Annelies

1946

Amsterdam

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

By noon a bright sun is bluing the sky, and Anne and Griet find they have had enough of school for the day. They hurry down the stairwell at the rear of the building and steal into the street. Only the circling gulls above the canal squawk with alarm at their truancy. On their bicycles it’s twenty minutes to the movie house. The cobblestones have been lacquered silvery bright by the early rain, but Anne feels free riding her bicycle, darting and weaving in between pedestrians. She feels the thrill of the speed, the rough delight of her tires brisking along the streets. People scold her impertinence, but it only makes her laugh with a keen release, and she calls back to Griet to keep up with a wild brand of joy.

• • •

Canadian troops are occupying the newly opened pubs, dance halls, and café tables as the city slowly drowses awake. For months Canadian cigarette rations have stood as the standard currency across the town. Shopkeepers display printed signs in their windows written in English: NO CURRENCY ACCEPTED. CIGARETTES ONLY. The English language has invaded the movie houses, too, and Dutch has been relegated to the subtitles.

Anne and Griet buy their tickets and step into the dim auditorium, which is nothing but a roomful of chairs facing the whitewashed wall where the film will be projected. To advertise their freedom, their brash disregard, both girls have hooked their legs over the empty seats in front of them, causing their skirts to hike, uncovering their knees and showing off their calves.

The movie is a comedy. A short, fat man and a tall, skinny man are best pals, yet there’s always something the fat one is doing to earn him a slap or a punch. It’s easy to see that the fat one is the funny man and that his antics are driving the show. The skinny man is only there to have jokes bounced off him and to administer hilarious punishment with a seltzer bottle or a bop on the noggin. The fat man is chased by a tiny yapping lapdog. Chased by a Chinese cook wielding a cleaver. Chased by a woman whose skirt has been ripped off. Everyone laughs. Anne laughs. She laughs as if she might never stop, as if she might drown in her own laughter.

The girls are still laughing when they stagger out into the afternoon. They lean against the casements featuring the advertising placards and huff smilingly at the air.

“Jezus Christus, that was too much,” Griet moans.

Anne sighs a laugh and breathes through a smile. “I’ve never heard you say that,” she notices.

“Heard me say what?”

“Jezus Christus.”

Griet only shrugs. “It’s just a saying.”

They hear a whistle as two of the Canadian soldiers cycle past them. “Hey there, honeypot.” One of them grins at Griet. “You look like you’re gonna bust outta your shirt.” And then he says something else that exceeds Anne’s grasp of English, something that causes the soldiers to chortle together loudly as they pedal off.

“What did he say, what did he say?” Griet is desperate to know.

“He said, ‘Hello, you beautiful ladies—please marry us and come live in our castles in Canada.’”

“Oh, he did not. Did he?”

“No.”

“Are there castles in Canada?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there are.” She expels a breath. “I have to be going.”

“Aw, don’t tell me you have to work in your father’s dumb old office again.”

“I do.”

“It’s not fair. You should come over to my flat. Nobody’s home at this time of day. We could do whatever we want.”

“Tomorrow, maybe. Today, I promised my father.”

“Promises.” Griet shrugs. “Well, if you must. But before you go”—she smiles—“I’ve got something for you.”

Anne smiles back at the tube of lipstick that Griet produces from her pocket. “Where did you get that?”

“Henk. He got a bunch of them from his brother,” Griet whispers mischievously as she unscrews the tube. Anne answers by shaping her mouth into a bow. She feels the sticky, creamy flow of the lip rouge, watching Griet shape her own mouth into an instructive oval as she applies the color to Anne’s lips. “Perfection.” Griet’s laugh is impish. “Now you’re irresistible.”

But Anne’s attention has been caught by a figure leaning against the brick balustrade at the end of the canal bridge. It’s the yellow-haired boy from the spice warehouse. A loiterer, dressed in poor, ill-fitting clothes, he gazes at them.

“Who’s that?” Griet wants to know.

