Goodbye, my dears! Kisses!
We’re now in Amsterdam, our third day already. When we arrived, the city was decked out in orange flags, but not for us.* My mother and I are sitting in a restaurant near the railway station, which floats on the black water. The sun is shining, ships sail by, motorboats moor at our feet.
We are waiting for Herr Krabbe. Maybe he’ll let me have a ride in a motorboat. He can be very nice sometimes, but at other times he gives me such a scowl, it’s as though he wishes I didn’t exist. Yesterday he refused to go and feed the gulls with me.
I can’t speak to my mother. She is wearing a frown of concentration. Probably she’s thinking about how to explain to Herr Krabbe that she’s forgotten to bring my father’s manuscript again.
I am writing a postcard to Madame Rostand. She doesn’t know Amsterdam at all, or France either. But my father once told her that she was a special type of Belgian woman who was more French than the French.
Amsterdam is very beautiful. It is made up of rivers which are called grachten. You’re not allowed to swim in them, because they’re poisonous. The flowers here are even lovelier than elsewhere. Because of the monarchy, a lot of them are yellow.
The hotel we’re staying in is so lovely and distinguished that we forget to breathe when we walk across the lobby. My mother thinks we don’t even look like guests any more, more like women bringing sheets and towels for the guests, or come to collect clothes for laundering and ironing. In the summer we were beautiful and could walk around in sandals and sheer dresses, but what about now?
Maybe my grandmother will come from Germany to see us, and bring some warm clothes and coats with her. But my mother doesn’t want to write and tell her all the things we need, in case she holds it against my father.
It’s cold here beside the water. We laid our heavy travelling plaids round our shoulders. But my mother doesn’t want to be seen going in and out of the hotel wrapped in blankets like that.
Last night in the hotel room we put on the lovely cheerful Hungarian folk costumes my father sent us. When the chambermaid came in to turn back the sheets, she asked us if we didn’t have a flyer or a playbill, because she was so sure we belonged to some travelling dance troupe.
Herr Krabbe called to say he was waiting for us downstairs in the café. I ran down as quickly as I could. Because it happens to be a fact that Herr Krabbe always gets a free dish of nuts from the waiters, but in return he has to drink some really horrible drink called Bols. If I so much as sniff it, it makes me splutter. My father always drinks medicine like that. Herr Krabbe lets me take his nuts.
All the people in the café except Herr Krabbe have looked at me and complimented me on my beautiful national costume. He thought it was about time my mother came down, but she has to get changed first. Imagine if she came down in the Hungarian national costume!
Herr Krabbe asked me about the manuscript for the novel. I said: ‘It’s in a suitcase.’
‘Will your mother be bringing it downstairs with her?’ asked Herr Krabbe, looking at me with squinting eyes.
‘I don’t know, Herr Krabbe.’
Herr Krabbe wants the novel, but my mother and I don’t have a manuscript. What to do?
‘Do lots of people write novels, Herr Krabbe?’
‘What do you mean “lots”? Everyone writes novels.’
‘My mother isn’t writing a novel.’
‘Really? You surprise me.’
‘Is the waiter here writing a novel?’
‘Bound to be.’
‘Does everyone have to write a novel?’
‘No.’
‘Why does my father have to, then?’
‘Because he knows how it’s done.’
‘Do the other people not know how it’s done, then?’
‘Almost never.’
‘So why do they write novels?’
‘Because they don’t know they can’t.’
‘Can children write novels, Herr Krabbe?’
‘No. Even though people who set themselves to write novels are children.’
‘My father isn’t a child.’
‘Oh yes, he is.’
‘But that can’t be true. My father’s as tall as you.’
‘Taller.’
‘Herr Krabbe, is it really true that no child has ever written a novel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think a well-behaved child could if she tried hard and applied herself?’
‘No.’
‘Not even if she practises on the typewriter?’
