Found the former mayor, and maybe because he took pity on me he did my taxes in one rather than the usual six visits: another shock.
The mirrored door broke off of the plastic bathroom medicine chest and there are none on the island to replace it. After feeling disproportionately deflated by this trivial setback, I badly stubbed my little toe on the base of my metal spiral staircase. It’s hurting like hell – black and red, blue and gray. Looking across the hills at your shadow-theater terrace, I remember how you slept outside during those early emphysema years because you could not stand to be inside where, you said, ‘There is no oxygen’. There you were, night or day, moving in profile, sometimes a Kabuki play.
Storm clouds all day, but not more than a few drops of rain. As the sun sets, the sea turns lavender, then eggshell pink, with a silvery sheen toward the Peloponnese. Perfect sea in which to drown oneself. If I should ever decide to commit suicide, there are two ways I’ve imagined:
One. Find fresh snow. Lie down in it. Take poison.
Two. Swim in a sea such as this. Swim toward and into the reflection of the setting sun, molten gold. Take poison.
I can hear you scolding me in your heavy Russian accent: ‘Al-i-son!’
Walking to the port this morning to buy a broom and bread accompanied by Marianne Ihlen – the Marianne of Leonard Cohen’s ‘So Long …’ – who told me that your mother’s lover was the King of Greece. That’s a new one to me. She also confided that yesterday a South African came up to her at the port, said, ‘Are you Leonard Cohen’s Marianne?’ She answered, ‘Yes I am.’ He pulled up his t-shirt, showed her a big scar on his chest, and explained: ‘I had a heart attack a few years ago. I was about to enter heaven when St. Peter stopped me and said, “You cannot die until you’ve met Marianne”.’
Now all is silent except for a dog in the distance. A slim new crescent moon that would prompt you to suggest a haircut, or that I do something for the very first time. Of course I do need a haircut, but you’re not here to give me it. I have not the imagination to venture into anything for the very first time. Sadly, I have not even the courage (or whatever it takes) to slide into the sea.
Your American friend wills you to hover.
DEAR ALI,
Just back from Winchester Gardens. Mom is immensely better. She was dressed, answered a couple of phone calls, sat in her chair and talked my head off. No disorientation, in fact she repeated herself less often than usual. Seems she even went to a shul service they had this morning. (It was a woman rabbi.) Also she asked me to launder the knitted pieces the kids and I had put up in her room as decoration as she thinks they’ve gotten soiled. I’d say you all can breathe a sigh of relief.
Maggie
DEAR LILY,
Day of the Holy Ghost. It’s me and whistling birds. The anniversary of Aunt Dorothy’s death approaches. Coincidently, it’s the same day as the Belmont Stakes in Belmont Horse Racing Park, not five minutes from her grave.
Finally, with your voice in my head ordering me to dive into it, I’ve risked a swim just one week before I’m scheduled to leave the island. The cold, silk, salt water made me gasp then cry out. I swam into a veil of silver; under it, my pinched shoulders relaxed. The tight skin of the malignity of these times also relaxed. I turned my back to the Peloponnese, swam through swelling waves made choppy by a passing boat.
The good news is that I woke this morning and realized that my stubbed toe was throbbing less. Its colors have changed to yellow and blackish purple. Though woebegone, this un-buffed body still heals itself; doom, gloom – mere burps on this winding road on days such as this. Walking up the steps to your house to have tea with Alan I heard a humming noise, then saw a million buzzing bees in the ivy. Armed with my new anaphylactic kit, I charged right past. I drank tea with Alan while bees hummed close by. When the death of your old neighbor was mentioned, Alan sighed and said, ‘I know less and less what to think or say or do about the fading pasts and their once-upon-a-time habitants.’
Alison
Rain starts. Rain stops
HI ALISON,
I am glad to hear that you got home safely to New York from chaotic Greece.
We are plowing through my parents’ legacy in writing. Mostly papers with pictures about where they were at any given time.
