Found and Lost Read online

  In its way, decline and fall, and rattling on with faulty mind and body and equipment, is just as varied and interesting as the healthy creative stuff. I have always thought that stories of failure are the best ones, and that stories of success are rather predictable and boring.

  Love,

  Alan

  DEAR ALAN,

  Thanks for your words. I have been reading the youthful letters of Samuel Beckett that recently were published, and in one of these he remarks to a friend, ‘Miss Costello said to me, “You haven’t a good word to say for anyone but the failures”. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time.’

  About my aunt: I must have had the same short conversation with her 5,000 times as her mind fogged over; shared French fries she so enjoyed from the McDonalds on 8th Avenue 500 times; thrown out the same tangerines I brought her because they’d gone gray and moldy at least five times. Now I wonder: Why did I continue to bring tangerines?

  Alison

  Put unused coins back into my pocket

  DEAR RUFFE,

  Nice to hear from you again including your many dreams of our Lily. I too dream of our much-loved friend. And often. Her strong and scented personality permeates still. When Lily’s daughter wrote that she sometimes feels her mother walk ‘briskly’ through her, it gave me the chills. My own aged mother is as know-it-all as ever, and my father, since the start of dementia, has been emptying his mind, and has turned surprisingly sweet in a way he never was before. It is very, very sad that they were unable to travel to the wedding of their grandson Thor (your once-upon-a-time swimming buddy) to Talia, in Santa Monica last Spring. Especially ironical since it was a stirring, traditional event, the kind my parents had dreamt of but were never offered by their own children. These days I bring a movie down to their place in Greenwich Village once a week. They think I’m a genius because I know how to insert/play/pause/remove a DVD. Have been showing them a cycle of musicals: Gypsy, Damn Yankees, Oklahoma, South Pacific. My father remembers every word to every song in every show and sings along with his (still vibrant) tenor voice. During these screenings, they sit side by side in red easy chairs about one foot away from the TV screen and hold hands. Once the film is going, I lie on the couch behind them, doze off, read, or watch with one eye. (BTW: I’m also able to recite or sing all the words to all the same songs, pressed into my brain as they were by endless playing during childhood. Had I only heard Dante or Puccini instead …) My next visit is on Friday. I’ve rented the Broadway stage version of Camelot with Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemming. That should scratch the itch.

  The eighth anniversary of the September 11th attack came and went. From where I was seated at my glass dining table I could see in the distance the double beams of white light – they’re called ‘Towers of Light’ – piercing the sky into oblivion. From the other window, the Empire State building, lit up in red, white, and blue. Our disturbed beehive of a world is swarming with hate – unending arms-manufacturing, fundamentalisms of all stripe spreading like spilled ink on blotting paper. After hearing each of the several thousand names read one by one on the radio at the ceremony at Ground Zero, I heard bells begin to toll. I am rendered irritable by everything and everyone.

  I imagine Lily would like us to stay in touch, but on second thought, what Lily wanted from people was never clear since so often during her last years she too found human company intensely irritating. And those outbursts against too much talk! Those I remember well. Except her own, since she could speak in unceasing monologue until the eyes would cross on her interlocutor. Once she said to me: ‘When I was in prison I dreamed of spending an entire day by myself eating a single egg.’ I think of this every time I eat an egg. (She was not alone. Several survivors I have interviewed dreamed of eating eggs while starving in wartime. Hannah Goslar, Anne Frank’s childhood friend who spoke with Anne through a barbed-wire and straw fence when they were both starved prisoners in Bergen-Belsen, dreamed of eating soft-boiled eggs along with buttered toast.)

  Six baby swallows in the garden below, waiting with gaping beaks for one or the other parent to swoop in with food.

  Alison

  Rye bread slices stacked, half a loaf

  DEAR MIEP,

  I am about to finalize my travel plans. Shall arrive at your door in time for coffee toward the end of September. I’ll send exact date and time soon. The entire street below is heavily shaded by trees. We’ve been experiencing what’s known as ‘dog days’ – sticky, oven-like, airless afternoons and nights. Today, after a business lunch (of calf’s liver, can you believe it?), I spent the afternoon sprawled across my couch, listening to the radio. It seems much too long until we’ll next meet. At evening’s end I turned on the television in time to behold a clandestine reminder of you – the film The Woman in the Window, from 1944, starring Joan Bennet and Edward G. Robinson. I well remember when you and I watched it in Santa Monica when I was living there, seated in my kitchen, on the evening after we shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills – because you needed something to wear for the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony. (Remember at the shop how you could not find the appropriate dress, so you combined a top you liked with a dress; worn together, looking like a one-piece dress – a secret we have kept to ourselves.) After you and I watched The Woman in the Window, and we began autographing a huge pile of books for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, you told me, ‘This is my most favorite film’. How much fun we had watching it. I also remember the next day when Anne Frank Remembered won in the documentary category, how the entire audience rose to give you a standing ovation while you walked onto the stage. Too bad the director took up all the allotted time to speak and left none for you to say the very few words you’d prepared. I think of them often: ‘I only did my human duty! You don’t have to be a hero to help another.’

