Found and Lost
Page 10
DEAR MS. GOLD
I have been wanting to contact you. I have been told that you knew Miep Gies better than anyone else; that you probably know things others don’t. Also rubbish from fact. If you have any inclination to write some kind of memoir about your friendship with Miep, something like Patti Smith’s Just Kids, please contact us first and let us take you to lunch to discuss, as there’s interest from a good-sized publisher.
Miep Gies was one of a kind, an icon of goodness, like no other. Not that her memory needs gilding, but nuancing surely. I hope you remember me? We met during a Jewish Book Fair tour you were on in Texas and Oklahoma. I’ve since been with this literary agency.
All best,
R. Rhodes
Sky boiling. Lightning, thunder. Birds swooping overhead
DEAR SIMON,
You can’t imagine how tired I am. My sisters too.
I recently emailed Miep’s son about whether or not his mother’s little bird Pete is still alive but haven’t heard back yet. Miep’s granddaughter gave the miniature canary to her for company about five years ago. Miep fed him on millet and seed. She and I would laugh when Pete dipped his minute beak into a small water holder with little Charlie Chaplin jerks. At night, in preparation for sleep, Miep would cover Pete’s cage with a cloth and no sound was heard from under the cloth until it was removed in the morning. When I asked her why she’d named him Pete, she explained, ‘All little birds are named Pete.’
As I write, a few birds are being blown by a nasty storm. I received a feeler from a publisher (through a literary agent) on whether or not I am inclined to write some kind of memoir about my long friendship with Miep. The hook seems to be that perhaps I know things that others don’t. Between you and me: it’s possible that I do.
But, if I were to write about my friendship with Miep, I would prefer to write a chapter on Miep and hungry birds to disclosing something incendiary, or sullying anyone or anything in her world; though there were and remain bits of dirt I could stir, and a few scores I’d like to settle. Settling scores is not in the spirit of Miep, so I’ll resist my lower self for her sake.
Until next time,
Alison
DEAR MOTHER TWITCHETT,
About Souvenir d’Anne Frank that you described to me – I think it needs to be seen/heard rather than read.
About birds, what comes to mind – Hiding from the world, as usual, watched a television chef prepare a small bird as a holiday repast. Watched him remove the head and feet, open the body, remove gizzards, pluck, split, rinse, dry, add rue, etc. I seem to remember reading somewhere that in biblical times women were treated for barrenness with bird eggs. I’ve just now looked it up and, yes indeed, cures for barrenness included cherries, white honey, pistachios, and … both small birds and small bird eggs.
See how very different we are. My stick never leaves the ice, yours is in midair …
Weren’t pigeons freed at War’s end?
Simple Simon
Dreamt I was eating something disgusting, sour, unchewable. Told they were boiled chicken necks
GEACHTE MEVROUW GOLD,
I am Tinneka Eringa’s executor. Although Tinneka had begun preparing a will, much was left undone. There were left all kinds of papers with ‘orders’ and ‘notations’. I found your bank account numbers and know Tinneka wanted to bequeath a sum of money to you, and her notes indicated how much. But there is not any formality. Conclusion is, on this moment I can do nothing. Having an overview of the situation, which is complicated, and discussions with the inheritors. Maybe there is something possible.
I’m very sorry. That Tinneka’s illness went so fast brings either on emotional level and on business level quite some problems in the coming period.
Cordially,
Notary Public
Ivan van Haak
SISTERS,
I drove in to see Mom today, to begin the moving process to Winchester Gardens. She wants me to fetch only the red NY Times reading chair and two lamps. She will not bring any of her nicer furniture from the living room. As I walked around the apartment surveying things, I realized there is nothing worth bringing. When we go there, we do not really look. Everything is old, decrepit, worn out, broken, even dirty. I asked if she wanted to bring any of her duck decoys. She said, ‘Yes, one.’ She picked the ceramic one (Ali brought) from Mexico.
I suggested the two portrait vases made of her and Dad. Yes to those. She wants to bring only a few paintings. And, of course, the enlarged photo of Daddy. For the first time today she said how much she misses him. I was there only an hour. She was exhausted and couldn’t do more. I didn’t want to disrupt things by starting to pack. I will go early on Monday morning and pack before the van arrives, so it’s done all at once.
Looking inside her world – at her things – made me sad. Her shoes are all worn out. Even her sheets are worn out. Her cashmere sweaters have moth holes. Much has been stolen, even a Hermès scarf she bought in Paris years ago. Happily, she agreed to bring her rug, the one Ali sent from Morocco.
David and I have gone shopping to make things homier. We bought a small writing table from Target, desk lamps, new sheets, a few dishes to outfit her kitchen for visitors. We will finish setting up tomorrow and the kids and I will add pieces we’ve woven for Yarn Bombing events to add a little whimsy and remind her of her days as an activist.
All is well.
