Annelies

1946

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Amsterdam-Centrum

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

In the afternoons after school, Anne slips through the hidden door behind the bookcase to the confines of their former hiding place. Closing the door behind her, she feels as if she is shutting out the world. Shutting out the present. Up in the attic, she sits on the floor holding le chat Mouschi in her lap. They have cut a deal, she and he. Monsieur le chat Mouschi. She has cultivated his cooperation with treats of fish skin and bits of tinned tuna, and he is now a purring ball of fur for her to pet.

She breathes in and out. Once, she felt this place to be a sanctuary, but now its emptiness settles over her like the quiet storm of dust drifting in the sunlight through the window glass. The leaves flutter on the branches of the old horse chestnut. She has organized a pack of cigarettes from her father’s desk and lights one with the scratch of a wooden match. Sweet Caporals supplied by the Canadian troops who liberated the city. A superior North American product. Before the war Holland was famous for the rich quality of the tobacco imported from its colonies, but now the dark brown shag of East Indian yield has been replaced by weak, fast-burning ersatz brands, so the punch of the genuine tobacco makes Anne’s head swim. Canadian cigarette cards feature the members of the English royal family. The king, the queen, the princesses. Once those might have gone up on her wall, but now they simply go into the rubbish bin. She inhales a rush of smoke and feels it settle inside her. Once again they are depending on Miep, who has maintained her contacts in the Jordaan for essentials. Dried fish, Canadian cigarettes, potatoes, tinned meats and oats, plums and string beans, malt coffee, sugar surrogate, and even the occasional gristly beefsteak from a cooperative butcher.

Anne expels smoke and watches it waft like a thin ghost across the empty room.

Peter.

He was older than Anne but younger than Margot. Tall and solid, with a broad face and densely curly hair that often defied his comb. For a moment she remembers the feel of his body sitting beside her on the divan, up here in the seclusion of the loft. He was very male. So heavy with his strength, the inadvertent strength of his arm, its weight slung across her shoulder. At the time she’d had many girlish thoughts about the depth of his soul. On the outside he would have been a roughneck boy from Osnabrück, better at fighting than at talking. No religion beyond the work of his hands. Easily bored to laziness, ridiculous in his excuses, and absurdly morbid in his obsessions with imaginary diseases. Look at my tongue. Isn’t it a strange color? But he also possessed a sweet, curious gaze that could settle on Anne with its guileless yearning. He had a good mind; she’d been so sure of it, but maybe that was more her desire than the truth. He preferred heavy work to too much thinking, so Anne had simply inserted the deep thoughts into his head for him. His silence she had taken for buried intensity. But really it was just the silence of a boy with nothing more to say. He was at ease with her. She listened to him when he jabbered on authoritatively, as boys do, or vented steam over his father’s harsh disapproval. And with her head resting against his chest, she counted the beats of his heart after he’d run out of words, here in the gray attic.

Now she sits with his cat instead, for Peter van Pels is far beyond her touch.

I’m sure that he knew you still cared for him, she hears Margot say.

“Are you?” Anne shakes her head. She doesn’t look at her sister’s face but only hugs the cat. “I’m not.” The cat struggles, suddenly uncomfortable in her arms. She must be gripping him too tightly. She does not attempt to calm him but lets him bound away. “I wasn’t always very kind to him,” Anne confesses, breathing in smoke from the smoldering Caporal she picks up from a red Bakelite ashtray.

You outgrew him, Margot points out, and Anne does not disagree.

“I always worried that it was painful for you.”

For me? Margot sits on her heels, wearing a floral-print dress and the sweater Mummy had knit from cashmere wool. Why for me?

“You know why,” Anne insists.

Anne. Now it’s Margot’s turn to shake her head. Her voice is meant to sound comforting, at least as comforting as the dead can manage. I was not at all interested in Peter in that way. I told you that.

“I didn’t believe you.”

Well. Perhaps at first I was disappointed, in a minor way, when I saw the direction in which his interests were roaming. But really, he was simply not my kind of boy. Nor was he your kind of boy. The only difference was, I was old enough to realize it, while you, she says, you were so desperately romantic.

“And lonely,” Anne tells her.

Well. You didn’t have to be. I was there. Pim was there. Mummy was there. If you were lonely, it must have been your choice.

“No, you don’t understand.”

Don’t I?

“I’m not like you, Margot. I’m not like Mummy, or even Pim. I need something more in my life.”

More? Margot asks. She blinks through the lenses of her spectacles. Like what, Anne? What more do you need that none of us could supply?

Anne shakes her head. “I can’t explain.”

Oh. You mean sex.

“You don’t have to be so smug, Margot. And no, I don’t mean sex. Really, I can’t explain it.”

Her sister shrugs. If you can’t explain it, then how can it be so important?

The cat inserts a pause between them as he pounces on the cigarette pack left on the hardwood planking, but it’s enough. Margot has not waited to hear Anne’s reply and has dissolved into the gray daylight, leaving Anne with a hard itch of discontent. Or maybe it is this place. The attic. Their hiding place. The Achterhuis. Perhaps this hard itch is the only part of her former self she has recovered. The need to be something more. She had suffered so long from a secret loneliness, even surrounded by her chattering friends in the school yard, even as she laughed at jokes and flirted with the boys; there was an emptiness that she could never fill. And when they had slipped into hiding, the emptiness had followed her. Peter had been there for that. At least at first. In the small space in which they were trapped, his roughneck physique seemed manly. His boyish energy alluring. But then something changed. She changed. The satisfaction that Peter provided thinned. She realized he would never truly understand her and that, most likely, he didn’t really wish to try. So what was left to her, trapped in this cramped and drab annex? She found that when she sat down in front of a clean page with her fountain pen in her hand, the emptiness was filled.