‘No – oh, for God’s sake, don’t cry – what’s your name again? Kully? Here, eat some nuts, drink some more orangeade, be brave. What would you say to some ice cream? Your dress is really very pretty. You’ve turned into such a big girl, I can’t sit you on my lap any more. When will your mother come? I want to go to bed. You can’t yet write a novel for your father – he’ll have to do it all by himself, and maybe he really will deliver it soon.’
‘I’m sure he will, Herr Krabbe. He only needs another two hundred pages.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Herr Krabbe.
My mother walked in. Herr Krabbe struggled to get out of his chair, kissed her hand, and said: ‘As a publisher I’d like to be Pope, and enforce celibacy on all my authors.’
‘Why?’ said my mother, and: ‘Oh God, now I’ve gone and left the manuscript upstairs – I’ll give it to you tomorrow, Herr Krabbe.’
I was sent to bed, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. Why shouldn’t a child write a novel? If an angel could perform a miracle and I could straight away type out two hundred pages of a novel, then we’d be saved.
When my mother and me arrived in Amsterdam two days ago, the first thing we did was sleep. Then my mother put me into the white dress, and we went to Herr Krabbe’s office. In the history book my mother is teaching me from, there is a picture of a veiled Queen Louise, standing imploringly before a grim and dark Napoleon.
That’s how my mother stood before Herr Krabbe as she asked him to send money to my father. Herr Krabbe was holding in his hand a telegram from my father that said: ‘Beg your protection for helpless wife and child.’ That meant Mama and me.
Herr Krabbe lifted both hands to his head, and squashed it between them. He showed my mother books full of sums, and each sum a line and a total. He said my father should have delivered his new novel to them six months ago already. He had kept on promising the completed manuscript, and already drawn an awful lot of money on it in the form of advances.
My mother said: ‘The novel’s finished. I’ve got it in the hotel room.’
Herr Krabbe sent my father the travel money he needed. That was our first visit to Herr Krabbe; since then we’ve seen quite a bit of him.
Now we’re sitting by the waterside, waiting for him again. Maybe he’ll turn up on his bicycle, and then I can try to ride it. Everyone here goes around on bicycles all the time, and they’re a lot of very happy cyclists. Only Herr Krabbe is an earnest-looking cyclist; he never hums or whistles to himself as he rides. Nor does he ride no-hands either. I only hope my father will be back soon.
We’re in a great state of alarm about the hotel now. If only we could move out! My mother doesn’t dare ask what the room is costing us. We are staying in the same hotel as a bunch of Maharajas – those are the richest men in the world.
My father wanted us to talk to the manager, Herr Flens, right away, about the sixty guilders he owed my father. But it was very disagreeable for my mother to go and talk about that with Herr Flens right away. So, because we didn’t even have the money for the tram to go to Herr Krabbe, she just sat quietly in our room for a couple of hours, to overcome her embarrassment. When she had overcome enough of it, she went downstairs with me, and asked for Herr Flens. He came out right away, short and fat, with Chinese eyes. He was very pleased to learn that we were associated with my father, and that my father sent him a greeting. And he said he had long wanted to have an address for my father, who still owed
him sixty guilders. The money would certainly come in handy now.
My father must have got everything mixed up. My mother said it was terribly difficult to be married to my father. I asked my mother whether she would like it better to be married to the Maharajas, and she replied: ‘No, not that either.’
I would really like to be married to the Maharajas. They are so lovely and brown, naturally brown, even in the middle of winter. To get like that, other people have to lie down in the burning sun for months.
Next to our hotel stands a man with a big cart, with lots and lots of jars of herrings and gherkins on it. I am friends with the man, but the only way I can speak to him is if I pinch my nose shut, because the herrings smell so. The man speaks Dutch, but even so I can almost always understand what he says. He has a face like a scrunched-up piece of paper, blue eyes and blond hair. His father is dead, but he still has a mother, and two sisters and no children, and no wife either, because he can’t afford one. He loves his herrings and his onions and his mother – he didn’t mention his sisters.
