The Diary of a Young Girl (35 page)

This morning Miep told us about her cousin’s engagement party, which she went to on Saturday. The cousin’s parents are rich, and the groom’s are even richer. Miep made our mouths water telling us about the food that was served: vegetable soup with meatballs, cheese, rolls with sliced meat, hors d’oeuvres made with eggs and roast beef, rolls with cheese, genoise, wine and cigarettes, and you could eat as much as you wanted.

Miep drank ten schnapps and smoked three cigarettes—could this be our temperance advocate? If Miep drank all those, I wonder how many her spouse managed to toss down? Everyone at the party was a little tipsy, of course. There were also two officers from the Homicide Squad, who took photographs of the wedding couple. You can see we’re never far from Miep’s thoughts, since she promptly noted their names and addresses in case anything should happen and we needed contacts with good Dutch people.

Our mouths were watering so much. We, who’d had nothing but two spoonfuls of hot cereal for breakfast and were absolutely famished; we, who get nothing but half-cooked spinach (for the vitamins!) and rotten potatoes day after day; we, who fill our empty stomachs with nothing but boiled lettuce, raw lettuce, spinach, spinach and more spinach. Maybe we’ll end up being as strong as Popeye, though up to now I’ve seen no sign of it!

If Miep had taken us along to the party, there wouldn’t have been any rolls left over for the other
guests. If we’d been there, we’d have snatched up everything in sight, including the furniture. I tell you, we were practically pulling the words right out of her mouth. We were gathered around her as if we’d never in all our lives heard of delicious food or elegant people! And these are the granddaughters of the distinguished millionaire. The world is a crazy place!

Yours, Anne M. Frank

T
UESDAY
, M
AY
9, 1944

Dearest Kitty
,

I’ve finished my story about Ellen, the fairy. I’ve copied it out on nice notepaper, decorated it with red ink and sewn the pages together. The whole thing looks quite pretty, but I don’t know if it’s enough of a birthday present. Margot and Mother have both written poems.

Mr. Kugler came upstairs this afternoon with the news that starting Monday, Mrs. Broks would like to spend two hours in the office every afternoon. Just imagine! The office staff won’t be able to come upstairs, the potatoes can’t be delivered, Bep won’t get her dinner, we can’t go to the bathroom, we won’t be able to move and all sorts of other inconveniences! We proposed a variety of ways to get rid of her. Mr. van Daan thought a good laxative in her coffee might do the trick. “No,” Mr. Kleiman answered, “please don’t, or we’ll never get her off the can!”

A roar of laughter. “The can?” Mrs. van D. asked. “What does that mean?” An explanation was given. “Is it all right to use that word?” she asked in perfect innocence.

“Just imagine,” Bep giggled, “there you are shopping
at The Bijenkorf and you ask the way to the can. They wouldn’t even know what you were talking about!”

Dussel now sits on the “can,” to borrow the expression, every day at twelve-thirty on the dot. This afternoon 1 boldly took a piece of pink paper and wrote:

Mr. Dussel’s Toilet Timetable

I tacked this to the green bathroom door while he was still inside. I might well have added “Transgressors will be subject to confinement!” Because our bathroom can be locked from both the inside and the outside.

Mr. van Daan’s latest joke:

I still have work to do; it’s already three o’clock.

Yours, Anne M. Frank

PS. Since I think I’ve mentioned the new cleaning lady, I just want to note that she’s married, sixty years old and hard of hearing! Very convenient, in view of all the noise that eight people in hiding are capable of making.

Oh, Kit, it’s such lovely weather. If only I could go outside!

W
EDNESDAY
, M
AY
10, 1944

Dearest Kitty
,

We were sitting in the attic yesterday afternoon working on our French when suddenly I heard the splatter of water behind me. I asked Peter what it might be. Without pausing to reply, he dashed up to the loft—the scene of the disaster—and shoved Mouschi, who was squatting beside her soggy litter box, back to the right place. This was followed by shouts and squeals, and then Mouschi, who by that time had finished peeing, took off downstairs. In search of something similar to her box, Mouschi had found herself a pile of wood shavings, right over a crack in the floor. The puddle immediately trickled down to the attic and, as luck would have it, landed in and next to the potato barrel. The ceiling was dripping, and since the attic floor has also got its share of cracks, little
yellow drops were leaking through the ceiling and onto the dining table, between a pile of stockings and books.

I was doubled up with laughter, it was such a funny sight. There was Mouschi crouched under a chair, Peter armed with water, powdered bleach and a cloth, and Mr. van Daan trying to calm everyone down. The room was soon set to rights, but it’s a well-known fact that cat puddles stink to high heaven. The potatoes proved that all too well, as did the wood shavings, which Father collected in a bucket and brought downstairs to burn.

Poor Mouschi! How were you to know it’s impossible to get peat for your box?

Anne

T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
11, 1944

Dearest Kitty
,

A new sketch to make you laugh:

Peter’s hair had to be cut, and as usual his mother was to be the hairdresser. At seven twenty-five Peter vanished into his room, and reappeared at the stroke of seven-thirty, stripped down to his blue swimming trunks and a pair of tennis shoes.

“Are you coming?” he asked his mother.

“Yes, I’ll be up in a minute, but I can’t find the scissors!”

Peter helped her look, rummaging around in her cosmetics drawer. “Don’t make such a mess, Peter,” she grumbled.

I didn’t catch Peter’s reply, but it must have been insolent, because she cuffed him on the arm. He cuffed her back, she punched him with all her might, and Peter pulled his arm away with a look of mock horror on his face. “Come on, old girl!”

Mrs. van D. stayed put. Peter grabbed her by the
wrists and pulled her all around the room. She laughed, cried, scolded and kicked, but nothing helped. Peter led his prisoner as far as the attic stairs, where he was obliged to let go of her. Mrs. van D. came back to the room and collapsed into a chair with a loud sigh.