There is a person who applied at City Hall for a public now empty garden to be called Miep Gies Public Garden. There is the old problem for me that my mother is in the picture again and not the other helpers. I have said that in one way or other their names should be present too. I will keep you posted.
Best regards,
Paul
A bin of basketballs at Gristedes market. Could not resist buying one
DEAR MOTHER TWITCHETT,
Were you aware that the Imam of the Grand Mosque of Paris helped Jews during the war? I’ve just read about a survivor from Budapest who searched for his family until he died at age ninety-five. He had achieved enough in his life to warrant the impressive obituary that caught the attention of a nephew, who had been tirelessly searching for his uncle all his life. Now it is too late.
Read of a survivor of Birkenau (Mr. Nachshon) whose tattooed numbers were duplicated onto a young person’s arm in order to venerate him. His family gassed, he survived. What struck me about the interview with him, more than the discussion of the phenomenon of duplicating these tattoos, was his comment that, despite the passing of seventy years since the events, he continues to dream about it every night. Every single night. The dream is always the same. In his words, ‘Many times we’re running away from the Nazis. Sometimes the whole night we were running. Maybe this time they won’t catch me.’
BTW, was offered a job (hope you’re sitting down) for a new translation from German of Bible stories for children. (Ironies in abundance, not least as you know my views on religion.) Not as much money as I’d like but enough to sustain me through the coming year in Yellowknife. Much as I’ve bullied you, circumstance has seen to it that I, not you (!), will be the next Jacob wrestling with the Angel.
And speaking of returns, the gray wolf and the white-tailed eagle have both come back from near-extinction. Also the ever-embraceable, ever-dancing, ever-ordinary brown bear.
Especially yours,
Simon of Cyrene
Pale moon of no color. Found a piece of white chalk – always a stub in Dad’s pocket – on a seat of the E train. Put it in my pocket
OH SIMON:
Glad you won’t be trapping foxes for dinner up there in your woody hideaway. Truth told, you’ve always been more of a Jacob than me.
About Mr. Nachshon: Yes! Maybe this time they won’t catch him!
Miep often described how, every time she and Jan were invited to see a stage play of The Diary of Anne Frank, just as the curtain was about to rise, she would catch herself wondering: ‘Maybe this time things will end differently.’ Later, when the curtain had fallen, her heart would sink, the play having ended the same way as always.
On a different note but from the same tune: during the hiding time, and from then on to the end of her life, Miep also told of a recurring dream: ‘In it there was no arrest and the war would end, I would throw open the door to the hiding place, make a wide gesture with my hand, and command the occupants: “Now go home!”’
I imagine, in some fairytale, child-like dimension: Miep, Jan, Anne, Otto, Edith, and Margot drinking coffee and eating spice cookies, with curtains pushed aside, open windows, shaking their heads at what has become of the world; Dorothy and my father around a kitchen table with their family of origin, eating boiled chicken and their mother’s famous buttered noodles and arguing about what has become of Labor Unions in America; Tinneka helping her gentle Alsatian into her BMW for a bracing walk under the Pyrenees; Denny (yes, I just heard the awful news) putting down her sharpened pencil, picking up the phone to call me to arrange lunch at our Cuban-Chinese; Lily standing in her kitchen on Hydra in an old black bikini bottom, slicing garlic to add to an omelet of
feta and tomato bubbling in olive oil over a high flame on her two-burner cooker, quoting a favorite William Empson poem with the refrain ‘The waste remains, remains and kills.’ You see, under it all, am not a wrestling Jacob but a six-year-old playing ball until dusk becomes night when I can’t see the ball anymore and it hits me in the face.
Have begun corresponding with a woman who calls herself Gretel: a well-spoken German born in 1941 in the Black Forest who now lives in England near Dover where the ferries go from England to France and back. We’re planning to meet. When I mentioned that I’d written about Anne Frank, she said, ‘Oh Anne Frank! They shoved her down our throats in school!’