  I miss our phone conversations since your small stroke. So, as promised, I’ll be writing letters, sending cards, knowing how much you like receiving even ones with photos of cats or cows. As you commented while shaking your head in disbelief in your Dutch way after your hundredth birthday, your longevity is ‘a mystery’. Perhaps your job on earth has not been completed? I send a little extra strength to help you with what is unspoken and hard now about living each day. (Of course you’ll never ask for help for yourself!) I look forward, as always, to hearing all your private thoughts, gossip too, when we’re across from each other in your living room once again, you in your soft easy chair, me stretched out on the couch. Think of me today when you have your coffee and I will be thinking of you. Until soon.

  Love and friendship,

  Alison

  DEAR SIMON OF CYRENE,

  I’m sorry you’re in such a bad place. I wish I could lift your spirits, but I can’t. I remain depleted, sunk in quicksand since the deaths of Lily and Aunt Dorothy. The very room I’m sitting in, the window through which I stare for hours every day, often pacing back then about-face and pace again, I owe to Dorothy and her fervent pro-union, pro-labor, left-leaning ways, all of which (but for being a card-carrying Communist) I seem to have inherited from her.

  Because the brick building, twenty-two stories high – it resembles a Soviet-era construction – was sponsored by the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union), which was my Russian grandfather’s union, Aunt Dorothy was among the original co-op members. She bullied me to put my name on its waiting list at a time when Chelsea was a shabby neighborhood full of Irish, Italian, and Greek dockworkers, gangs, and belly-dancing bars. When Dorothy bullied you, it was almost impossible to resist her: she was so stubborn, so single-minded. The reason my father was able to go to college was because Dorothy did not, but went to work instead so as to bring a needed pay envelope home to her family. (My mother always thought she never married because she was married to her union and the Communist Party, and because her first loyalty was always to, and would always remain to, her father and her family of birth.) At the ceremony to inaugura
te the building works, Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK spoke and broke ground.

  When my name rose to the top of the waiting list, twenty-one years later, I had totally forgotten I was even on the list. But Dorothy had not; she told me she knew, and had always known, that someday her union-sponsored complex would make a place for me too.

  The picture you paint of your own gloomy paralysis after finishing your recent job (didn’t I read that the young Austrian novelist you’re translating won some kind of a prize?) is not much different from mine since I finished writing the new Afterword for the special reissue of Anne Frank Remembered. This re-release marks Miep’s hundredth birthday and is meant to fill in the many remarkable new unfoldings in the worlds of Miep and Anne Frank since the book was first published twenty-five years ago. The only one I know who seems to have kept her equanimity in these unloving times is indeed dear Miep. Though every clock in her house shows a different time since Jan died, she lives apart from time, sails quietly on, contending with old, older, oldest age, giving leftover bread to the birds on her terrace, head (relatively) clear, humor intact, never complaining, barely varying her daily schedule that includes reading two newspapers, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, coffee at ten, tea at four, answering the many letters that she receives (from school children and adults) from around the world with the help of a friend, dozing in her chair, watching evening news at eight, drinking decaf at ten; finally, and rarely before 11 at night, making her way from window to window to pull the heavy drapes closed.

  In late August I volunteered to write a piece for a nonprofit organization and spent a weekend with a group of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organizer and I went down to Washington by train, then picked up the wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital where they live in various stages of rehabilitation, and joined the group on the retrofitted bus (for wheelchairs) bringing them to New York. The purpose: a weekend of theater, museums, dining, good hotels, sightseeing. These prosthesis-wearing or legless, wheelchair-bound, scar-covered folks, many with befuddling brain traumas, these sweet (mostly young) men and women fighting ‘our’ wars, brought the abstract and far-away horrors into knife-sharp focus. So soul-souring I can barely get out of bed since. That my nationality has implicated me in these wars is, I think, half the reason I spend so much time in bed. You are so lucky that you are Canadian. I look forward to hearing from you when you return to Toronto. I hope the trip will take you as far from the daily news of our world as you can get.

  Oh: A new neighbor has moved in next door. She is from Kiev. That her name is Lillian/Lily is a trumpet note.

  Mother Twitchett

  Jostled in the elevator by Baruch Spinoza from the 19th floor

  SIGNORA,

  I am called Maria Mosca. Recently I am reading your book Fiet’s Vase. I am searching information on the Second War.

  You write your book in 2004, and also at that time it must be difficult to gather interviews from survivors, now sixty-five years after the War.

  My story preferred tells of the Sirovys. Karl’s watercolor View from a Mountain obsesses me and is verily beautiful. You understand me?

  I fascinate myself with the sequence of Nazi Germany and the many stories of the Second War.

  I have been and am still in search of an answer – How could it have succeeded in a country so civilized?

  After thirty or forty books, I do not have still an answer.

  I share this passion with my best friend, feeding her books that I have scarcely finished.

  One day she tells me about an old man who goes to her church. He has eighty-five years now and fifteen when Germany invades Holland. He has been awarded a ‘Righteous Gentile’.

