“Oh, so that’s it. The truth comes out. It’s not that you’re afraid that nobody will publish it, you’re afraid that somebody will. You’re afraid I’ll make you look bad.”
“Not just me, Annelies. But may I ask? If you’re so very sure that Jews are still being persecuted, even here in the Netherlands, is it really your intention to expose the most intimate moments of our life in such a public fashion?”
Anne frowns.
“Think of your mother,” Pim tells her. “Consider the picture you drew of her in your pages.” He gazes at her, not unsympathetically. “It was often very unpleasant and unfair. Do you really want the world to remember her as the critical, unsympathetic, and unlovable person you often made her out to be?”
To this, Anne has no answer.
Pim places his napkin from his lap onto the table. “I’m sorry, meisje. I returned your diary for your own private satisfaction, because it was the correct thing to do. But you have no right to expose the pain and suffering of those in hiding, since they are no longer alive to grant you consent. As a result I must be adamant. No publication of your diary.”
Anne is suddenly on her feet, as if a fire has ignited in her belly. “How dare you, Pim?” she seethes. “How dare you act as if my diary was yours to return or not, to publish or not? I know that it frightens you. I know it! If my diary’s published, then you’ll no longer be in charge of what happened to us.”
“I was never in charge of what happened to us, Anne.”
“Really? You certainly pretended otherwise.”
“That’s unfair!” His face flushes pink. “That is completely, completely unfair. Someone had to assume a leadership role. You think it was going to be Hermann van Pels? You think it was going to be Fritz Pfeffer? Eight of us packed together, smothering each other day after day. I had no other choice, daughter. No other choice. And don’t imagine it was easy either! Do you believe I enjoyed being ‘in charge’ as you would have it? The constant bitterness and bickering. The unending squabbling over this stupidity and that one. But someone had to play the peacemaker, so it was me. Yes. I will admit to that crime, Annelies. I took on the burden of that responsibility, and believe me, burden it was. But I tried not to complain. I did my best to stay impartial, to make decisions that were in the best interest of us all. When the toilet clogged”—he frowns—“who fished out excrement with a pole? The only person who volunteered. When Miep or Bep or Mr. Kugler was fed up with our complaints, who soothed their feelings? When you and Mr. Pfeffer locked horns over the use of the desk, who was the broker of compromise? It was hard labor keeping the roof on. Not to mention the fact that I was still trying to run a business to keep us fed and to educate you children—not just my own daughters, mind you, but Peter, too. In that respect I was father to you all,” he declares. “So, my dear daughter, don’t believe that I am frightened now by what you’ve written, because I am not. When I tell you that there will be no publication of your diary writing, it is not for my sake but for the sake of those who have passed before us—and for yours.”
Anne glares at her father’s face, angry, his cheeks inflamed, then storms into her room. She hears him call her name but slams the door behind her.
There Margot is waiting in her typhus rags. So now you’re going to alienate Pim as well? Soon I’ll be the only one you have left, Anne.
“Shut up, will you?” Anne flings herself onto her bed and lights another cigarette, her hands still trembling with anger. “You’re the one who said I had to live. Remember that? All I’m doing is trying to keep our story alive, too.”
A cough rumbles through Margot’s chest. Is that really all?
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
No? You complain that Pim withheld the truth from you. But aren’t you still doing the same to him?
Anne turns, her face hot with tears. “I didn’t mean to do it, Margot,” she whispers desperately. “I didn’t mean to.”
But there is no one there to respond.
• • •
The next morning she ignores the knock on her door from Pim. She pretends she cannot hear him speak her name but waits instead until the flat is empty to go bathe in the tub. The water is tepid. She uses the soap Mr. Nussbaum brought her. But then she stops. The tub is so comfortable. So inviting. For a moment she slips beneath the surface, feeling the water envelop her. A few bubbles of oxygen. That’s all that stands between her and the angel of death. But then she rises up, splashing, seizing her next breath of air.
Nussbaum
Tweedehands-Boekverkoper
The Rozengracht
. . . if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.
She stops reading. Presses the pages against her breast. Mr. Nussbaum is seated behind the sales desk in his bookshop, observing her with an unreadable expression. For a moment he simply gazes at her, his arms folded at an angle in front of him, a shadow across his face. Then the chair creaks as he shifts forward, and he speaks quietly. “And how old . . .” he begins, “how old were you when you wrote this?”
“Fifteen,” she says. “I was fifteen. It was the last thing I wrote before the Gestapo came.”
A blink and then a shake of his head.
“I know it probably sounds childish,” she tells him.
“No. No, Anne. Not childish. Innocent, perhaps. A certain innocence. But not childish in the least.”
“So,” she breathes, “you think it’s not so bad?”
He surprises her with a laugh, even though the shadow does not leave his face. “Not so bad? Anne, what you’ve read to me here today,” he says, “it’s been a privilege to hear it. You, Miss Frank, like it or not, are a writer.”
Anne swallows. A flash of joyful terror shoots through her. “Well,” she answers with gratitude, “thank you for saying that. But the truth is, I think, that I’m just some Jewish girl who the Germans forgot to gas.”
“Now, you see. This is what I mean. This is why I told your father that he must allow you to go to America. So that you can be free of that awful stigma.”