But as her father rises to leave, she calls out to him, “Pim, are we going into hiding?”
Her father stiffens as if he has just stepped on a tack but wants to keep it a secret. “Why do you ask such a thing?”
“Because I wonder where Oma Rose’s sterling-silver set has gone.” One hundred and thirteen pieces from Koch & Bergfeld of Bremen, and one of her mother’s prized possessions. “I was hoping that I would be allowed to use it for the party, but when I looked for it in the cabinet, it was missing. I even looked under the beds. The entire case has vanished.”
“And did you ask your mother about this?” Pim wonders.
“No. I’m asking you. Did you have to turn it over to the robbery bank?” Anne asks, worried to know the answer if it’s yes.
But Pim’s expression remains calm. Rational. “Your mother’s silverware is quite valuable to her,” he explains. “We thought it would be safer to ask some friends to hold on to it for the time being.”
“Friends who aren’t Jewish,” says Anne.
“That’s right,” her father admits without embarrassment.
“So the silverware has gone into hiding, but not us?”
“This is nothing you need to worry about tonight, my dear,” her father tells her. He returns to her bedside long enough to give her forehead a kiss. “Now sleep.”
“Pim, wait. My prayers.” Anne closes her eyes. Sometimes when she prays, she pictures God listening. A colossal, snowy-bearded bompa, the contented Master of the Universe, who gladly sets aside the governing of the cosmos long enough to listen to Anne Frank’s small recitation. Her prayers are in German still, just because they always have been so, and she ends them as she always has, with her closing message to the Father of Creation. Ich danke dir für all das Gute und Liebe und Schöne. Her thanks for all the goodness and love and beauty in the world. Amen.
“Very nice,” her father says with quiet satisfaction.
She gazes for a moment at the misty image of the divine in her head but then blinks it away. “Do you think that God can protect us, Pim?”
Pim appears surprised by this question. “Can he? Well. Of course he can, Anne.”
“Really? Even when the enemy is all around?”
“Especially then. The Lord has his plan, Anneke,” Pim assures her. “No need to worry yourself. You should simply have a good night’s sleep.”
Anne settles. He kisses her again on the forehead as Margot enters from her toilette.
“Good night, my dear Mutz,” he tells Margot.
“Good night, Pim,” Margot answers, and stops for a kiss on the head before their father exits into the hallway. Anne’s tabby has pranced into the room behind her sister, slinking around Margot’s ankle, but when he hops up to the end of Anne’s bed, Anne seizes him, gazing at her sister closely. Margot does not bother with curlers. She never talks about cosmetics, like Anne does, or begs Mother to let her wear lipstick, as it’s generally agreed that of the two of them Margot is the Naturally Pretty One. Anne is all gawky elbows and limbs, with a too-pointy chin and therefore in need of some cosmetic improvement. She stares as her sister says her prayers alone in an intimate whisper into God’s ear, too old to require Pim to watch over her. “What?” Margot demands thickly when she finishes.
Anne squeezes Moortje like the little bag of stuffing he is. “I didn’t say a thing.”
“Maybe not.” Margot fluffs her pillow with a spank. “But I could hear you anyway.”
“I asked Pim if we were going into hiding.”
“Yes?” Margot faces her, now alert.
Anne lifts the cat up under his front legs so that his paws dangle loosely. “He said they have given Oma Rose’s silverware to Christian friends for safekeeping. But that’s it.”
Margot expels the breath she has been holding. “Good.”
“Good?”
“I don’t want to go into hiding,” she says as she slips into her bed. “Do you?” she asks, as if Anne might be harboring some silly desire on the subject.
“No, of course not.” Anne returns her attention to Moortje, who mews lightly when she lowers him enough to press his nose against hers. “You think I want to be stuck in a smelly old farmhouse somewhere and lose all my friends?”
“I never know with you,” her sister says, settling her head on the properly fluffed pillow. “Anyway, you told me that Pim said there’s nothing happening.”
“No,” Anne must point out, letting Moortje loose on the blanket. “In fact, he didn’t say that. Not in so many words. He said I should go to sleep.”
“What a tremendous idea,” Margot replies with sisterly sarcasm.
Anne huffs but says nothing further, settling under her bedclothes as Moortje finds his spot at the foot of her davenport. Hiding. A frightening prospect, but also slightly exciting. Can she be forgiven for feeling a certain sly thrill at outsmarting the Nazis? Diving under. Onder het duiken! Farewell, Boche! Auf Wiedersehen! May we never meet again.
The rumor at school is that the whole Lowenstein family is paying a Christian farmer in Drenthe to let them live in a hayloft. Could she live in a hayloft? Surely not. She draws her knees up under the covers and rolls over toward the wall. Certainly, if the day comes, they will do better than a hayloft. If. If the day comes. Until then she will rely on Pim and God, as always, to make the right decisions.
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
The Canal Ring West
When Anne was still a toddler, Pim had purchased an Amsterdam franchise of the Opekta pectin company to cover their exit from Germany, opening the office with Mr. Kugler, selling products for quick jam. Mr. Kleiman had come aboard soon after to keep the books, and then came Miep, who had quickly been promoted to senior secretary, though, as Miep tells it, Pim had her in the kitchen for her first month making batch after batch of ten-minute jam so that she’d learn everything that could possibly go wrong with every recipe. “Too much fruit,” says Miep. “That was the main problem. People didn’t follow the recipe. They put in too much fruit and not enough sugar.”
Dearest Miep. She was sent to a foster home in Holland as a child because her parents in Vienna were too poor to feed her. It’s difficult for Anne to imagine such a thing, but it happened, though Miep is not the least bit bitter about it. She is such a trustworthy and understanding soul, Anne thinks. And even if she still speaks with a ghost of a wienerisch accent, she can be forgiven that, because in every other way she is completely Dutch.
A Dutch husband. Dutch fortitude. Dutch honesty and stubbornness. Miep possesses them all.
The window glass rattles. Another squadron of Luftwaffe Junkers grumbles through the sky from its air base north of Arnhem. Eyes rise for as long as it takes the buzz of the bombers to drift away, but no one has much to say about it. The German occupation is a fact of life, like a chronic bowel problem.
There’s a German, in fact, in the private office. A Herr So-and-So from the Frankfurt office of the Pomosin-Werke that oversees all Opekta franchises. He is cloistered in there with Mr. Kleiman, but the managing director of the franchise, Mr. Frank himself, is in the kitchen washing out dirty cups and saucers.
Anne has abandoned her after-school office duties, sorting invoices and such, out of boredom, and also out of a kind of nervous curiosity. “So what are you doing in here?” she asks Pim, hanging in the kitchen’s threshold.