“I don’t know his name. He works in my father’s warehouse.”

“Well. He looks very interested in something,” she points out, and gives Anne a nudge. “I wonder what.”

• • •

Curiosity. That’s all it is. It’s just for curiosity’s sake that Anne walks her bicycle up the Prinsengracht rather than riding it. At first she camouflages her over-the-shoulder glances. Stopping to tie her shoe and sneaking a peek. Another fleeting look as she allows an old man to pass with his cane or to yield to a pair of cyclists dinging their bells as they turn onto the Leidsegracht. Each time, she sees that he’s still behind her, hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, his shoulders hunched with a purposeful stride.

She’s both excited by this and a little frightened. The gulls are swooping above her, crying. She can smell the diesel stench of boat engines. By the time she passes the fat yellow advertising column at the corner of the Rozenstraat, she quits trying to cover her backward glances. Halfway across the bridge to the Westermarkt, she stops as a canal boat putters beneath and leans her bike against the stonework. The boy hesitates for an instant. But then he walks toward her.

“You’re following me,” she accuses him blankly.

“Could be,” he answers.

“Why?” She feels his eyes penetrating her bravado.

“Why do you think?”

“I’m sure I haven’t the slightest,” Anne insists.

“No?” A smile bends his lip. “I saw you coming out of the movie house. Do you like it when soldiers whistle at you?”

She feels a sudden heat. “It wasn’t me they were whistling at.”

“Oh. You mean it was your friend with the big boobies.”

Anne’s jaw clenches.

“Well, I like you better,” the boy tells her.

“Oh, do you? That’s such an honor.” She frowns. Though, honestly, she’s surprised at the bright sting of joy she feels.

“I like your face. I like watching you look at things.”

“Things?”

“Things.” He shrugs. “I liked the way you looked at me. But I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what?”

The boy gazes at her.

“Sure of what?”

Another shrug. “You’re the owner’s daughter. I’m just a broom boy. A piece of canal trash.”

Anne stares back at him. “You’re a gentile,” she says, “and I’m Jewish.” She says this and waits for his response. Waits to judge his response. But all he gives her is a lazy exhale. “That doesn’t mean something to you?” she must demand.

“Well. My pap always said Jews are bloodsuckers. But my pap hated everybody. Me? I don’t care if you’re from the moon. I just want to touch your face.”

Anne breathes in and then breathes out. The boy is so close to her. The maleness of him. She feels tension in the simple proximity of their bodies. She can smell his bitter sweat. Is it guilt that stings her? Margot is never going to stand so close to a rough-edged boy like this, with nothing but a heartbeat between them. Anne feels her attraction as if it’s a type of pain.

“That’s all you want?” she asks. “Just to touch my face?”

The boy’s expression bends as he turns his head, unsure if he is being baited. She can see the hurt in his eyes. The uncertainty.

“Well, then,” Anne prompts. “I’m standing here.”

And now the boy straightens. His posture perks up, but his eyes are still hunted. “You mean . . . now?”

The carillon of the Westertoren chimes the quarter hour. The boy glances around, but the bustling Dutch citizenry are more interested in their own business than in how close together the two of them are standing. So he takes another step forward. She watches his hand rise and notices the dirt under his fingernails, but then she looks into his face as, ever so gingerly, his fingertips brush the skin of her cheek. It’s just a whisper of a touch, but she feels it root her to the spot. For an instant the pain in his eyes has lifted. She swallows.

“Can I do it again?” he asks, but doesn’t really wait for an answer. His fingers rise, and he strokes her cheek with a sudden intimacy that causes her heart to clench. Her lips part and her body moves, and in the next instance she seizes him, smothers her mouth against his. It is not a kiss, it’s an attack. She wants to devour him at a single gulp. She snatches his hair as if she might rip it out. She wants to inhale him. She wants so much more than Peter’s wet mouth could ever have offered her in the attic of the Achterhuis. She wants the boy’s breath. She wants his blood. And when she bites his lip, she tastes it.

