“Mr. Frank ran a spice company,” she declared. “Mr. Frank was a gentleman, a dear friend of my father’s. Whenever we stopped in, Mr. Frank always asked after my mother’s health, for she was frequently ill; she suffered with asthmatic attacks, and he kept a jar of toffees behind Miss Gies’s desk for children such as I. Years later, after the diary was published, I saw Mr. Frank once in Dam Square and wanted to approach him, to remind him of Edda, who had been in his office many times as a girl, but I hesitated. I watched as he passed among the tourists, unseen, jostled by some of them. A man wearing an Ajax T-shirt thrust a camera into his hands and asked him to take a photograph of him and his wife, and afterward he took the camera back without so much as a thank-you, as if Mr. Frank existed for no other reason than to do his bidding. I wondered what any of the people in the square that day would do if they knew that here was a man among men. And then, his head bowed, he simply disappeared from sight. It was the only time I ever saw Mr. Frank in the flesh after the war.”
There were so many questions that I wanted to ask but I was uncertain how intrusive my curiosity might be. In the four years that I’d lived and worked in Amsterdam, I had met dozens of survivors of the death camps and formed professional connections with many of them due to my work at the museum but there was something more intimate to me about this moment, for here were two people who had gone through the worst of all possible experiences and survived it, and I was in love with their son and he, to my utter astonishment, appeared to be in love with me too.
“How can you bear it?” asked Edda, sitting down now and raising her voice, partly in anger and partly in bewilderment. “Working there, I mean? Spending every day in such a place? Does it not become painful? Or is it worse than that, have you simply become immune to it all?”
“No,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “It fascinates me. Growing up in Ireland I knew very little of what had taken place during the war. They didn’t teach us about it. And now I learn more every day. At the museum, our education plan is always growing. We welcome school groups all the time. It’s my job to help educate them about the things that happened there.”
“And how can you do that?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “When you understand absolutely nothing about it yourself?”
I said nothing. It was true that I could not possibly understand as they understood, could not feel as they felt, but since arriving in Amsterdam and finding work as a junior curator at the museum, my life had begun to hold meaning for me for the first time. I was thirty-five years old and felt that I belonged somewhere at last. That I was of use. The House mattered to me more than I could possibly say. It was a place steeped in historical danger and yet, perversely, it was also a place where I felt utterly safe.
“Of course it’s important,” she continued with a sigh. “I don’t dispute that. But to spend all day there with those ghosts.” She shivered and Arjan reached across to place his hand atop hers; his sleeve rode up a little now and when my eyes glanced toward it, he pushed it back down. “And why are you interested anyway? Are there no Irish Jews who you can patronize?”
“Not many,” I admitted, stung by her choice of verb.
“There are not many anywhere,” said Arjan.
“I know all about your country,” she said. “I’ve read about it. I’ve heard about it. It sounds like a backward place. A people with no empathy for anyone. Why do you let your priests decide everything for you?”
“Because they always have, I suppose.”
“What a ridiculous answer,” she said with an irritated laugh. “Still, at least you abandoned it. I think you were clever to do that.”
“I didn’t abandon it,” I said, surprised to feel unexpected stirrings of patriotism in a soul that I had always thought devoid of such parochial bullshit. “I left it, that’s all.”
“Is there a difference?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll go back someday, I expect. All Irish boys go home to their mothers in the end, don’t they?”
“If they know who their mothers are, perhaps.”
“Well, I couldn’t do what you do,” she said. “I don’t even like visiting Amsterdam anymore. I haven’t been near the Westerkerk in years and I loved climbing to the summit when I was a girl. It’s like…” and here she turned to her husband. “Elspeth’s son. What’s his name again?”
“Henrik,” said Arjan.
“Yes, Henrik. The son of a friend of ours. A historian. And he has spent the last two years working in the museum at Auschwitz. How can he do such a thing? How can he bear it? It baffles me.”
“Would you ever consider giving a talk at the House?” I asked, an idea coming half-formed into my head and translating itself into words before I had a chance to consider them properly. “Perhaps to some of the children who visit?”
“I don’t think so, Cyril,” said Arjan, shaking his head. “What could I say anyway? That Peter Van Pels was a good footballer? That my sister, like Anne Frank, had a crush on him? This is almost forty years ago, remember. I don’t have anything to say that would be of interest to anyone.”
“Then perhaps you could talk about your time at—”
He stood up, pushing his chair back with such force that it screeched across the tiled floor, making me wince at the sound. Looking up, it struck me how big he was, how hard he had worked to keep himself in shape. Physically, he had a similar build to the man who had beaten up the boy outside my apartment a few days earlier but his heft belied his gentle nature and I felt ashamed to make the comparison. No one spoke for a few moments until Arjan turned around and made his way slowly toward the sink, turning on the taps as he began to rinse out the teacups.
“You shouldn’t lose touch with your home,” said Edda finally, reaching out and taking my hand in hers, her tone softening now. “It’s where all your memories were made. Perhaps you should bring Bastiaan sometime. Does he want to see it?”
“He says he does,” I said, glancing at the clock and hoping that he would arrive soon. “Maybe someday. We’ll see. The truth is, I’m happy in Amsterdam. Holland feels more like home to me than Ireland ever did. But I’m not sure if I could ever go back. The truth is, when I left—”
And then, to my relief, before I could reveal too much of myself, I heard footsteps ascending the steps outside to the front door. There was a quick triple tap on the woodwork before the sound of the latch being pulled and there was Bastiaan, red-faced from rushing to get there, marching in and hugging both his parents in a display of family love that was utterly foreign to me, before turning and smiling at me in a way that said there was no one else in the world he wanted to see more at that moment than me.
By Rokin