“Have I?” the rabbi asks. “Then I apologize. It is a choice,” he says. “But I never intended to make it sound easy.” He crushes out his cigarette. “When I think of the future, I do my best to compromise. It shall be as God wills and what we make of God’s will.” Rabbi Souza blinks slowly. “Are you familiar, Anne, with the notion of tikkun olam?”
Anne says nothing.
“Tikkun olam,” the rabbi repeats. “It’s something of a mystery. But I have come to define its meaning as ‘repairing the world.’”
Anne shakes her head. “How is such a thing possible?”
“Repairing the world is a Jewish obligation,” the rabbi says. “How? That’s the question we must all ask and answer for ourselves, Anne. This much, though, I can say: We must learn to conquer our anger. We must put our faith in the sheer beauty of God’s creation and practice repentance and forgiveness. Even if we don’t want to. Even if we don’t feel it in our hearts. Especially then. It is our duty to repair the damage we have done and therefore repair the damage done to us.”
Anne eyes her smoldering cigarette, the ember glowing red. Repairing the world? She is unwilling to reveal it, but the rabbi’s words have pierced her in an unexpected way. And some hidden part of her responds with a soupçon of hope.
• • •
That night she dreams of Belsen, and there Margot is waiting for her. They are spooned together on the filthy pallet, desiccated by typhus. Her sister coughing away the last moments of her life.
“Forgive me,” Anne whispers. “Please, forgive me,” she begs.
32 TRUTH
The truth is a heavy burden that few care to carry.
—Jewish proverb
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Anne dashes around to the landing and up the steps, unlatches the bookshelf, and pushes it aside to enter the Achterhuis. She is pulling off her shoes so the squeak of the floorboards won’t give her away. The anonymous men in dark suits have appeared once again and have been admitted into the private office. She can already hear the indistinct murmur of voices below her as she lies down and presses her ear to the floor so she can listen in. Margot appears beside her, her ear pressed to the floor as well. Her Kazetnik rags crawling with lice, she complains urgently, Anne, I can’t hear them. I can’t hear them. What are they saying?
Anne’s eyes have gone wet with the shock of rage that has gripped her by the heart. “They’re saying,” she whispers hotly, “that our father is a collaborator.”
• • •
For now the men in the dark suits have finished. But as Pim sees them off at the top of the stairs, Anne slips into the private office and fills one of the chairs, the cushion still warm. When Pim returns to find her there, he stops dead. His breath shortens. Maybe the soldier in him has just detected an ambush. “Anne?” He speaks guardedly. “Anne, what’s wrong?”
“I heard everything,” she tells him, staring blankly.
Pim pauses. “And what does that mean, exactly? You heard everything?”
“You know what it means,” she insists. “I heard the truth, Pim. I was upstairs with my ear to the floor, and I heard the truth. All this time you pretended that it was just a simple business matter. A bureaucratic problem.”
“And it always was.”
“I was afraid they were going to deport you because you were German, but that was never the reason they were here, was it, Pim? They were here because you were selling goods to the German Wehrmacht.”
Pim swallows. After quietly closing the office door, he sits in his padded chair with a careful creak of leather, as if he might be sitting on a land mine to keep it from exploding. His eyes dampen. “Anne . . .” he whispers. A plea.
“How could you, Pim?”
Her father draws a shallow breath and holds it as he repeats her name. “Anne, please. You must try to understand. It was wartime.”
“How can that be any kind of justification? You. A Jew. A Jew! Yet you profited by selling to the murderers of our people, Pim! The murderers of our neighbors. Of our family!”
“Anne, don’t say something you’ll be unable to take back,” Pim warns her bleakly. “The truth is that this sort of transaction was commonplace. The occupation authority was in control and had an army to supply. If they were interested in doing business with your company, then you simply accepted their price concessions and put your signature on the contracts. We were given no alternative. It was either supply them or be shut down. And we couldn’t afford that possibility,” he says thickly. “Business was terrible. Nonexistent. We needed the Wehrmacht’s money coming in—please, can’t you understand that? Maybe it was just a trickle, but it was enough to buy food to feed us in hiding.”
But Anne’s anger is not slackened. “You made us war profiteers, Pim. Criminals. Taking money from those who planned to slaughter us. And now the government’s going to put us on the list for deportation.”
“No, Anne.”
“They did Mr. Nussbaum. And he was innocent! Of any crime.”
“Werner Nussbaum made his own troubles,” Pim insists heatedly. “I warned him to simply pay the taxes, as abhorrent as they might be, and not to make unnecessary enemies. But he was stubborn. He was stubborn from the day I met him in the barracks block, and he wouldn’t listen.”
“At least he was true to his own convictions.”
“Did I make a mistake, Anne?” Pim bursts out, his ears pinking with anger. “Perhaps I did! But at that critical moment, I believed that what I was doing was best for us all. Selling the Wehrmacht pectin? A few hundred barrels of spices? I believed I was protecting us, Anne. And if I was wrong—if that was a sin—I cannot change that now. Our regrets may be strong in our hearts, but none of them are strong enough to alter the past.”
“And did Mummy know?” she asks sharply.
Her father stops. Stares before he answers simply, “I never kept secrets from your mother.”
A sharp knock at the door, and in steps Dassah, a scolding expression clamped onto her face, one that she seldom wears at work. “What is going on here? We can hear your voices raised all the way in the front office.”
“What about her?” Anne demands. “I don’t suppose you keep secrets from her either. Does she know all about your dealings with the mof assassins?”
For once Anne seems to have actually taken Dassah by surprise. Her stepmother blanches. Steps in and quickly secures the door behind her. “You told her this?” she asks Pim pointedly.