He yelps painfully as he breaks away from her. His eyes blinking with shock, he wipes his lips and glares at the stain of blood and lipstick on his fingers without comprehension. Anne gives him a wild gaze, her eyes flooding with tears, as she mounts her bicycle and launches her frantic escape.

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Amsterdam-Centrum

When she reaches the doors of her father’s building, she is out of breath, still wiping away the tears as she rolls her bicycle into the warehouse. The air is thick with coriander, and a powdery haze hangs in the heavy sunlight. The men ignore her, too busy to bother with hellos, which is a relief. She climbs the steep stairs slowly and then pauses outside the office door, trying to compose herself. Wipes the lipstick onto a handkerchief, trying to compose a face to wear. She was once well known among her friends for her expressions of careless insouciance. But now her heart is a deep drumbeat in her chest, and she feels a terrible thrum of rage and hunger. She breathes in, she breathes out, her eyes shut tight, trying to suppress the painful surge of desire that she tastes in her mouth like the tang of the boy’s blood.

“Sorry I’m late,” she announces, breezing into the front room, her voice a panic of nonchalance. Miep looks up at her with blank anxiety.

“Late? Oh,” says Miep, and then she shakes her head dismissively. “I hadn’t even noticed. I think Bep has a stack of correspondence that needs filing.”

Anne looks up, slips her book sack from her shoulder. Bep is watching her nervously from the opposite desk, then staples a selection of papers together with a quick bang.

“Where is everybody?” Anne wants to know. She noticed that her father’s office door was closed when she climbed the steps from the warehouse, but it meant nothing. Pim has people in the private office all the time. Salesmen, advertising-agency people, spice distributors, a steady flow of municipal functionaries, all with their own particular rubber stamps that require inking. But now Anne wonders, “Where is Mr. Kugler? Where is Mr. Kleiman?”

A half glance from Miep. “They’re in your papa’s office.”

Something about the sound of this is odd. The small intimacy softening Miep’s voice. In the flat they share, Miep calls Pim by his given name, “Otto,” but at the office it is always and only “Mr. Frank.” Now it’s suddenly “in your papa’s office.”

Bep is harried as she dashes off her explanation of Anne’s assignment, and then she picks up the teacup and saucer from her desk. “I’m going to wash the dishes,” she announces, standing. And before Anne can respond, Bep is bustling away, pausing only to collect an empty cup from Mr. Kleiman’s desk before rattling off to the kitchen beside Pim’s private office.

“Oh, Bep,” Miep calls, holding up her own cup and saucer, but Bep is already gone. “Anne, I’m sorry, but would you mind taking this in, too?” she asks. Her voice is dim and distracted, hiding unspoken nerves.

“What’s happening?” Anne asks.

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Yes. Something.”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Anne, please. The cup.”

She takes it, pursing her lips. Passing her father’s office, Anne can hear the weave of voices but cannot make out a word spoken. She slips into the kitchen behind Bep and sets Miep’s cup and saucer on the sink. “Another cup, Bep,” she says.

“Oh.” A blank glance. “Thank you,” Bep tells her with a thin smile, and returns to the teacup she is scrubbing.

Anne lifts herself onto the counter for a seat, legs dangling. “So who’s in my father’s office with him?” she asks as casually as possible.

Bep’s glance is clouded. “Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler are in there,” she says. “And some other gentlemen. I don’t know who they are. Honestly, no one is telling me anything.” Bep frowns fearfully. “Not Mr. Frank, not Mr. Kleiman. Not even Miep.” Her posture and expression are guarded, and the light of the flagging sun from the window turns her glasses opaque. Then, “Excuse me,” she says, leaving the towel hung over the sink’s faucet and returning the cups and saucers to the cupboard. “I should get back to my work. There’s still so much to do.”

Quickly, Anne drops her feet back to the floor, latching onto Bep’s arm. “Bep,” she whispers. “Wait.”

