Annexed (5 page)

Anne picks up a book and coughs, just like her father, and begins telling me in terrible Dutch (all our parents speak bad Dutch—they make it sound like German!) all about Descartes. She sounds just like Mr. Frank! I act like Mutti, trying to look like I understand what she's saying, nodding my head. I cuddle up close to Anne and peer at the book, asking more and more stupid questions. Every time she answers, she steps away from me and I step closer. She stares, her eyes wide in mock alarm (just like her father).

I step so close I breathe into her neck, so close I can smell her. She smells of the soap we all use, and something else ... something that's just her.

Just Anne.

And then Margot laughs out loud and I step away. We bow deeply, doff our hats and run out. We're laughing so much we have to help each other up the attic steps.

"Oh, that's a tonic!" I hear Mutti laugh. "Am I really quite so obvious?"

"Auguste, you're charming!" says Mr. Frank.

I can't get the dress off. It's stuck halfway! My rear's out one end and my head's lost inside it.

"Breathe out!" says Anne and she pulls. I go one way, and Anne and the dress go the other. We lie on the floor, laughing.

"Look!" says Anne. "Look up!"

And I look up. In our patch of sky a thousand stars are glittering.

"Amazing!" I say.

Miep is crying. She sits in the kitchen. We watch as the tears roll down her face. We all stare at her. We don't know what to do. What can we do? Our lives are in the hands she holds up to her face. She thinks she should be able to save everyone, but today she had to make a choice—and she chose us. We're grateful, but we're sad, too—and ashamed. At least I am, that Miep had to make this choice.

An old woman, or us.

The Gestapo left an old Jewish woman outside Miep's house to wait for transport. She banged and banged on the door and when Miep finally opened it, the woman begged Miep to save her, to take her in. But how could she? The police knew the woman was there. If Miep let her in, they might arrest her or search her workplace. And then what would they find? Us.

And so now Miep sits at the kitchen table. Crying.

"But that poor woman, what'll become of her?" she says, and the tears flow again. We don't cry. Are we all thinking the same thing—that it could be us next time? Sometime. Anytime. A different knock at the door. We don't want to answer Miep. We can't. We don't want to think about what might
become of the old lady, because it means thinking about what might become of us. Miep notices, like she notices everything.

"I'm being silly. Honestly! Anyone would think it was me in danger."

She straightens her back and says to Mutti, "I don't ever want anyone to find you, Auguste, you make the best soup in the whole of Holland!"

Mutti smiles. "For the best woman in the whole of Holland!" she says, and we all agree. That's exactly what Miep is—and the rest of them in the office—all of them are in danger, risking their lives just for us.

As she leaves, Mr. Frank puts his hand on her shoulder.

"It's not you who made this evil, Miep, but it
is
you fighting it. We're grateful."

She smiles at him. "Thank you!" she says.

But he shrugs. "No, it's us who should thank you," and he smiles back. I can see she feels better.

He's like that, Mr. Frank.

Yes. Yes he is. He was.

If I believed in any of it I'd say he had God in his soul, but I don't believe. Not anymore. I think Mr. Frank had something better than God, something they couldn't touch or fight or gas. Something they couldn't destroy—not in him anyway. He had hope—and a belief.

That most of us are good.

I'm glad I helped keep him alive, right up until the end at Auschwitz.

Until I...

After lunch I go and stand in the attic and look at the sky.

There are still so many questions inside me. Why do they help us—Miep and Bep and Mr. Kleiman and Kugler? I try to ask them, but they shush me—as though I were still a child. They tell me that the Dutch hate the Nazis and that if they have to, they'll fight them until the whole of Holland is empty and silent.

Amsterdam empty ... I imagine it: just the trees lining the canals—looking down at themselves in the water—drifting leaves, empty boats. The gulls. I get out my pencil and begin to draw. When the picture's finished I feel better.

I hear footsteps on the stairs and hide my drawing quickly. Mr. Frank appears.

"All right?" he asks.