He told me some more about the Maharajas. I’m pretty certain I’m going to marry a Maharaja now. The Maharajas will give me a diamond as big as an egg. Once I have a diamond like that, I’ll be able to buy all the hotels in the world, and my parents and I will be able to travel fearlessly from hotel to hotel. We will never have to pay a bill, and we will always be able to leave just exactly when we feel like it.
It seems a Maharaja has several wives, which I think is a good thing. That way when he has to leave, I won’t be alone but will be able to turn to the other wives for comfort. I don’t know whether it’s allowed to marry several Maharajas. Obviously that would be the best. Then, if a couple of them had to travel to Poland, I’d still have a few more to hand. My mother is a great example of how difficult it is for a woman who has to get by on just one man.
At last Herr Krabbe has turned up in our restaurant by the waterside. He looks dark and angry, like a cannibal. It seems more writers have turned up in Amsterdam, so Herr Krabbe really has his hands full, because they’re all after him for money.
Herr Krabbe has a letter from my father, who says the travel money he sent wasn’t enough, and he’s to send more, and also that it was inhuman on the part of Krabbe to keep a man away from his wife and child; in addition he had a pitiable creature whom he had to comfort over in Poland. That pitiable creature is Manya.
Herr Krabbe says he thinks it’s perfectly possible that my father might marry a second wife somewhere else out of pure absent-minded politeness. He wanted my mother to write and inform him that Herr Krabbe would not consider himself responsible for any further families of my father’s, and would not support him either if he should find himself locked up for bigamy.
Bigamy is the thing the Maharajas do, but they’re allowed to. My father is only allowed to have my mother and me. My mother approves of that arrangement too.
Mama is crying. Herr Krabbe has had it up to here with misery. He even forgets to ask after the manuscript; instead he orders milk, cake and coffee for us.
My mother has no use for Manya, but my father does. When we were in Poland a year ago, he kept on comforting her. Manya is as beautiful as the princesses in the fairytale books my mother reads to me. In the cafés in Poland, I always wanted to hold my cold hands in front of Manya’s eyes, to make them warm. Those are the sort of eyes Manya has.
Manya is the wife of Uncle Genek. I suppose she’s my aunt really. But she’s not a real aunt. Real aunts don’t sparkle like that, and they aren’t so nice-smelling either. Uncle Genek isn’t a real uncle either. He has terribly big ears, and in the middle of them he looks very small and sad. He walks much too fast – a real uncle has a different sort of walk.
We met Uncle Genek last year in Vienna; that’s when my father discovered that they were related. Uncle Genek invited us to visit them in Poland. We really don’t mind where we go, so long as it’s inside some country or other.
My father was able to give a series of lectures in Poland too, but I wasn’t allowed to listen. The thing about lectures is that they always take place after bedtime. I so badly wanted to go, because thousands of lights are turned on in wonderful castles, and lots of people come, all beautiful and sparkling like the evening star. I imagine a lecture must be something like thunder made out of diamonds.
Cars came to collect my father. My mother calmed me down and said all that was going to happen was that my father was going to speak. After that I could fall asleep quite easily, because I know what it’s like when my father speaks. Only: why is speaking sometimes called ‘lecture’, and sometimes just ‘speaking’?
When we arrived in Poland, Manya and Uncle Genek were living in Lvov in a large cold dark house where lots of aunt-like women eddied back and forth. My father declined to live there with them. Then I was supposed to live there, but my mother didn’t want that. My father has got lots of people, but my mother has only me.
We moved into a small hotel. There were seventeen men in navy caps waiting outside the door, merely in order to open the door for the guests – that was probably their livelihood. Our room was as bright as summer, but when we looked out of the window, we saw a world that was all Christmas.
I asked my mother if that was really all snow. She said: ‘Yes.’
I could hardly believe it. The snow came down from the sky. The whole of the earth was white with snow, glistening. Stars shone down on the houses, pine trees stood in the big square, and in the very middle of it stood the Almighty, watching over everything like a big dark pillar. My father, though, said it wasn’t the Almighty at all, but some Polish general. That may have been the case during the day, at night it was certainly the Almighty.