Much love,
Maggie
My father’s voice calling out my name
DEAR SIMON,
To refresh your memory of birds at the end of ‘The Darkest Time’ section in Anne Frank Remembered: Miep and Jan’s friends from the Rijnstraat tap on their window and wave their arms, telling Miep ‘It’s over. It’s over’:
The streets were crowded with people. Big bonfires were burning; young people were dancing around the fires. Old people were walking up and down the street, laughing and embracing each other. The feeling everywhere was exhilarating, lovely. Germans were nowhere to be seen.
We started back toward home. I knew we’d hardly be able to sleep this night. The sky was just beginning to darken. I noticed how beautiful the twilit sky was. Then, right above the rooftops, I saw a flock of pigeons swooping and circling. It struck me that it was a very long time since I had seen any birds in Amsterdam. How long had the sparrows been gone? How long had the swans not been in the canals? The ducks? Of course, I thought, birds could so easily get away; there couldn’t have been food for them to eat either.
Under the Germans, it had been against the law to keep pigeons. These pigeons must have been kept hidden throughout the occupation. Now, at the news, they’d been set free. They were like confetti thrown against the sky.
There were pigeons again above the roofs of Amsterdam. They were free, and so were we.
Is it as you remember?
Old and exhausted,
Alison
DEAR ALISON,
The bird Pete isn’t alive anymore. No icy days here. Light rain and 10 Celsius. No further news.
Paul
– Interlogue IV –
Every day in rehab without alcohol – and for long afterwards – seemed as if it would last a year. More fitting to my nature would have been to die choking on my own vomit, or during a seizure, than to live trapped in my own person morning, afternoon, and night. A reinvigorated fear of impending doom poured into the void that alcohol had vacated in the halfway house I resided in after rehab. My skin hurt perpetually. The seasons blurred. Lily would occasionally telephone me from one of the few payphones on Hydra, while she was standing next to the dry riverbed, spending drachma coins she did not have in order to bolster my flat spirits. In her deep, heavily accented voice, she’d pelt me with poetry, like pebbles thrown against a closed window, trying to override my gloom while I became more and more tongue-tied. She’d quote at me Eliot’s The Waste Land, a few lines for every season, starting that first gray winter:
Winter kept us warm, covering
A little life with dried tubers.
She picked up the poem again in what, for me, was colorless spring, as if she had not been interrupted by the months that had intervened:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
With the arrival of odorless summer:
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
For the subsequent autumn, she had saved lines from Paul Celan’s ‘Corona’:
Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
Once again, she would manage to lift my spirit. But all too suddenly she would say, ‘Shut it now!’ – never anything as commonplace as ‘Goodbye’ – and I would. And afterwards, what I would experience was almost a hangover.
Only a very little of my divorce settlement remained. How would I survive? I had never held down a job, had no identifiable skills. My brain no longer functioned; all day and night what I longed for was the release of a strong drink. The choice between dying drunk and living a miserable, fear-fuelled, sober life was grim any way I cut the cards. Finally, using an entirely fictitious resume, I skewered what courage I could muster and interviewed for a menial job as a gofer at a small film company. For some reason my terror went unnoticed, and the skills required were so minimal that I landed the job. Another low-level position followed, after I was fired from the first. In these jobs I earned hardly more than subsistence wages and was increasingly convinced I was about to slip into destitution.
Though motherhood, responsibility, the future, all menaced me, after two years with his grandparents, my son was sent back to live with me, now aged eleven. Casting around for a less stressful, less costly life, I moved us to Los Angeles in time for him to enter high school. I bought myself a cheap second-hand car, an old Audi Fox that belched white smoke. Thor was embarrassed to be seen emerging from such a crappy car, and insisted I drop him a block from school. I began a love affair during which every emotion overwhelmed me, having hitherto not had to deal with emotions except through the filter of alcohol. As I’d never had sex, either, while sober, it was as if I were losing my virginity all over again.
Since leaving my halfway house, I had somehow managed to gain a toehold in writing – one radio play, several articles in magazines – when I was hired as a researcher by the television show This is Your Life. It was on the network again after an absence of decades. The new job required me to drop Thor at school and to race every morning to Hollywood Boulevard with its rows of tall palm trees and stars in the sidewalk, smoke trailing from my tailpipe and an extra can of engine oil in my trunk. The format of the show was to ‘surprise’ some (un)lucky individual who was then brought into the TV studio so that, in front of an invited audience, everyone who had ever mattered to her/him could parade across the floor and share the tears of heartfelt emotion.
Wanting to impress the producers, I began seeking ideas for future shows; if they liked celebrity participation, they also liked to broadcast occasional shows about ‘ordinary people’ who had overcome ‘extraordinary obstacles’. I stumbled upon one of these in an obscure self-published memoir found in a second-hand bookshop in the San Fernando Valley; this seemed like it could become a successful show, maybe even a tear-jerker. It was a memoir written by one Barry Spaanjard, who lived in Los Angeles where he spoke to schoolchildren about his experience of surviving the Holocaust. Though I had hardly thought about the Holocaust since I’d read Anne Frank’s diary as a teenager, I saw potential in his book, entitled Don’t Fence Me In: An American Teenager in the Holocaust, as it was dramatic, sad, but also triumphant. I pitched the idea to the producers, and they recognized its promise.
