Rita Mendes-Flohr
THE SECRET ANNEX

In all those years we have lived in this the old house in town so close to the sea, I have never been able to get near the beautiful turquoise water behind the row of houses on the Pietermaai. It is too dangerous to walk through the narrow alleys between those houses to the sea that is sparkling at the other end. You don’t know who is hanging around there, my Mami says.

In the backyard of the Wilhelmina School, we are even closer to the sea. If you listen hard, you can hear the rustling of the waves above the terrible noise of the scream­ing girls. But we are locked inside the schoolyard by a high yellow wall with broken pieces of glass on top to make sure we won’t climb out.

I want to get to the sea that is so close and yet so far away. I want to swim like a dolphin across the waters, jumping up and going down into the waves again. I want to sail to distant lands, far from this little island—to see the world on the other side of the sea. But I am locked inside the schoolyard, with the broken glass on the wall to make sure we will stay safely inside.

Sometimes I find a sòldachi, in our schoolyard, a little hermit crab gone astray from the sea. I pick it up and put it on the palm of my hand. But the sòldachi pulls in its little claws and hides deep inside its shell, and then I must wait patiently for the little crab to feel safe and come out again.

How I wish I were a sòldachi. With my claws I dig a hole under the tall yellow wall and crawl out to the sea, away from all the noise and the screaming. Here, on the flat rocks, it is quiet. There is only the whispering of the sea leaping onto the shore, filling up the pools and puddles and pulling back again, leaving behind little waterfalls splash­ing down the rocks until the sea comes in again, jumping and frolicking as before. It never gets tired, that old and beautiful sea. It does not even stop to rest. Sometimes it is fiercer, sometimes it is calmer, but it is always there, pushing and pulling against the rocks.

I look out over the sea, shimmering in many shades of turquoise and green. Gra­dually, it gets darker and darker until finally, in the distance, it turns into a deep dark blue, almost black, when the bottom drops down, like a precipice.

Out there, the sea is so black you cannot know what is underneath. There can be sharks lurking below the surface or ferocious barracudas with razor‑edge teeth that can rip you to pieces, there can be manta rays and giant eels that prey upon you from under­neath the deepest sea and there is no way you can see them coming.

No, I will never know the magnificent continents on the other side of the sea. I must stay here on the shore with my little shell on my back.

I am afraid.

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Even though the Wilhelmina School is not so far away from our house, I always get a ride so that I won’t have to walk alone on the dangerous streets. Often, it is Tio Chaco who drives me to school, especially when Papi must leave very early and does not come home for lunch because a tourist ship is in the harbor and he must keep the store open, like all the other storekeepers.

Now that I started fifth grade, I tell Mami that I am old enough to walk to school by myself. Mami finally agrees but only after I promise to stay on the main road and never stray off my path into the side streets and the alley­ways. Mami tells me to walk by fast when I pass one of those dark and narrow alleys between the houses on the Pieter­maai, those alleys that always smell of urine. She says I should never stand there and stare at the beautiful blue‑­green sea at the other end of the alley.

As I walk home from my ballet class, which is held in the gym of the Wilhelmina School, a man calls out to me. He is standing in one of those narrow alleys between the houses on the Pietermaai. The muscles on his brown arms and shoulders are shimmering with drops of saltwater. In his hands he holds a huge karkó—a conch shell that curls around an inner core of mother-of-pearl in a deliciously pink color. It is much, much larger than the shell I had found in Bonaire and that I treasure on a shelf of the bookcase next to my bed.

“Come here, pretty little girl,” he says, as he reaches out for me. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t eat you up. All I want is to show you this beautiful karkó I brought up from the bottom of the sea.”

My heart stops beating. This is exactly what my mother has warned me about. A strange man is touching me. He has his hand on my skirt. Here it is. Now it is coming. What have I done that this should happen to me?

With all my strength I push him away and run as fast as I can. I do not even look back to see if he is following me. I run back into the schoolyard and into the gym, panting. The next ballet class has already started, and so I hide behind the parallel ­bars and the pummel horses. As if I have done something wrong.

