Anne Frank (13 page)

One thing seems inarguable: Anne was able to make the Van Pelses so real and present to us that we grieve at the thought of the hand injury that made Hermann lose his will to survive at Auschwitz, just as we can hardly bear to wonder if Auguste regretted the loss of her beloved fur coat during that freezing march from Bergen-Belsen to her death.

I
F
the characterization of the Van Pelses is a marvel of literary portraiture, the image of their son, Peter, is another matter. If Peter strikes us as an interesting character, a closer reading re
veals that this is largely because he is lit by the refracted glow of Anne’s interest. When her fascination wanes and disappears, as it does in Anne’s revisions—which we’ll look at in the next chapter—we are left with only what we actually see him do and say. He accompanies Otto to investigate the break-in, does the heavy lifting of the sacks of beans, and wishes he weren’t Jewish. Young readers may develop a crush on Peter, but it is Anne’s crush. Her attraction transforms Peter into a romantic figure. But without that intensity—which, again, is Anne’s—Peter is a touching but rather ordinary boy. Moody, mercurial, restless, not especially perceptive, he is a scrim on which the isolated girl can project her loneliness and longing.

Anne’s early opinion of Peter is so harsh that one pleasure of reading the book is watching that antipathy reverse itself. In the “a” version of the diary, Anne reports getting a chocolate bar from Peter for her thirteenth birthday, before the families went into hiding. But the fact that they are acquaintances is hard to extract from her account of the Van Pelses’ arrival in the attic; Anne calls Peter “a rather soft, shy, gawky youth; can’t expect much from his company.” The authors of the play must have thought it simplified matters to have the young couple meet for the first time in the annex, which is the impression that most readers and audience members come away with.

Over the next months, Anne emphasizes how boring, lazy, and hypersensitive Peter is; the hypochondria he shares with his father is less winning in a young person. The first dramatized scene in which he appears involves a fight over a book that his father doesn’t want him reading. Peter gets credit for standing up to Mr. Van Pels, but loses it for the peevish and pouting quality of his resistance. Peter, we learn, has trouble with English, and has a comical fondness for using foreign words he doesn’t understand.

By late September, Anne is telling the Van Pelses that Peter
often strokes her cheek, and she wishes he wouldn’t. Appalled by their response—could she grow to “like” Peter? He “certainly liked me very much”—Anne tells his parents that she thinks Peter is “rather awkward.” But slowly a camaraderie develops; Peter and Anne both enjoy dressing up in the clothes of the opposite-sex parent. For his birthday, in November, Peter gets a razor, a Monopoly game, and a cigarette lighter—in contrast to the Franks, who get, and give one another, books. In fact, Anne tells us, Peter “seldom reads.”

Peter at last moves to center stage as the hero of an adventure involving the transport of masses of beans. Four months later, we see him bitten by one of the large rats swarming the attic, and not long after, he is the one who goes downstairs with Otto after they hear a noise.

Not until January 1944 do we realize—before Anne does—what is starting to happen between the two teenagers: “It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?” By the next month, Anne and Peter are having the intimate conversations that will fuel Anne’s longing for someone to love, as well as her conviction that this someone is Peter.

But even as Anne finds these exchanges endlessly fascinating, the reader may feel that Peter’s contributions to these talks are less riveting than hers. Peter expresses his desire to go to the Dutch East Indies and live on a plantation, as well as his hope that he may be able to pass for Christian after the war. When he reveals his inferiority complex and claims he feels he is less intelligent than the Franks, an impartial observer might agree. And yet, early in March, Anne records wanting to do something about Peter’s loneliness and sense of being unloved,
and in a postscript to the March 6 entry, she admits that she has begun to live from one of their meetings to the next.

They talk, in the abstract, about kissing; they discover how much they have in common, how much they have changed during their time in the attic, how their ideas about each other have evolved. They discuss the fact that neither of them can confide in their parents, that frustration drives Anne to cry herself to sleep at night while Peter retreats to his loft and swears. They consider how different they were when they first arrived in the annex, and how they can barely recognize themselves as the same people they were in 1942. They marvel at the astonishing fact that they could have disliked each other at first, that Peter thought Anne chattered too much, while she was annoyed that he didn’t bother flirting with her. When Peter refers to his tendency to isolate himself from the others, Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter. As unlikely as it may seem, she too loves peace and quiet. They admit how glad they are to be together, to have each other. And Anne tells Peter that she would love to be able to help him.