Mrs. Twitchett
Dreamt of spilling sticky Calvados on a royalty check
DEAR SIMON,
It is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile crisis. Hurricane Sandy, a slow-moving, 900-mile-wide ‘hybrid’ hurricane (whatever that may signify) is blowing through twenty-three states at damaging speeds having (they say) the lowest pressure ever recorded, causing floods, blizzards, rain, mad winds. You’ll have seen it on the news, no doubt, and I am here to assure you it is true.
In New York, gazing out from my window, the city is entirely dark, almost black, no streetlights, only tail lights given that my Avenue is one-way heading south. The reason I’m not afraid is that when I was a child and expressed fear of the dark, my father would say, ‘The dark is friendly’. And then he would explain how it was more black velvet than something to be feared.
Especially yours too.
Mother Twitchett
Snow goose weathervane with fairy lights curled around it
DEAR ALI,
Forgot to tell you this very funny dream I had. I had been baking and gardening all day as I had four rooms booked for the weekend. I decided to stop for a glass of wine but couldn’t find the bottle. While I searched for it, I discovered a large room that had gone unnoticed and unattended for the entire time I’ve lived here. It was scary – fossilized animal carcasses, flea-ridden beds, dried giant cockroaches (like the ones infesting Lily’s Athens flat). I began to clean up and at the same time discovered that you had given away my shower-curtain-liner. I was very pissed off. Kept trying to get you to return it to me. It ended in limbo, of course, but I still couldn’t reconcile myself to your nerve at having given away the curtain-liner especially when the B&B would be full for the weekend.
Who knows where that came from? Imagine, not even the shower curtain, but the shower-curtain liner.
Lots of love,
Nancy
Smell of snow in the air. First Snow, New Year
DEAR MRS. GOLDE,
Our class read The Diary of Anne Frank together, then we saw the funny but sad play about Anne Frank performed at the High School. We also read the book you and Miep wrote. Our assignment is to find things in Anne Frank Remembered that we wouldn’t have known just from reading Anne’s diary and seeing the play. From my list I have some questions. Would you be able to help me with answers, then I can write a better report?
About the eighth person in hiding, the Dentist. In the play he’s a stodgy jerk, a bachelor, but you and Miep describe him as a suave and cultured person with a wife.
Question. Which is true?
While Miep and her husband were risking their lives to protect and take care of the people in hiding, they also were hiding the Christian student Karel in their own home.
Question. What did Mr. Frank say about this? How did the student thank them after the war for risking their lives for him?
Going on outside the hiding place for those two years was occupation. Oppression. Danger. Food shortages. Then worse food shortages.
Question (two questions really). I wonder, if the student in their home hadn’t gone by then and the people in hiding hadn’t been arrested in August 1944, with the food shortages getting worse and worse to the point of starvation or near starvation, how would Miep have been able to feed eleven extra people through Hunger Winter until the end of the War? It was such a horrible time when she and her husband could hardly feed themselves.
The play and the diary end long ago. Miep’s story continues for sixty more years.
Question. Did she still remember the anniversary day of the arrest, August 4, until the end of her life?
Oh, and, I am wondering if the Gieses ever went to Israel? (Just for my own curiosity.)
Answers from you who know would be awesome. What a scary time Miep lived through. How could anyone be normal after that?
From, Marvin Waterland
Grade 12
Sidney, BC, Canada
DEAR MARVIN,
I will try to answer you but I must be brief since I’m off shortly to visit my elderly mother and take her for a haircut. All are good questions, and questions I also asked when Miep, Jan and I worked together on the book and the facts of the story slowly, bit by bit, unfurled.