“I have to go.”

“In a moment. Please wait for just a moment,” Anne begs. Bep seems to freeze in place. “It’s been hard for you, I know, with me around,” Anne says. “And maybe one reason is that I should have said this to you sooner. So let me say it now: Thank you. Thank you, Bep, for all you did for us. Even if it all ended the way it did, you and Miep cared for us so well. You risked your own safety for ours.”

Bep is still fixed in place, still staring, her eyes locked open behind the lenses of her glasses. “I don’t need any thanks,” she says tightly. “I don’t want anyone to feel grateful to me.”

“But I am grateful. You must let me be grateful, Bep. It’s one of the few human things I can still feel. Grateful to you and Miep, Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler. I can’t explain it, but I need to be grateful.”

Bep bites into her lower lip, shaking her head. “No. You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” Anne admits. “I’m lost. So utterly lost. I need some purpose, Bep. I must accomplish something to justify myself. Why am I alive? Mummy’s dead. Margot’s dead. Why am I the lucky one? How can I deserve that?”

For an instant Bep looks at Anne with stark, pale terror. “It’s the police,” she confesses suddenly, as if the words were too dire to remain unspoken a second longer.

“The police?” Anne repeats.

“The BNV. In your father’s office.”

Fear like a poke from a needle. Police? The BNV is the Bureau of National Security, and that only means one thing to Anne: arrest. She feels her throat thicken. “Why would you think that?”

“Because who else could it be? They’ve been here all afternoon. They called Miep in. For an hour she was in there. And when I asked her what was going on, all she did was tell me to stay calm and keep my head on. And then came my turn and all those dreadful questions. How well did I know the men working in the warehouse? How often did I talk to them? What was my contact with the man from the home office in Frankfurt?”

“The mof?”

“How many times did I speak to him over the telephone? How could I be expected to remember such a thing?” she exclaims. “I answered the telephone ten times a day.” She bites down to steady the quiver of her chin, and then she whispers a dark conclusion to herself. “I think they suspect me.”

Anne feels her neck heat with sweat. “Suspect you?”

A quick blink from Bep, as if for an instant she’d forgotten that Anne was there. Her eyes go wet. “Of betrayal.”

“Bep,” Anne breathes. “You’re frightening me.”

“I’m sorry, but what if it’s true? What if they’re planning on taking me into custody as a collaborator?”

And for the smallest fraction of an instant, Anne introduces that possibility into her brain: Bep as betrayer. A painful pinprick till she shakes it off. “No. That can’t be true.”

“Can’t it? All I know is that the whole town’s out for vengeance. Don’t you know? It’s ‘Hatchet Days,’ and I’ve seen what’s done in the name of justice. Up close!” Eyes darting. “I’m sorry, Anne, but I must go. I really must.”

“Bep.” Anne speaks her name as if trying to snag her with a hook, trying to latch onto Bep’s arm again, but this time Bep won’t permit it.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bep keeps repeating. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you or I can do. Things will never be the way they were again, Anne. Not ever,” she declares, and beats a tearful retreat, leaving Anne alone. Her eyes burn hotly. Her breathing shortens, and she feels she must force herself into her next breath.

• • •

Out in the corridor, Anne finds Mr. Kleiman lighting a cigarette outside Pim’s private office, thin as a reed with short, silvered hair and round horn-rimmed spectacles. Because of his stomach troubles, Mr. Kleiman rarely smokes. Everyone knows that. But this afternoon he is inhaling the chalky gray smoke before he turns with a dismal gaze and observes Anne standing in the threshold of the kitchen.

“Goedemiddag, Anne,” he offers with an unusual formality.

“Is something going on, Mr. Kleiman?” she asks him.

