response. But in the auditorium a darkness is sweeping over her. The room is clammy with a sickly aroma of smoke and damp clothing. She feels all expression fall away from her face. An ugliness grips her belly. An oily guilt slithering through her.
An English newsreel begins with a fanfare of trumpets. The narrator’s voice is a trumpet itself, as the images of the world flash past. Presenting the world to the world! Anne slouches deeply into her seat as crimes against humanity scorch across the screen and the camera pans across the piles and piles of corpses carpeting a scrubby expanse of mudflats. A bottomless hole opens under her. It makes her dizzy. She blinks. On the screen a few of the corpses are moving still, imitating the living as the narrator’s tone drops into a righteously grim timbre. “This,” he declares, “is Belsen,” and Anne feels her heart go rigid. “A city of the dead and the living dead.” A woman squats as she sips from a bowl in the midst of the ragged debris of bodies. Skeletons stumbling in their rags, aimless faces gaping into the camera without comprehension. “What is impossible for film to communicate is the stench,” the narrator insists, but Anne can smell it. That putrid perfume of animal rot. She watches the SS women, still in their feldgrau frocks, rounded up by Tommies. Scowling and sneering into the camera. “Members of Himmler’s female legion now required to bury the victims of their homicidal desires at the point of Royal Army bayonets.” The bodies of the dead, decaying, shrunken limbs, sacks of bones, are being dragged to the burial pits, where they are tossed in like rubbish. The corpses tumble down, limbs akimbo—one more onto the dung heap. When Anne was in the DP hospital, she’d been so deeply gratified to hear that the SS had been forced to handle disease-bloated corpses with their bare hands. But seeing it now—seeing their disregard for the humanity of their bundles, seeing the grim repulsion stamped on their faces as they grip each corpse by wrists and ankles and heave it into the pit with the flourish of trash removers—it enrages Anne. The obscenity of it. The despicable handling of these naked dead, stripped and decaying.
“Anne, do you want to go?” Miep whispers, “Do you want to leave?”
Suddenly she can see Margot’s face attached to every corpse. That one could be her. Or that one. Or that one sliding down the sandy bank into the massive open grave, that could be Margot.
She wants to scream. She wants to dive into the screen and shroud her sister’s shameful nakedness with a blanket. She wants to bellow at those SS hags: Get your hands off her, you filthy cunts! And maybe she does, because the next instant she finds herself standing, her body clenched, her hands trembling, as the echo of her own voice thunders inside her head.
Quickly, Miep is up out of her seat and guiding Anne into the aisle. “You’re safe now, you’re safe,” she’s murmuring. “Anne, it’s over, it’s over,” she tells her. But on the screen it isn’t over. On the screen there’s a soldier operating a bulldozer with a kerchief masking his face against the stench, the bodies twisting in the dirt as the broad blade digs in. “Let no one say,” the narrator commands, “that these crimes were never real.”
Tearing away from Miep, Anne runs, bursting from the cinema doors into the rain, desperate to outpace her panic. The bulldozer is behind her, plowing the corpses into the pit, its blade at her heels. She hears someone shout. A cyclist swerves on the slick cobbles; her body swivels out from under her. There’s an instant of wild tumble, nothing but the air clutching her, until she feels the impact as she penetrates the surface of the water. Her body plummets as the canal receives her. She can feel her breath swell up from her belly and into her chest in thick bubbles. Eyes clamped shut, limbs thrashing as the tortured images of Margot’s corpse are washed from her brain. If she doesn’t fight, she will sink, so can’t she just stop? Can’t she? Please, please can’t she just stop? The pressure of the depths grips her, trying to squeeze the final balloon of air from her breast as her feet flail against nothing. No floor to stop her, just a single plunge. The insistent downward draw to the bottom, where regrets end, where fear ends and pain dissolves. The panic of her body weakening. Her eyes flash open, her breath boiling from her lips. She knows the angel of death is waiting below. But before she can surrender, an intrusion. An intrusion! Margot is there, horning in, slinking down into the water, head shaved, her Kazetnik pullover ballooning around her arms, the Judenstern floating, her eyes wide and black. Not a single breath bubbles from her lips as she speaks. Anne, if you die, we die with you.