The Ghost Writer (13 page)

One Saturday only a few months after her arrival in England, vowing that if she heard another plaintive “Belsen” out of Uncle Daniel’s mouth she would run off to Southampton and stow away on an American ship—and having had about enough of the snooty brand of sympathy the pure-bred English teachers offered at school—she burned her arm while ironing a blouse. The neighbors came running at the sound of her screams and rushed her to the hospital emergency room. When the bandage was removed, there was a patch of purple scar tissue about half the size of an egg instead of her camp number.

After the accident, as her foster parents called it, Uncle Daniel informed the Jewish Welfare Board that his wife’s ill health made it impossible for them to continue to have Amy in their home. The foster child moved on to another family—and then another. She told whoever asked that she had been evacuated from Holland with a group of Jewish schoolchildren one week before the Nazis invaded. Sometimes she did not even say that the school children were Jewish, an omission for which she was mildly rebuked by the Jewish families who had accepted responsibility for her and were troubled by her lying. But she could not bear them all laying .their helpful hands upon her shoulders because of Auschwitz and Belsen. If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made of herself since.

They were kind and thoughtful people, and they tried to get her to understand that she was not in danger in England. “You needn’t feel frightened or threatened in any way,” they assured her. “Or ashamed of anything.” “I’m not ashamed. That’s the point.” “Well, that isn’t always the point when young people try to hide their Jewish origins.” “Maybe it isn’t with others,” she told them, “but it is with me.”

On the Saturday after discovering her father’s photograph in
Time
, she took the morning bus to Boston, and in every foreign bookstore looked in vain for a copy of
Het Achterhuis
. Two weeks later she traveled the three hours to Boston again, this time to the main post office to rent a box. She paid for it in cash, then mailed the letter she was carrying in her handbag, along with a money order for fifteen dollars, to Contact Publishers in Amsterdam, requesting them to send, postage paid, to Pilgrim International Bookshop, P.O. Box 1S2, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., as many copies as fifteen dollars would buy of
Het Achterhuis
by Anne Frank.

She had been dead for him some four years; believing her dead for another month or two would not really hurt much more. Curiously she did not hurt more either, except in bed at night when she cried and begged forgiveness for the cruelty she was practicing on her perfect father, now sixty.

Nearly three months after she had sent the order off to her Amsterdam publisher, on a warm, sunny day at the beginning of August, there was a package too large for the Pilgrim Book shop post-office box waiting to be picked up in Boston. She was wearing a beige linen skirt and a fresh white cotton blouse, both ironed the night before. Her hair, cut in pageboy style that spring, had been washed and set the previous night, and her skin was evenly tanned. She was swimming a mile every morning and playing tennis every afternoon and, all in all, was as fit and energetic as a twenty-year-old could be. Maybe that was why, when the postal clerk handed her the parcel, she did not tear at the string with her teeth or feint straightaway onto the marble floor. Instead, she walked over to the Common—the package mailed from Holland swinging idly from one hand—and wandered along until she found an unoccupied bench. She sat first on a bench in the shade, but then got up and walked on until she found a perfect spot in the sunshine.

After thoroughly studying the Dutch stamps—postwar issues new to her—and contemplating the postmark, she set about to see how carefully she could undo the package. It was a preposterous display of unruffled patience and she meant it to be. She was feeling at once triumphant and giddy. Forbearance, she thought. Patience. Without patience there is no life. When she had finally untied the string and unfolded, without tearing, the layers of thick brown paper, it seemed to her that what she had so meticulously removed from the wrappings and placed onto the lap of her clean and pretty American girl’s beige linen skirt was her survival itself.

Van Anne Frank.
Her book. Hers.

She had begun keeping a diary less than three weeks before Pim told her that they were going into hiding. Until she ran out of pages and had to carry over onto office ledgers, she made the entries in a cardboard-covered notebook that he’d given her for her thirteenth birthday. She still remembered most of what happened to her in the
achterhuis
, some of it down to the most minute detail, but of the firry thousand words recording it all, she couldn’t remember writing one. Nor could she remember anything much of what she’d confided there about her personal problems to the phantom confidante she’d named Kitty—whole pages of her tribulations as new and strange to her as her native tongue.