But Kleiman only shrugs as if to say, Who could explain it? His expression is pale and bleak. No more sunshine from Mr. Kleiman. Before the war he was a man with a cheery, sympathetic manner, who was known for his love of jokes, riddles, and tongue twisters. Now Mr. Kleiman is known for his sudden silences, as if he has been confronted by a riddle he simply cannot crack. A puzzle that will not be solved. He gazes at Anne through his spectacles; his expression looks bludgeoned and burdened by a deeply routine pain.

“Those men in there,” she says. “Who are they? What do they want?”

His head shakes. “You’ll have to ask your father about that, Anne,” he answers simply. “It’s not my place to say.”

“Can I see him?” She takes a step forward, but Kleiman raises his palm to stop her.

“No. No, not now. Now is not good.”

But Anne feels a rush of dark energy building up inside her. She quickly ducks past Mr. Kleiman and rattles the door handle.

“Anne!” Kleiman squawks. But the door is locked.

“Pim!” she demands, and in a moment the latch turns and the door cracks open, Pim blocking her entrance.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Kleiman is apologizing tensely behind her. “I had no idea that she would try to barge through like this.”

“Anne,” Pim says firmly. “This is no time for antics.”

“What’s going on in there? That’s all I want to know.” She tries to peer past Pim, but her father will not permit it.

“Anne, I’m closing the door.”

“No! You can’t keep any more secrets from me.”

“I’m not. But some matters are private. There’s a difference. Go back to your work and allow the adults to handle things.”

“Oh, as if the adults have handled all matters so perfectly up till now.”

“Anne.”

“All the adults have done is raze half the world to the ground.”

“Anne, do as you are told!” Her father’s voice booms with an unnatural jolt of anger. “Do as you’re told or there will be consequences.”

“Consequences? Ha!” she shouts back. “And what could those consequences possibly be? What can you take away from me that I haven’t already lost?”

Pim simply doesn’t answer her and simply bangs the door closed, relatching the lock. Anne bulls past Kleiman and storms away, but not to fume. Quickly, she dashes around to the landing and up the steps. Unhooking the bookshelf, she pushes it aside and enters the Achterhuis. The room creaks. Gulls squawk outside the windows, but she can hear a muffle of voices drifting upward from the private office beneath her. Once, after they’d gone into hiding, a big wheel from Pomosin-Werke in Frankfurt had traveled to Amsterdam to confer with Kugler and Kleiman over Opekta’s financial health. Pim had been so anxious about missing this meeting that he’d lain down with his ear pressed to the floorboards to listen in. Margot, too, had been conscripted into lending her ear to the effort, trying to take notes in shorthand while prone on the hardwood. This worked for a bit, but when Pim had grown too stiff to continue, Anne had been drafted next. Now, down on her belly, she presses her ear to the floor. She can hear a strange tone enter her father’s voice, stiltedly formal but also weighted by a hard anger and something else: fear.

“Please, allow me to finish my point,” he is saying. “The survival of my family was my only concern. The businesses were secondary.”

“That’s irrelevant,” she can hear one of the unknown men correct. “Regardless of your motives, Mr. Frank, facts are facts.”

Anne, what are they saying? Margot wants to know, suddenly lying beside her, just as if they were still together in hiding, ear pressed to the wood. I can’t hear them, Anne. What are they saying?

“Quiet, will you?” Anne hisses back. But she’s missed what Pim has just said, and now the other man is talking.

“This will do for today, Mr. Frank. We’ll keep you informed as necessary while we continue our investigation.”

By the time Anne makes it back belowstairs in the front of the building, it’s too late. Whoever the people were in Pim’s office, they have made their exit. She can hear Kleiman’s voice warning them to mind the steepness of the steps as they descend to the street. She thinks of trying to follow them, but before she can do so, Pim pokes his head out of the private office. “Anne. I want to speak to you, please,” he announces darkly.

• • •

The private office was always considered very plush. The padded upholstery. The velvet drapes. The warm oak paneling. The well-polished desk and the brass fixtures. This was the spot where they would gather in hiding to listen to the BBC or Radio Oranje after the workers below had gone home. But now there is a forlorn quality to it. The brass has begun to tarnish. The furnishings show their many nicks and scratches. The heavy drapes are dull with dust, and years of plumbing failures have stained the wallpaper.