A sigh rustles through the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside as a burst of sunshine burns through the clouds. She watches the windowpanes brighten.

Tuschinski Theater

Reguliersbreestraat 26-34

Amsterdam-Centrum

The gorgeous deco towers are still standing. The Tuschinski Theater was a favorite before the war. Pim used to take them all to the matinees on Sunday afternoons and then to the Japanese tearoom on the premises for green-tea ice cream. Once on Pim’s birthday, Mr. Tuschinski himself stopped by just to say mazel tov. When the moffen came, they called the place the Tivoli and showed anti-Semitic propaganda. But since the liberation, the Tuschinski name has been restored, though Anne heard from Pim that Mr. Tuschinski and his whole family went up the chimneys of the Kremas.

Inside, the palatial Grote Zaal is nicknamed the “Plum Cake,” and even though the war has taken its toll on maintenance, it still looks rather scrumptious. The plush velvet, the confectionary swirls of the bric-a-brac. In the rear of the auditorium, Griet has just passed Anne a cigarette, but she draws a puff slowly, totally captivated by the screen as an American newsreel trumpets into the space. “This is New York,” a narrator declares as an aerial view of soaring building spires circles in the reflection of Anne’s eyes. “The greatest city the world has known!”

Anne’s heartbeat swells. The subtitles are blurry, but who needs them? The sprawl of images is mesmerizing; Griet must nudge her twice in order to get her cigarette back. “The dazzling marquees. A glittering extravaganza,” the narrator intones. “Crossroads of the world. Bright lights, the theaters, good food, and dancing to the music of the world’s most famous orchestras.” Something in Anne starts to expand. She can feel it rising from the pit of her belly. The Waldorf Astoria, the Starlight Roof, the Empire Room, Peacock Alley, Radio City Music Hall! Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to 110th Street. “The sidewalk cafés and towering apartment houses.” People stream from banks of crowded elevators. The Empire State Building! “The tallest structure on the face of the earth.” Sixty thousand tons of steel, ten million bricks, seven miles of elevator shafts going straight up. The never-ending view. “The turreted heights.” The Statue of Liberty, a beacon of freedom! Anne’s stare is steady. The force invading her feels like some kind of . . . what? Some kind of destiny, nothing less. Like a message for her alone from the future, or from fate, or maybe even from God himself. Could it be?

A hot dog with everything on it! On the screen a girl takes a huge bite in front of a street vendor. Grand Central Terminal! People streaming across a cavernous concourse, in sunlight pouring from massive cathedral windows. “This is New York,” the narrator reminds with zest. “Where everyone’s wish comes true. Where dreams come to life. Where the lights outshine the stars in the heavens!”

Squinting into the sunlight after the film, Anne feels as if the image of those towers has been singed onto the insides of her eyes.

This is New York. Where everyone’s wish comes true.

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Two additions have been made to the office over the past few weeks. The first is a new typewriter. An Olympia Model 8. It’s German-made war booty with a sleek military shape, a roll of vulcanized rubber, and a grin of punishing type bars. It boasts an assertive array of slate-gray keys, including a key for umlauts. It is a ruthless machine manufactured to type out arrest lists. To type out execution lists. Not so long ago, it was used to hail the führer’s name at the close of every decree, in a clatter of steely type. Now it types out memos and correspondence advancing the sale of gelatin products to Dutch housewives. How humiliating for the Herr Typewriter. Such a demotion in rank.

Then there’s the second addition. She is a well-built machine, too. A woman, with carefully managed hair, capable hands, and a profile as regally featured as the queen’s head on a fiver. This is Mrs. Zuckert. Ostensibly it was Mr. Kugler who hired her as both a typist and a part-time bookkeeper, but Anne knows that nothing happens in the office without Pim’s approval, and Pim certainly seems to approve. She’s attractive for a woman of a certain age, handsome, with thick reddish curls, and a gaze as strong as hot coffee. And then there’s the matter of her forearm, or rather what’s tattooed upon it. Anne has only seen it once, as the woman stretched for a box of powdered milk surrogate on a shelf in the office kitchen. She’s not very tall, and her sleeve was tugged away from her forearm, revealing a string of purple numbers.

In the kitchen, where the women address one another by their given names, Mrs. Zuckert explains that her mother named her Hadassah but directs everyone to call her Dassah. That is the name she answers to, she says. Everyone is polite, but there’s a sense that Dassah is a creature that should be given a wide berth. There is something in her gaze that reveals the lioness at her core.

On the other hand, Pim appears quite eager in his approach toward the lady. Suddenly he is spending time in the front rooms, just to look out the windows, he says, and absorb some good Dutch sunshine. Or he happens to remember a joke as he delivers a file to Mrs. Zuckert’s possession. Mrs. Zuckert smiles appreciatively, regardless of the fact that it’s a repeat of the joke from two days before. “Ah, yes.” She nods, eyebrows arched. “Very clever, Mr. Frank,” she responds in her good Germanic Dutch. “Very funny.”

