‘Neither am I,’ I replied, leaving us both scratching our heads.
When I’m feeling at all better, I shall take a swim. Then, if my rum ankle will allow me to stand upright and scurry back onto the rocks, I shall climb the mountain’s stone steps to visit you. Coffee or whisky, which shall I bring you? Both, of course. Then I’ll lie on the slab beside yours in solidarity.
I won’t forget.
And yes, it’s getting late. Am donning my bathing suit right now before the wind reawakens. I risk being drowned not in the sea but in dry, colorless bougainvillea blossoms.
Your Alison
The sea clings. A citrus mist curtains off the sunset
DEAR ALISON,
I’ve never even been to Alaska.
You may not believe it but I’ve lived all these years beside my parents’ semi-detached house where I grew up and have hardly traveled. I’m as ordinary as a dormouse too, with no regrets, one wife, two kids, two grandchildren, a parakeet and an old, fat tomcat. Tree Frog meet Dormouse.
My father took me into his dry-cleaning business after I foundered as a sports commentator. I took over the store completely when he died; have always been able to make a living. I remember your father’s joke about the Jewish guy, Harry, who got hit by a car. Harry’s lying in the street, bleeding. A fellow from the neighborhood rushes up to him, puts a pillow under his head, covers his torso with a blanket, asks, ‘Are you comfortable?’ Harry replies, ‘I make a good living.’ Your father was and remains my joke-telling role model. He could fire them off like a machine gun.
I even made peace with my father and would occasionally accompany him to Mass. Remember, I’m the guy who tells jokes, not the guy who has much of a deep side. By the way, I still don’t believe in the Transmigration of the Soul. It just stopped making a difference in the bigger picture. Or perhaps the fight went out of me, who knows. Anyhow, one day when I’ve gone to Mitten Heaven (where all the never recovered mittens in your Lost and Found went) or my ‘sell by’ date arrives, I’ll discover if my soul is to be inserted into another body or being or thing, or if it’s to be left to wander amongst other wandering souls.
When you’re back in New York, how about a reunion in the old neighborhood before all the ghosts of our footprints are gone? Maybe there’s material for a book about growing up in the fifties? After all, we were the children and grandchildren of immigrant Jews and Italians and Irish and Polish and Greeks and Germans, we were being assimilated into the American mainstream, our ethnicities getting watered down. People can’t imagine what it was like, living in the country here between Long Island Sound and Little Neck Bay. Right after the end of World War II was a grand time to be American.
As you must recall, we’d get on our bikes and be gone all day, totally free, not even needing to lock them. Since my kick-stand was perpetually broken, I’d lie it down on the ground. When I’d come back, it was always where I left it. So was yours except your kick-stand worked and yours was upright.
Come back little Sheba!
Stanley
– Epilogue –
After Anne Frank Remembered was finally completed and published in English, it passed into more than twenty other languages. Dutch was one of these, and at an international press launch for the book in Amsterdam a sour Dutch journalist stood up and challenged Miep, saying the following: ‘Not to be disrespectful, Mrs. Gies, but why would you and your husband allow an American writer to take our very own story away from us?’
Miep locked eyes with the journalist and replied: ‘For the past forty years you and every other journalist who has interviewed us has asked us the same five questions. When Alison came to us she was the first who ever asked us a sixth question, then a seventh, and more. That is why.’
I had often wondered the same thing. I’d also wondered how I was able to find words to convince iron-willed Miep and Jan to allow me to write more than an article about their wartime deeds, culminating in two close years in their living room working together on our book, on preserving their memories. They had, after our initial, cordial interview, dug in their heels and adamantly resisted the idea of a book. Their reason: modesty. As they explained: ‘We didn’t do anything special. We did only what needed doing in a situation that was unjust. Many, many people here in Holland did what we did, even did more. Why should we receive special attention just because one of the people we cared for happened to be Anne Frank?’
I must have found the right words.
If I have a talent, beside helping children find lost mittens, it has been as a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories that seem to be on the brink of extinction. As a writer, I have tried to ‘translate’ what’s been rescued into words – words addressed sometimes to the living, sometimes to the dead, picking from the litter of bones, skulls, and relics tossed from graves by lackadaisical cemetery attendants.
On catching sight of a skull, Hamlet asks the gravediggers: ‘Whose was it?’ And, when told that it belonged to someone he knew – the court jester Yorick – he laments, famously, ‘Alas poor Yorick … a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times … Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.’
Like Hamlet’s, my own affection does not end with death. Nor is it lonely here, staying behind to exhume, examine bones, skulls (perhaps even my own), after other mourners have left. Before reinterring, though, I would like to wash each with wine – perfume too.
My own life had never seemed worth translating: not that I was cagey or reserved, rather the life was just not that interesting, while – in the bigger picture, in a world of manifest cruelty and inequity to which I no longer want to belong – I’ve been of negligible real use, just spit in the wind. What the deaths of so many loved-ones taught me, however, is that ‘my own life’ was never really my own at all; rather, it was only ever a fabric of which, if I am the weft, then my loved-ones are the warp. And this, when a woven fabric requires both: weft and warp. I realized, I hope not too belatedly, that to talk of myself I would necessarily be talking of others – my others. I realized – to vary the metaphor – now that so many significant actors in my life’s play had left the stage, one by one, now that the cast had diminished, the technical crew too, that the empty stage invites a new play – light, story, music, an attraction, a final curtain.
