Annelies

1946

Amsterdam

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

There’s a brewery house off the Brouwersgracht, a dilapidated four-story canal house, chalky with decay, its ancient whitewash peeling from the bricks. Dingy houseboats bump against the canal walls, leaving paint scrapes like a little child left to color the walls with crayons. It’s here she waits, leaning on her bicycle after school has been dismissed, smoking a cigarette, inhaling the odor of hops that drifts heavily on the humid air.

A breathy warmth floats above the canals, and the sun is thrust high into the sky like the eye of heaven. The brewery’s rickety old lorry rumbles into view and shudders to a halt. A crew of workmen appear hustling out of the warehouse doors and start rolling out hefty ironbound kegs, which they proceed to usher up a ramp and stack onto the lorry’s bed. He is wearing a stained canvas apron like the others, his blond hair bristling, uncombed. When he stops, he stands up straight and stares back at her until he gets a friendly elbow from one of the other workers. The keg in place, he hops down to the pavement and breaks into a trot, coming to a halt where only a meter or so separates them. His face is smudged with a half smile.

“You smell like beer,” she says.

He shrugs. “You got your bike fixed.”

“Yep.”

“And your knee works.”

“Can you take a walk with me?” she asks.

“A walk.”

“Just a walk.”

“Why?”

She swallows. “You know why,” she answers, looking at him.

“I dunno,” he considers, “you’re kinda dangerous.”

She doesn’t disagree. “Does that mean you’re too afraid?”

“No. But I can’t. Not right now.” One of the older workmen is already whistling for him to return to the job of loading the lorry. “I gotta work. But tomorrow,” he says.

“Tomorrow.”

“You’ll be here?”

Anne gazes at him. Sweat makes his shirt stick to his skin. “Possibly,” she says. And then she advances on him. Grabbing a handful of his shirt, she presses her mouth against his, attacking with a kiss, before breaking off with a pop of her lips. She feels her glare shove him onto his heels. “You’d better get back to work,” she informs him as she mounts her bike, stabbing the pedal with her foot and pumping away.

The word she is not thinking, not admitting to thinking, is retaliation.

• • •

After supper her father springs his trap for her in the kitchen. She is washing the dishes and Miep is drying and setting them on the shelves when in comes Pim trailing the smell of Heeren-Baai pipe tobacco. “I’ll finish up with Anne,” he informs Miep, and Miep does not resist as she usually might when a man offers assistance in the kitchen.

Anne concentrates on dunking the supper dishes into the tub of soapy water, addressing them with a sponge. She brushes a strand of hair from her face with her wrist. Only after she plunges a soup bowl into the rinsing tub and then lifts it from the greasy rainbow of water does she glance at Pim. “Since when do you do kitchen work?” she wants to know.

“Oh, now, that’s not very fair,” her father responds amiably as he wipes the bowl with a faded cotton rag. “I used to help your mother quite often with the dishes. Don’t you recall?”

Anne only shrugs and sponges another bowl.

“Can we discuss this, Anne?” Pim asks her, his tone dipping but still hopeful.

“Discuss what?” The bowl clinks against the rim of the pot as she rinses it and then hands it over. “Discuss supper dishes?”

“She makes me happy, meisje,” her father tells her.

Anne frowns at the plate she picks up. “You’ve replaced Mummy. In the blink of an eye.”

“No. No,” Pim corrects.“I haven’t. It’s not like that. Hadas . . .” He speaks the name, then hesitates, eyes flickering as he works out the next sentence. “She offers me a different kind of happiness,” he decides. “One that I never believed I could experience again.”

“You mean in bed?” Anne asks ruthlessly.

Pim straightens like a whip crack, blinking over the top of his frown. “Anne. Shame on you for asking such an indecent question.”

But Anne sighs drably over the sink. “I only wondered if that’s what you meant.”

“It certainly was not. What I’m speaking of is genuine happiness. Happiness of the heart.”

Anne hands him a wet dish. “Oké,” she says.

He accepts the dish and blankly runs the rag over it. “You’re angry,” he observes. “You’re still very angry.”

A glance from Anne, but no words.

“And whether or not you’re willing to believe it, it’s an anger I recognize, because I felt it, too. I still feel it. But I refuse to let it rule me. I refuse to, Anne,” he insists forcefully. Then he puffs a breath and shakes his head. “Yet I see how it has you in its grasp. How it makes you suffer. Every day. Isn’t there something I can do to help you be free of it, daughter? I continue to try but continue to fail.”

