Bep shrivels into a slump, her shoulders disappearing. “I knew you would be angry. Of course. You have every right to be angry. You have every right to hate me.”
A sharp sob strikes Anne in the chest. She grabs her forehead, eyes squeezed tightly shut. She can feel the thump of her heart dictating her reaction, but she resists it. Shaking her head, she blinks open her eyes and wipes them roughly with the palms of her hands. “No,” she answers, though her voice shivers. “No, Bep. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. You risked your life to keep us safe. And what your sister did?” A heavy breath stops her. “What your sister did or didn’t do,” she says. “You bear no responsibility for that.”
Bep gazes back at her. Her eyes are dark with suffering, wounded, begging forgiveness. When she breaks down in tears, Anne hesitates but then steps forward. She gathers the woman into her arms, her own tears wetting her cheeks, and stares past Bep at Margot’s thin shadow, her Belsen death rags hanging from her body as she gazes back at them with blighted sympathy. Clouds move. The envelope of light drains of color. Drains of anger. Empties itself of regret and reprisal. What can Anne possibly do but embrace an exhausted forgiveness, along with her lost friend?
Bep breathes in and out as they separate. Opens her purse for a handkerchief and mops her eyes. “I have something for you, Anne,” she manages to say. Replacing the handkerchief, she draws out a small, flat package, wrapped in brown paper and closed with Scotch tape. “Something that was yours many years ago. I took it because . . .” says Bep, but then it’s hard for her to explain why she took it. She shakes her head. “I wanted a memento of you. It was an impulse, but once I had it, I was too embarrassed to give it back.”
Anne gazes at Bep, who nods at her to accept it. Her gaze drops to the package as she takes it into her hands. The package is soft. Pliable. Carefully, she tugs open the tape that binds it and stares at its contents. “My combing shawl.”
“I found it on the floor that awful day. And I took it. I thought I would keep it for you until you came back. But I suppose it’s taken me a long time to return it.”
Odd how such a small thing, such an insignificant item from her girlhood, has such an effect. “I would wear this over my shoulders every night. And I remember how sometimes Margot would brush my hair for me,” she says. “We could be arguing all day, but that special moment would overcome all of it. It made me feel so close to her that it was impossible to feel anything except love. More than love,” Anne says. “I felt as if we had something magical that only sisters could share.” She looks past Bep, to the spot where Margot should be standing, yet it’s nothing save empty light now.
“Anne—” Bep starts to say, but Anne breaks in, the words coming unbidden, unplanned.
“I killed her,” she announces. A thin shiver passes through her body.
Bep squints at her, confused. “You . . . you what?”
“I killed her. I killed her, Bep. I killed my sister at Bergen-Belsen.”
Bep opens her mouth. “I don’t . . .” she begins, but then she shakes her head as if to shake the words away. “Anne . . .” she whispers.
“It’s not my guilt speaking,” Anne says. “That is, my guilt at surviving when she did not. I do feel a terrible guilt over that. Survival? That is its own kind of crime. But my crime is something different.” Rolling tears begin to ice her cheek, but she does not wipe them away. “We were . . .” Anne tries to continue, but her words die in her mouth, and she must start again. “We were in Barracks Block 1 in Belsen, Margot and I. Both of us had been brought into Germany from Birkenau. The weather was freezing. The camp was overflowing with disease. Typhus, dysentery, scurvy,” she recites the list. “Both of us were dreadfully, dreadfully sick. And I had been suffering from these . . . these horrible visions—rats the size of dinner platters crawling over us. Blinded cats, their eyes gouged out, shivering and mewing in agony, but when I tried to pick them up, they would spit at me and bite my fingers until I was bleeding. I suppose it was the fever. I felt like my eyes were slowly boiling inside my skull, and I was so, so horribly exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep. To fall into the deepest sleep ever conceived and never, ever wake up. But the barracks block was noisy. And Margot was coughing so loudly. We were lying close beside each other on the same pallet. There were lice in the straw. Lice in our ears and under our arms. Lice everywhere. In every crevice and pit of our bodies. I couldn’t sleep no matter how exhausted I felt, because everything itched so badly, my whole body. I just wanted to tear my skin off. And Margot was still coughing. I remember how I shouted at her, ‘Be quiet! Can’t you be quiet?’ But she just kept coughing. I only wanted to sleep,” she tries to explain as the tears flood her eyes and cling to her lashes. “I only wanted to sleep.”
She sees it all again. The disease-rotted barracks. The pallet on which she lay beside Margot. She can smell the stench of the filthy, lice-infested straw. The stink of bodies. The noise of Margot’s cough. She feels the impulse to shut her up. To heave her away. A beat. She swallows something hard and heavy. “So I shoved her,” she confesses. “She was lying with her back to me, and I shoved her from behind. I only wanted her to stop. Just stop coughing so loudly, so I could sleep. I didn’t mean to shove her . . . to shove her so hard.” Her voice diminishes. “So hard that she would roll off the pallet. But I did. I must have. And when she fell, it was too much for her. She was so weak. We were both so weak. The impact was too great a shock for her body.” The slowest beat. “She was dead,” Anne whispers. And then her sister is on the ground. Limbs akimbo. Her body motionless. Eyes open but her gaze stolen. Anne can feel the scream clog her throat, but she is too weak to release it as those around her begin to strip the corpse of its value. The dead have no need for socks on their feet. They do not require a woolen pullover.
Bep stares, her eyes raw. And then slowly she says, “Anne. Anne, I want you to listen to me, please.” She wipes her eyes, but a strange calm has transformed the woman’s face. “Will you? Will you listen to me? What you just told me—what you just told me you think happened,” she corrects. “You should consider it nothing more than a nightmare. Do you hear me, Anne? You were so ill. So fevered. It was simply—I’m sure of it—simply another hallucination.”
Anne gazes at Bep heavily. “Hallucination,” she repeats.
“You were so young,” Bep tells her. “Just a helpless child. You must believe me when I tell you that you have no right to take on the guilt of your sister’s death. The blame for that lands squarely on the men who perpetrated these crimes. Not on you, do you understand that?”
Anne is shaking her head, swiping at the tears on her face. “I know what I know.”
“But you don’t know, Anne,” Bep insists sharply now. “You don’t know. You think that you were strong lying there in that hideous place? Do you really? If Margot rolled off the pallet and died, then it was because she was coughing so violently. Not because of any kind of pitiful shove on your part. Not because of you.”