Here in my living room in New York, the black and metallic Kettle rowing machine sprawls adjacent to my windows. It’s ever-ready; makes a kind of swishing noise when the oars are pulled, which they are occasionally. Viewable from these windows (in front of which I’ve walked back and forth so many, many times), is my small patch in the communal garden across 25th Street where tender cherry tomatoes I’ve planted have begun to grow beside Lily’s rose bush, now thriving. The watermelon-pink wild roses give off their familiar, evocative scent – past, present, future – always the same perfume.
Beside my desk that is piled high with papers and notes, there’s a cutting from a bright red thirty-leaf May rose that I carried back from a recent trip to Bulgaria – so close to Greece yet entirely new to me as I’d never been there before. I was treated with so much kindness during my stay. What a balm to my spirit. Inklings that may have the makings of a new book were stirred.
These glimmers can take the time they need to find their form; the Bulgarian rose is ready to plant.
– Characters and Correspondents –
Agatha and Boris – German friends living in Dusseldorf who frequently visit the Isle of Hydra, Greece, where I have owned a house for over forty-five years
Alan – Lily Mack’s English husband
Aleksy Nowak – Jewish archivist
Anna Stein – a reader from California
Bob – original editor of Anne Frank Remembered at Simon & Schuster
Bram Cloet – a Dutch reader of my work
Denny – professional editor and long-time New York-based friend
Dorothy – my father’s old
er sister, a card-carrying Communist active in progressive causes, especially Labor Unions
‘Faruk Ulster’ – name on scam email
Gerda – nurse originally from Dublin who once saved my life
Gerlof – family friend of Miep’s and of her son
Ivan van Haak – notary for Tinneka’s estate
Lydia – wife of a Croatian novelist, living in Berlin
Lily Mack – dynamic Russian woman who became a lifelong friend and mentor, based on Hydra
Louis de Soto – great-grandchild of Holocaust survivor
Michael Beigel – child of Holocaust survivor living in Israel who spots, on the cover of my book Fiet’s Vase, his mother’s face in a photo of three survivors from 1945
M. Brown – woman from a home inventory services agency engaged to complete inventory of my deceased parents’ apartment
Maarten – Dutch friend, a designer living in Spain
Maggie – younger of my two sisters, ten years my junior, a film director, married to David, a musician
Maria Mosca – a reader from Milan, Italy
Miep Gies – originally from Vienna, came alone to Holland aged eleven, took Dutch nationality when she married Jan Gies (a Dutchman); both risked their lives to help – ultimately unsuccessfully – Anne Frank and her family hide from the Nazis during World War II; Miep rescued Anne’s diary after the arrests, hoping to return it to Anne after the war. When it was learned that Anne would not be coming back, Miep gave the diary to Otto Frank, Anne’s father
Nancy – elder of my two sisters, four years my junior, owns a B & B in upstate New York
Nolan Davis – friend and neighbor from childhood
Oystein – acquaintance in Oslo, Norway
Paul Gies – only son of Miep and Jan Gies, married to Lucie
R. Rhodes – New York literary agent
Ruffe – casual friend of Lily’s and mine, French, from the early Hydra days
Simon – translator and recluse, a Canadian
Stanley – long-lost childhood friend, presumed dead
Tess – documentary filmmaker and friend based in New Orleans
Thor – my son, married to Talia
Tinneka Eringa – Dutch lover living on a vineyard near the Pyrenees in Southern France
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to and acknowledge the following whose words have been shaken into this work as spice
Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Michael Beigel, Jeff Blackborn, James Boswell, Bess Carrick, Constantine P. Cavafy, Paul Celan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Susan Coolidge, Lydia Cosic, Ensemble Colin Decio Piano Trio, Dennison Demac, T. S. Eliot, Euripides, Anne Frank, Gerlof, Paul and Lucie Gies, Gilles, Mother Goose, John Hershey, George Hicks, Mary Hopkin, Sasha and Doris Jaeger, David Nolan, Alan Parkin, Melanie Safka, William Shakespeare, Pieter van der Zwan, Marvin Waterlund, Marcus Weld, YIVO, and Neil Young
and to the Cahiers Series, Center for Writers & Translators, The American University of Paris and Sylph Editions, who previously published Part I of Found and Lost as ‘Lost and Found’, Cahier #12, in 2010
and the following whose kindness and help is gratefully recognized
Melissa Brown, Talia and Thor Gold, Helle Valborg Goldman, Nancy Greenwald, Maggie Greenwald, Kirsty Gunn, Anna ‘Gerda’ Kennedy, Kim Kremer, Ivanka, Dincho, and Kristina Kovacheva, Anna Luerssen, Vickie Price, Gail Vanderhoof, Mark Walter; and, finally, as the ground buckles under us all, to the precious luminary without whose generosity and strong arm, flavor, aroma, and leavening would not have been stirred into an otherwise uncooked work:
Dan Gunn
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Published in 2017
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Widworthy Barton Honiton Devon EX14 9JS
This edition published in 2018
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Copyright © 2017 by Alison Leslie Gold
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