Jess didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Fing never has nightmares,’ she said. ‘Fing, you never have nightmares, do you?’
‘I was just lying the wrong way,’ I said.
But the following night I was once again running down Sjlammbams Sahara. This time the letter was still in one piece, but I knew I had to deliver it very quickly, or something terrible would happen. I ran and ran and ran, but couldn’t find the house anywhere.
‘You have to look,’ Oompah Hatsi shouted again, putting one cigar after the other into his mouth and eating them. ‘Look carefully!’
In a panic, I hurled myself through the hedge, which was suddenly metres and metres thick, with branches that caught on fire. And on the other side sat Oma Mei, madly scrubbing the nameless grave. The soft soap foamed like whipped milk, and I slipped, and fell, and fell. Again it was my grandfather who couldn’t stop laughing. Bent over, he was, the felt hat getting crushed in his hand.
‘What’s wrong?’ Muulke asked softly. My nightshirt hung over a chair, soaked with sweat. I had put on a fresh one. It was the third night in a row.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said.
‘You’re being weird,’ said Muulke.
I was silent.
‘And miserable.’
What could I say? I didn’t know what was wrong . . . whether anything was wrong. All I knew was that I couldn’t get rid of that restlessness. It nagged at my stomach during the day and at my dreams at night.
‘There is something wrong,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘That’s the problem, I don’t know.’
I could hear how dumb that sounded. I searched for words, for something to hang onto. I tried to remember when this feeling had first begun. Was it truly when I stood outside the house? Or had it been before that? Suddenly I knew. ‘Do you remember when we realised Jess had been eavesdropping, sitting on the stairs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oma Mei said, Let’s hope you can find rest now.’
‘Let’s hope you can find rest now?’
‘That’s strange, isn’t it?’
Muulke was silent.
‘And her swivel-eye was fluttering.’
‘That flutters all the time.’
‘It was just as if she was talking to somebody,’ I insisted. ‘But there was no one else there except her and me. And when I asked if she’d meant Oompah, she said yes.’
‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’ said Muulke. ‘Oompah was a wanderer. Now he has a roof over his head. And so he has found rest.’
I looked at her. Where was the Muulke of the tragical tragedies? The Muulke who suspected neighbours of being jewel thieves? Who knew for a fact that a showman with a hairy back was a werewolf? Hearing her now was like listening to myself talking. As if, by some bizarre magic, I had crawled into her skin and she into mine.
‘And what about the nameless grave?’ I asked.
‘What about it?’
‘I think it’s Charley’s.’
‘Where did you get that idea from?’
‘I just think so.’
‘Kwatsj.’ Muulke yawned. ‘Charley went away and never came back. That’s what she said, wasn’t it?’
‘So whose is it?’ I asked. ‘And why is there such a huge crack in the stone?’
‘Perhaps a tree blew over one day.’
I took a deep breath. It took all my courage to say what I wanted to say. Especially because I wasn’t at all sure I was right.
‘I think something bad happened,’ I said. ‘And I think Oma Mei had something to do with it.’
‘Oma Mei? Why would you think that?’
‘Why else does she scrub that grave in the middle of the night?’
Muulke yawned. ‘Maybe you dreamed it.’
‘How can you say that?’ I cried.
Jess groaned. She frowned, rubbed her hand over her eyes. We were silent. The wind rattled the roof tiles. We waited until her breathing was regular again.
‘How can you say a thing like that?’ I whispered.
‘You said it yourself,’ Muulke whispered back. ‘When we were sitting on the front fence, you said, I may have dreamt it. Well, perhaps that’s how it was.’
‘But I didn’t mean it.’
‘Then why did you say it?’
‘I thought you wouldn’t believe me.’
She grinned. I saw her teeth glittering in the dark, and when she spoke her voice was full of insufferable triumph: ‘If I didn’t know better, I would think you are thinking of a tragical tragedy.’
Why was I so angry? It had happened a thousand times before – Muulke driving everyone mad with her stories of curses and murders, but the very moment anybody at all started seeing the world through her eyes, losing interest.
It had happened before, and would happen again. Some things never change.
I was going to have to sort it out myself.
the order
On Saturday afternoon, Oma Mei heard that there was a special meat sale on. She sent me off to get some of it. People were crowded around the cart in the market square, and I was only just in time: the people behind me in the queue were fresh out of luck. There was a lot of pushing, complaining and cursing. To be on the safe side, I put the meat I’d bought, which was wrapped in old newspapers, deep in my basket and kept a tight hold on it.
I can’t quite remember when I got the idea. Anyway, I didn’t walk back towards Put Street, but in the opposite direction, past our school, along the cobbled street where the doctor lived, and then across the town wall, until I was just outside the old centre of the town.
The cemetery gate was old and rusty, and squeaked solemnly when I opened it. There were no carefully laid-out paths here. Visitors had worn an untidy track in the knee-high grass.
The gravestones of the old cemetery lay in tight circles around a small chapel. It was so crowded that some of the tombstones had been cemented into the outer wall.
It wasn’t all that hard to find what I was looking for. It was the only grave made of bricks. It looked straight and angular compared to the rounded shapes of the other graves. It had crenellations, as if it was a little castle. On each corner stood a vase made from bricks, but judging by the thick layer of moss that had grown over them, it must have been a long time since they’d contained flowers.
Hendrikus Theodoor van Wessum
31 January 1830 – 20 October 1902
Underneath that was a name I didn’t recognise – a name I’ve never managed to remember, because it seemed to have so little to do with the girl who built houses in the maize field. But as soon as I looked at the dates alongside that name, I knew that it was Nienevee.
I stood in front of the brick grave and couldn’t take my eyes off it. It felt like a maths problem with the wrong answer: something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what.