“Yes, Pim,” Anne cannot help but cut in, “even more funny than it was the first time you told it.”

“Anne,” Miep scolds her mildly. “Decorum, please. We’re in a business office.”

Tell him that, she almost answers, but buttons her lip. Pim, however, chuckles and takes his daughter’s rudeness in stride. “Never mind, Miep,” he says. “Anne has always had a talent for rudeness. God knows her mother, may she rest, tried to cure her of it, but . . .” He shrugs and allows the sentence to finish itself.

Anne feels her face blaze, but a terrible blackness overcomes her, so that she must look away. She must glare blindly at the small button keys of Miep’s typewriter. Pim hands Mrs. Zuckert the file he carried in from the private office, along with a set of petty instructions, then strolls out in a businesslike manner as Anne seethes. To break up the concrete silence, Kugler begins to whistle. He’s good, actually, and is whipping through a wireless hit from the Dutch Swing College Band. Anne’s eyes rise and are caught by the pincer of Mrs. Zuckert’s gaze. The message there is clear: Don’t like me? Too bad. It’s not your opinion that counts. Then, as a kind of counterpoint to Kugler’s whistling, Mrs. Zuckert begins to rattle across the keys of the Herr Typewriter, spitting out her own impenetrable staccato rhythm.

• • •

“Have you talked to Bep, Miep?” Anne hears herself asking later in the afternoon, finding Miep in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea for Pim.

“A few days ago, yes,” Miep tells her, turning off the fire under the steaming kettle. “She telephoned. Her father is back in the hospital.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“About you?”

“Yes. Anything, good or bad.”

“Anne.” Miep pronounces her name firmly and then takes a breath. Obviously to compose her words. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking. But Bep was overjoyed when you came home. Just as we all were.”

Anne says nothing more on the subject. Instead she says, “I’ll take Pim his tea.”

She knocks but doesn’t wait for permission to enter, popping open the door to Pim’s office. Pim glances up from the telephone with a wary expression. Anne brings in the tea and sets it on his desk but then doesn’t leave. Instead she sits and waits, causing Pim to excuse himself from his call long enough to press a hand over the mouthpiece.

“Yes, Anneke?”

“I brought your tea,” she tells him.

“I can see that, meisje, but I’m on a call.”

“Yes, I can see that, too,” Anne replies, but she does not budge.

Returning to the telephone with a half frown, he asks if he might ring the caller back. Setting the receiver on its hook carefully, he turns his frown on his daughter. “Is there something wrong?”

“Who were you talking to?” Her voice is neutral.

“When?”

“Just now on the telephone.”

“Mr. Rosenzweig. My attorney.”

“Why do you need an attorney?”

“Anne. Darling. I’m really rather busy.”

“Why didn’t we go to America?” she asks bluntly.

Pim blinks. Appears mildly stricken. “I beg your pardon?”

“Mummy’s brothers were already there. You knew people in New York City. Mr. Straus,” she says. “Why didn’t we go there when we left Germany?”

“Why?” Pim lifts his eyebrows. “Well, it didn’t seem necessary at the time. You must understand, Anne, when we emigrated, Hitler had only just been appointed Reichskanzler. It was years before any danger of war. And my first responsibility was to make a living and support the family. You and Margot were still so young. You were just a toddler then. So when your uncle Erich had an opportunity for me here in Amsterdam with Opekta, I took it.” He curls his lower lip, staring for an instant at nothing. “We actually did consider the States, your mother and I, but it was so far away, an ocean away. Also, the Americans,” he says. “They had very strict immigration quotas.”

“For Jews,” she says.

“Yes. For Jews.” He doesn’t deny it.

She swallows. Feels a rise of heat in her breast. “Do you ever hate the world, Pim?” It’s a simple question to her, but it appears to shock her father. He shifts back in his chair as if to distance himself from it.

“The world? Of course not. How could I?”

“I do,” Anne tells him. “Sometimes I do.”

Pim looks back at her, pained. “Anneke,” he whispers. “Please, it would break my heart if I thought that were true.”

Biking over the Singel Canal bridge to the Rozengracht, Anne remembers the vulgarities once slopped in paint across the bridge wall. DOWN WITH THE JEWS! THE JEWS ARE OUR PLAGUE! They’ve since been whitewashed over, like many things, but they’re still visible in her mind. However, she concentrates on other things. The stretch of her muscles as she pedals. The cool breeze ruffling her hair. The boy with the straw-blond hair. The touch of his fingers on her face. The salty taste of his mouth before she bit him. Another cyclist dings his bell as he passes her, breaking her reverie, and in the next instant she is skidding to a halt, gripping the handlebars, her knuckles bleaching white.

It’s as if she has accidentally bicycled backward in time.

There’s a man, rather scrawny, hatless, with a balding head and untrimmed chin whiskers, hard at work scraping yellow paint from a door, colored chips dusting his shoes, but the obscenity he’s attempting to eradicate is still quite legible: KIKES PERISH!

Anne can only stare, rooted in place. She grips the handles of her bicycle, her palms going sweaty, her heart drumming in her chest, and she tastes a sickly-sour kind of fear in her mouth. How could this be? How can she still be confronted by such filthy scrawls?