“I cannot conceive of what made you feel justified in indulging in such an outburst.”

“Who were those men?”

“Anne, I’ve told you. It’s a private matter.”

“There’s nothing private about who betrayed us, Pim.”

“Betrayed us?”

“Why is the BNV investigating Bep?”

“Anne,” says her father patiently as if naming a silly, irrational thing.

“They were interrogating her. She told me. Both her and Miep.”

“Anne,” he says again. “Those gentlemen are not BNV, and they were not interrogating anybody. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. There were simply certain matters that needed to be cleared up. Certain questions that needed to be asked.”

“Asked by whom? If you say those men are not BNV, then who are they?”

“Enough, daughter,” Pim says firmly, his voice going ragged around the edges. “Please, enough. I’ve already told you everything you need to know.”

“You’ve told me nothing,” Anne protests.

“Untrue. I’ve told you it’s none of your concern and that you should leave it be.”

“Bep is very upset,” Anne says.

“She had a difficult interview,” Pim is willing to admit.

“Is she going to be dismissed?”

Pim huffs with an exhausted air. “No one is being dismissed. Bep is still a valued employee and a good friend to whom you and I both owe a great debt.” At this point her father leans forward, hands clasping on his blotter. “So please, meisje,” he says, adopting a sturdy calm, as he used to when he was soothing her agitations during a bombing raid. “Enough. I don’t wish to argue any longer. I understand that you’re confused. I understand that you’re anxious. It’s a very anxious world,” he agrees. “But you must trust me to do what’s best. For all of us.”

• • •

Trust. Anne writes the word on the page. What an odd little word that has become to her. Anne should “trust” in Pim. She should “trust” in God. But how can she possibly?

Margot has appeared in her Kazetnik’s rags, her face shrunk down to the bone by starvation and disease.

“What?” Anne demands to know. She is up in the Achterhuis, bundled in an old sweater, sitting with her notebook, her back pressed against the wall in the spot where her desk once stood. Margot’s eyes are greasy with death in the light from the bare windows.

Have you really sunk so low that you could believe that a woman who risked her life for us could be a criminal? Bep? Bep of all people? You can’t actually believe for a minute that she could have betrayed us, can you? That’s lunacy.

“Maybe. Maybe it isn’t,” Anne replies dryly, flexing her writing hand. “Under the right circumstances, who is not capable of anything? Didn’t the camps teach you that much, Margot?”

Margot answers her with a blunt glare. Are you talking about Bep now or yourself?

Anne glares back. “I’m guilty, yes. Is that what you want to hear me say? I’m guilty of the crime of surviving. That wretched sin. Bep must be able to see that. And who can blame her, really?” Anne wonders. Closing the notebook in her lap, she stares at nothing. “I want to trust Bep. Of course I do. But perhaps in a way it’s easier to believe that she could have betrayed us rather than simply believe she’s rejected me. That she can see that I am ruined and wants to put plenty of distance between us.”

Anne speaks this aloud, but when she looks back at Margot, her sister is nothing more than dust motes drifting through the prying daylight.

Anne pedals through the damp afternoon to the Prinsengracht. At the Keizersgracht she climbs off her bicycle and walks in, just as she did the day the boy from the warehouse followed her, but there is no sign of him. Only people bustling to and fro, on foot, on bikes, as the seagulls mill above their heads. Does she really think he will still try to catch up to her? After she drew blood from his kiss? No, she doesn’t think that, but she also hopes she’s wrong. Maybe he’s just gone to work, and she can catch his glance as he’s lugging a barrel. When she reaches the warehouse, one of the workers holds the door for her, calling her “Little Princess.” It’s hard to know if he means it as a polite endearment or a casual jibe, but regardless, she nods courteously as she pushes her bicycle into the dusty storage room and leans it in the corner. No sign of a straw-headed boy, though. When she asks the foreman, Mr. Groot, about him, the man shrugs his heavy shoulders. “Didn’t show.”