"Why should they go on protecting us?" I blurt out.

Mr. Frank stares at me for a long time before he answers. "Well, partly because we pay their wages."

"But how could you say that?"

"Because it's
one
of the reasons, Peter. A minor one, but important not to forget. Mostly they do it because they feel that what's happening is wrong, and they want no part of it. More than that, they want to stop it."

"But it doesn't affect them, they're not Jewish, are they?"

He sighs. "It's not just about Jews, Peter, is it? It's about all the people the Nazis hate. I think the office workers know that it
does
affect them, Peter—that's what makes them so special. What's happening to us is about everyone, although they blame us first, last, and most of all. It's about hate. We can't stand by and do nothing when people are killed for their difference."

I take a deep breath. "But we
are
doing nothing. Why aren't we fighting?" He steps back, and I realize I hissed it out at him. I blush again. I didn't mean to.

"We're doing
our
job, Peter. They're doing
theirs.
Does the chick put its head out of the nest while its mother fights the kestrel?"

"What?"

But he doesn't answer. He's looking out at the sky, over the rooftops at the horizon and all the way to the sea. He's looking at it like he wonders sometimes, too, if it's all really still there.

"They're full of hate, Peter! So full of it that they turn it into hating us—into hating anything that's different—and then they try to kill it. They're trying to wipe us out: country by country, city by city, like pestilence. But one day, someday, maybe even after we've all gone, they'll have to look at themselves—and the hate will still be there. What then? I
wonder. But until then..." He breathes out. Shakes his head. "This is nothing new. Our job is not to fight, not now. Our job is to survive it. Especially the young. Especially you. How else will the world know what's happened? If youth goes, where is our future?"

I step back. I've never heard him rant like this. He's a bit frightening.

"Stay alive. That's your job, Peter. There will be others out there, fighting."

"Jews?" I ask.

He smiles. "Of course!" he says. "What? Do you think there are none of us resisting?"

"I don't know," I whisper.

"Well, even by the law of averages it's probable that there are, wouldn't you say?"

I shrug. "I don't know."

"No," he says quietly, "we can't know, Peter. We can't know. But we can believe."

"Believe what? That God will save us?"

"Well, that would be a help, yes—but is there only blind faith to save us? Isn't there something else that we can do, even cooped up in here?"

"I don't know," I whisper, because I don't. They are so clever, the Franks, it's hard to know what they mean sometimes.

Mr. Frank sighs. "We have to try, Peter. We have to try and believe that
our
love can be greater than
their
hate."

"You want me to
love
them! But I
hate
them. I hate them. If I could I'd..."

He holds up his hand. "No, of course I don't want you to love them. What they're doing is ... is ... evil, but if you hate back, Peter, then will you be any better than them?"

"It doesn't feel right," is all I can say. And it doesn't. "I
want
the people who did this to suffer. I want them to die. I wish I was ... I wish I was fighting them instead of stuck in here just..." I stop. I don't want to sound ungrateful to be here, but Mr. Frank just smiles.

"At your age, I'd rather have been fighting too. We need to fight them. They leave us no other choice."

"But you said we had to
love
them!"

"No! I said that you mustn't let their hate become
your
hate."

"I just want them to die!"

"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," he says, sighing.

"Yes!" I say.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. "And when we're all blind and toothless, what then, Peter?"

"I don't know," I mutter.

I hate Mr. Frank sometimes.

"And hating them is so much easier than not knowing why they hate us, isn't it?" he asks, gently.

I nod, because it's true. It is.

I wonder aloud what terrible thing it is that they avoid by hating us all so much. Mr. Frank mutters, "Yes, sometimes I wonder just what terrible thing it must be!" And then he turns and walks out of the room, still muttering, until he gets to the steps, where he turns and smiles at me. "Don't forget to do that English homework, Peter!"

That's Mr. Frank!

Otto Frank. Even in Auschwitz he was himself. "They can't kill our dreams, Peter," he said.