“Die Entführung der Mutter,”
²⁶
I joked.

“Yes, but he hurt me.”

I went to have a look and cooled her hot, red wrists with water. Peter, still by the stairs and growing impatient again, strode into the room with his belt in his hand, like a lion tamer. Mrs. van D. didn’t move, but stayed by her writing desk, looking for a handkerchief. “You’ve got to apologize first.”

“All right, I hereby offer my apologies, but only because if I don’t, we’ll be here till midnight.”

Mrs. van D. had to laugh in spite of herself. She got up and went toward the door, where she felt obliged to give us an explanation. (By us I mean Father, Mother and me; we were busy doing the dishes.) “He wasn’t like this at home,” she said. “I’d have belted him so hard he’d have gone flying down the stairs [!]. He’s never been so insolent. This isn’t the first time he’s deserved a good hiding. That’s what you get with a modern upbringing, modern children. I’d never have grabbed my mother like that. Did you treat your mother that way, Mr. Frank?” She was very upset, pacing back and forth, saying whatever came into her head, and she still hadn’t gone upstairs. Finally, at long last, she made her exit.

Less than five minutes later she stormed back down the stairs, with her cheeks all puffed out, and flung her apron on a chair. When I asked if she was through, she replied that she was going downstairs. She tore down the
stairs like a tornado, probably straight into the arms of her Putti.

She didn’t come up again until eight, this time with her husband. Peter was dragged from the attic, given a merciless scolding and showered with abuse: ill-mannered brat, no-good bum, bad example, Anne this, Margot that, I couldn’t hear the rest.

Everything seems to have calmed down again today!

Yours, Anne M. Frank

PS. Tuesday and Wednesday evening our beloved Queen addressed the country. She’s taking a vacation so she’ll be in good health for her return to the Netherlands. She used words like “soon, when I’m back in Holland,” “a swift liberation,” “heroism” and “heavy burdens.”

This was followed by a speech by Prime Minister Gerbrandy. He has such a squeaky little child’s voice that Mother instinctively said, “Oooh.” A clergyman, who must have borrowed his voice from Mr. Edel, concluded by asking God to take care of the Jews, all those in concentration camps and prisons and everyone working in Germany.

T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
11, 1944

Dearest Kitty
,

Since I’ve left my entire “junk box”—including my fountain pen—upstairs and I’m not allowed to disturb the grown-ups during their nap time (until two-thirty), you’ll have to make do with a letter in pencil.

I’m terribly busy at the moment, and strange as it may sound, I don’t have enough time to get through my pile of work. Shall I tell you briefly what I’ve got to do? Well then, before tomorrow I have to finish reading the first volume of a biography of Galileo Galilei, since it has to be returned to the library. I started reading it yesterday
and have gotten up to page 220 out of 320 pages, so I’ll manage it. Next week I have to read
Palestine at the Crossroads
and the second volume of Galilei. Besides that, I finished the first volume of a biography of Emperor Charles V yesterday, and I still have to work out the many genealogical charts I’ve collected and the notes I’ve taken. Next I have three pages of foreign words from my various books, all of which have to be written down, memorized and read aloud. Number four: my movie stars are in a terrible disarray and are dying to be straightened out, but since it’ll take several days to do that and Professor Anne is, as she’s already said, up to her ears in work, they’ll have to put up with the chaos a while longer. Then there’re Theseus, Oedipus, Peleus, Orpheus, Jason and Hercules all waiting to be untangled, since their various deeds are running crisscross through my mind like multicolored threads in a dress. Myron and Phidias are also urgently in need of attention, or else I’ll forget entirely how they fit into the picture. The same applies, for example, to the Seven Years’ War and the Nine Years’ War. Now I’m getting everything all mixed up. Well, what can you do with a memory like mine! Just imagine how forgetful I’ll be when I’m eighty!

Oh, one more thing. The Bible. How long is it going to take before I come to the story of the bathing Susanna? And what do they mean by Sodom and Gomorrah? Oh, there’s still so much to find out and learn. And in the meantime, I’ve left Charlotte of the Palatine in the lurch.

You can see, can’t you, Kitty, that I’m full to bursting?

And now something else. You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a
famous writer. We’ll have to wait and see if these grand illusions (or delusions!) will ever come true, but up to now I’ve had no lack of topics. In any case, after the war I’d like to publish a book called
The Secret Annex
. It remains to be seen whether I’ll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis.

I also need to finish “Cady’s Life.” I’ve thought up the rest of the plot. After being cured in the sanatorium, Cady goes back home and continues writing to Hans. It’s 1941, and it doesn’t take her long to discover Hans’s Nazi sympathies, and since Cady is deeply concerned with the plight of the Jews and of her friend Marianne, they begin drifting apart. They meet and get back together, but break up when Hans takes up with another girl. Cady is shattered, and because she wants to have a good job, she studies nursing. After graduation she accepts a position, at the urging of her father’s friends, as a nurse in a TB sanatorium in Switzerland. During her first vacation she goes to Lake Como, where she runs into Hans. He tells her that two years earlier he’d married Cady’s successor, but that his wife took her life in a fit of depression. Now that he’s seen his little Cady again, he realizes how much he loves her, and once more asks for her hand in marriage. Cady refuses, even though, in spite of herself, she loves him as much as ever. But her pride holds her back. Hans goes away, and years later Cady learns that he’s wound up in England, where he’s struggling with ill health.

When she’s twenty-seven, Cady marries a well-to-do man from the country, named Simon. She grows to love him, but not as much as Hans. She has two daughters and a son, Lilian, Judith and Nico. She and Simon are happy together, but Hans is always in the back of her mind until one night she dreams of him and says farewell.