Found and Lost Read online

  I was reminded of how, after coffee and cake, or lunch or dinner with Miep and Jan at their Amsterdam apartment, Miep would gather plates and carry them into her tiny kitchen. Often, I’d be following behind with an armload of silverware and cups and watch as Miep gathered any bread or crumbs of cake from the plates. She would open the back door that led to a wooden walkway that encircled the building with stairways leading down to the large, tree- and foliage-filled communal inner garden that served the entire block of apartments. She would carefully place the offerings on top of the wooden railing and – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly – birds would swoop down. When I commented on the spectacle of these various birds, wings flapping, descending from nowhere, Miep explained that it was not just that birds in Amsterdam were always hungry but that, since the war, she couldn’t stand wasting a single scrap of anything edible, even crumbs. (She also confided that her neighbors were fed up with her feeding the birds as often they left ‘nature’s offerings’ – to use Anne Frank’s phrase – on the terraces.)

  During the years of interviews and the writing of Anne Frank Remembered, the sight (and sounds) of birds against the always dramatic, ever changing Dutch sky (think of racing clouds, iridescent light, Rembrandt, Jan van Goyen, Albert Cuyp), became a quintessential image of Holland for me. The Dutch sky of your childhood, dear Tinneka.

  I again kept hold of Miep’s hand, wrapped it within mine. Through the large picture window a foot from her bed, in the field, I saw brown rabbits hopping through the snow. Also pheasants, blue tits, scavenging for food. All morning I kept her hand cupped in mine. There is a kind of coffee shop/ cafeteria at the nursing home, so at 10 o’clock, the usual hour as you well know, I went and fetched coffees, arranged them on a tray. Symbolically I brought one for Miep, put it on the table beside her where it stayed while we drank ours and while the rabbits lingered outside the window. Again I told Paul that I very much wanted to stay the night there, but was again gently rebuffed. I wanted to insist but did not. While drinking my coffee, I described the rabbits in the glinting snow not eight feet from her. I don’t know if she heard me.

  She is a little more than one month away from her 101st birthday. I am uncertain what I’m hoping for, just that something would not be as it is; that she should not suffer.

  Alison

  DEAR LILY,

  Who else to write to but you with this news. My fingers are boneless. Yesterday, at evening’s end, 11 January 2010, around 10, the telephone rang. The nursing home phoned to report that Miep had drawn her last breath a few minutes before. Immediately, Paul phoned the Anne Frank Foundation. They must have quickly issued a press release because, within a very few hours, as the long cold night continued, a multitude of messages of condolence poured into my email inbox. By dawn I’d received at least a thousand from places as far afield as India, Los Angeles, Brazil. Extraordinary. I also had at least twenty requests for interviews from press, radio, and television. Simultaneously, ten thousand personal messages arrived from every corner of the world on the website that Paul and his children had recently designed for Miep. And more and more poured in as the day began. So many of these messages are tender, personal, heartfelt, also sincere, heaping respect while honoring the bravery Miep constantly denied. Though for young people the saga of World War II and the Holocaust is blending into the amorphous past, I distinguish a vital feeling for Miep as an icon of heroism who risked all for friendship.

  I cannot imagine giving interviews right now, and have ignored all who contacted me. Paul too is besieged. After breakfast, as the raw fact of her death is being swallowed by us along with boiled eggs, bread and cheese, more, also fervent, press requests poured in. Paul and I finally faced the growing pressure, but easily agreed – no interviews. Miep’s wish is, like Jan’s was, to be cremated. After breakfast, Paul and family began discussing the service. The local crematorium and hall would not be available for more than a week, with no convenient alternative; Paul booked the first date, ten days from now. I told him I’d gladly go to a hotel for the duration, no problem. He said: ‘You stay with us.’

  Right now I would like to imagine Anne, Margot, Otto, Edith Frank, Fritz Pfeffer (Dr. Dussel), Mr. and Mrs. van Pels (van Daan), Peter, also tall handsome Jan leaning languidly against a wall as he did in the hiding place, greeting Miep somewhere that smells of strong coffee, telling her it had been an awfully long wait. And, as Anne did every time Miep entered the hiding place, I imagine her demanding, not asking: ‘So Miep, what’s the news?’

