Annexed (19 page)

The British are bombing all along the northern French coast. I look out the window. The rain's falling on the canal. I wish I could feel it on my face. I wish it like I've never wished for anything before. If I could have any power in the world, I'd be invisible. I'd go outside and still be safe. I say so. Anne glances up at me.

"Don't be silly," she says, and flicks another page of her magazine. "If you were invisible you wouldn't really exist."

I think about that as I watch her turning the pages, staring, smiling. After a while she looks up.

"Well? It's true, isn't it?"

I think it's true that Anne has had enough of me.

"I'm not sure. I mean, I'd still be here really, wouldn't I? And ... and I could go outside."

She sighs, exasperated. I do that to her these days. Make her sigh. Mr. Frank was upset and angry with her for seeing me, and now she's upset and angry with me for still wanting her, when all she wants is the day of liberation to come and to work on her diary.

"Would you though, Peter?" she says. "Would you really be you if you could go out there? Would you be the same person with the same set of experiences? Honestly?" She's smiling now, laughing. She's playing with me. All of my thoughts feel meaningless when she's like this. I turn away. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know anything, do I?

I stare at the window. I'd like to hit it. I'd like to put my fist through it and feel it shatter. I'd like to see blood. But it feels like if I tried, the glass would only bend and trap me. Like Anne's mind does. She gives a big, loud sigh.

"Nothing to say?" she asks. "Well there's a surprise." And she turns back to her magazine in disgust. I wait. I wait until the anger isn't so loud in me.

"I've got lots to say."

She looks up. "What then?"

The silence in the attic stretches. I'm going to say it. I can feel the words rising up in me, about to be spoken.

And so can Anne. She holds her hand out suddenly, as though she could stop me. "Peter ... I..."

It's late. The attic's bathed in late spring twilight. Dusk. That's good. That makes the words come more easily.

"I'm Peter," I say. And my own name echoes inside me. I hear Liese's voice calling me in my dreams. I hear Anne say my name as she slips through my fingers.

"Peter van Pels," I say, and for some reason my name sounds wonderful to me. "Peter van Pels." I say it again. I am Peter. I am here, and it feels like a miracle to me. Not just that I'm alive, but that anyone is, ever.

"Well, that's your name, that's true, but it's hardly an identity, is it?" says Anne.

I laugh. It sounds odd.

"It's enough for me," I say. "That's all I want to be. Peter van Pels. Not Jewish, not Dutch, not German, just me!"

It's a strange feeling hearing my thoughts out loud.

Anne's voice is a hiss in the dark.

"Yes, Peter van Pels, too cowardly to own up to being a Jew! Too cowardly to want to tell our story!"

"No!" Because that's not what I mean. I'm not a coward because I didn't stand in the street and fight to the death for Liese, although I wish I had, and I'm not a coward because I wish I could be invisible enough to go outside. I'm a coward because I can't speak. Like right now, in the dark with Anne's voice accusing me. The words have gone. I'm a coward because I don't know how to be me. That's what I want to say.

"You're wrong!" is all that comes out of me. Her fury is like a fist in the dark.

"One day," she cries, "everyone will know what they did. Our story, not theirs. And we'll be proud to be Jews!"

"Good!" I say. And I mean it. "I wish we could all be whatever we wanted, that's all that matters. That we're all human! We can be anything, Anne, as long as it isn't a Nazi. That's all."

She isn't listening. "We have to survive, Peter. We have to give witness!"

I sigh.

"That's your way, Anne," I say quietly.

"What other way is there?" she asks. "Are you really happy pretending none of this is happening, to spend all our time kissing on the floor?"

"What?"

She blushes.

"Is that how you see it?" I ask.

"I asked
you
the question: what other way is there left, except to tell our story?"

I don't know the answer to her question. I just know it's not the
only
question. Listening to her makes me feel like the weight of survival's suffocating me. But Anne won't let me lie down. She won't let me sleep. She's like a tram bell going off in my ear. I sit down next to her.

