‘Are his hands small like a dressmaker’s?’ we women asked them softly. ‘And, apart from grey, is his beard the colour of copper?’
They stood and let it sink in. Oompah Hatsi, the button-chewer, was the son of Charley Bottletop and Nienevee from Outside the Walls?
‘Bloody hell! Oh well . . . what does it matter, really . . . ?’
They came back into the kitchen; stretched, cracked their knuckles; tried to outdo each other with stories about madmen and madhouses.
‘But what did Charley do after Nienevee had accepted Van Wessum’s proposal?’ the Dad asked with a yawn.
‘He left,’ replied Oma Mei. ‘When he heard that Nienevee had said yes to the proposal, he left all his belongings behind. Including the furniture Van Wessum had ordered but not collected. It had been carefully stacked, wrapped in rags, and that was how it was moved: four large carts full. Everything was arranged and displayed: the dining chairs, the armchairs, the writing desk. Every piece had been made exactly as Van Wessum had ordered. Everything . . . ’
Muulke and I looked at each other.
‘. . . except the bed,’ I said.
‘He’d made that to look like a tombstone,’ exclaimed Muulke.
Oma Mei nodded.
‘And those dates?’ I asked.
‘1863 was the year they met,’ said Oma Mei. ‘And in 1870 Nienevee married Van Wessum.’
‘But why are those dates there together?’ asked Muulke. ‘And why does the headboard of the bed look like a tombstone?’
We were all silent for a while.
‘Because love lived for such a short time.’
We looked at our grandmother and realised right away that it wasn’t her who had given that answer. The voice had come from the passage.
Wrapped in a blanket, Jess sat halfway up the stairs, leaning against the railing, her arms around the supports.
‘Have you been sitting there all this time?’ asked Oma Mei, worried rather than angry.
Jess nodded sleepily.
‘Take her upstairs immediately,’ said Oma Mei.
We all went into the passage and the Dad lifted her up. ‘You’ll have to put on a bit of weight, little bird. One of these days you’ll blow away.’
Jess opened her eyes in a final effort to stay awake.
‘Love lived for such a short time,’ she said once more. Her voice sounded terribly sad. ‘First he loved her, and then he didn’t anymore. She killed his love. And that is why the bed had to be like a grave. Isn’t it sad?’
Our brothers and Muulke went back into the kitchen. I stayed behind in the passage, listening to them move their chairs about and pour coffee. Suddenly, I realised how tired I was.
Oma Mei still stood staring at the stairs. Her back was broad and a bit rounded, as if she was leaning into an invisible storm. ‘Let’s hope you can find rest now,’ she said. Her voice sounded thoughtful, almost pleading.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Oompah?’
She turned abruptly. I caught a glimpse of her swivel-eye fluttering wildly before she hurriedly pressed it closed with her finger.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Who else?’
And then she chased Muulke and me upstairs.
ten open arms
And so the house got another pair of arms.
‘It should really be called Ten Open Arms now,’ said Muulke.
‘Ten Poor Arms,’ Oma Mei grumbled. ‘Ten Poorer than Poor Arms.’
As if she’d had nothing to do with the button-chewer coming to live with us. ‘What else can we do?’ she exclaimed. We were lying with our ears flat to the crack in the floor of our bedroom. ‘He can’t possibly look after himself, that’s obvious. And I really can’t deliver the poor man to the Ursuline sisters or the Franciscan monks. Or send him back to the home. Didn’t you see how crazy that made him?’
‘He can be dangerous,’ said the Dad, but we could hear from the tone of his voice that he’d only said it to wind Oma Mei up.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Oma Mei. ‘That man is only a danger to buttons. He can sleep in the workshop. In a way, that is his home.’
‘There’s plenty of room in the attic, too,’ said the Dad.
‘That leaking hellhole? Don’t even think of it. We’ve called down enough misfortune on ourselves.’ We heard her sigh. ‘So for God’s sake,’ she said, as if she still had to convince herself, ‘we’ll only make him sleep there if he gets up to no good . . . ’
But Oompah had a deep respect for her. And for her part, she ticked him off the same as she did all of us.
