"'Yours, Anne'"
MARGOLIS 15, RICHARD j.
States of the Union 'YOURS, ANNE' BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Diane and I spent some time in Holland recently, with the following consequences. Saturday: We have found a sunny room at the Hotel...
...I am gazing at the Nuenen original for the first time...
...A woman in a red hat works the dirt with a hoe...
...My family stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding their breath, ready if necessary to drag them apart...
...Sitting in the nave beneath a vaulted ceiling of cedar wood, we listen to the astonishing rumbles of Bach and Handel, Schumann and Dupre...
...This observation runs contrary to the old nursery rhyme: The children in Holland take pleasure in making What the children in England take pleasure in breaking...
...By the time she has gotten around to English, what she is describing is no longer in view...
...Diane rejects my notion that the Dutch gracht, or canal, is an etymological ancestor of our "creek...
...They are so sticky and tough, they lie like stones in one's stomach—ah, well...
...and Mrs...
...The music is therapy...
...We eat potatoes at every meal," she wrote in her diary, "beginning with breakfast...
...Our spirits brighten under the sun...
...But we're still alive, and quite often we even enjoy our poor meals...
...A young woman holding a microphone stands at the bow and, as the boat churns through Amsterdam waters, tries to tell us what we are seeing...
...Here," as Rupert Brooke remarked, "tulips bloomasthey are told...
...I think of her as a child, of course— as the little girl with black hair and prayerful eyes who stares out at us from bookstore shelves...
...Until about 150 years ago, the Town Hall boasted an outdoor scaffold for hangings...
...As Vincent himself pointed out, "Black has a glow all its own...
...The family sits around the table, eating potatoes and drinking coffee, amid an ether the color of potato peelings...
...The yells and screams, stamping and abuse—you can't possibly imagine it...
...The room Anne shared with Mr...
...Children gleefully ride the rubber-bumpered "Dodge-Ems...
...The rider rings his little bell—an angry chirp—and then favors us with a guttural freshet of Dutch invective...
...We will cultivate our garden amid falling leaves, and await another spring...
...Two roosters, their crowns strangely matching the woman's hat, peck at the earth...
...Diane and I stand at a window facing the back yard...
...Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is...
...No doubt there are scientific explanations for the miracle that occurs when air is forced through pipes, but at the moment I am not interested...
...We are not alone...
...There are moments when one can be grateful for language barriers...
...Frank's —was not an unmixed blessing...
...Near the map one sees signs of a different sort of progress—thin, horizontal pencil lines on the plaster, to mark the children's increasing heights...
...We are happy to return to our Herrengracht haven...
...Cohabitation with the Van Daans—he was a business associate of Mr...
...Van Daan's apartment, which also served as the Franks' kitchen and living room...
...and Mrs...
...Anne Frank might have appreciated the riddle of the clock...
...Nobody, she points out, has ever been up a. gracht without a paddle...
...Somewhere near the Royal Palace I fall asleep, a victim of gentle tides and jet lag...
...The diary, which must have looked luxuriantly blank and beckoning, was given to Anne on her 13 th birthday, June 12, 1942...
...The luck was all ours...
...Deliverance must have seemed just inches away before August 1, 1944, when Nazi police stormed up the stairs shouting "Open up...
...I must tell you about the dumplings, which we make out of government flour, water, and yeast...
...Through a window behind the little circle no light enters...
...Yours, Anne...
...The Potato-Eaters" turned out to be Vincent's first great painting, although no one except Theo thought so at the time...
...This morning we take one to Haarlem to see a friend who lives down the block from the Frans Hals Museum...
...It is 7 p.m...
...Like their forebears who came here to attend hangings, the children can momentarily satisfy their aggressions without fear of reprisal...
...The old place—it was built in 1635—is packed with pilgrims like us, mostly Americans, mostly Jews...
...Today is also a holiday—post-East-er—and a small carnival Midway has been set up in the marketplace...
...Light and darkness...
...The contrast between what we see and where we stand saddens me...
...Life and death...
...It suggests the reasonableness of Anne's simple prayer: "I want to go on living after my death...
...Later in the afternoon we walk to the Old Church (Oude Kerk) to hear an Easter Sunday organ recital...