  He is beaten near to death by Nazis after they arrive. His family care for him and when he heals he joins the Underground.

  He works for a circus near the border of Germany and leads escaping Jews and others to their first alloggio sicuro (sorry I not know the words in English) after the border crossing.

  He is captured, torturated, and set on a train to a concentration camp. Fortunately, he succeeds to escape and to free 300 people from the cattle wagons. Later he married an Italian lady and came to Italy. But she is dead.

  He gives to me his permission that I write his story and I tape eight sessions. Then suddenly he wants to stop. He does not want for a book. I now will visit him and I find out what happens. I have most of the story, and so I could write it. He does not have much memory for details. He remembers the type of rifle he wore but not any family celebrations. Anyway, some real holes exist in the story. Not so much the sequence, but the fiber(?).

  I am happy for any hints on where to find about the environment, holidays, etc., in his hometown, Joure (Freisland). He not remembers where on the border he smuggles refugees, so to describe it will be hard. He not knows the name of the circus. He was torturated in a large stone building in the city of Utrecht.

  Exists any way I can find which building? And if I do not find details how do I write around the holes in my researches? In any case, all your suggestions are helpful.

  So few there exist of these people still living, so precious are their stories.

  Grazie!

  I hope you write to me. (I am born ’45.) Forgive my poor English.

  Maria Mosca, Milano

  DEAR PAUL,

  I hope you enjoyed your holiday and rested. I was away in California visiting my son and his new wife for the past week where there were wild fires and hellish heat. My son Thor, his wife Talia, their dog Penelope, hid indoors with me to escape the smoke and heat. I was glad to get back to coolish New York yesterday even if there are some emerging medical problems with my father. Everything in New York right now is about being Dutch. Shortly, we’ll be celebrating the 400th anniversary, the quadricentennial, of the Dutch arrival here in what would become New Amsterdam.

  I’ll be arriving in Old Amsterdam on September 23rd and will take the 114 bus from Central Station directly to your mother’s. While I’m visiting her, I would very much like to meet Leon Prinz and (perhaps) conduct a short interview with him if he is willing. If not an interview, then just a cup of coffee.

  Sending regards to you and the family,

  Alison

  DEAR MARIA MOSCA,

  Thanks for your patience. I was away from New York and did not receive your letter until I returned. Thanks too for writing and for reading Fiet’s Vase, a favorite of my books, though less known than others. If I understand you correctly, you ask if I have suggestions about filling in missing pieces in books that I’ve written. There are two ways I have dealt with this. First, to go there, the place where the story takes place, and look for yourself, find survivors of the time with whom to speak. (You’d best hurry, though, as these living pieces of history are rapidly leaving us.) In this case it would mean going to Utrecht, also to Joure in Friesland. This is what I’ve mostly done. (Zurich, Paris, Trieste, Krakow, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Budapest and beyond, for Holocaust-related work such as Fiet’s Vase, Anne Frank Remembered, The Devil’s Mistress, and so on.) Go to the place and you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll find, especially in the Netherlands where so much remains as it was. You may actually come face to face with exactly what your subject saw, even if it occurred seventy years ago.

  But, when something is really gone, can’t be retrieved – missing pieces, swathes of time, shards of information – there’s nothing to do but to work around what is missing. After all, retrieving these stories is a reconstitution anyway. It’s like pulling a statue from the sea, when it’s been underwater for a very long time. A nose, a leg, a shoulder, perhaps half the torso are missing. I personally find it beautiful in its fractured imperfection, and have no choice but to exclude what’s missing, and texture the remainder somehow.

  An example of this, in my case, is when the time came to interview Miep and Jan Gies about Margot Frank, Anne’s sister, obviously a major figure in the saga that became Anne Frank Remembered. I had rese
rved a couple of interviewing days for Margot; arrived at the Gieses’ apartment where we worked every day. After coffee and cake, I explained that the time had come for them to tell me about Margot. Miep shook her head; Jan shrugged. When I asked how I should interpret their reactions, they explained that, although Margot had been in the picture from 1933 when Mrs. Frank and the children (who had been waiting in Aachen, Germany, for him to get settled) joined Mr. Frank in Amsterdam, they never really got to know her. Although Miep’s association with the Frank family began in ’33, then Jan’s did a little later on, both continuing until August 1944 (the day of the arrest), during all this time, they explained, they had almost no real interaction with Margot. In those years children were not expected to mix with adults, and Margot had not. The only reason they had a relationship with Anne was because Anne had defied social convention, had sought them out, been curious and bold, gregarious and friendly, asked them to spend a night at the hiding place and hence had emerged as a person in her own right; whereas Margot, though polite, had always hung back. This left me, the writer, in a strange dilemma. It meant that there would inevitably be a big blank around one of the major characters in the story. And, if you check Anne Frank Remembered, you’ll see there’s texture, and bits of historically accurate information, but that Margot – sadly – never emerges as anything more than the shadow she was to the Gieses. I guess we deal, as writers, with missing pieces and holes case by case.

  Again, thank you for writing. Don’t know if I’ve been of any help. I wish you luck, whether or not your subject changes his mind.