And really before she knows she’s done it, Anne has smashed the dish in her hand against the rim of the sink, shattering it into shrapnel.

Pim leaps back a step, gripping the bowl clutched in the dishrag.

“Oops,” Anne announces, her eyes heating with tears as Miep comes hurrying into the kitchen to view the current catastrophe. “I’m sorry, Miep,” Anne breathes, and strikes away a tear with her wrist. “Butterfingers.”

Her father swallows deeply, wearing a pained expression, but he hands the bowl and rag over to Miep on his way out.

The Grachtengordel

Amsterdam-Centrum

The street is narrow but thick with people trying to get a bit of shopping done on their midday breaks. In the doorway of an empty shop, Anne blocks the view of passersby while Griet strips off her socks and saddle shoes and slides on silk stockings. The stockings have seams that follow the calves of Griet’s legs up her lovely thighs to the soft nether region under her skirt. A gift from her new Canadian boyfriend. Across the street is the Liefje cinema. “Love” cinema. The Canadians who take their Dutch girlfriends there like the joke.

“So I suppose this means you’ve dropped your sweetheart Henk?” Anne asks her.

A shrug. “Henk was just a boy. And it was never anything serious between us.” Wriggling her feet into a pair of suede pumps, Griet says, “Albert is a man. And treats me like a woman.”

“Does that mean you’re doing it with him?” Anne asks bluntly, curious at what bonds men and women together.

Griet shrugs, bashful. “He says he wants to marry me.”

And now Anne’s brow creases sharply. Can the girl really be so foolish? “Marry you?”

“Yep.”

“And you believe him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not.”

“But you’re still doing it with him.”

“It’s fun, Anne. It feels good. Really good.”

Anne huffs dimly. “Isn’t that him?” she inquires. A solidly built Canadian soldier in the standard beret and khaki fatigues. He wears a thick reddish mustache and is lighting his pipe in front of the cinema doors.

Griet can’t help but grin. “That’s him, all right. He’s a lance sergeant, you know. In charge of a squad of riflemen.”

“He’s quite mature-looking,” Anne must admit.

Griet gives her a look of defensive scrutiny. “You think I’m a whore, don’t you?”

“No, and I would never use that word.” Which is true. She hates the judgment in that word. But this talk of marriage, of commitment, unnerves her. Doesn’t all commitment lead to eventual betrayal? “I’m only wondering,” she says, “what happens if you end up with a baby in your belly?”

Griet shrugs this off. “Then I guess he’ll have to marry me, like it or not. It wouldn’t be so bad, I think. Being a Canadian.”

“Unless he just leaves you in the lurch.”

Griet frowns darkly, shakes her head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“No?” Anne wants to make it clear she is not so sure about that. “Is he even Jewish?”

“Jewish?” Griet repeats, as if perhaps she has to concentrate to remember what that means. “I never asked.”

“You never asked,” Anne repeats, and looks at her friend more closely. “And does he know that you’re Jewish?”

“He never asked me either.”

“Oké. So he thinks you’re a Good Christian Girl.”

“Well, what if he does? Who cares? The war’s over now, who cares?” It’s obvious that she’s sick of the conversation, and maybe a little sick of Anne, too. “Why are you always like this now?” she asks. “You didn’t used to be so depressing about everything.”

“I’m not. I’m sorry,” says Anne, and maybe she means it a little.

Griet caps the lipstick she was using and slaps it into Anne’s palm. “Here, take it. I’ve got plenty. Maybe you can paint a smile on that puss of yours.” She grins, wagging Anne’s chin playfully.

Anne only tugs away and puffs out a breath. “He looks impatient. You’d better go to him,” she says, mounting her bicycle, “before he decides to marry the next Good Christian Girl with big boobies who comes along.”

Griet blinks at her but then shrugs and follows her interest across the street. Anne watches for a moment as Griet approaches her Canadian, watches the smile pry open the young soldier’s face as he spots her. The kiss in public, the lance sergeant’s arm slung around her waist as they enter the cinema. It’s a scene that reeks of the future. A terrifying future based on touch and joy and desire, she thinks.