The sign above the shop reads NUSSBAUM TWEEDEHANDS-BOEKVERKOPER. Nussbaum Secondhand Book Handling. A dowdy little place, the windows papered over with newsprint or boarded up. The scrawny man quits his scraping to take a breather and must notice her, because he turns about, still swallowing to catch his next breath. “I’m, sorry.” He smiles. “May I be of assistance?”

No response.

“Are you a reader,” he wonders, “looking for a good book?”

Her eyes blink from the door to the man, back to the door.

“Ah. Yes,” he says. “Just removing an unfortunate eyesore. Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose.” He says this with a slight frown but then returns to his smile, though his eyes are studying her now. “If you’re looking for a book, you should come inside. I’m happy to make recommendations.”

“Shouldn’t you do something?” Anne demands.

“Do something? Well, as you can see I’m scouring off the paint.”

“No, I mean, do something. Call the police.”

A shrug. The police? “And what would they do, really?”

“You mean because you’re a Jew.”

A smile remains, but a bit of the life in his eyes goes slack. “I think I’ve had enough of scraping for now. My arms are getting tired. Why don’t we step inside? We can share a pot of tea, and you can have a look at the shop. It’s really much nicer on the inside,” he confides.

• • •

A bell jangles above them as they enter. The shop has the comfortably musty smell that some bookshops develop after years of too many books packed into too small a space. The man is rubbing his arm as he goes to the hot plate sitting on a table behind the wooden sales desk. “I have no sugar or milk, I’m afraid. Not even surrogate.” He speaks in Dutch to Anne, but she can quite definitely recognize the clipped accent of a Berliner.

“Is it because you’re Jewish that you won’t call the police?”

“No, it’s because I see no point.”

“So you should let them get away with it? Defacing your property.”

“Someone slapped a door with a paintbrush.” He shrugs. “Not exactly a capital offense.”

“I’m sorry, it’s only that—”

His eyebrows lift. “Yes?”

“I’m Jewish, too,” she informs him.

The man shows her that smile again. “Yes, I rather surmised as much. But you needn’t be sorry about it. It’s not a crime any longer,” he assures her, and then he observes Anne with a kind of gentle appraisal. “I’m Werner Nussbaum,” he tells her, and leans across the sales desk to offer his hand. Anne stares at the hand for an instant, then steps forward and takes it.

“Mr. Nussbaum,” she repeats, and examines his face more closely. A long, aquiline nose, slightly bulbous. A powerful forehead, balding across the crown, close-cropped curls, and a scraggly gray-white mustache over a vandyke beard. One eye droops as if it is simply too exhausted to open at full mast, though the core of his gaze is still probing, still eager.

“And you are?” he inquires.

“My name,” she says, “is Anne Frank.”

Mr. Nussbaum cocks his head slightly to one side, as if a thought has knocked it a bit off balance. “Frank,” he repeats. “Well, that’s a coincidence. I knew a man named Frank. German originally.”

“We came from Germany,” Anne admits. “Frankfurt-am-Main.”

“Oh, no—this is too impossible,” the fellow insists. “By any chance in the world,” he wonders, “could you be related to an Otto Frank?”

Anne straightens. “Otto Frank is my father.”

“Otto Frank. Who ran—what was it?—a spice business, I think, here in Amsterdam?”

“He still does,” Anne answers.

“So you’re saying . . . he lives?”

Now it’s Anne who’s feeling a bit off balance, thrown by this question that Jews must now ask one another. All she does is nod her head to answer, and she watches the man slump at the shoulders as if he had been working hard to keep his spine straight till this very moment.

“So miracles do persist. The mensch still lives,” he declares, then looks back at Anne. “You must be confused. But I came to know your father quite well,” Mr. Nussbaum explains gently, as he bares his forearm, revealing a tattooed number, “while we were guests at the same hotel.”

When Mr. Nussbaum appears in the Jekerstraat flat, he begins to whistle Beethoven at the sight of Pim. Pim stands to his full soldier’s height, his eyes flooding, and joins in whistling as well. This is how their reunion begins. All in all a teary welter, neither man able to control his emotions, and, watching them, neither is Anne. Pain strikes her, as if her heart has been thumped by a hammer, and she is forced to retreat to her room. Margot attempts to console her, or rather interrogate her, in her Lager rags. Anne, why are you crying? Why are you crying? But Anne has no answer for her. She cannot contain her own tears; she cannot control her own grief, though both seem to exercise perfect control over her. She is curled up in a ball on her bed when her father knocks.

“Anne?”

“Yes?” she calls, sniffing, staring at the wall beside her bed.

“May I come in?”

“I’m not feeling well,” she answers, but Pim cracks open the door anyway.

“I’ll only need a moment.”

She rolls over and sits quickly, her eyes reddened. “Is Mr. Nussbaum still here?”

“No. He’s gone for now,” Pim tells her. “I’m sorry if our reunion was such a strain on you. Old men can get emotional.”

“How did you meet?”

“How?” A small exhale. “At Auschwitz—we were billeted in the same barracks block. But I’m ashamed to say that the first time we met, I punched him in the face.”

Anne blinks. “You punched him?”

“In the face, yes.” Her father nods. “I don’t even remember why now. Some measly dispute. But we were not the masters of our temper there.”

“So you became friends because you struck him in the face?”

