An Immigrant Girl’s Search for Home

(Excerpted from the Dutch Immigrant Memoir Open Turns by Hendrika de Vries.)

 

Missing Amsterdam

I awaken early in our new home.
Already, the just-risen sun makes me sweat,
scalds my pale thirteen-year-old Dutch skin,
and reminds me I do not belong in this country of sunshine and hope,
this Land of Tomorrow.

You will adapt, my parents say.
We survived the war.
We are immigrants, resilient and strong.

But every night my soul flies back across the equator
to the edge of the grey North Sea,
where I eat salted herrings at stands
on curved bridges over manmade canals.
Watch shimmery images on the still waters
that mirror stately 17th century tall narrow houses
lined along ancient cobblestoned sidewalks.
They lean into one another,
bearing the quiet burden of history.

My young feet take me down a narrow street.
Look, there’s my home,
just a short walk, few blocks only, from the annex,
where Anne Frank, not much older than I, once hid
from the hatred that took her life and forever changed mine.

Now bicycles whizz by.
New riders laugh and joke in my mother tongue.
I wish I could join them.
A familiar cool rain drips out of the low-hanging sky,
mixes with tears, cools my cheeks,
washes the cobble stones under my feet.
Slowly, a pale sun
pushes aside the clouds,
as if remembering the needs of the earth below
and bathes my old city in a Rembrandt glow.
Announces the Arrival of Spring in the Lowlands,
the place that was home from the day before I was born.

But the heat of a harsh summer sun, the hissing
of blowflies outside the screen door, return me to now.
I long for a shower, to feel water cooling my skin,
but the rainwater tanks are half empty.
Rain is a rarity in this dry mallee scrub desert.
Our new home is in the Australian Bush.

You will adapt, my parents insist.
You survived war. You are an immigrant resilient strong.
But I wonder, how will I ever retrieve my soul?