Annexed (18 page)

I lie flat and reach for her hand; our fingers curl within each other's. I turn my head and kiss her forehead. She raises her head, touches my lips with hers. She opens her eyes. We stare at each other as we kiss.

"Anne?" I whisper. She nods her head, eyes wide.

My heart lurches. I don't know what's happening. I try and smile but I can't. My face won't move.

I lift my hand and reach beneath her hair. Her neck is so small I can almost fit one hand around it. I'm shaking. I touch the bone where her head joins her neck, small and delicate.

Anne shivers slightly. Our eyes are locked. I run my fingers all the way down her spine and feel her breathing change, like Mouschi's, almost to a purr. She stretches and sighs, turns on her back, closes her eyes. I rest my hand on her stomach. And concentrate. On keeping it there.

"Anne?"

"Peter?"

Her eyes open. Our faces move closer. I put my hands in her hair. It's soft and wiry all at the same time. We move closer and closer until we're pressed up tight against each other in the sunlight, her skin warm beneath my fingers. She's like the curve of a perfect piece of wood beneath my hands, only soft and real and here and now. I hold her so close I forget where she begins and I end.

She moves back swiftly. Sharply. And gasps. "Oh!" And looks down at me. I sit up.

"It's all right," I whisper quickly, moving back. But it's not all right. Everything's returning: the sunlight, the window, the hanging washing. It's all spinning toward me as Anne moves away. I hold on to her hand.

"Peter!" she whispers. "Peter!"

I take a breath, try to make sense of everything, remember who I am, where I am. "Anne?" I ask.

"I'm fine," she says. "I just, it's just ... well, it's so much more
real,
than I thought!"

I nod. She grips my hand.

We sit together, silent, until my breath returns, until the words come back with the world that for just a moment had dissolved completely into sunlight, and Anne.

"Anne."

"Mmm."

"Don't put this in your diary."

"I won't." She lets got of my hand. "Peter?"

"Mmm."

"You know, I'm not just with you for something to put in my diary."

"Thanks," I say. I stand up and look out the window. Outside the sky's a pale blue, and the sea a strip of dark in the distance against it. I look at it waiting for my body to stop aching with longing, to settle.

We're silent for a while.

"Will you stay here, in Holland, when the war ends?" Anne asks.

I sigh. We lean against opposite ends of the window.

"No. I think I'll go somewhere warm."

"Don't you want to be Dutch?"

"I don't want to be anything," I say.

"How can you say that?"

"Why
can't
I say that?"

"It's not fair," she says passionately, and I wish she felt like that when she's in my arms, the way she sounds now. But she doesn't. "If we were Christians we'd just be people! If we do anything wrong it's like the whole Jewish race has done it! Why is that?" she mutters.

"Of course it's like that, Anne, but maybe some of us make it like that, by thinking we're so special."

"We have to, we have to preserve our tradition, we're under attack. We should be proud!"

"We are proud. Maybe
too
proud!"

"Peter!"

"I like the idea of being responsible for
my
actions, not the whole race's. Is that so wrong?"

"No, but..." And then she begins to giggle. When Anne giggles ... Well, the sound of it is like a light in a dark room. Really. Or that feeling you get when the pencil does the drawing for you. Soon she's rolling on the floor.

"What? What is it?"

"Imagine," she gasps, "if you were the only boy left..."

"That's not funny."

"Peter van Pels, last man standing, it is your job to procreate the race!"

And now we're both on the floor, laughing, holding on to each other, trying to be quiet.

"You ... you'll be like my old algebra book." She laughs. "All used up. So many names in you!" I'm now laughing. And then I imagine the lines of girls, waiting. Good Jewish girls, doing their duty, hoping to perpetuate the race. Anne is still lying on the floor, shoulders shaking.

"Anne!" No answer.

"Anne, it's not funny!" She stops. She stops as suddenly as she started.

"I know," she says.

We're silent. We sit apart with the whole world and all its hatred lying in the air between us.