“No. We became friends because I heard him whistling ‘Clair de Lune.’ Terribly so, but with passion, as if every note he whistled were an affirmation that he was still alive. I knew immediately that I must ask him for his forgiveness. So I began to whistle it, too. After that”—Pim shrugs—“we became close comrades. We talked of music or art and literature. He had run a publishing company in Berlin before the Nazis stole it from him. He could recite Schiller, Heine, Goethe—especially Goethe—all from memory. It was quite inspiring. To keep using our minds, that was the thing. In the end, when I was truly on the edge of oblivion, it was he who brought one of the prisoner physicians to me. It’s how I was admitted to the convalescent block of the infirmary, which probably saved my life. So I owe him a great deal. I tried to locate him through the Red Cross after liberation, but all I could determine was that he had been marched out of Auschwitz when the Germans were evacuating the camp. Honestly? Until today I assumed that he hadn’t survived. So I must thank you, Anne, for returning him to me.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she says.

“Perhaps you don’t think so, but Werner tells me you made an impression on him.”

“Did he tell you what happened? Did he tell you what they did to the door of his bookshop?”

“Yes,” her father answers carefully. “He did. He also told me that he was struck by your spirit. And thought you were quite self-possessed.” Pim says this, and then he adds, “In fact, he wondered if you might be interested in spending some time working in his shop.”

Anne stares. “His shop?”

“Yes. I told him of your love of books,” her father says. “He seemed eager to have you aboard. I’d still expect you to help out at the office, of course. But a few afternoons a week, shelving books after school . . . It’s just him otherwise, so I think he could use another pair of hands. Does that sound like something that might interest you, meisje?”

Nussbaum

Tweedehands-Boekverkoper

The Rozengracht

The shop is not so very far from where Pim used to lease an office on the Singel. Anne now bikes there twice a week for a few hours before supper. She likes the place. She likes the smells of old paper and aging binder’s glue and even the leathery stench of Mr. Nussbaum’s cigar smoke. And of course she likes the shelves bursting with tatty old books of every size, shape, and color. Even when it’s empty of customers, as it often is, there is still a comforting benefit from all those books, floor to ceiling, wall after wall. It’s really quite gezellig, Anne writes in her notebook—a favorite word of the Dutch. A cozy den of books, she calls it. Her job is to categorize new arrivals, compiling them into stacks according to their type and then stocking the shelves. She loves handling the books and often forgets herself, opening the covers for a peek, only to lose herself in the pages instead of finishing her work. But Mr. Nussbaum doesn’t seem to mind. He lends her this book and that and says, “Give this one a try,” or “I think this is a story you might find either scintillating or preposterous. Or maybe both.” And, of course, in addition to the books, books, and books, there is the cat. He’s a hulking tortoiseshell lapjeskat with a lazy gaze, and Anne has named him Lapjes for his calico patches. He tolerates Anne’s affection when he’s in the mood, but he’s a street cat by nature and only looks out for himself, lounging about in a spot of sun. Anne admires this ability of his but cannot seem to successfully imitate it.

“So tell me,” Mr. Nussbaum begins. He wears a double set of sweaters, because, he says, he can never get warm, not with a hundred sweaters. Still, two are better than none. “Tell me, is it true?” he inquires. “Your papa says you have a talent with words.”

Anne looks up from a heavy tome. Blinks. “Did he?”

“Oh, yes. He was adamant about it, actually. He said you were quite gifted.”

Anne swallows. Turns back to the box of mismatched books she is unpacking. “Once I thought so,” she answers.

“And what changed your mind?”

She looks up at Mr. Nussbaum’s face. Is he making a joke? The man has a sly affection for irony, no doubt about that. But there’s nothing ironic in his expression, only a humble curiosity.

“I was keeping a diary. When we were in hiding. I was going to write a book after the war. Maybe a novel or something. About our life. What it was like for us. For Jews,” she says. “But it was all lost when we were arrested.”

“And after that?” he asks.

“After?”

“After that you just quit writing altogether?”

Anne hesitates. “No,” she admits.

“No.”

“No, I still write. But it’s not the same.”

“Not the same, I see.” He nods. He draws a thoughtful puff from his cigar and balances it, ember outward, on the edge of the sales desk, where there is a spot scarred black by many small burns on the varnish. “And why’s that?”

“Because,” Anne says. “Because it doesn’t mean anything.”

“No? Well, it must mean something, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum points out. “Else why would you be doing it?”

“I don’t know,” Anne confesses, turning away. “I suppose,” she begins, but then shakes her head as she is displeased with her thoughts. “I suppose I’m simply compelled,” she confesses, and picks up another book from the box.

“Hmm. That sounds like a writer talking to me.”

“Do we really have to discuss this, Mr. Nussbaum?”

“Oh, no. No, not if you’d rather not,” he says, opening up the thick sales ledger on the desk. “I only wonder . . .”

A beat. Anne looks back up. “Wonder what?”

“I only wonder,” he says, perusing the ledger’s contents, issuing her a brief but solid glance, “why you think your writing is worth less now than it was before? It’s still your story. Isn’t it?”

Anne stares.

“But you don’t have to answer that question. Just something to think about,” he says as he retrieves his smoldering cigar from the edge of the desk.

“Pim said that you owned a publishing house in Germany.” Maybe she brings this up merely to block further interrogation on the subject of her writing, but a cloud scuds across Mr. Nussbaum’s face.