“‘You always do help me,’” he said. ‘How?’ I asked, very surprised. ‘By your cheerfulness.’ That was certainly the loveliest thing he said. It was wonderful, he must have grown to love me as a friend, and that is enough for the time being…

“If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.”

Such outpourings will be familiar (perhaps all too familiar) to anyone who has ever fallen in love. But they are utterly new to Anne, and, again, it is a tribute to her ability to write honestly and persuasively and to find the right tone for what she is telling Kitty (and us) that she can make it seem new. Anne longs for a kiss, they don’t kiss, they kiss. How easy it would be for another writer to make this sound banal.

On May 19, Anne writes, “After my laborious conquest, I’ve
got the situation a bit more in hand now, but I don’t think my love has cooled off.” On June 14, she tells Kitty, “Peter is good and he’s a darling, but still there’s no denying that there’s a lot about him that disappoints me.” Three weeks later, Peter jokes about the possibility of becoming a criminal or a gambler, and Anne fears that Peter is becoming too dependent on her. “Poor boy, he’s never known what it feels like to make other people happy, and I can’t teach him that either…it hurts me every time I see how deserted, how scornful, and how poor he really is.”

By the fifteenth of July, Anne’s enchantment with Peter has reached a low ebb: “Now he clings to me, and for the time being, I don’t see any way of shaking him off and putting him on his own feet. When I realized that he could not be a friend for my understanding, I thought I would at least try to lift him up out of his narrowmindedness and make him do something with his youth.” That is the final mention of Peter in Anne’s book.

In the theatrical and film versions of the diary, Anne and Peter are in the garret, staring rapturously at the heavens when the Gestapo come to arrest them. But that was not what happened. Anne was with her mother and sister. Otto was upstairs with Peter, helping him with the English lessons that, we know from Anne, gave him so much trouble.

T
WO
relatively minor characters, the dentist Pfeffer and Margot Frank, are among the most nuanced and well drawn. With every minutely monitored tic, Fritz Pfeffer becomes the remarkable literary creation that is Albert Dussel. Of the eight people in the annex, his characterization is probably least like his counterpart in life; by all accounts, Pfeffer was extremely attractive to the ladies. But his charms were lost on Anne.

The dentist arrives late and brings bad news. Nazis have been going door-to-door, hunting down Jews. Friends have
been rounded up and deported, loaded trucks rumble past, and columns of bullied prisoners trudge through the streets. These sobering truths, mixed with gratitude for having been spared the fate of her fellow Jews, temper the reluctance Anne otherwise might have felt on learning that Pfeffer—who is her father’s age, but whom, unlike Otto, she refers to as
old
—is going to share her little room.

In her excellent biography of Anne Frank, Melissa Müller writes, “Otto and Edith’s decision to put Pfeffer in the same room with Anne instead of with the sixteen-year-old Peter van Pels corroborates Anne’s complaint that she was in fact regarded as a child. Not only Otto but Edith Frank as well disregarded her growing need for privacy and obviously ignored their adolescent daughter’s sense of modesty, which was of course becoming all the more acute as she matured sexually.”

Perhaps Anne’s characterization of Pfeffer might have been a bit more sympathetic had she not spent night after wakeful night listening to a middle-aged man sleep. By contrast, Miep Gies very much liked her dentist, as did many of his loyal patients.

His Christian fiancée, Charlotte Kaletta, was devoted to Pffefer, who was nineteen years her senior and who had a son from an earlier marriage that had ended in divorce. The couple had lived in Germany until Hitler’s racial laws forced them to flee in the futile hope that they could be married in Holland. In the diary, “Lotje” is referred to as Dussel’s wife, and in a section cut from the “a” version, Anne mentions getting a roll of candy drops for her thirteenth birthday from “Mrs. Pfeffer.” When her fiancé went into hiding, Charlotte kept up their correspondence, love letters that Miep delivered without revealing where he was.

