When We Flew Away, page 5
“I made a to-do list,” Margot said. “You made a wish list.”
“You don’t have wishes?”
It took a while before Margot spoke. “I’m afraid to.”
“I’m not,” Anne said.
“That’s why you’re you,” Margot told her sister, and for the first time Anne wondered if her sister might be envious of her. She got into bed with Margot so she would not be so alone. She could see the black moth, so she closed her eyes.
“Once upon a time,” Anne said, “there were two sisters. One was beautiful and one was not.”
Margot laughed. “No, that’s not the way the story goes.”
“How does it go?”
Their voices were soft so that no one else could hear them. “Once upon a time, there were two sisters who would do anything for each other,” Margot began.
“What would they do?” Anne’s voice was softer than usual. She didn’t feel very grown up now.
“They would protect each other and they would always believe in each other.”
“No matter what?” Anne asked.
“No matter what,” Margot told her.
“Then that’s what I wish,” Anne said.
“You don’t have to wish.” Margot’s eyes were closed now too. “It’s already true.”
When her sister had fallen asleep, Anne crept from her bed to look out into the darkness in the courtyard. She wanted to believe they could protect each other, but they were living in wolf time, a time of shadows. Most people told themselves that all would be well, but if they stayed up late, if they really thought about it, they would know that no matter who loved you, no matter who tried to protect you, nothing was fine and nothing was the same, and by the end of May, all the rabbits were gone.
It was Anne’s eleventh birthday on the 12th of June. It had always been her lucky day, the best day of the year. Usually her friends gathered for games and cake. Last year she’d had eight friends at the celebration, including Hanneli and Sanne, but this year only the family celebrated. Still, eleven was a good age, and next year would be even better, and thirteen would be best of all.
“I can’t wait to be grown up,” Anne told Oma.
Her grandmother told her not to rush things. “When you are young,” Oma said, “time goes slowly, and when you are old, you want to reverse time and go backward.”
“I won’t,” Anne assured her grandmother. “I’ll never want to go backward.”
“Why do you want to grow up so fast?” Oma wanted to know. “Stay a child. Enjoy it.”
Anne flung her arms around her grandmother, but she knew what she wanted, and she wanted to grow up more than she wanted anything. In her dreams, she was a grown woman and could do as she pleased. California was such a beautiful word, and she often repeated it to herself until she fell asleep as the moonlight poured through the window, a pale silvery light that made everything look unfamiliar in her own room, as if she was already living someplace brand new. Anne was certain she could be an actress, for even now she felt as if she was acting out a play every day, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. The young girl who didn’t know that the world was closing in on them, who didn’t see her mother watching her to see if she would make a mistake, wrong shoes, wrong socks, wrong words when she answered a question. She kept her worries inside, and wasn’t that acting? Was she not pretty enough, smart enough, brave enough? She had been in school plays and in holiday performances and was always the star of every show. The reason was simple: She could become someone else in the blink of an eye. She could be Juliet, she could be a witch in the forest, she could be a lost girl begging for bread, she could be Esther, the queen who had saved the Jews.
“How do you do it?” Anne’s friend Hanneli asked her. They had been playing in Hanneli’s room, acting out scenes from the movies they loved. Hanneli admired Anne’s talents and was never jealous of her or annoyed by her the way some of the girls at school were. Unlike the other girls, she didn’t mind if Anne always wanted to be the star.
“You’re so different when you play the part of someone else,” Hanneli said admiringly.
Anne shrugged, for she had no answer. It was difficult to explain how easy it was for her to become a character in a play, much easier than living her ordinary life. Maybe she was able to do so because she wished that she was someone else. The perfect sister, that was a part she would love to play, that was who she often wished to be, not that she’d ever admit it. The beautiful, kind sister everyone loved and admired and who always knew the right thing to say and do, who was generous rather than bossy, who all the boys gazed at with interest, who pleased her mother with everything she did. Anne had certainly studied Margot well enough; she could walk and talk like her, imitating her sister to amuse her friends and make them laugh. Or perhaps she could be someone else entirely, someone she’d never known and had wholly invented. She could be Merle Oberon, or the wonderful and mysterious actress Greta Garbo.
“You’ll fit right into Hollywood.”
“I don’t know.” Lately, Anne had been doubting her own dreams. “You have to be beautiful, and I’m not,” she blurted.
She had been stung when she’d overheard the other girls in her class discussing her. She was too sure of herself, they said, and too needy, both bossy and clingy. What hurt most of all was when she heard them say she wasn’t half as attractive as Margot. Margot was a true beauty, they said, and Anne was only average. She knew it, of course, but the cruelty of their laughter cut right through her.
“All I know is that when you’re in a play, you’re the only one people watch. You’re the one who shines,” Hanneli told her friend.
It was true; more boys had begun to gather around Anne in the schoolyard, not because she was beautiful, but because she shimmered, like a firefly. She was so alive they were drawn to her, and they didn’t even know why. She was electric, so much more intense than most people.