But he's wrong, because we all have the same dreams here. We all grind our teeth as we dream of food. Food that our teeth could bite on. Food that our bodies could grow on.

I always have the same dream: of garden peas, still green and fresh and a little hard. They're poached in Mutti's chicken stock with just a little lettuce. In my dream it's spring and she brings a great steaming tureen of them to the table—more than I could possibly ever eat. I raise the spoon to my lips. I breathe in the smell, relish the color, my mouth waters at the taste to come. I put the spoon to my lips, open my mouth and close it ... on nothing.

My bunkmate digs his knees in my back ... a second later his own teeth begin to grind ... the dream spreads through the hut ... joins the endless noise of our dreams shouting out, desperate to try and make sense of something, anything ... no, even our dreams are not our own.

Not here.

I'm dreaming of Liese. She's naked. She's so beautiful I can't speak, only ache. There are lines and lines of people. All of them are naked. They hold their hands between their legs. They keep their heads down. They are embarrassed.

But Liese isn't.

She's slender and beautiful. She doesn't look down at the ground like all the others. She looks up into the air above her, at the sky. Her hands don't cover herself, they hang loose by her sides. I watch, mesmerized, as slowly she lifts them. Her arms rise above her in a perfect arc. Her breasts lift. They are so beautiful. In my dream I hear music as she begins to dance. The silent people raise their bowed heads to watch as she steps out of the line.

"Stop!" shouts a guard. But she doesn't stop. She stays in perfect time to the music that only we can hear. Her face is rapt in concentration; her back is straight and tall as she balances. She takes a step forward and lifts one beautiful, naked leg high into the air, and turns. She steps lightly, slowly. Twisting and turning to the invisible music.

She stops. In front of the guard.

She lowers her arms. She's sweating. Her breath comes in gasps. She smiles up at him. I realize he's her age. My age. He stares at her breasts.

All is silence and staring.

She curtsies. Her knees bent, her arms back, her breasts a present, and then in one swift motion she sweeps her arms forward to hug him. She pulls the gun from his holster and fires. And then she turns the gun to her own head, but before she can fire, her body is already dancing under the impact of fired bullets.

"Liese! NO!"

My own scream wakes me.

I lie in the dark.

Waiting.

Breathing.

Listening for the Westertoren bells to strike the hours till morning.

Thinking about hate.

I wake up with an ache in my guts, a fear that she's already dead.

I make myself get out of bed.

My heart feels so heavy I don't know how to carry it. Simple things seem strange. All day I do my chores and watch myself, amazed at how I go on, just as if nothing at all was happening.

"Well done, Peter!"

"Thank you."

"Why can't you eat, Peter? Eat more! Don't you like it?"

"It's lovely. I've had enough."

At night I lie awake, scared of all the dreams that might be waiting for me in the walls. Sometimes, deep in the night, I crawl up the attic steps and stand in the darkness, waiting for the bombs to land, thinking that if I stay up here, watching, I can somehow stop them from landing on us.

Sometimes Mouschi comes and lies on my chest, purring. We watch the stars through the window.

Last night Anne left an apple on my bed. I take it up to the attic and eat it. It sounds loud in the darkness. It's crisp
and cold and sweet. It's an apple. I didn't know an apple could feel like a miracle. But it does.

I eat it slowly, watching the stars move across the small piece of sky. I crawl downstairs in the first light and fall asleep.

I miss breakfast. Anne wakes me.

"Sleepyhead! You didn't even say thank you for the apple!"

I try to open my eyes. She's sitting on the bed, bouncing.

"Get off!"

But she goes on. "Get up! Get up! Get up! We have to be weighed."

I groan. Turn over. Try to block her out. My head hurts. My ears hurt. My whole body hurts with the dream; aches with it.

But she doesn't stop.

"Peter Piper picked a peck of Opekta pepper. See how good my English is getting?"

And then she tries to tickle me through the covers. I get up quickly. I can't bear being touched. She laughs and then she stops. "Peter!" she whispers. "You're still dressed."