Yes, the dentist, called ‘Dr Dussel’ by Anne in an early published version of the Diary, was actually Fritz Pfeffer. He did have a ‘Frau’ or ‘wife’ with him in Amsterdam, Carlotta Kaletta, to whom, after he went into hiding, Miep couriered letters – back and forth. (An aside: a packet of these love letters was discovered much later at an Amsterdam flea market, in the 1980s.) The ‘wife’ never knew that he was hidden right in the center of Amsterdam until the arrest happened. Her impression was that he was out in the country, which troubled her since he was not someone who liked the country. The reason I’ve put quotation marks around ‘wife’ is that Carlotta and Dr Pfeffer were not officially married but had run away from Germany together. They were not permitted to marry because, at the time, there were laws (Nuremburg Race Laws) forbidding a Jew and a non-Jew to marry. Though it was long, long after the War and the world had vastly changed by the time we began working on the book together, Miep had not changed, and so she asked if we could use the word Frau or wife in reference to Carlotta even though it was not technically true. She, in her own way, was still protecting the reputations of her people – Dr. Pfeffer and Carlotta – since, in the eyes of society at the time, living together and being unmarried could be considered shameful.
Mr. Frank did not know about Karel, the student hidden in the Gieses’ home; Miep and Jan never told him. The reason is that although Mr. Frank was a kind man, the knowledge would have worried him since it put Miep and Jan, his lifelines, in extra danger, and any danger to them was also a danger to his family. Although they always wondered what happened to Karel after the War, they never saw or heard from him again. (I can hardly believe that he never returned later in life, if for no other reason than to thank them for risking their lives …)
I too have always wondered how Miep and the other helpers would have fed everyone in hiding through the Hunger Winter had they not been deported. I like to think they would have found a way.
Every year on August 4th, Miep and Jan sat the whole day with the drapes drawn and their backs toward the grandfather clock that had belonged to Edith Frank and was gifted to them by Otto Frank after the war (as described in the book). After Jan died and until her own death, Miep continued doing the same thing. When the day would end, they, then she alone, would feel a huge relief that another anniversary of that fateful day was over.
Finally: Mr. and Mrs. Gies did go to Israel once, during the 1970s. They flew with a group with which they were to tour, were met by an Israeli guide at Tel Aviv airport. When the luggage came down the carousel, the guide ordered the travelers to take their suitcases and carry them to the bus, and to hurry. Jan, already elderly by then, was slow in retrieving their luggage, which caused the guide to chastise him, a performance that was repeated when the luggage had to be unloaded from the bus at the hotel. Otto Frank was still alive at this point, and had (unbeknown to the Gieses) alerted the Israeli government to their visit. The second morning, as the group was preparing to board the bus and the guide once again had begun to chastise Jan for his slowness, a shiny government limousine pulled up, an official got
out who asked that Miep and Jan Gies identify themselves. They were invited to climb into the car as they were due to be honored at Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl). When they’d gone, the tour guide was informed who they were, and the next morning, when the group was again boarding the bus, he apologized profusely to Jan in front of the entire group. He was shamefaced.
Another small note: When I visited Yad Vashem in the 1990s, I looked and looked and finally found the tree planted for Miep and Jan. I gave it some water and stood beside it and thought about their deeds. They, like other Righteous Christians, are honored with a tree with a plaque in a special garden there.
I hope these responses are of help. Good luck with your report.
Alison Leslie Gold
My father whistling for us children in that sharp, shrill way, with two fingers pressed against his lower lip
DEAR SISTERS
Need to speak with you both. I’d like to do a conference call. I’m heading out for a few hours now, how about four-ish?
Maggie
The curtain blows into the room over and over and over again
DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS:
My mother, Dr. Shirley E. Greenwald, died peacefully yesterday, February 17th. A funeral service will be held at 11 am on Wednesday the 20th at Redden’s Funeral Home on 14th Street.
All are welcome.
No phone calls right now, please, as we’re preparing for the funeral and the arrival of relatives from far away. Shirley fought the good fight and lived a long and interesting life. She seemed invincible but, as it’s turned out, was not.
Alison (Leslie Gold)
City veiled in silver
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