“Let’s plan our lives in California,” Anne said. “We’ll swim in the Pacific Ocean every morning. We’ll have chocolate cake and champagne.” The girls looked at each other and laughed at the thought of being old enough to drink champagne.
“I’ll live in your guesthouse,” Hanneli declared. “Every movie star has one. I’ll hide out there so I never have to leave.”
“Never,” Anne agreed.
All of a sudden, Hanneli looked solemn. Not everyone lived in a dream life. “If something happens and I don’t get to go with you, promise me you’ll write me letters.”
Anne wondered if she shouldn’t have spoken of her dreams to Hanneli. These were her most private thoughts and she now felt she’d revealed too much of herself. If her friends knew her real self, they would know she was selfish sometimes and that she felt she was different and special on occasion, but at other times she felt exactly the opposite, as if she was nothing more than a shadow on the wall. At night the room filled with moths, more and more all the time, until it was so dark it was impossible to see.
Otto Frank continued to write letters trying to get them out of the Netherlands, but as he wrote there was a dark cast of fear on his face. He said nothing about the fact that letters were taking longer and longer to get to where they’d been addressed, and that letters coming to him took weeks. He paced as he thought about what he would write next. He had already begged his wife’s brothers to do anything they could. The situation was changing by the day, and was worse all the time. More and more rules were passed, depriving Jews of their livelihoods and their dignity. Lately, Anne couldn’t see any farther than the green square, which had always felt as though it belonged to them. In the past, they had never thought twice about going out in the dusk, riding their bicycles or playing hide-and-seek, ducking beneath the bushes or watching the stars in the sky.
The simple things they’d taken for granted were no longer possible. Anne wished she could stand out in the square as night sifted down, which she and Pim used to do. The last time they’d done so seemed so long ago she could barely remember the bowl of stars above them. She wished she could walk along the canals in the evening and find a boat and row to the sea. If she tried hard enough, perhaps she could find a place where she could do as she pleased, where she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the soldiers on the street; she would find a city far from here where she could spend all day in a bookstore and curl up and sleep there at night. When she closed her eyes, there she was, somewhere in the future where she didn’t have to explain herself to anyone.
Anne and Margot sat outside on the steps of 37 Merwedeplein, not speaking, but sitting so close they could feel each other’s hearts beating. More and more often the sisters looped their arms around each other’s waists for comfort when they were both distressed. They had never been close, and they still didn’t confide in each other. There was something Anne wanted that Margot couldn’t give her, something she needed, a person who could understand her at the deepest level, soul to soul. And yet something had changed between them, for Anne knew she could trust Margot, who was honest and kindhearted, in a way she trusted no one else. Margot would never tell anyone that sometimes, as they sat outside on the steps in the shadow of the Skyscraper building, Anne cried, then wiped her eyes, embarrassed. “Something was in my eye,” she always told her sister.
“It must be dust or a piece of grass,” Margot would agree, even though she knew the truth.
Today when they sat on the steps, Anne didn’t cry. She was learning to hold more and more of her feelings inside. Sometimes she imagined that if she didn’t let them out in some way they might burst inside her.
“Are you all right?” Margot asked, because her sister was so quiet.
“Is anyone?” Anne found herself saying.
“You’re answering a question with a question,” Margot chided her gently.
Anne didn’t take the opportunity to make their conversation into a joke, saying Am I? Instead, she whispered, “I know,” and they sat even closer together.
When all the lights had been turned off and dusk had settled, Anne gazed up to scan the trees. There were so few birds; something had chased them away, a sense of doom, the weight of the silence in the city. The only birds that appeared to have stayed on were the magpies, since their kind never migrated far from home.
Margot pointed upward to the branches above them. “Isn’t that the bird who follows you?”
Anne thought Margot was humoring her, but when she looked up, she saw that her sister was right. It was the same bird in the tree above them, the one who recognized her and followed her home from school. Anne stood up and waved him away. She wanted him to flee to Spain or Morocco and forget all about Amsterdam. She wanted him to be somewhere safe where the bombs didn’t shake the stars in the sky.
“Go on,” she called out. “Fly away now!”
When the magpie soared off above the elm trees, both sisters applauded, even though they knew they should be quiet so as not to call attention to themselves. They were so very different, but they were sisters all the same. You can love someone who doesn’t understand you. That’s what Anne had decided. You can trust them more than anyone else. Margot had on her favorite blue dress, one she would wear until it was threadbare. Before long, there would be no new dresses to buy and no money to buy them with, but they didn’t know that now. In other times, girls of their ages went to dances, they fell in love, they prepared to go to universities, they walked along the canals and didn’t have to show their identification cards, they were not in mortal fear, they kissed their parents good night, they went to bed and weren’t afraid of their own dreams, they didn’t cry and pretend not to, they didn’t wish that all the birds would fly away to a safe place that was far from here, they didn’t wish they could follow them.
