I've received a few letters from classmates asking for some more of my stories.....I hope you will indulge me.....  This one from a trip a few years back to Amsterdam to visit my daughter who was on contract there.....Anne Frank, Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Hans Brinker, even Don McLain.....And Leonard Cohen.....

Written with great trepidation of a Mrs. Penny comma splice  :-)

For Sally Smisson, our great 10th grade English teacher....

Amsterdam...

The Vestibule of Betrayal

Pearl and I walked the lonely streets (straats) of Amsterdam near Herengracht one evening, a cool and misty traverse along one of the semi-circular canals (grachts) that run through vintage neighborhoods of fine old Dutch architecture, narrow upright houses, offices, shops and restaurants pushing together in a symbolic clash of gables and colors, some structures seeming to elicit a low moan of anguish as they bend forward in a last squeeze to retain their rightful address, the tilt of despair leaving them clutching, leaning.

Pearl is a wonderful American dog, about 55 pounds, young and black as night, a mixture of Lab and likely Rottweiler, but with a gentle heart and a knowledge of the neighborhood in which we walked--she led the way.

A male cyclist with two young boys following rode by us, the man snapping at me to "Clean up the mess!" I looked around. Pearl was being accused of another hound's doing, a sizable deposit along the brick bike trail. I shouted back at him--"It is not my dog's!" The man wore a suit and tie, his two boys in school uniforms, and they all glared as he waved an angry arm down in disgust at me. "It's the law!" he barked. "It's the law!"

Whenever I walk through European cities I tend to conjure up Nazi soldiers and SS in grey uniforms with loose jodhpurs, Gestapo agents in trench coats and drooping black fedoras.  People held at bay, terrified, bullied. "Papers, papers!" Men dressed like children.

Amsterdam is the quietest city of size, so many bicycles, so few dogs barking, the occasional exploding engine of a moto intruding into the starkness of our evening together, Pearl and I.  We slipped across the canal bridge and walked down streets where once plague ravaged. Some 27,000 dead souls were quickly buried, burned or carted off as the scourge of the flea by way of the rat spread the virus, bulbous sores creating panic among Dutch households.  Probably Dutch shipping from Algiers brought in the horror.

We stopped at a restaurant on a street corner where the warm smell of pizza brought us back to the present. The Dutch are friendly hosts and we were both invited into the main dining room where I sat at a wooden table, Pearl lying at my feet, and ordered a Margarita pizza and a Heineken draught.

A lady with DUKE stitched onto the breast of her navy blue sweatshirt approached our table and struck up a conversation with me.  As she knelt down to pet Pearl, she told me she was given the DUKE jersey by a man with whom she once "shagged." Not sure how to take that. Maybe some southern dance (Shag Basic) like they did years ago at the Jolly Knave (now Mitch's Tavern). I told her that I went to State, near Duke.  She said, "Oh the cheap seats!"  I nodded and she moved on--she was too quick for me, but attractively sassy.

I finished the pizza and beer, then Pearl and I left and resumed our walk along a row of houses leading up to a great cathedral with a towering steeple. We walked on past the giant edifice and came to the Anne Frank house, now a museum. Again Nazi soldiers, occupiers of Amsterdam, came to mind. Anne, along with family and friends, was captured while hiding in a secret annex of her father's office, and since she was avoiding arrest was treated harshly as a criminal by the Nazis. She and the others were marched out onto the street and shipped off to Auschwitz.  Later her sister Margot and she were transferred to Bergen-Belsen where they both died of typhus shortly before the end of the war.

Speculation on their capture focuses on betrayal--the feeling is that it was an inside job. There are three suspects, but most think the betrayer was the warehouseman William van Maaren. Over 85,000 Jews from Amsterdam perished in the Nazi concentration camps. What possessed a proud Dutchman, some 64 years ago, to turn in a 15 year-old girl and her family and friends to the SS and the Gestapo? Maybe just an officious duty-bound citizen of Amsterdam. "It's the law! It's the law!" Pearl and I moved into the secret annex of my daughter's house that night.

Gestapo Agents

Nazi SS officers

The Anne Frank House (now a museum)

Margot Frank

 

Margot and Anne

 

 

 

leonard cohen dance me to the end of love

"Starry Starry Night"

The following morning I rode a bicycle along the lovely canals, the day bright with sunshine, the air crisp and cool and clean. The city is so beautiful, the home of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. The land of wooden shoes and tulips and wind mills and "Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates." A fairytale. Today the German foot soldier gave way to romance and promise. I took in shops and museums and markets, ate olives and bread and cheese, and sipped Dutch beer. I rode down along the bay windows near the Central Station and witnessed scantily attired ladies for hire inside portals of desire while throngs of English hooligans stirred up mischief by slinging obscenities at them, other groups of packaged tours taking in the local ambience, all in stride.

Soon the day was falling into shadow and evening was upon me. Twilight fell into darkness, the cloudless sky now a star-filled canopy evoking the heartfelt brush strokes of Vincent Van Gogh. The perfunctory cadence of toy soldiers, the vagaries of gaping tourists, the insurmountable ride over hallowed turf unto sullen eyes. The lovely brunette behind the bay window, her Mona Lisa smile stylishly cryptic, emoting both mischief and betrayal.

But heavenly illusions, whether on stretched canvas or celestial panorama, the beauty within the eyes of the painter, the writer, lie within the nocturnal closure of somnolence, the eternal refuge from the mundane fixtures of rigor and protocol.

 

Van Gogh (The Starry Night)

For little Anne Frank and her sister Margot-- from Don McLean's tribute to Vincent Van Gogh ('Vincent')

"This world was never meant for someone as beautiful as you."

(Tap the image for Don McClean's 'Vincent')

I took a train to Dusseldorf the next morning and caught a flight on Air Berlin to Bangkok. The conductor on the train took my ticket with a smile, the flight personnel were warm and hospitable, no Gestapo agents, no SS.

From Bangkok--Dan(ny)

Cheers to Sally Smisson and Broughton memories ...... 

Dan(ny)