"Anne," I say, "what if we lived in Holland, but it was just a name?"

"Well it is a name." She shakes her head, irritated.

"I know, but..." She laughs at me before I can finish. I go on anyway. "But what if Holland or Amsterdam were just places? I mean, imagine if you only said those words because they were somewhere you wanted to go." I'm not explaining very well. I can feel it.

"Well, that's obvious," she says. She laughs. I feel like a clown getting the jokes wrong.

"Is it?" I ask, wondering. Has she really understood so easily what has taken me so long?

"Of course," she says.

I nod. "So Holland is just Holland to you? Not Holland the place that saved us; or Amsterdam that is now so dangerous because people are starving and might betray us?"

"Oh," she says, and she ruffles my hair. "You mean people attach meaning to places. Yes,
of course
I understand that, Peter!" She's so quick it tires me.

"Well what if we didn't?"

Her hand falls away from my hair. "What do you mean?"

"What if we didn't attach meaning to places, or religions?" I admit I whisper the last bit.

"That's not possible, you sweet-hearted twit. It's not human," she says.

"Isn't it?" The words come out too loud. "If there was no Germany, or Holland, or France, or Belgium, there'd be no one to fight, would there?"

For once she's silent. It gives me courage. "And Anne, if there were no Christians or Jews—if we were allowed to be just people, just Peter and Anne ... No! I mean that
is
what we are. We're not just Jews. We're us, here in the attic, feeling what we feel." I gulp. "Like me wanting you—and you wanting to save the world. I mean does one of us always have to be the right one? Can't
both
things be true?"

I'm shaking. I've never said so much, or meant it so much. I reach out for her hand but she pushes me away. She stands up, a shadow in the faint light from the window. She doesn't say anything for a while. Neither do I. For a moment I hope that she might turn and take me in her arms, that she might be the Anne who knows this might be our only chance, and wants to take it.

"I'm grateful to you, Peter," she says.

"Why?"

"Because you showed me something."

"What?"

"That it's my writing I want, really."

"Oh."

"And that everything else, even Father and you, have to come second."

"I know, but I still thought we might be..."

"I can't, Peter. I can't think about anything else. Except that it's ending and that we have the chance to tell. Nothing else matters, not to me, and I can't believe you don't want to be a Jew anymore."

"No! I was born Jewish, I can't deny that. I don't even want to, but it's up to me what I do about it. And I'd never not support Jews, or anyone else being treated like we are."

"Do you believe in anything?" she asks.

"Yes!" I say. And the word feels good. Even if it means that she walks away, even if it makes no difference to anyone else, because it matters to me. It's what I think.

"Like what?" she sneers at me. I turn away from the look on her face so I can put the thoughts into words.

"I believe in people."

"Right," she says, "and not God?" I can hear her shock. I'm shocked myself. Shocked at finally hearing the things I've been thinking said out loud. They sound final. They sound real. They sound like a door shutting between us. A door that we'd only just opened.

"I don't know," I say. "It's not the idea of God I don't like, it's the choosing. It's that one religion is meant to be better than the other. I mean, how is God deciding any different from Nazis deciding, I don't see...?"

She gasps as though I've hit her, knocked the breath out of her.

"No, you don't see," she says, "but I do! You don't believe in anything at all!"

"I believe in
people,
Anne! In you and me and even Dr. Pfeffer. In all of us." I want to say more, like if I have to die, then I don't want to die for being a Jew, I want to die for ... for being me ... for hating Nazis and everything they stand for. I don't want them to choose
why
I die ... I want to resist ... But the words have stopped. We don't say any more for a long, long time. Anne waits at the window. I want to put my arm around her, but I can't. I want to hold her, but I can't.

She's somewhere else now.

Beyond me.

"You're a coward, Peter," she says at last, "because you're afraid of being a Jew who'll stand up and be counted."

I can't answer her. Maybe she's right. Maybe it's true. I don't know. I only know this. "I'm not a practicing Jew and we both know that makes no difference, Anne, that they'll still kill me if they find us."