“Yes, that’s right,” he answers. “My father’s firm. It had been a small, scholarly, rather esoteric affair under him, but after he passed, I took it over with the idea of building up the list of authors,” he says. “Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth, André Breton. Really it was quite a remarkable time.”

“Until the Nazis,” says Anne.

He agrees, his voice dropping into a quiet hole. “Until then.” He shrugs almost imperceptibly. “I tried to start again elsewhere. I followed what had become the well-worn trail of literary exiles. First to Paris and then to Amsterdam. Amsterdam in particular hosted a constellation of German publishers at the time, so I dearly hoped I could make a go of it. But the money ran out, and, uh . . . life was not so easy. The magic in my world drained away.”

Anne understands this. Even though Mr. Nussbaum is so much older, she feels a touch of pure kinship. A literary heart brought so low.

• • •

The next afternoon, when Anne arrives at the office, she finds that Mrs. Zuckert is yet again sequestered in Pim’s private office with her steno pad.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she must ask Miep.

“Doesn’t what bother me?”

“That she’s taking over.”

Miep shakes her head. “No one is ‘taking over,’ Anne.”

At four o’clock Mr. Kugler goes into the kitchen, as he does at this hour every day for his afternoon cup of tea. Anne slips from her desk. “I’m getting a drink of water,” she tells Miep, but doesn’t wait for a response. In the corridor she can hear the laughter from the private office and then the chatty tone of their talk. What’s worse, they’re speaking German. German! The language of the executioners.

She catches Kugler in the kitchen gazing forlornly at the kettle on the hot plate as it builds steam. The air of talented modesty he once cultivated has been wrecked. Instead his expressions are often haunted or blank. She’s noted that he’s given to long, pointless stares while seated at his desk. He may rally then, he may rouse himself and become good old Mr. Kugler again, the man with all the answers. But she can tell that in his heart he has no answers any longer.

Slipping into the kitchen, she retrieves a water glass from the dish drain. Kugler looks up, but it’s as if he doesn’t quite see her for a moment. Then he takes a breath. “So,” he says without much conviction, “how is Anne today?”

“How am I?” she asks with a tone that asks, Isn’t that obvious?

“School, I mean. How is school this year?”

But Anne does not answer his question. She walks to the sink and unscrews the tap, letting water rush into her glass. “She seems highly skilled,” Anne points out.

“I’m sorry?”

“Mrs. Zuckert.”

“Ah. Yes,” he agrees. “Highly.”

“I suppose she must have plenty of experience.”

“She does,” Mr. Kugler confirms, maintaining his mildly distracted tone. “Ten years as an assistant bookkeeper in an accounting firm. Before the war she helped out Mr. Kleiman from time to time.”

“And what,” Anne presses forward, “has become of her husband?”

Blankness. “Become of him?”

“Yes. What has become of Mr. Zuckert? Is he alive? Is he dead?”

Kugler looks suddenly alarmed. “That’s really none of our business, Anne,” he tries to convince her.

“No? You think not, Mr. Kugler? Well, I think it is.” She takes a swallow of water and sets the glass down on the counter.

“Anne,” Kugler breathes, “if you have questions, you must ask your father.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me, but my father says nothing. Listen to them in there laughing, the two of them. Laughing,” she repeats, as if naming a crime.

Kugler hesitates. His expression looks crushed. Finally he clears his throat and speaks grayly to the wall. “From what I understand,” he begins, “her husband had been working in Germany before the Nazis. He was a Jew, but a Dutch-born Jew. So when they came to Amsterdam after Hitler, she sat for the test and became a Dutch citizen. The marriage didn’t work out.” A shrug. “I don’t know why. But they were divorced, and he left for Canada. Or maybe it was Cuba, I don’t recall.”

Anne says nothing. But in her silence, Kugler’s expression darkens, even in the sunlight from the kitchen’s window. He stands when the teakettle’s whistle stings the air, and he shuts off the burner flame. “You know, Anne, there’s something I have noticed about you,” he informs her. “I’m sorry, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I have to say this. I’ve noticed that you often use your brutalization at the hands of the Nazis as if it’s a weapon to wield. As if the pain and the awful sorrow you have borne have imbued you with a kind of unassailable righteousness,” he says. “Of course, the stories your father told us upon his return . . . well, they were horrific. And I don’t pretend to understand your anguish. But I must say that it wasn’t easy for any of us. The SS sent Kleiman and me to one prison after another. First Amstelveenseweg. Then Weteringschans, where they held us for days in a cell with men condemned to death. Then finally to that godforsaken spot in the Leusderheide,” he says despondently, as if he has stepped back behind the barbed wire in his mind. “Hard labor. Barely any food. Roll calls in the freezing rain. Kleiman would have died there, I’m sure of it, if it hadn’t been for the Red Cross.” He frowns, suddenly self-conscious, and shoots Anne a sliver of a glance. “Now, I know what you must be thinking,” he says with a kind of miserable tension. “‘Poor Kugler. He believes he’s such a victim, yet he knows nothing about true suffering.’ And maybe you’re right. Maybe I cannot begin to conceive of the barbarities to which your people were subjected. Maybe Amersfoort and its ilk were not the same hell as those places to which Jews were deported. But I can testify, Anne, that neither were they holiday spas. I watched men die in Amersfoort. Good men, who should have been home with their wives and children, and I simply watched them drop over dead with shovels still stuck in their hands. Or worse. Clubbed to death in front of my eyes. Yet to hear you talk, it’s as if you have utterly cornered the market on pain. It’s the reason Bep left.”