‘Sit up straight. Are you a bag of coal or something?’
‘Wash your hands.You’re not to come to the table like that.’
‘You can keep that growling for the fair. They might even pay you for it.’
She looked after his burns every day, though, and when Oompah ripped his worn trousers one morning, she sent Piet and Krit up to the attic and had them bring down a wooden box full of mothballs and layers of tissue paper. In among these lay our grandfather’s carefully folded and barely creased Sunday best clothes. And although they were a lot less elegant than the supervisor’s clothes in the photo of Opa Pei and his workmen, and they didn’t include a felt hat and a silk vest, they were still remarkably smart.
‘Are you going to give him those?’ The Dad sounded surprised.
‘Do I look like a good Samaritan?’ Oma Mei snapped. ‘He can borrow them. And he’ll have to do his own alterations. He’s better at that than I am.’
‘It’s only family she talks to like that, Oompah,’ said Muulke.
Later, the button-chewer sat on an old chair in front of our house, his mouth full of pins, utterly content.
Snip, went the scissors.
Whether Oompah actually slept in the workshop or not, we didn’t know. When the Dad and our brothers went there in the mornings they always found the door that used to be a window ajar. He only came into the house for meals, obviously ill at ease, and always made himself scarce straight after he’d eaten. When we wondered about that, Oma Mei said there was nothing surprising about it.
‘But it’s his house, isn’t it?’ I said.
Oma Mei’s face looked grim. ‘That may be, but it was never his home.’
We waited.
‘He was only born here,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s easy enough to figure out. He was Charley’s child. Did you really think Van Wessum would accept a child that wasn’t his?’
‘How horribly mean!’ Jess cried out.
‘There was nothing mean about it,’ Oma Mei said curtly. ‘It just wasn’t possible. As soon as he was born, Van Wessum took the child to the orphanage.’
‘And did Nienevee agree?’ I asked.
‘What else could she do? She had been disowned by the travellers. And the townspeople didn’t want her, either. Van Wessum allowed her to visit Oompah in the orphanage for an hour once a month, and later on he could visit her here, but Oompah never set foot inside this house. He always had to wait on the porch for her to come outside. And then they walked along Sjlammbams Sahara until the hour was over.’
‘Poor, poor Oompah,’ said Jess, her eyes filled with tears.
Was it because of that story? Or because Oompah, dressed in our grandfather’s clothes, suddenly looked much less like a tramp? At any rate, she seemed to be much less scared of the button-chewer. She no longer ran off when he approached. And one day, when Oompah became restless during the meal and Oma Mei sent him outside, she went after him with his plate.
It was Saturday and Muulke and I were scrubbing the living room floor. The Dad came in with his overcoat still on. He sat down on a chair, then on another chair. He stirred the fire in the stove a bit, whistled an unrecognisable tune, looking around all the while.
‘Is she around?’ he asked eventually.
Muulke and I looked at each other.
‘Oma Mei is in the vegetable garden,’ I said.
&n
bsp; ‘Aha,’ said the Dad. He opened his mouth, then shut it again.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Muulke.
‘Oh, nothing, leeveke,’ said the Dad. He had a quick look behind the couch, as if he expected our grandmother to be hiding there. ‘Well, practically nothing.’
We waited.
‘You haven’t seen a, uh, letter somewhere, have you?’
‘A letter?’ Muulke echoed.
I immediately felt myself blushing, but Muulke blinked twice and asked calmly what sort of a letter he was talking about.
‘Oh, well, uh,’ said the Dad, blushing bright-red in his turn. ‘Uh . . . one from the bank.’
‘Nothing important, I hope?’ said Muulke airily.
‘No, no, don’t be silly,’ said the Dad. ‘Not really . . . just a bit.’ He got that helpless look on his face, the one that made him look like more of an older brother than a father. And a not-all-that-much-older brother, either. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands, but managed not to.
