Страница 32 из 49
“I guess he got pretty rich on that book,” I said after a while.
“Oh, no no, he is of the Van Houtens,” she said. “In the seventeenth century, his ancestor discovered how to mix cocoa into water. Some
Van Houtens moved to the United States long ago, and Peter is of those, but he moved to Holland after his novel. He is an embarrassment to
a great family.”
The engine screamed. Lidewij shifted and we shot up a canal bridge. “It is circumstance,” she said. “Circumstance has made him so cruel.
He is not an evil man. But this day, I did not think—when he said these terrible things, I could not believe it. I am very sorry. Very very sorry.”
We had to park a block away from the A
“Okay?” he asked, looking down at me. I shrugged and reached a hand for his calf. It was his fake calf, but I held on to it. He looked down at me.
“I wanted . . .” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I know. A pparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.” That made me smile a little.
Lidewij returned with tickets, but her thin lips were pursed with worry. “There is no elevator,” she said. “I am very very sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, there are many stairs,” she said. “Steep stairs.”
“It’s okay,” I said again. A ugustus started to say something, but I interrupted. “It’s okay. I can do it.”
We began in a room with a video about Jews in Holland and the Nazi invasion and the Frank family. Then we walked upstairs into the
canal house where Otto Frank’s business had been. The stairs were slow, for me and A ugustus both, but I felt strong. Soon I was staring at the famous bookcase that had hid A
set of stairs, only wide enough for one person. There were fellow visitors all around us, and I didn’t want to hold up the procession, but
Lidewij said, “If everyone could be patient, please,” and I began the walk up, Lidewij carrying the cart behind me, Gus behind her.
It was fourteen steps. I kept thinking about the people behind me—they were mostly adults speaking a variety of languages—and feeling
embarrassed or whatever, feeling like a ghost that both comforts and haunts, but finally I made it up, and then I was in an eerily empty room, leaning against the wall, my brain telling my lungs it’s okay it’s okay calm down it’s okay and my lungs telling my brain oh, God, we’re dying here. I didn’t even see A ugustus come upstairs, but he came over and wiped his brow with the back of his hand like whew and said, “You’re a champion.”
A fter a few minutes of wall-leaning, I made it to the next room, which A
newspapers were still there.
A nother staircase led up to the room where the van Pels family had lived, this one steeper than the last and eighteen steps, essentially a glorified ladder. I got to the threshold and looked up and figured I could not do it, but also knew the only way through was up.
“Let’s go back,” Gus said behind me.
“I’m okay,” I answered quietly. It’s stupid, but I kept thinking I owed it to her—to A
wasn’t, because she had stayed quiet and kept the blinds drawn and done everything right and still died, and so I should go up the steps and see the rest of the world she’d lived in those years before the Gestapo came.
I began to climb the stairs, crawling up them like a little kid would, slow at first so I could breathe, but then faster because I knew I
couldn’t breathe and wanted to get to the top before everything gave out. The blackness encroached around my field of vision as I pulled
myself up, eighteen steps, steep as hell. I finally crested the staircase mostly blind and nauseated, the muscles in my arms and legs screaming for oxygen. I slumped seated against a wall, heaving watered-down coughs. There was an empty glass case bolted to the wall above me and I
stared up through it to the ceiling and tried not to pass out.
Lidewij crouched down next to me, saying, “You are at the top, that is it,” and I nodded. I had a vague awareness of the adults all around
glancing down at me worriedly; of Lidewij speaking quietly in one language and then another and then another to various visitors; of
A ugustus standing above me, his hand on the top of my head, stroking my hair along the part.
A fter a long time, Lidewij and A ugustus pulled me to my feet and I saw what was protected by the glass case: pencil marks on the
wallpaper measuring the growth of all the children in the a
From there, we left the Franks’ living area, but we were still in the museum: A long narrow hallway showed pictures of each of the
a
“The only member of his whole family who survived the war,” Lidewij told us, referring to A
we were in church.
“But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” A ugustus said. “He survived a genocide.”
“True,” Lidewij said. “I do not know how you go on, without your family. I do not know.” A s I read about each of the seven who died, I
thought of Otto Frank not being a father anymore, left with a diary instead of a wife and two daughters. A t the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary, contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust. (Only 5,000 of the deported
Dutch Jews, a wall label explained, had survived. 5,000 Otto Franks.) The book was turned to the page with A
historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four A ron Franks as long as I was
around. (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don’t.)
A s we got to the end of the room, Gus stopped and said, “You okay?” I nodded.
He gestured back toward A
Lidewij took a few steps away to watch a video, and I grabbed A ugustus’s hand as we walked into the next room. It was an A -frame
room with some letters Otto Frank had written to people during his months-long search for his daughters. On the wall in the middle of the
room, a video of Otto Frank played. He was speaking in English.
“A re there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” A ugustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s
letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.
“I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.”
“True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the
world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.”
A lthough it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I