After the war, Charlotte’s friendship with Otto Frank ended, possibly because she was upset by Anne’s portrayal of
Pfeffer in the diary and later by his characterization in the play. It’s easy to see that the woman who loved Fritz Pfeffer so much that she waited for his return even after it had become clear that he had died in Neuengamme might object to the reader catching a near final glimpse of Pfeffer after a quarrel with the Franks over the “sharing out of the butter. Dussel’s capitulation. Mrs. Van Daan and the latter very thick, flirtations, kisses and friendly little laughs. Dussel is beginning to get longings for women.”

Anne’s patience wears especially thin on Sundays, when Pfeffer performs the exercises she describes in appalled detail: “When he has ended with a couple of violent arm-waving exercises to loosen his muscles, His Lordship begins his toilet.” Though everyone behaves as if no decent person should think twice about a grown man sharing a room with a pubescent girl, sexual discomfort suffuses Anne’s view of Pfeffer. She’s repulsed when she comes down with the flu and he plays doctor, laying his greasy head on her naked chest. “Not only did his hair tickle unbearably, but I was embarrassed in spite of the fact that he once, thirty years ago, studied medicine and has the title of Doctor. Why should the fellow come and lie on my heart? He’s not my lover, after all! For that matter, he wouldn’t hear whether it’s healthy or unhealthy inside me anyway, his ears need syringing first as he’s becoming alarmingly hard of hearing.”

In July 1943, open warfare breaks out between the roommates when Pfeffer rejects Anne’s “reasonable request” to use the little table in their room so she can work there, twice a week, from four until five thirty. He mocks her whole idea of work (mythology! knitting!). She asks Otto for advice, and she and the dentist attempt a détente. Pfeffer responds by berating Anne for her selfishness and her stubborn insistence on getting what she wants. Only when Otto intercedes do they agree: Anne
can work in their shared room, two afternoons each week, but only until five. “Dussel looked down his nose very much, didn’t speak to me for two days and still had to go and sit at the table from five till half past—frightfully childish.”

Regardless of whether he needs it or not, Pfeffer insists on having all his allotted time at the contested table. Rarely in literature have we seen a more pointed illustration of human
smallness,
and of the inability to compromise with grace.

Anne is not the only person whom Pfeffer is driving mad. One evening, as the annex residents violate the unofficial prohibition against Teutonic culture and listen to a radio broadcast of “Immortal Music of the German Masters,” the dentist fiddles with the dials until Peter explodes and Pfeffer replies, in his “most hoity-toity manner,” that he is working to get the sound perfectly right. Yet Anne lets us see another side of Pfeffer when she records each resident’s wish for what freedom will bring: “Dussel thinks of nothing but seeing Lotje, his wife.”

In the diary, Pfeffer is given quite a lot to say, not nearly so much as Mrs. Van Pels, but far more than the good-girl Margot, who only rarely appears onstage, and who Anne interprets
for
us, interceding and telling us what her sister is like. Much of what we learn about Margot is the result of projection on Anne’s part, as she repeatedly tries to intuit her sister’s responses to life in the attic.

After her romance with Peter begins, Anne worries that her sister may also have feelings for the annex’s only viable young male. Anne says, “I think it’s so rotten that you should be the odd one out,” to which her sister replies, “somewhat bitterly,” that being the odd one out is something she’s gotten used to. What does that mean? Anne doesn’t ask, and either Margot doesn’t say or Anne doesn’t tell us.

Anne’s first direct analysis of her sister comes at a moment when her sister has been held up (yet again, according to Anne)
as a model human being. “I don’t want to be in the least like Margot. She is much too soft and passive for my liking, and allows everyone to talk her around, and gives in about everything. I want to be a stronger character!”

More than a year afterward, Margot’s “mouse-like” eating habits come up for scrutiny along with those of the others gathered around the table. “The only things that go down are vegetables and fruit. ‘Spoiled’ is the Van Daans’ judgment; ‘not enough fresh air and games’ our opinion.”