Anne stares at him in wordless response. And then, “No. No, you’re wrong.”

“Oh, there’s her father’s illness, yes, if that’s what you mean. But she has four other sisters, Anne. So if you want the real reason for Bep’s departure, the truth,” he says, “I’ll tell you.” He takes a breath and looks at her with blunt, deeply agitated eyes. “She could not face you any longer.”

“That’s not true,” Anne insists.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“No. No. I know the real reason Bep left—it’s because the police suspected her of betraying us.”

Kugler looks confused. Repulsed. “Bep?” And then he nearly laughs. “Don’t be silly, Anne.”

“I’m not. I know why those men were in the private office that day. I know that my father wants to keep me in the dark. He continues to tell me that it’s nothing. A private business matter, but how can I believe that?”

Kugler is incredulous. “The greater question is, Anne, how can you believe that Bep could possibly be a traitor? How could you even think such a thing of a loyal friend?”

A loyal friend? Anne blinks at the question, feeling a cold pulse in her blood. For all his squawking on the subject, one might have imagined that Amersfoort would have taught Mr. Kugler something, but obviously he has refused to learn it. He has refused to recognize the insidious patience of betrayal. How it can infect the human heart without the knowledge of its host, until suddenly, one impulse . . . one moment’s anger . . .

“It’s not what I think, Mr. Kugler. It’s what Bep thought,” she insists. “It’s the reason she left.”

“No, Anne.” Kugler shakes his head heavily. “No, Bep’s leavetaking had nothing to do with any such thing. She left, quite simply, because she wanted a new life. She couldn’t stand to confront the terrible past on a daily basis. She couldn’t stand to face you.”

Anne absorbs his words and feels a cold, weeping hole open in her chest.

“I’m sorry, Anne,” Kugler says. “I am. I wish it weren’t the truth. But it is.”

Miep walks into the kitchen. “Mr. Kugler, there’s a gentleman on the telephone for you,” she says, and mentions the name of the gentleman. A Mr. So-and-So spice distributor from Antwerp.

“Ah,” Kugler breathes, relieved. “I’ve been waiting for this call.” Then he frowns. “Excuse me, Anne,” he says, and quickly frees himself from the kitchen.

Miep waits for a moment, quietly examining Anne. “Is something wrong?”

But Anne has no words to speak.

• • •

In the attic of the Achterhuis, she sobs without hope, until quite suddenly the tears dry up as if the spigot has been twisted shut. She breathes until her chest quits heaving. Rubs her face, smearing away the tears. Dries her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater and ignites a cigarette, inhaling the acrid smoke. The branches of the chestnut tree nudge the window glass, touched by a whisper of wind.

Coming down the steps, she spots Pim by the door to his private office with Mrs. Zuckert. His hand is on her arm. And though Anne cannot discern what they are saying, she cannot miss the intimate tone of their murmur. She decides to make a noise. Scuffs a step loudly and watches how swiftly her father’s hand disconnects from the lady’s limb. His forehead prunes lightly as he calls upward, “Anne?”

“Yes, Pim. It’s me.”

“Your eyes are reddened. Are you all right, meisje?”

“I’m fine.”

“You were up in the rooms again?” This is how he refers to the Achterhuis now: up in the rooms.

“Only for a few minutes.”

“Anne, darling, I worry that you spend too much time up there.”

“And I worry that you don’t spend enough time, Pim.”

An edge of silence like a knife, but Mrs. Zuckert ignores it. “Thank you, Otto,” she says, her voice pleasantly relaxed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she smiles—“Good night, Anne”—but doesn’t stick around for Anne to reply.

“You know, I can take dictation, too,” she says to her father. “Don’t you recall the mail-order courses?” Line-height parts, quarter-height parts, half-height consonants, the System Groote. “Margot and I completed them. Don’t you remember?”

Another blink. Often the mere mention of Margot’s name dampens Pim’s expression. His poor Mutz, he always calls her.

“I could take dictation from you,” Anne says, plowing ahead. “It would be good practice for me,” she tells him with earnest intention. “So, really, you don’t always have to rely on your dear Mrs. Zuckert.”

For an instant Pim appears distressed. But then he quickly regains control and offers Anne his particular brand of pleasantly frowning agreement. “Hmm. Well,” he says, matching Anne’s earnest tone, “that sounds like a very compelling proposition.” But during the fraction of a heartbeat in which he meets his daughter’s eyes, she can spot the jolt of inflexible resolve behind the façade. The same resolve that must have enabled Otto Heinrich Frank to survive five months of KL Auschwitz.

• • •

Later, after the supper dishes are cleared and washed and Miep and Jan have gone out for their evening walk, Anne finds Pim sitting in a chair in the Jekerstraat flat with a book open. She watches him from the room’s threshold. His body reedy and his face thin, but with a touch of color returning to his cheeks. His eyes look gentle and unhurried as he gazes down at the page, lost in words. It’s Goethe he’s reading this time instead of Dickens. The smoke from his cigarette curls softly upward.

He raises his eyes suddenly when he realizes that his daughter is watching him. “Anne?”

