Found and Lost by Alison Leslie Gold

Author:Alison Leslie Gold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749609
Publisher: New York Review Books

DARLING TINNEKA,

At eight I went down for a breakfast of bread, butter, cheese, salami, a boiled egg. I drank tea and cold milk: the usual. Around the large rectangular table: Paul, Lucie, their children, and the fiancée of the eldest son. As we were finishing, Lucie diced a stack of bread slices on top of a cutting board, brown and white bread. Followed by me and the two large house cats, she carried the cutting board out into the garden that is beside the Ijsselmeer, and waded into calf-deep snow past small trees and covered flowerbeds. As the cats and I watched from the doorway, Lucie flung the bread scraps into the air and, amazingly, birds swooped out of nowhere to catch them. These were gulls, small birds, waterfowl that had bred on the Russian tundra in summer and taken their traditional path to winter in the Netherlands. Lucie explained that the birds were very hungry as snow has obscured their food for many days.

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

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.