‘What’s the matter, then?’ I asked.
He beckoned us to come closer.
‘I’ve borrowed a little bit of money.’ He put a finger over his lips. ‘And, well, you know what banks are like.’
I didn’t understand exactly what he meant by that, but I knew enough to realise that the next disaster was lurking round the corner. ‘Does Oma Mei know about this?’ I asked, against my better judgement.
‘Oh, she gets worried so easily,’ the Dad said casually. ‘So I thought we needn’t tell her yet.’ He was silent for a little while, and then said, ‘So, you’re sure you haven’t seen that letter?’
He looked at me, and I felt my cheeks still burning. He winked, and suddenly I knew that he knew.
‘No,’ we said.
‘So it can’t suddenly just turn up?’
Muulke and I shook our heads.
‘Absolutely sure?’
I thought of the torn-up letter that had blown about all over the place.
‘Absolutely sure,’ I said firmly.
The Dad grinned widely. ‘Excellent, excellent,’ he said, and he went outside whistling.
Life went on. We went to school, and afterwards we did our chores in and around the house.
The Dad bought a bale of ready-to-use filler from a tobacco-grower in Tegelen who had only recently gone into business. He and our brothers made five cigars and lit them.
A penetrating smell of sweaty feet filled our house. The Dad still insisted a bargain was a bargain, but less than five seconds later the five of them were in the garden throwing up.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Nol later, ‘that someone picks up a case of tobacco-poisoning from an amateur like that.’
‘You could have told me a bit sooner,’ said the Dad, still pale as death and sweating.
‘I did,’ said Nol. ‘But, as usual, you weren’t listening.’
Life went on as if nothing had happened.
a homesick saint
On the first Monday in June, the boys from the technical school came into our classroom with their teacher. Each of them was carrying a metal frame. The frames looked rather like Jess’s straightener, only the slats were made of metal and were fixed on the front as well as the back.
‘Nicely on time,’ said Sister Angelica.
The boys stood in a tight group. They hardly dared look up.
We stared at them. We didn’t often see so many boys at once.
Then we had to stand up one at a time, collect one of those frames, curtsey and go back to our seat.
The boys disappeared.
‘Saint Rosa, Saint Rosa,’ girls were whispering.
‘No whispering,’ said Sister Angelica. ‘No need to turn it into a shambles.’ But her own face was flushed with excitement.
‘Is it for Saint Rosa?’ one girl asked.
‘Put your hand up first, child.’
‘Is it for Saint Rosa?’
Sister Angelica beamed.
‘Are we getting new wings, sister?’
Her smile became even broader. ‘You girls are going to be the loveliest angels in town,’ she said.
On the back of each frame there were four hinges. Fretwork wings were going to be fixed to those. During the next two months, we were going to cover the wings during our needlework classes – first with old sheets from the hospital, and then chicken and pigeon feathers sewn, one by one, onto the sheets.
‘It’s going to be wonderful, you’ll see,’ said Sister Angelica.
Then she brought out the moth-eaten map of South America. She hung it up on the door and unrolled it. She pointed out the city of Lima, where Saint Rosa, the patron saint of our town, had come from, and then she showed us on the lumpy old world globe how great the distance was between her city and our town.
‘Saints get homesick, too,’ she said, her eyes shining with emotion. ‘So I want you all to do your very best.’
‘Damn!’ Muulke cursed when we were walking home. ‘Chicken feathers! And all done in stupid cross-stitch.’ She furiously swished a branch about.
‘Watch out,’ I said. ‘You’ll poke somebody’s eye out.’
Muulke had always disliked needlework. At our old school, we had never held a needle and thread; there had been a sister for that once, but she’d finished up under the hooves of the butcher’s runaway horse, and the brothers couldn’t do it. The only thing that school had was an old wood-turning lathe with a foot pedal. Muulke had been the only girl who managed to get permission to join the boys’ class.
‘Damn!’ Muulke said again.