"It can't be a
choice,
" she hisses. "Maybe later, but not now, Peter! Not in the middle of all this!"

I wish, more than anything else in the world, that I could fall into her arms and say, "I'm sorry, I know what you mean, none of it matters, let's just hold each other." But I can't. I have to be me, to understand who I am. If Anne's taught me anything, it's this. It doesn't matter what we
want,
what matters is who we
are,
and we can't change that, not even if we were the last people left on earth. I sigh. "But that's what I
am
saying, Anne," I say quietly, "that for me it
is
a choice."

"You're wrong," she says. "You're deserting us."

"Anne! I would never leave you!" The pain of her words twist inside me and I can't help it, I reach out for her.

"You're already gone!" she says as she leaps away from me. My hand falls through the air and she turns quickly and runs down the stairs.

I sit in the attic.

"Great!" I whisper to myself. "Well done, Peter!"

I want her to come back. I want to hold her. I want to make love to a girl. I want so many things, but what I
need
is to know who I am. Because if I don't know that, I can only ever be what they say I am.

A Jew.

In Auschwitz there is only one way to count a Jew.

Stand us in the freezing cold or rain or heat in groups of five.

And add us up.

Do I count?

No. I am just a number, a body.
A
cog in the wheel that must be counted.

The sun has gone. The wind and rain howl around the house all night. I can't sleep. The wind whistles down the pipe by the head of my bed.

Outside, terrible things are happening: everything is running out. There is no food. There is no money. People are starving. We are too. How will we survive? Will we survive? We don't know.

Outside, wonderful things are happening too: the invasion has begun and Churchill has said the end is in sight. We are frightened to hope. Mutti and Papi say, "Ach! It's just a trial, not the real thing," but excitement lingers beneath our words like the stink of Mouschi's pee in the attic. You can't see it but you can smell it.

It's the smell of hope.

I want to buy Anne something beautiful for her birthday. I want her to know that we can still be friends, can't we, even if we're different?

And now we have to find a way back to friendship. The memory of touching her, wanting her, already feels strange somehow—like a violation. Sometimes you don't know until you try.

It was wrong.

It was right.

It was all we had.

I ask Miep if she'll buy Anne some flowers. She gives us such hope, Miep. Caen has fallen to the British. Hope is in the air. The Annex is alive with it.

In the end I ask her to buy some peonies. Pink and young and not yet quite opened—but they will be so full and beautiful when they do. She gives me a strange look when I describe it like that—and then she smiles and nods. The bunch she brings is perfect. I put it on my desk and stare at the flowers all evening. I draw them. But I can't get it. I can get a likeness, but not their essence; not the fresh, alive, unopened green smell of them. I see them in my sleep. Shining in the dark. And when I open my eyes they're still there. I can't wait to give them to her.

She was about to be fifteen. She was clever and contemptuous and funny and thin and sometimes, when she smiled, she was beautiful. As beautiful as the world outside seemed. I don't know if she'll ever be sixteen.

Anne looks at them. My flowers.

"Thank you, Peter, they're lovely."

I don't say anything. Once I would have wanted to explain. I would have felt sad. I would have wanted them to be perfect for her, but now, well, if Anne doesn't like them, there's nothing I can do.

"I enjoyed looking at them, all evening," I say, and she glances at me and away again. She's unhappy. I know how that feels. To have a birthday in the Annex, an anniversary. A time of thinking about what's past, and worse, what might be about to come. Birthdays aren't joyous for us, despite the news of the invasion.

And the weather is terrible. Really.

Anne fiddles with the little gold bracelet on her wrist that Margot gave her. They giggle together, and play "Remember."

"Remember when we used to sit on the roof at Merwedeplein?" "Remember at the Jewish Lyceum when that couple came to get married?"

We're all remembering the past, the way you only can when you're hopeful about the future.

Mr. Frank looks at me, and smiles. I feel proud when he does that, even though I shouldn't, not really. It's not my doing that we're no longer together, it's just the way it's happened.