“So you know she’s divorced?” Anne asks him.

His expression does not change, but the light recedes immediately from his eyes.

“Mrs. Zuckert,” Anne says thickly. “Your favorite—” She begins to say, Your favorite in the office, but Pim’s voice is level when he cuts her off.

“I know who you mean, Anne. And the answer is yes. I am aware that Mrs. Zuckert has been divorced. There is no need to stigmatize her over it. So she left a bad marriage. That does not make her a bad person.”

“This is not about her,” Anne lies, “it’s about you, Pim. Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what, daughter? I’m not doing anything.”

“Yes you are,” she insists. “Yes, you are. It’s obvious to everyone. She calls you by your given name, for God’s sake.”

And now her father expels a breath. He cheats a drag from his cigarette before tamping it out in Miep’s Bakelite ashtray, which he’s dirtied like a fireplace grate. “Anne,” he says. Her name as a preamble. The beginning of a lecture or a sermon: Anne, you have no idea what you’re saying. Anne, you have no business interfering with adults. Anne, you are still only a child. But what he says is, “Anne, I won’t deny that I may have certain feelings in regard to Mrs. Zuckert. And I won’t deny that she may, and I said may, harbor certain feelings for me.” He pauses. Allows these words to sink in. “Now, of course I can understand that you might find it difficult to accept such a . . .” Such a what? “A situation,” he decides to call it.

“You understand?” All at once the fury in her breaks free. “You understand, do you? No, Pim. No, I don’t think you understand a thing.”

Her father shifts uncomfortably in the chair and huffs a breath. “Really, it’s always this, isn’t it?” he says. “Always this anger. It’s all you offer me, Anneke.”

“Well, perhaps”—and her eyes are hot as she says it—“perhaps I’m angry because you’re betraying my mother’s memory.”

“No,” Pim replies adamantly.

“Yes. You are. How long has your wife been dead, Pim? Fourteen months? Fifteen? No time to waste. Better get a replacement in the works!”

“Stop it,” he demands, running his fingers over the vein suddenly popping at his temple. “Just stop it.”

“Kugler says she used to do bookkeeping for the company. Is that when you first noticed her, when Mummy wasn’t around?”

Her father leaps to his feet. “I will not have this!” he shouts, his face bleaching. “Don’t you dare say such a thing!”

“She bore you two children. She made a home for us all. Even in a cramped hideout above a dirty warehouse, she made a home for us, and this is how you repay her? This is how you keep her memory? By chasing another man’s wife?” Anne feels a surge of elation, as if provoking her father has proved that Pim is not so invulnerable to his own anger.

“Your mother and I,” he breathes, and then he must swallow a heavy rock, blinking at the sharp tears in his eyes. “Your mother and I had a long and very loving relationship. No matter what you think, Anne. No matter what you’ve so precociously surmised. I did everything I could to make her happy, and she did the same for me. In fact, if you recall, it wasn’t me who criticized her. It wasn’t me who always had a sharp tongue in his head for your mother. It was her younger daughter who so often left her crying,” he says. “It wasn’t me who complained so constantly and so vociferously about being so very misunderstood. It wasn’t me who sought no value in your mother’s solace—it was Annelies Marie Frank! How did you put it?” he demands suddenly of the air. “Let me see—it was something like, ‘She means nothing to me. I don’t have a mother! I must learn to mother myself!’”

Anne glares. A bright electric shock of realization has pulsed through her body at what Pim, in his anger, has just let slip. “How,” she asks, “do you know that?”

“How do I know what?” her father demands, still quivering with anger.

“How do you know,” she asks thickly, “how I put anything?”

And now a thin sliver of alarm inserts itself into her father’s jagged expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” Anne says.

“I think I’ve had enough. Enough accusations from my own daughter for one evening.”

“You read it,” Anne says with a heated mixture of indignity and mortification. “You read my diary. Otherwise how could you have known?”

Pim’s mouth closes and is drawn into a straight line.

“When?” she demands. “I put it in your briefcase. For safekeeping. You promised me that no one would dare touch it there. I remember! But what you meant to say was no one but you.”

Pim still has nothing to say. Only stares painfully.

And then an even more horrible thought strikes her. “Did you show it to Mummy, too?” she asks darkly. “Did she read it?”

“No.” Her father speaks the single word.

“No? Are you sure? Perhaps you passed it around? Passed it around to the van Pelses? To that old fart Pfeffer? God, they were all such snoops, weren’t they? Always prying. I bet they had such a good laugh at my expense. The tragic unbosoming of a know-it-all adolescent!”

“No, Anne,” Pim protests. “No one else read a word. I can assure you of that. No one else.”

“No one else but my father.”

Pim swallows. His hands are squeezed into fists. His eyes wet.

And then suddenly, “Anne,” he whispers desperately, but before he can say another word, the front door to the flat opens and in come Miep and Jan, home from their evening walk. They are chatting and smiling until they freeze at the threshold of their own home, gazing in at the expressions of father and daughter. Miep sums it up quickly. “We’re interrupting,” she declares apologetically. But Pim steps forward, suddenly relieved.

“No,” he corrects her. “No you’re not. Not at all. Excuse me,” he says, and yanks his fedora and raincoat from the rack. “I think I’m in need of some exercise.” And with that he bolts from the flat.