The whole of the earth was white – I felt so glad. Sleighs drove by carrying Christmas manger straw, and other sleighs hailed them by ringing their bells. I secretly ran down very fast and jumped into the snow.
Sometimes the snow got to be very slippery-smooth. Once, my mother fell down in the middle of Akademizki. Then a whole regiment of marching soldiers picked her up. After that we bought galoshes for her. But she kept on taking timid little steps, just like the aunts when they left that big dark house.
They don’t have taxis in Lvov. We only ever saw one, and that was broken. So we always took a sleigh when we went to the café Roma at lunchtime. There, all the men kissed my mother’s hand and complimented her. My father assembled crowds around him at table. Everyone drank green schnapps, as green as the traffic lights in Brussels and Amsterdam. The men wore black cloth blinkers over their ears and noses, because the cold ate away human extremities. It’s my belief that only the men suffer in this way, because the women never went around with black blinkers on their faces, nor did I ever see one without a nose or ears.
My mother wasn’t able to pronounce Polish very well, so I had to learn it for her. I made friends with the daughter of the toilet lady in the Roma, and with a man who stood near the hotel, and sold lighters on the sly. If you must know, the Polish government is against lighters. I sometimes helped the man whisper into people’s ears, and if they didn’t buy anything, we swore at them together.
In a new country the first words I learn are ones my father thinks are indecent, and I’m not meant to say them. But it’s a pity to have to give up any of the very few words at your disposal. And when I’ve said them, people have always looked at me extra fondly.
Just now in Amsterdam Herr Krabbe told me not to say a certain indecent Dutch word, so I decided I had better talk to him.
‘Herr Krabbe, is my spit decent so long as it’s in my mouth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Herr Krabbe, is my spit indecent if I spit it on the table here?’
‘Yes. Your spit is, and you are.’
‘Herr Krabbe, is it indecent if I say “spit”?’
‘“Saliva” might be considered better.’
‘Is saliva the same as spit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Herr Kra
bbe, if I spit my saliva on the table, is that still indecent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Herr Krabbe, if my saliva on the table is indecent and the word “saliva” is decent, what makes a word indecent?’
‘Goddamnit, I’ve had enough of this. I don’t care – you can use all the bad language you like.’
‘Herr Krabbe, why is saliva that I’ve spat out indecent anyway?’
‘It’s not indecent at all, it’s you who are indecent. Spit doesn’t belong on the table, because it makes it dirty. Anyway spitting is disgusting.’
‘Herr Krabbe, if I spit spit I’m indecent, but if I say “spit” I’m not indecent, because surely it’s just a word?’
‘Oh, child! Just a word! What do you know about words!’
‘I know lots of bad words, Herr Krabbe.’
When we were in Poland, we ate lots of red soup and white chicken, and sometimes I was allowed to drink sweet molten honey, which is called mead. When I’d had some of that, I was as happy as a cloud.
Akademizki is a street, a wide street with black bare trees either side of it, and people running up and down it. My mother calls streets like that ‘promenade’. There were men on it who wore fur caps. And sometimes men rushed past who had had their faces all wrapped up in beards and hair, not because it was cold, but so that they could be Jewish and pleasing unto the Lord.
That’s what Uncle Genek told me. I’m not sure if it’s true. Sometimes people don’t tell me the truth. I believed that it was pleasing unto the Lord if people wore a lot of hair. And now I knew also why my father didn’t want to be bald, and why Mary Mother of God had lots of hair too.
In the afternoon I had to go into the gloomy house with the gloomy aunts. They asked me about my mother. I said: ‘She wants to be pleasing unto the Lord.’
In the evening the gloomy aunts and my father both asked me: ‘Why did you lie? You knew your mother wasn’t in church, but at the hairdresser’s.’
‘But she was in church.’
‘Kully, did your mother say she was going to church?’
Child of All Nations Page 5