Perhaps because
Het Achterhuis
was the first Dutch book she’d read since she’d written it, her first thought when she finished was of her childhood friends in Amsterdam, the boys and girls from the Montessori school where she’d learned to read and write. She tried to remember the names of the Christian children, who would have survived the war. She tried to recall the names of her teachers, going all the way back to kindergarten. She pictured the faces of the shopkeepers, the postman, the milk deliveryman who had known her as a child. She imagined their neighbors in the houses on Merwedeplein. And when she had, she saw each of them closing her book and thinking. Who realized she was so gifted? Who realized we had such a writer in our midst?

The first passage she reread was dated over a year before the birth of Amy Bellette. The first time round she’d bent back the comer of the page; the second time, with a pen from her purse, she drew a dark meaningful line in the margin and beside it wrote—in English, of course—”uncanny.” (Everything she marked she was marking for him, or made the mark actually pretending to be him.)
I
have an odd way of sometimes, as it were, being able to see myself through someone else’s eyes. Then 1 view the affairs of a certain
“Anne”
at my ease, and browse through the pages of her life as if she were a stranger. Before we came here, when I didn’t think about things as much as I do now, I used at times to have the feeling that I didn’t belong to Mansa, Pim, and Margot, and that I would always be a bit of an outsider. Sometimes I used to pretend I was an orphan…

Then she read the whole thing from the start again, making a small marginal notation—and a small grimace—whenever she came upon anything she was sure he would consider “decorative” or “imprecise” or “unclear.” But mostly she marked passages she couldn’t believe that she had written as little more than a child. Why, what eloquence, Anne—it gave her gooseflesh, whispering her own name in Boston—what deftness, what wit! How nice, she thought, if I could write like this for Mr. Lonoff’s English 12. ‘it’s good,” she heard him saying, “it’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Miss Bellette.”

But of course it was—she’d had a “great subject,” as the girls said in English class. Her family’s affinity with what families were suffering everywhere had been clear to her right from the beginning.
There is nothing we can do but wait as calmly as we can till the misery comes to an end. Jews and Christians wait, the whole earth waits; and there are many who wait for death
. But while writing these lines (“Quiet, emphatic feeling—that’s the idea. E.I.L.”) she had had no grandiose delusions about her little
achterhuis
diary’s ever standing as part of the record of the misery. It wasn’t to educate anybody other than herself—out of her great expectations—that she kept track of how trying it all was. Recording it was enduring it; the diary kept her company and it kept her sane, and whenever being her parents’ child seemed to her as harrowing as the war itself, it was where she went to confess. Only to Kitty was she able to speak freely about the hopelessness of trying to satisfy her mother the way Margot did; only to Kitty could she openly bewail her inability, even to pronounce the word “Mumsie” to. her aloud—and to concede the depth of her feeling for Pirn, a father she wanted to want her to the exclusion of all others,
not only as his child, but for me—Anne, myself.

Of course it had eventually to occur to any child
so mad on books and reading
that for all she knew she was writing a book of her own. But most of the time it was her morale that she was sustaining not, at fourteen, literary ambition. As for developing into a writer—she owed that not to any decision to sit down each day and try to be one but to their stifling life. That, of all things, seemed to have nurtured her talent! Truly, without the terror and the claustrophobia of the
achterhuis
as a
chatterbox
surrounded by friends and
rollicking with laughter
, free to come and go, free to clown around, free to pursue her every last expectation, would she ever have written sentences so deft and so eloquent and so witty? She thought, Now maybe that’s the problem in English 12—not the absence of the great subject but the presence of the lake and the tennis courts and Tanglewood. The perfect tan, the linen skirts, my emerging reputation as the Pallas Athene of Athene College—maybe that’s what’s doing me in. Maybe if I were locked up again in a room somewhere and fed on rotten potatoes and clothed in rags and terrified out of my wits, maybe then I could write a decent story for Mr. Lonoff!