‘Do you think I’ll be allowed to be in it?’ Jess asked.
I thought of those metal frames. And the wings of timber and bits of sheets.
‘We’ll ask,’ I said.
‘Will you ask for me?’
‘You can do it yourself.’
‘But you can do it better,’ pleaded Jess.
Of course, it turned into a drama. Weeping with fury, Jess stormed out of the kitchen even before Oma Mei had finished speaking. Our grandmother pressed her lips together and cut the bread to shreds, and when I tried to go after Jess, she snapped at me to stay in my seat till after the meal.
‘She will have to get used to the idea that she can’t do everything, with that wreckbone,’ she exclaimed, and added that it wasn’t for nothing that the words ‘heart’ and ‘hard’ were so similar. And when everybody was silent: ‘Do I always have to do everything? Does it always have to be me who’s the ogre here?’
She looked at the Dad, but he looked at the clock and was suddenly in a great hurry to leave.
‘It’s not fair,’ Jess sobbed.
We found her near Mr Wetsels’ shed. She dried her tears and angrily picked at the half-perished hessian that covered the doorway.
‘I want to be an angel, too.’
‘You can be, can’t you?’ I said.
‘You can walk with us without wings, can’t you?’ said Muulke.
‘Are you kidding me?’
We were silent. She was right. An angel without wings?
‘Then Muulke and I will go without any, too,’ I said.
‘Yes!’ shouted Muulke, who was of course immediately keen on the idea because then she wouldn’t have to do any needlework. ‘Then we’ll all look exactly the same!’
‘We’re not at all exactly the same,’ Jess snapped. ‘You’re allowed anything you want. I’m not allowed anything. Ever.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Muulke.
‘Get lost,’ said Jess.
‘Get lost yourself.’ Muulke walked off.
I held out my arm, but Jess stayed where she was.
I walked back through the field. It was a dull day, the sky grey but cloudless. Nine Open Arms looked more off-putting than ever, with its sagging roof, the two different colours of tiles, the cracks in the walls, the holes above the door where the ‘Townies’ Welcome’ sign had once hung.
And then it happened.
One mome
nt, my thoughts were focused on Jess; the next, it was as if something inside me shifted. First I felt a vague feeling of uneasiness, and then, suddenly, without any reason, I thought, There is something wrong. There is something very wrong with this house.
I have no idea where that thought came from, but it was there, unmistakable, as real as a grain of barley in a summer shoe.
restless
I was walking along Sjlammbams Sahara with Muulke and Jess. We were on our way to school, and it was late. We ran, but no matter how hard we tried, we didn’t make any progress. The wind was too strong. Around us, trees were blowing over with bright, crackling noises. Jess shouted that she wanted to take off her straightener. I tried to stop her, but Muulke started tickling me, and suddenly Jess turned into a letter that tore into small pieces in my hands. I desperately tried to keep her with me, but she blew through my fingers. I shouted that she mustn’t go away. I knew something terrible was going to happen, but Jess was blown further and further away.
Then, suddenly, I was standing in front of Nine Open Arms. A small boy was sitting in front of our door, looking at me curiously. I told him to say something, for how was I supposed to guess what he wanted? But he just kept looking at me. I slapped him, and he burst into tears.
I ran to the cemetery, but the hedge had grown really dense. I ran and ran, but couldn’t get any further. The branches and leaves wrapped around me more and more tightly. Above me hung Oma Mei’s head, huge, like an angry sun. Twigs got into my mouth and nose. I wanted to scream but couldn’t make a sound. And Opa Pei was there in his smart felt hat and his silk vest, and he and the workers laughed uproariously, and Oompah Hatsi was shouting, ‘Fing, Jess, Muu-huu-huulke, look carefully, look carefully!’
I gasped for breath and saw the gleaming eyes of my sisters floating above me. It was still dark, but no longer night.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Jess.
My throat felt powder-dry. My back was wet with sweat.
‘A nightmare.’ Muulke grinned.
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