Born in America, Barry’s Dutch Jewish parents had returned with him to Amsterdam as a boy in 1932. The timing could not have been worse. When the war began in Europe it spread to Holland; Hitler’s hunt for Jewish people everywhere was already underway. Trapped by the German Occupation, Barry and his family were swept into Jewish deportations, were incarcerated in concentration camps that included Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank and her sister Margot were dying of malnutrition and disease). Barry was the same age as Anne at the time, and he insisted he and Anne had known one another in the camp. Near war’s end, because of his American passport, Barry and his parents were transported to the Swiss border to be exchanged for several high-level German officers. Though his father died during the exchange, Barry and his mother made it back to the United States.
While developing the show, the couple who had sheltered Anne Frank and her family – Mr. and Mrs. Gies – were mentioned as possible invitees, because of Barry’s belief that he had known Anne in Bergen-Belsen. When I telephoned the couple to invite them, they politely refused; yet I found that for some reason I was anything but disappointed. Just to have heard their voices had made something shiver in my soul, and I purposefully kept their address and phone number on the top of my research notes after the TV show stopped production and I was out of a job. It struck me that, as far as I knew (which was admittedly not at all far), the story of the diary from the point of view of the helpers/hiders/protectors had never been told. How astonishing that these people from long ago were alive in contemporary Amsterdam; how astonishing for me to feel the stirrings of genuine curiosity for the first time in at least two decades.
I realized that if not preserved, this piece of history would be lost. Miep Gies was in her seventies, Jan in his eighties: their advanced ages lent urgency to the need that was astir in me, that their story be told before they were gone. Out of the blue I felt a proper sense of responsibility, and it was no doubt this that lent me the audacity to take pen in hand and write a personal letter to them, inquiring if it would be possible to meet and even interview them.
When I received an affirmative answer, it was as if I had been plunged into iced water from a great height: something akin to, but at the same time utterly different from, a seizure.
Two weeks later, having used the last of my savings to buy an airplane ticket to Holland, I was standing on an Amsterdam street, in a residential neighborhood, across from a bakery, beside a bicycle shop, and – with quivering heart – was about to ring a bell marked ‘J. A. Gies’.
The front door sprung open to reveal a narrow, steeply winding stairway that smelled of cigars. As I began to climb, it was as if an undiscovered me – different feet, different legs, different eyes, different internal compass – was making the climb. The colorless odorless tasteless flat grey world slid away; I was back, fully awake; my sober senses, in full color, were aroused in a way they had never been before.
At the top of the stairway, at an open door, side-by-side, he in jacket and tie, thick white hair billowing back from his forehead, a tall thin man smoking a slim cigar; she, beside him, short in height, soft round cheeks, wearing a tailored dress that might have been new but might also have been from the 1940s, blonde (dyed) hair coiffed, glasses in front of bright blue, smiling eyes – here stood the couple.
‘Come in,’ she said, stepping aside. ‘The coffee is hot.’
Part V
– A Curtain Blows into the Room –
DEAR ALISON,
I sent a card to your mother. It came back marked ‘Unable to forward’.
I hope she is OK. Would you let me know?
Best regards from across the years.
Nolan Davis
Natalie Wood, hair cut short as in Splendor in the Grass after the breakdown, bends to feed a spaniel from her table at Txikito Café
DEAR GERDA,
As you’re a nurse, perhaps
you have some thoughts on the following symptoms of ‘nodding disease’, where one’s head droops, one’s eyes close, one’s mind drifts into blankness that’s like a trance. A variation is when one wanders around with no destination as I do, back and forth a hundred times in front of my living room windows. It’s as if one were in another world. I don’t want to alarm you, but I think I have ‘nodding disease’ (or something like it). I’m of no use to anyone or anything. Your thoughts please as a psych nurse and trusted old friend who has already saved my life once. Do you still plan on returning to Ireland when you retire, by the way?
Alison
DEAR NOLAN,
I am sorry for the loss of your father. I remember him well, his crew cut and blue eyes. Mine also passed on – my kingdom for some new, less clichéd terms for dying (it was Freud, if I remember rightly, who said that the unconscious has no representation of death). It happened in 2009, on October 9th – but I think you saw his obituary in The Times and wrote to my mother. He is missed. My mother, happily, is alive and relatively well. At the end of June, she decided that it was too much to continue living in her apartment and moved into an Assisted Living place in Maplewood, New Jersey, near to my sister Maggie (who might not yet have been born when we lived above you). I’ll send Mother’s contact information. If you’d like to write or phone, I’m sure she’d be delighted. We’ve been amazed at how much she enjoys reading her daily NY Times, as my father did every day for seventy years. But of course your father worked for The Times … It comes back to me. She attends and takes pleasure in lectures and music events, exercise class, sitting outside beside the garden, and even won $3 at bingo the other day.