It was only with the euphoria of
invasion fever
, with the prospect of the Allied landings and the German collapse and the coming of that golden age known around the
achterhuis
as
after
the war
, that she was able to announce to Kitty that the diary had perhaps done more than just assuage her adolescent lone liness. After two years of honing her prose, she felt herself ready for the great undertaking:
my greatest wish is to become a jour nalist someday and later on a famous writer.
But that was in May of 1944, when to be famous someday seemed to her no more or less extraordinary than to be going back to school in September. Oh, that May of marvelous expectations! Never again another winter in the
achterhuis
. Another winter and she would have gone crazy.

The first year there it hadn’t been that bad; they’d all been so busy settling in that she didn’t have time to feel desperate.

In fact, so diligently had they all worked to transform the attic into a
superpractical
home that her father had gotten everybody to agree to subdivide the space still further and take in another Jew. But once the Allied bombing started, the
superpractical
home became her torture chamber. During the day the two families squabbled over everything, and then at night she couldn’t sleep, sure that the Gestapo was going to come in the dark to take them away. In bed she began to have horrifying visions of Lies, her schoolfriend, reproaching her for being safe in bed in Amsterdam and not in a concentration camp, like all her Jewish friends:
“Oh. Anne, why have you deserted me? Help, oh, help me, rescue me from this hell!”
She
would see
herself in a dungeon, without Mummy and Daddy
—and worse. Right down to the final hours of 1943 she was dreaming and thinking
the most terrible things
. But then all at once it was over. Miraculously. “And what did.it, Professor Lonoff? See
Anna Karenina
. See
Madame Bovary
. See half the literature of the Western world.” The miracle: desire. She would be back to school in September, but she would not be returning to class the same girl. She was no longer a girl. Tears would roll down her cheeks at the thought of a naked woman. Her unpleasant menstrual periods became a source of the strangest pleasure. At night in bed she was excited by her breasts. Just these sensations—but all at once forebodings of her miserable death were replaced with a craze for life. One day she was completely recovered, and the next she was, of course, in love. Their troubles had made her her own woman, at fourteen. She began going off on private visits to the secluded corner of the topmost floor, which was occupied exclusively by Peter, the Van Daans’ seventeen-year-old son. That she might be stealing him away from Margot didn’t stop her, and neither did her scandalized parents: first just teatime visits, then evening assignations—then the defiant letter to the disappointed father. On May 3
of that marvelous May:
I
am young and I possess many buried qualities; I am young and strong and am living a great adventure
. And two days later, to the father who had saved her from the hell that had swallowed up Lies, to the Pim whose favorite living creature she had always longed to be, a declaration of her independence, in mind and body, as she bluntly put it:
I
have now reached the stage that I can live entirely on my own, without Mummy’s support or anyone else’s for that matter…I don’t feel in the least
bit responsible to any of you...I don’t have to give an account of my deeds to anyone but myself…

Well, the strength of a woman on her own wasn’t all she’d imagined it to be. Neither was the strength of a loving father. He told her it was the most unpleasant letter he’d ever received, and when she began to cry with shame for having been
too low
for words
, he wept along with her. He burned the letter in the fire, the weeks passed, and she found herself growing disenchanted with Peter. In fact, by July she was wondering how it would be possible, in their circumstances, to
shake him off
, a problem resolved for her on a sunny August Friday, when in the middle of the morning, as Pirn was helping Peter with his English lessons and she was off studying by herself, the Dutch Green Police arrived and dissolved forever the secret household still heedful of propriety, obedience, discretion, self-improvement, and mutual respect. The Franks, as a family, came to an end, and, fittingly enough, thought the diarist, so did her chronicle of their effort to go sensibly on as themselves, in spite of everything.