At this point smelly old Mr. Lueders decides to chime in. “What you expect from his sort?”

Anne tilts her head. “What does that mean? His sort of what?”

“Fruit from a rotten tree,” Lueders is kind enough to elaborate.

“All right, enough of that,” Mr. Groot decides. “Sweep your own street, will you, Lueders?”

“What’s his name? Can you tell me that much?” Anne asks.

Mr. Groot frowns as he lugs a heavy carton and dumps it on a wooden pallet. “We called him Raaf. But his father’s name was Hoekstra. And Lueders is right. Not a good name around here.”

“Not a good name?” Anne repeats.

The man shrugs, but it’s obvious he’s had enough of this conversation with the boss’s daughter. “If you don’t mind, miss? An end to these questions, please. There’s work to be done.”

Anne feels a queasy kind of disappointment in her belly as she begins to climb the stairs up to the office, when abruptly there is a clatter of footsteps heading down from above. It’s Bep in her coat and hat, her handbag dangling from her arm. She’s in such a hurry that she’s rushing dangerously down the Dutch steps. Anne calls her name and starts to point this out when she realizes that Bep’s face is a flood of tears. And though Anne’s first instinct is to wedge herself against the wall, to clear the steps for trouble to pass, she resists the impulse and blocks the woman’s way, forcing Bep to brace herself against the stairwell wall to halt her momentum.

“Bep. You’re crying.”

“Anne.” Bep is shaking her head, blotting her face with a handkerchief.

“What’s happened?”

But Bep just keeps shaking her head. “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t continue. I’m sorry,” she cries, and then forces her way past. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Sorry?” Anne freezes up for an instant. “Sorry for what? Bep? Bep, tell me what’s happened! Bep!” she calls out as she follows the woman’s path down the steps, but by the time she pushes past the door and bolts into the street, Bep is already hurrying along the pavement past the Westerkerk, and Anne is nearly run over by a cyclist who inquires if perhaps she’s gone blind.

Clambering back up the stairs herself, she rushes to the kantoor window and bolts into the office, where a wall of stares meets her. Miep’s eyes are red, and she frowns sadly back down at her typewriter. Kugler is seated at Kleiman’s desk and surveys Anne’s entry with a controlled melancholy, but her father is standing, with a sheet of paper hanging in his hand. His face silent.

“What’s happened to Bep?” Anne demands, though she’s really frightened to know the answer. “Why was she crying?”

Kugler draws a breath as if to choke up an answer, but her father hands him the paper and takes a small step forward.

“Anne, Bep has resigned,” Pim says quietly.

Anne glares back. “What?”

“She’s left the firm.”

“But . . .” Anne shakes her head, as if to clear away such an unacceptable idea. “But why? What happened to her?”

Kugler and Miep both look up at this, as if they might be called upon to provide an answer, but Pim simply says, “There was nothing to be done, Anne. Bep’s father is so very ill. The cancer has spread, and he needs care. We must accept that there are some circumstances that cannot be altered no matter how we might wish otherwise.”

Anne clamps her mouth shut. Once she never would have imagined that Bep could possibly have betrayed them. But now? Perhaps she needed money for her father’s treatment. Who knows what medicines cost on the black market while the mof still stood astride the world? Wouldn’t Anne herself have sacrificed the lives of others to save Pim’s life or even simply ease his pain?

She does not want to cry in front of Pim or Kugler, so she holds back till she can shut herself up in the WC, where she releases a knotted sob and allows the tears to flow. She’s still losing people. Will that ever stop? Will she ever be able to truly count on someone’s love again? Count on people’s devotion without the fear of losing them? Without fear of their abandoning her, because even death is a kind of abandonment. How can she ever trust her own life not to crush her?