...When the Franks were hiding here, all the windows had to be covered with black paper, but now we can look down and see people cultivating their tiny gardens on Easter Sunday...
...Wednesday: "I hope to have some luck with my picture of the potato-eaters," Vincent Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo in April 1885...
...Saturday: We have found a sunny room at the Hotel Ambassade, 341 Herrengracht, Amsterdam...
...A few blocks away we board a tour boat made of glass...
...And therefore, I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me...
...People would crowd into the square to enjoy the spectacle...
...After lunch we board a bus for Ley-den, and then a second bus for Lisse and the Keukenhof Gardens, resplendent with blossoms...
...Only a few years separate his darkling peasants of Nuenen from his luminescent sunflowers and cypresses of Aries, and the similarities seem clear enough...
...And: "I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to...
...This is our house, too...
...A map of Normandy still covers part of a wall, with ink markings to show the Allies' progress toward Holland...
...Executions were occasions for holidays...
...Open up...
...Monday: As in Mussolini's Italy, the trains in democratic Holland run on time...
...A weak gaslight flares overhead...
...I want to go on living after my death...
...Or did he wish us to conclude the clock was broken—another sign of agrarian poverty...
...There have been resounding rows again between Mr...
...To the very end, which came all too soon—on July 29, 1890, after Vincent shot himself with a revolver— he hoped in vain for recognition...
...Looking to my left, I notice something I have not seen in the reproductions—a wooden clock...
...Yet even up here, in the enforced gloom, there was hope and there was growth...
...Bravo, where Hals is interred...
...Holland was the cradle of capitalism, and the rich merchants we see here, so somber and substantial, paid their artists handsomely for the privilege of immortality...
...Nobody starves in Holland, because anyone in need can go " on the dole...
...From the bathroom another stairway leads up to Mr...
...Did Van Gogh intend to depict a midnight meal, to show how hard and long the peasants had worked...
...From a local flower producer we order scores of tulip bulbs, having been assured they will arrive in Connecticut next September...
...It fronts a brown canal decorated with houseboats and, looking very small and disoriented, an occasional mallard...
...Certainly she could have identified with the scene in the painting...
...Some of her Hollywood movie star pictures remain pasted on the walls...
...Actually, it is something less than a decision: We are drawn here by powerful magnets of history...
...The grass glistens...
...The official unemployment rate in Holland is just over 14 per cent, and we are told by our academic acquaintances here that the real figure is considerably higher...
...But the slack-jaw looks of these young people with nothing to do suggest another kind of hunger—for rewards and favors only an expanding economy can confer...
...When we have had enough, our friend leads us out and down a narrow lane to the old marketplace, flanked on one side by the 13th-century Town Hall (still in use) and on another by the Church of St...
...The pencil markings on the wall have already been noted...
...Van Daan," Anne wrote in October 1943...
...One assumes it is nighttime...
...The hands point to 25 minutes before 12, a puzzling signal...
...In the main room, not much bigger than our hotel quarters, the parents slept alongside Margot, their older daughter...
...All this shouting and weeping...
...Now, on this Amsterdam workday, we see that many people are out of work...
...Most of them are young, and they are everywhere in evidence— sitting on cathedral steps, lounging by the fountain in Dam Square, nursing their cups of coffee at sidewalk cafes...
...We have discovered spring, a state of mind we cannot resist exporting...
...It houses many portraits—only a few of them by Hals—of sturdy Dutch burghers wearing improbably large black hats...
...Note, too, Anne's diary:" I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work...
...Dus-sel is next door...
...Sunday: It is Easter, so we decide to visit the Anne Frank House, the closest we can come to sharpening our sense of death and renewal...
...Together we climb the steep steps that lead to The Annex, where the Frank family hid themselves for two years...
...But in reality she is my contemporary, born exactly 18 days before I was...
...Tuesday: The long holiday weekend kept us from knowing...
...Church and state facing off, as usual...
...It finally materialized here on the Paulus Potterstraat in Amsterdam, where the citizens of Holland have erected a museum devoted entirely to Van Gogh's remarkable works...
...Armed with our Baedeker, we walk down the narrow staircase that guards our door and enter the street, where we are nearly flattened by a fast-moving bicycle...
...Alas, she must speak sequentially in four languages...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 69