  I’m mostly in my room on the second floor, either lying down or looking out the window at Lucie’s snowy garden.

  In the early afternoon, Paul called me and I went with him and Lucie, driving through fresh snow to Abbekerk. We returned to Miep’s room where she had been laid out, hands upon her breast, crossed. The metal brace had been removed. She looked like herself again. Paul and Lucie stood at her right hand, I at her left. I covered her hands with mine, kissed her forehead, tasting hot, salty tears. When I was able, I backed away so I would not intrude on Paul and Lucie standing beside her. From a few feet away, I watched as they gently coaxed the black onyx ring from her finger. This was the ring that Auguste van Pels, the mother of Peter van Pels, gave Miep one day in 1944 in the hiding place as a small token of gratitude. The van Pels were, like the Franks, a family that Miep risked her life to help. At the time, Miep promised to wear the ring always. This promise, like others she made in her life, she honored fully.

  Alison

  – Interlogue III –

  By 1973, Thor was of school age, and my parents ordered me to settle down. I moved us to London – hard though it is to believe now, it was cheap then for an American – and registered him in a school in Hampstead, across the street from our rental. I hired another au pair, this one named Tom (nicknamed ‘Soccer Tom’ because he loved football, both as a fan and as a player). He was Irish, had been studying to become a priest, but had left the seminary voluntarily or been kicked out – I never knew which. The three-story, furnished house we sublet on Holford Road was a block from the Heath. When Lily visited from Hydra, she and I would walk on the Heath together and she would point to the area where once she had spied Frieda Lawrence. Intensifying her cautionary warnings about my excessive drinking, she several times described how Frieda (by then old, it was the 1950s, many years after D.H. had died), went uncombed, was drunk, stinking, sporting a urine-soaked skirt. ‘This will be you, one day,’ she predicted, locking her marbled green eyes to mine.

  One evening, Lily and I were drinking in a pub with one of her former boyfriends, a painter named Frank. It was winter and I was wearing a long black woolen firefighter’s coat that I had purchased secondhand at a thrift shop. When the pub shut at ten, none of us wanted to go home, so we found a Greek-Cypriot restaurant nearby where, if one ordered some token food, one could go on drinking. And we did go on drinking. And drinking. I had just received my first credit card, from Diner’s Club, and when the bill came I decided to use it to pay. I gave the waiter the card, he ran it through a machine, brought a chit back for me to sign, which I did. A few minutes later, he returned with another, unsigned chit, explaining that my signature was illegible, so I signed the second one. Again, it was returned as illegible, but this time by the owner who was becoming irritated. So was I. Also rather paranoid, thinking that the owner was gathering my signature on chits in order to fleece me.

  The third (or was it the fifth?) time they asked me to sign my name, I wrote – ‘Mickey Mouse’. A quarrel ensued, and quickly escalated until the police were called. Very drunk by now, I became obstreperous, obnoxious. A Black Maria was ordered and I was escorted into it. Lily’s ex, ever the gentleman, jumped in with me, and we were driven to the local police station, with Lily following – she too had had a few too many and had managed to annoy the police so much with her domineering, verbose interference, that they made her wait outside the station in the street. They questioned me: I thought it was all one big joke, and con
tinued being a smart ass. Minutes later, I was taken to a cell. A policeman handed me a coarse gray wool blanket, nudged me inside, and shut the door. I heard the lock turn and only then looked around. It was almost totally dark, a cramped little room. It had a narrow single bed, a sink, a toilet without a seat. I sat on the bed.

