Annelies

1946

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Amsterdam-Centrum

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

A modest celebration is held at the official announcement of Pim and Dassah’s engagement to wed. Pim has arrived in the front office with a bottle of Maréchal Foch. Everyone cheers at the pop of the cork. Everyone but his daughter. Wine burbles into the set of newly procured matched lead-crystal ware. Royal Leerdam, Pim laughs with a pleasantly incredulous note. How does she lay her hands on such things? he inquires of the air. He is referring, of course, to Mrs. Zuckert, his newly declared fiancée, who is standing beside him. He now continually calls her by his special nickname for her, Hadas, or, worse, sometimes the painfully more intimate Hadasma, as when he says, “Hadasma and I are so pleased that the people here in this room are the first to know of our intentions.”

Anne sits and glares at the color of the wine that fills the glass on the desk in front of her. A dark purple with a tinge of pinkish light. One beautiful thing. But when the room toasts the happy couple, Anne does not move.

Mrs. Zuckert smiles at her. “Anne, you don’t care for your wine?”

“Wine is too bitter for me,” she answers with a blank tone. “It’s my stomach, you see. I’ve always had a weak stomach—haven’t I, Pim? Didn’t Mummy always insist I had a weak stomach?”

Pim releases the thinnest sigh as he shifts a hand into the pocket of his trousers. “She did, Anne,” he confirms. “That is true, she did.”

A stumbling silence follows, until Kleiman pipes up. “So have you set the date?” he asks brightly, and Pim immediately offers him a pleasantly questioning blink.

“A date? Well. I’m not sure we have. Have we set a date?” he asks his fiancée.

“Soon,” Mrs. Zuckert replies as a joke, gripping Pim’s arm. “Before he tries to escape,” she says, and everyone laughs. Everyone but Anne Frank.

On a graying day, hectored by rain in the hour before sunset, Anne sits in a chair with her pen in her hand and writes that today Mr. Otto Heinrich Frank wed Mrs. Hadassah Zuckert-Bauer by civil procedure in the marriage hall of the Hotel Prinsenhof. The brief ceremony was held approximately one year and four months from the date of the death of Mr. Frank’s first wife of blessed memory, Mrs. Edith Frank-Holländer, who perished of starvation in the infirmary of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mr. and Mrs. Frank are now slated to occupy a modest flat on the Herengracht, six days hence, where a single room, as adequate as any prison cell, will be provided for the new Mrs. Frank’s freshly acquired stepchild, one A.F.