"Sorry," she whispers.

"Me too," I answer.

"So where would you go?" she asks after a while.

"Far away," I say. "Somewhere where the sun shines. You know the word I love?"

"No."

"El Dorado!"

She laughs. "Why?"

"I don't know. It means gold, doesn't it? The thing you want, that you'll discover. The thing that will make you rich!" and as I say the words I realize I mean
her.
Anne. She's the thing I want to discover.

"Oh," is all she says. "Not all riches are about money!"

***

Later, when we meet on the stairs, I call her my El Dorado so she'll know that I didn't mean money!

"Sweet boy," she says, "you can't call a person that."

But you can. You can if you know that they are better than gold and are yet to be discovered.

Was there ever really a world like that, where we spoke and laughed and thought aloud?

Where we weren't stripped bare and made to know what a man is when there is nothing left of him but thought for his own survival.

Mr. Frank saved me from that.

At least, while we were together.

Did I tell you about the soup? Did I tell you how I longed to fill my stomach? That if I could get a few extra pints warm inside me, I'd take it. Forgetting how it will press against my bladder in the night, and wake me.

Once I got up to piss and it was freezing. The stars were so high. So far away. So clear. So cold. But for some reason, that night, I could see how beautiful they were. And I stood there. Staring. And for a moment. Just a moment. I felt human again. And then the moment passed.

Everything's changing. The invasion is coming closer. The whole Annex is upside down. One minute the bombardment will come tomorrow. The next we'll never escape because the Nazis will drown us like rats, will flood the whole of Holland if they can't have it to themselves.

Outside people are starving. We are too. I would love the taste of something fresh in my mouth, something that hasn't spent months in a barrel. Everything is rotten.

Everyone is hoping we'll be free by the end of the year. Anne is so excited by the thought of outside, by the idea that her diary will be a testament to what happens in hiding.

"But it's so boring in here most of the time!" I say.

"It depends how you put it," she answers, which is a bit worrying.

I escape to the storeroom, but someone's knocked over a bag of flour. In my heart I hope it's Boche, even though I know he'd never be so clumsy. I don't know whether to leave it or clean it up.

"Have you walked in it?" asks Mr. Frank.

"No."

"Then leave it." He looks worried. That means I can't go down there all weekend. I feel even more trapped. I go down to the warehouse instead.

The door's stuck, but finally I get it open. Mouschi follows me in. He crouches down, his back arched and nose to the ground, his eyes staring up at nothing. He does the same thing with sunlight sometimes in the attic. He watches and watches and then he pounces on the light and nothing's there! But this is different, unnerving, like he's watching an invisible enemy. Suddenly I wonder if he can see an invisible Boche, playing in the air. I shake my head.

Slowly I slide back up the wall and slip toward the door. That's when I see the wedge pushed back—and realize that's what made the door stick. I know right away that there's nothing I can do. Nothing. I can't put it back. I can't close the door and put the wedge in on the right side. I stare at it. I stare at it as though I could make it go away. Who put it there?

I go through the door and close it. I tell Mr. Frank.

"Thank you, Peter. Let's just keep this to ourselves, shall we?" I nod. I don't go back downstairs.

I don't want to anymore. I make sure Mouschi stays upstairs. There's still no sign of Boche. I know in my heart he's gone. I've known it for weeks, but I keep on hoping, keep on thinking he might stalk in when I least expect it, and put his head beneath my palms.

***

Anne is lit up. Sometimes when I touch her, I'm amazed she's not burning with heat, with passion for all the words and ideas and hope that come pouring out of her.

But it's not passion for me.

"Peter?"

"Mmm?"

"I'm writing! I'm writing!"

"I know!"

"I want people to know, Peter. I want them to feel what we feel. What it's like to be scared. What it's like to look out the window and see your own people led away while you're safe in your bed. What it's like to eat while they starve. If they know, if they feel it too, then they can never do this again, can they?" Her eyes are alight. Blazing. Burning. They are amazing.