  Suddenly, nothing was funny anymore. How had this happened? Here I was, harmless Alison, a young mother, just wanting to have a good time, sitting in a jail cell, beginning to shed tears of self-pity. My nose ran, mixing with the salty tears, soaking the front of my firefighter’s coat. I must have passed out, because suddenly it was morning and an officer was standing at the open cell door. ‘You can go home,’ he told me, ‘but you must appear before the judge at 10.’ He showed me out. ‘Call me a taxi,’ I demanded, no longer humbled, but arrogant and entitled once again, buttoning my coat now covered with silvery dried snot as if snails had spent the night passing over me. He smiled, shook his head, and phoned for a mini-cab.

  In the courtroom, I stood in the dock before a judge who had on a crimped silvery wig. The charge: Drunk and disorderly. The punishment: A five-pound fine. Lily stood off to the side of the courtroom. Her skin had a tense, yellowish cast, and her expression was grave; she looked, in a word, defeated.

  I later understood that alcohol-induced seizures were in turn causing abnormal activity in my brain. The symptoms included tremors, sometimes blankness. Often, as a seizure was coming on (after two, five, ten drinks; there was no pattern), there would be a glowing aura or corona outlining objects. In London the quantity and intensity of my fits had increased. After a year there, when we returned to New York, I was drinking more or less around the clock. New symptoms dogged me, including an overmastering feeling of impending doom, compounded by paranoia, shakes, panic. I weighed under a hundred pounds and could barely boil an egg for Thor’s breakfast. I’d dispensed my divorce settlement hand over fist, had given it away, had squandered it until little remained. I could no longer afford au pair boys, or any other kind of help. What would become of me? I was unfit as a parent, had no skills, had never held down a job. I learned that my parents were removing Thor so that he could live with them; they intended to start by inviting him to spend the summer with them in the Hamptons – the summer of 1975. I, of course, said he could go.

  I reacted to my son’s absence by contracting pneumonia. Gerda, my nurse friend from Dublin, whom I’d met in a bar when she’d recently arrived in New York and who had discreetly been monitoring my implosion, suggested a visit to a doctor in a neighborhood not my own. Almost unable to breathe, it was nonetheless reluctantly that I went to her office.

  This doctor turned out to be connected to Roosevelt Hospital – at the time the only hospital in New York that had begun to educate doctors about alcoholism, and Gerda had been conspiring to get me there. Roosevelt had opened a rehab in an old mansion on East 93rd Street that had been donated by the Christopher Smithers Foundation. When I wound up in the doctor’s office – after a few drinks of course – it was suggested I give rehab a go. She stressed how grand the mansion was, that it had belonged to the theater impresario Billy Rose – so why not give it a try? I have no recollection of the word ‘alcoholism’ having being mentioned. However, I do remember thinking: Not a bad idea. I’ll dry out. Have an affair while there. Write a book. It will be like a Tennessee Williams play. And when I reemerge I’ll be able to start drinking again, begin anew, get a grip …

  The sun’s corona is visible during a total solar eclipse, a pearly glow girdling the darkened moon. But the coronas I saw during my alcoholic seizures had another kind of luminescence. I could never predict when I would be overcome. On June 30th 1975, when I walked through the door of that white marble mansion, I immediately suffered a first seizure, then a second.

  It’s not the ‘small death’ I experienced during every seizure, or the bars I was thrown out of between London and that final day, or the snot and tears that had stained my clothes; it’s the euphoric ‘pearly glow’ that remains in my memory. There’s the rub. The demoralization, unfit mothering, perilousness that intensified through those years, I perceived as blissful oblivion, as a high-wire act. ‘Only when we drink poison are we well,’ Baudelaire is supposed to have written. And that delusion, in the passionate love affair I had with an elixir that turned me into a monster but felt like a blessing, is what alcoholism induced in me.

  Part IV

  – Snow Goose Weathervane –

  GOOD DAY MISSES

  Since I located you I have been waiting for you to contact me for your Confirmable Bank Draft of $5,000,000,00 United States Dollars. If I hear from you, the only money you will send to the FEDEX DELIVERY COURIER SERVICE to deliver your consignment direct to your postal address. Don’t be deceived by anybody to pay any other money except 55,000 USD.