After the class is over, I ask Maritza’s mother if she can drive me home. I do not tell anyone what has happened to me. I just say I stayed at the gym to watch the next class and worry that everyone can see right through me.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is better to stay inside the yard behind the white fence, where it is safe. Outside, on the street there are evil men out to prey upon you. Per­haps I should believe the grownups. They know better. They say that boys can fend for themsel­ves out there on the street, that they know how to fight back.

But you are weak, they say. You need to be protected. And it is you they’re after.

You are a girl.

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So now I walk to school on the other side of the broad Pietermaai, far from the little alleys that look out to the sea. That way I am certain not to run into the man with the karkó. And at the end of the school day, I meet Tio Chaco at his office, which is right next to the Wilhelmina School, so that I can get a ride home with him. That is a lot safer, I figure, even though I do not dare to admit the real reason to my mother.

Tio Chaco’s office is in a narrow building in the Breedestraat that looks like the tall and thin houses on the canals of Amsterdam, except, here, in the tropics, the outside walls are covered with painted plaster—green, yellow, orange, and sometimes a dark red. You enter Tio Chaco’s office through a very narrow hallway. Closer to the store-front window is another office with a glass door, but Tio Chaco’s office is all the way in the back, through a door made of the same kind of wood as the partition wall that closes off one side of the hallway.

Tio Chaco does not seem to have many visitors and I am sure they have a hard time finding the door to his office, as it does not look any different from the gray partition wall. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t be able to tell there is an office there.

I think Tio Chaco’s office, with that hidden door, must be like Anne Frank’s Secret Annex—het Achterhuis. My teachers in school like to tell me—the only Jewish girl in my class—how much I look like her and go on to describe that hiding place with the moveable bookcase camouflaging the entrance. They tell us how the good Dutch people hid the Jews from the horrible Germans who had invaded Holland.

Inside the Secret Annex, Anne was safe, and she could write her diary. The entrance to her hiding place could not be found. Outside, the sirens were blaring, and thousands of Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo on the streets of Amsterdam and sent to concentration camps, packed into cattle cars. But in the end, Anne was betrayed—the Secret Annex was not a safe place after all. Poor Anne died of typhus just a few days before Bergen Belsen was liberated. If only she could have held on a little longer.

I am relieved our little island stayed out of the war even though the Germans were after the oil from our refinery and their submarines fired several shots at our harbor. Imagine if the Germans had conquered our island during the war, then perhaps Mami and Papi and all the other Jews would have been taken away to concentration camps, and my brother Dito and I would have never been born.

Most of the time, when I come to Tio Chaco’s office, Estela, his secretary, is there, but now and then Tio Chaco is all alone. Often, I must sit and wait patiently, as Tio Chaco is busy on the phone in a heated discussion I do not understand—perhaps it has to do with the land he buys to build houses for poor people. But as soon as he finishes that phone call, my beloved Tio Chaco pours all his attention on me. He hugs and kisses me, his sweet Little Princess, and asks what special gift I would like him to buy me.

Then he starts to close the windows and the door that open to the back of the building, bolting them securely, and my heart begins to pound. When he turns off the lights and it becomes dark, I have the feeling of being closed in and I am gasping for air. Like the day the swimming teacher took me to his office and taped my mouth shut so that I would stop screaming.

Suddenly, I feel a large figure with a black cloak hovering above me like an enormous manta ray. I cannot see his face in the darkness. He grabs me from behind and wraps me in his big black cloak. I am terrified he will take me with him, down, to the bottom of the sea.

I want to get out, but Tio Chaco has locked all the doors. I cry out for my Mami to come and save me, my mother, the champion swimmer who can dive into the deepest waters. But my mother does not come. She is busy with my little brother who cries all the time.

And so, I hope and pray that Tio Chaco will hurry and finish what he must do so that we can get the hell out of there.

Rita Mendes-Flohr is an exhibiting visual artist, ardent trekker, and co-founder of a feminist art gallery. Born on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao, she attended college in Boston and lives in Jerusalem, feeling at home only in the in-between. Coming to writing at a later stage in life, she has published (in Hebrew translation) a memoir of her multicultural Caribbean childhood and writes introspective essays about her journeys and treks in distant regions of the world. Her work can be viewed on her website.

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