"But we're
not
safe in our beds, Anne, are we?" I say gently. I don't know why I have to say it. Anne knows it already. Anne fears it more than any of us. Quite often she shakes with fear. I can feel it inside her when I hold her. That she is always trembling. With fear. With excitement. With despair. And now, with hope. It's her diary. That's what does it. It means she remembers instead of forgets. It means she hopes instead of just waiting, like the rest of us.

"But we've lasted so long. Waited so long, Peter! Don't you think...?" And then she stops herself.

"What?" I ask. She slows herself down. I watch her do it. She wants to shout her words from the rooftops, but she is trying to slow herself down, to hold on to herself. But really, she's flying. Flying above us all. Flying high in the air on words and ideas and writing, writing, writing.

"Don't you think God is saving us for a reason?" she says. "A purpose? Anyway, despair is a sin, especially when we have all this!" And she throws her arms out toward the window, where the sun is shining through the leaves of the chestnut tree, full of summer. And Anne is like that too—full of hope and life and belief. It's exhausting.

"Why should he?" I say.

"What?" She looks away from the window, toward me. She looks shocked, surprised that I need to say anything at all. After all, she's said it all already, hasn't she?

I swallow. I say the words. "Why should God save us, Anne, when he hasn't saved so many?"

She stops. She doesn't answer for a while.

"I dreamed of Hanneli, my friend, the other day. Did you know her? She was taken away." She doesn't have to say any more. We all have our dreams of those who are gone. We don't speak of them. We don't have to. They're written on our faces the next day, in our dull eyes, our slow movements. We all notice. We all move around that person carefully. Maybe we're being kind. Maybe we're scared of being infected. I don't know. All I know is that we give each other time. And space. And that we don't talk about it.

"We all dream, Anne," I say. I think of Liese's shaven head, heavy in my hands. I bite my lip. I don't want Anne's dreams. I have enough of my own.

"I was cruel to Hanneli, Peter. If I ever get out of here, I'll make it up to her. I will." She's frantic now. Panicking. I sigh. Everything Anne feels she feels more than anyone else.

"You were a child, Anne, like your father said, children are often cruel without meaning it, like animals."

"But what if she's dead? What if I never get the chance to say sorry?" she wails. She looks so tiny. So lost. So frail. So I hold her. I can't help it. I know I shouldn't. I know in the end it won't make anything better—and that I can never make her love me more than she loves ideas and books and writing—but it soothes her. And she's warm. And for a while I feel strong. And sure. Sure that for once I'm doing something good. Holding things safe in my hands. No. Holding
her
safe in my hands.

***

I dreamed of her last night.

I was high on a trapeze. I was upside down. Swinging. And then the people came. Their bodies fell down around me like rain. I held out my hands to catch them. A touch. A clasp. But they all fell through my fingers in the end. Down and down into the distance. Thousands of them. All with shaven heads and accusing eyes. I held my palms out, reached and felt fingers. Held tight. And then I heard her voice: "Peter," she said, and our eyes met.

"Anne?" Her eyes held mine. Her eyes were trying to tell me something, but I couldn't hear it. And she began to slip. Slip through my fingers...

Until she fell. Until she was one of a hundred, thousand, million bodies like raindrops—falling. And then it stopped. And the world was empty. I swung upside down in the darkness. With nothing but the torn piece of paper she'd left me, fluttering in my hands.

The next morning everyone steps around me. Gives me space. And I know the dream is written on me.

You see? We knew. We knew it was coming. That the net was closing. That we were just fish, really, already flapping and struggling for air. We used to joke about it, in the old days, back in Zuider Amstellaan. "What will they ration next?" Papi would say. "The air we breathe?
"

Yes, Father, yes. They turned the air into gas and killed you with it.

Is this just another dream?

Another nightmare?

Another telling?

And in the end, the thing that always happens will happen again.

You'll smile and stand up. Make some comment that proves you haven't heard me at all.

And then you'll walk away.

Isn't that how it goes?