  Note the FEDEX DELIVERY COURIER SERVICES don’t know the contents of the box. I registered it as a BOX OF AFRICA CLOTHS. They do not know the content is money. This is to avoid them delaying with the BOX. I’m waiting your urgent response.

  Grace and peace,

  Mr. Faruk Ulster

  DEAR ALISON,

  So many memories. The way you and I met in Amsterdam and the many times we were in the Woestduinstraat apartment drinking coffee with Miep and Jan. I still see us on the bridge over Singel making photographs and, again, making photographs in our apartment on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. It seems all very long ago.

  Funny memories of dinner on Herengracht. I had asked Dusty Springfield over for coffee. Dusty called to say she had a terrible headache and could not come downstairs. Ten minutes later she called that this was nonsense, but she was so very nervous, because she never met a war hero before. To break the ice, I played twenty minutes of Miep’s Story made by the Anne Frank people, and then twenty minutes of Dusty’s concert in the Royal Albert Hall. Dusty sat on the floor at Miep and Jan’s feet.

  Miep and Jan accompanied me when my lover was cremated. I felt comforted because of that. I had no family and there were these hordes of older uncles and aunts from Pim’s family. Having Miep and Jan with me felt a little bit like I had a family as well. A year later Jan died. Of course I went as you saw, but I was lost among all those people whom I did not know. Suddenly so many best friends. That always happens when famous people die. I think a lot of Miep these days and that is my way of grieving. I must have met Paul at Jan’s funeral. I think we shook hands. I will send him a letter of condolence. I wish I could have been there to see you but hope that will happen in happier circumstance in the South of France one day. I thought of you when we drove by Perpignan last week. Very glad that you were there in time to say goodbye, hope you told Miep I loved her, when nobody was looking.

  Lots of love from a very rainy Spain. Your old friend,

  Maarten

  Spinoza’s mongrel growls at him in the elevator. Fell asleep in silence, woke with the radio on

  DEAR ALISON,

  About Miep, it had to happen.

  About Anne Frank, did you know that the play of the Diary of Anne Frank has been done with puppets in Atlanta, Georgia, and that there is a new book told from Peter’s point of view? The author of the latter has been accused of ‘oversexualizing the young diarist’ and ‘exploiting the Shoah’. Have you read it? It is certainly a shame that rain and wind have toppled Anne Frank’s beloved chestnut tree. Will there ever be an end to related bits and bobs?

  I stumbled on a blog that comments on the talk you gave in north London in February, saying you expressed ‘Holocaust fatigue’ – a phrase I can’t imagine you actually using. The blogger wrote, Did Stendhal and Tolstoy exhaust Napoleonic war literature? Check it out, as they say, it was in a Guardian UK Book Blog. Maybe you need a breath or two before you get your hockey stick back on the ice?

  Simon

  DEAR SIMON,

  Is that what I have, ‘Holocaust fatigue’? No, I haven’t read the new book imagining Peter’s side of the story, nor have I seen the blog. The reading
in north London went well enough, I thought. It was great to be in London again – you know I lived there once? You don’t believe that I haven’t been keeping up with Holocaust and A.F. literature, but it’s true. The only story that recently enticed me was the possibility of arranging a reunion, as a kind of surprise for her birthday, between Miep and Leon Prinz – I think you already know she and Jan had saved him as a small Jewish child during the war. Even though he was located, miraculously, Prinz told Miep’s son he has ‘closed the door on the war’, and declined to be interviewed. He did attend Miep’s funeral – incognito. I was quietly introduced by Paul’s friend Gerlof to a square-jawed, dark, still-youthful man: Leon Prinz. When I shook his somewhat delicate hand, he did not pull away.

  Also at the funeral: Anne Frank’s sole surviving relative, her cousin Bernd ‘Buddy’ Elias who once ice-skated with Anne, was an actor, and recently became head of the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel; and Anne’s childhood friend Jacqueline (now quite elderly as Anne would also be), called ‘Joopie’ in early versions of the Diary, who (as Anne explained in her diary) when Anne asked her before going into hiding if, ‘as proof’ of their friendship, they could ‘touch each other’s breasts’, had refused.