Anne had begun to dream of monsters. Each one had a human face and long arms and legs. They pinched her in her dreams and bruised her arms and legs. The monsters spoke German and they scratched at the window, leaving their fingerprints on the glass. They were only in her imagination, she knew that, but she had begun to fear going to sleep. In the mornings when she woke, she saw the black moth in the corner, larger than it had been before.
Everyone in the family noticed that Anne wasn’t her usual cheerful self. She was so quiet it was sometimes possible to forget she was there, and that wasn’t like Anne at all. She was usually impossible to ignore and, if anything, took up too much space. Now she was quiet, thinking things over, wondering if the life they’d led before had been nothing more than a dream.
When her mother sent Anne to the market, she overheard people talking about the Jews. She was behind them and was too afraid to pass them. She felt a pulse in her throat. “We won’t have to suffer with them around much longer,” one woman said to her friend. She was an ordinary woman wearing a gray coat. Anne took a breath and forced herself to walk past the women. She walked as fast as she could, but when the woman spied Anne, she made a face. This woman was a goblin, just like the figures in her dreams, only she was here, wearing a gray coat, a scarf at her throat. Anne walked even faster. “Who does she think she is?” the woman said. She spoke in a well-mannered voice, but the hatred was there, just underneath her words.
“Ugly little thing,” the other woman said, but by then Anne was running back to 37 Merwedeplein.
Otto was at his desk writing letters when she arrived home. Right away, he knew his daughter was distressed, and he left his desk to go to her. “Did something happen?”
When she explained how the women had acted toward her, Otto shook his head.
“Am I different from other people?” Anne asked her father. “What do they have against me?”
“They’ve been taught to hate, and unfortunately, we’re the object of that hate,” Pim told her. “It’s not personal.”
“But it’s not fair,” Anne said. “It shouldn’t be this way.”
She ran upstairs to the rooftop, where she could be alone. What she’d experienced on the street felt deeply personal to her, no matter what Pim said. On this day, she felt as if she knew nothing of the world. Anything could happen. People could betray you and surprise you, they could hate you for no reason, whether or not it was fair. She sat under the clear blue sky, and there was the magpie who had followed her home. “Fly away,” she told the bird when he landed on the rooftop, but he stayed where he was, he didn’t fly away to Morocco or to Spain, and so they stayed there together, for the truth was, there was really nowhere else to go.
We were not citizens and had no rights. There was no country to escape to, none would have us, none wanted us, none came to our rescue. We could not go out at night or raise our eyes when we passed soldiers on the street corners. We could not smile or laugh in public, and if we did, our mothers hushed us and tugged on our coats. Remember, they were telling us, we are living behind locked doors.
In our country everything was the same and everything had changed. The canals were there, and the trees, and our apartments, but the things we had taken for granted seemed like treasures to us now: books, bread, cake, aunts and uncles, cousins, a holiday, a river, a future.
When we looked in the mirror, we didn’t understand why they didn’t see what we saw. Why were we considered to be so different? Were we not like them?
That was when we began to wonder how much longer we would be safe.
There were certain things they never talked about. They never mentioned the future or the past. Only a few words of doubt or fear might cause the monsters to appear right in front of them, walking along the road or there in their very own bedroom, sitting in the closet or waiting under their beds, counting every breath they took. They had been in nightmares once upon a time, but now the monsters were real, flesh and blood, wearing heavy boots and thick jackets.
The girls closed their eyes and wished away all that was evil. But monsters prefer silence, they delight in quiet houses and desperate people. They take whatever they want while no one says a word. They steal people’s souls and keep them in a satchel that they carry over their shoulders.
That was when the younger sister realized that the monsters would be there whether or not they spoke of them. She crawled into her sister’s bed. She took a breath and then she said the truth out loud.
All we have to do is open our eyes. Then we’ll see what has happened.
They’re at the window right now.
Snow was falling and a sheen of blue ice covered the ground. Just below the surface of the frozen canals silvery fish were motionless, shining like stars, dreaming through the coldest months of the year. Anne’s favorite thing to do in winter was to skate at the ice rink where she took figure skating lessons or with her friends on the frozen ponds of Vondelpark, the huge park of a hundred twenty acres in the center of Amsterdam. When she was skating, the world seemed full of joy, and she and her friends laughed and teased one another as if it was any other winter; they wore gloves and mittens and glided along in a row as if they were figure skaters.
“Faster,” Anne always called out, and they went so fast they were nearly flying.
Hanne and Sanne and Anne locked arms and laughed until they thought they might fall onto the ice.
“We can’t go any faster than this,” Hanneli declared.
“How do we know if we don’t try? Maybe we could set a record if someone timed us,” Anne said, which was why her friends loved her, even if she could be difficult. She always thought bigger than anyone else.