The next day Anne escapes from school alone. She has slipped a set of ersatz pearls made from glass over her collar and powdered away the number on her forearm, as she’s now in the habit of doing. Then, pedaling to the Lindengracht, she stops to apply Griet’s tube of lipstick in the reflection of a garment shop’s window so it will still be bright and fresh when he sees her. A passing lorryload of Canadian soldiers whistles and howls.

You don’t think that makes you look a bit cheap? Margot inquires. She has filled the window glass with her Kazetnik’s reflection, the Judenstern drooping from her pullover.

Anne glances at her as she puckers her lips. “Is it even?” she asks.

Margot squints without her glasses. I suppose. But you still haven’t answered my question.

Anne dabs at the lip rouge lightly with a fingertip. “Maybe I don’t mind looking a bit cheap. Did that ever occur to you?”

No, Margot must answer honestly. No, is my response to that. I just hope you’re not planning on throwing yourself at this boy.

“Throwing myself? Whatever do you mean?”

You know precisely what I mean.

But Anne shakes her head, closing the lipstick tube. “You’re just jealous,” she says.

That’s not true.

“It is true. You’re jealous because I’m alive and you’re not. Jealous because you never knew what it was like to be with a man, and I still can. You just want to deny me any sort of a normal existence.”

That’s not true, Anne.

“No? Well, if it’s not, then why can’t you just leave me alone? Why can’t you just quit interfering and butt out?” A bell dings over the door as a stiff-faced Dutch matron steps out of the shop and shoots Anne a suspect frown before walking on.

Anne shakes her head. “Wonderful. Now I look like a lunatic thanks to you, talking to no one,” she says, but Margot’s reflection has vanished from the window glass.

When he appears from inside the brewery, Anne is waiting beside her bicycle. He comes trotting toward her again with his hands in his pockets, then stops as if an invisible wall divides them. “You look different,” he tells her. His eyes are hooded and rather cautious, like a sleepy animal’s.

“You don’t,” she replies. “And you still smell like beer.” Maybe she overdid it, dressing up this way, trying to appear beautiful. Raaf is not exactly one of her beaux from school taking her out for ice cream. Maybe it’s too much for him, this “beautiful” Anne, so she disguises any disappointment she might feel that he seems more confused than enchanted. But she doesn’t disguise the fact that she is pleased to be standing so close to him, and she takes his hand. “Come with me,” she says.

They walk to the spot Anne has mapped out in her head: the center of the Skinny Bridge off the Kerkstraat, straddling a narrow stripe of the sun-dappled water where leafy branches float calmly. She asks him for a cigarette as an excuse to stop, to anchor them to this spot, and is amazed to watch him hand-roll a pair of smokes so efficiently from a pouch of stringy black shag. He solders each into a tight little cylinder with a swipe of his tongue, offering her a light from a match that he ignites with a flick of his thumb. Halfzware, he calls the tobacco. She inhales its bitter tang that tastes like fireplace ashes cured in shoe polish. She says something to this effect, and he looks surprised at the sound of his own laughter.

She stands with the boy, sharing his hand-rolled shag, watching the smoke from it drift in the breeze that tousles their hair. This close she can’t help but see that his face is caged. As if he’s bracing himself for pain. He leans forward onto the railing, and she follows his lead so that their shoulders brush together. She presses her elbow against his and lets it stay. When he turns, she sees that the light has sharpened to points in the lazy blue of his eyes. His hand touches her cheek. And then his hand is slipping past her cheek, caressing her neck, and he is guiding her forward toward his mouth. Pressing her lips against the sudden dampness, she feels a shock of joy. In that moment the soft squish of their kiss quells the pang of her loss, releasing her from herself. Gentling the anger of her incompressible desire. In that moment her heart beats in a clean, strong pulse, as she seizes the uncombed hair at the back of his head and presses herself into him, absorbing his heat. Her need fusing with his. Losing herself in a deep swim of stunningly guiltless pleasure.

When their lips separate, she gazes into the light of his eyes. It’s steady and clear. His face is unlocked. “Raaf,” she pronounces quietly.

“What?” His voice is close.

“Nothing,” she replies. “I wanted to speak your name aloud.” Raaf. Not Peter. A boy named Raaf with a thatch of straw-blond hair. She feels herself drawing him toward her, her arms slipping over his neck—she, opening her lips, opening herself to the messy, blissful invasion of human craving.