‘Tell me,’ I muttered. ‘Tell me.’
But, apart from the squeaking of the gate in the wind, there was only silence.
When I came home, my brothers were sitting in the kitchen straddling back-to-front chairs. They leaned their stomachs against the chair backs and Oma Mei said nothing about it! Or about them smoking and dropping cigar ash on the table. They looked very pleased with themselves.
‘We’ve got one,’ said Piet.
‘An order,’ said Eet.
‘For five thousand,’ said Sjeer.
‘Ready by Saint Rosa’s Day,’ said Krit.
They breathed out all at once, four mouths open too wide for the tiny bit of smoke they’d managed to suck out of the better-luck-next-time cigars.
On Saint Rosa’s Day, the shopkeepers wanted to present gifts to their customers. Originally, these were going to be small bottles of liqueur, but the liqueur-maker had gone bankrupt. At the eleventh hour, the shopkeepers had decided on a box of cigars per customer instead. They ordered one hundred thousand cigars, and the current cigar kings couldn’t manage that many at such short notice on top o
f their other orders. Not even the mechanised cigar emperor.
‘Nol must have had something to do with it,’ was Oma Mei’s opinion as she poured coffee.
‘It’s just that we make the very best cigars anyone has ever tasted,’ said our brothers.
‘Just,’ Oma Mei scoffed.
‘But . . . ’ said Jess and Muulke.
‘No buts,’ our brothers said. ‘What does the Dad always say?’
Silence.
‘Well?’ they prompted him.
The Dad looked up absent-mindedly. ‘What?’
‘Believing first, then seeing, no?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Dad. ‘Sure thing.’
‘While I think of it,’ said Piet before they locked themselves into the workshop, ‘the cushion the Dad always sits on has gone missing again. And Oma Mei can’t find her soup ladle.’
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I have to get water anyway.’
Even though Oompah no longer lived in the hedge and had a roof over his head, our grandfather’s clothes and Oma Mei’s stern care, that didn’t mean he had become even slightly more normal. He still only answered questions with his little scissors, and he still pilfered constantly. Oma Mei had told him off about it a few times, but it hadn’t made much difference.
Strangely enough, nobody got too worked up about it, though. Whenever people in the town missed something, they just dropped by. At least twice a week, somebody would walk the length of that long road with a recovered frying pan, a box of cutlery, sheets, cloths or cushions.
I pushed the baby carriage to the pump. Then I searched the hedge. By now I had worked out where to look, and soon enough I spotted the edge of a large hessian sack among the branches.
As I emptied the sack, I heard rustling in the passage. I fancied I saw a head disappear.
‘You’ll have to stop this, Oompah!’ I called. ‘This isn’t funny anymore.’
I snatched the Dad’s cushion out of the sack, then our soup ladle. As well, I found two unfamiliar eggcups and a brand-new cast-iron pan.
The nameless grave looked deserted. I no longer smelled soap when I went near it, but the stone slab was still free of ivy and looked neat and tidy. Was Oma Mei still scrubbing it?
For a moment, I considered asking her. I would just go up to her. I would . . . I would . . .
Kwatsj. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t game, and even if I was, it would be unthinkable for Oma Mei to simply give an answer. Instead, she would want to know what I’d thought I was doing out there in the middle of the night. And I wouldn’t be able to lie – I’d want to, but I wouldn’t be able to. And if she found out about the letter from the bank, if she found out that the Dad had borrowed money again, then the fat would really be in the fire.
Even if the Crocodile had not moved since Jess had discovered that it stood on its side and in its cover in our grandmother’s bedroom, it still wasn’t safely under her bed. And it wouldn’t take much to . . .
A powerless fury surged up inside me. I kicked the stone.
‘Piss off, whoever you are,’ I said. ‘Leave us in peace.’
The day of the procession was rapidly approaching. The efforts to turn better-luck-next-time cigars into proper cigars became more and more frantic. Our brothers showed us the results every evening. They put each cigar between two rulers.
‘I reckon these rulers aren’t straight,’ Piet complained.
‘That’s why these cigars look more bent than they are,’ said Eet.
‘This one’s getting pretty close to being straight, don’t you think, Eet?’
‘At least it’s a lot less bent, Sjeer.’
We tried to improve the cigars by looking at them, but though we fancied that they had become a little less misshapen, they still didn’t look much like the cigar kings’ cigars, not to mention the cigar emperor’s.
During the next few days, we came across the Dad in the passage, in the kitchen, by the gate – everywhere except in the workshop.
‘Is everything going alright?’ we would shout at the living room wall.
‘Well enough,’ our brothers would shout back.
We’d enquire how many cigars they’d done so far.
They’d shout back that it was not about quantity – it was all about quality.
We were not allowed to come in; they kept the door locked. After three days, we peered in through the window that had always been a window.
There were the cigars.
‘Quite a stack,’ said Muulke.
‘A little stack,’ said Jess.
‘How many?’ I asked.
‘A hundred,’ Muulke guessed.
‘Fifty at the most,’ said Jess. She looked at me. ‘How much is five thousand minus fifty?’
‘Far too much,’ I said.
We did sums till our heads spun. Fifty cigars in three days. That was sixteen-and-a-bit per day. That times seven made a hundred-and-something. And that times the number of weeks till the Saint Rosa’s Day procession – that made . . . that made . . .
‘Where are our brothers when we need them?’ said Muulke.
‘Anyway, at this rate they’ll never get to five thousand,’ wailed Jess.
‘And we’re not even talking yet about how you turn better-luck-next-time cigars into real ones,’ I moaned.
That night, I was pursued by a man from the Rotterdam Banking Society. He rode after me on a tiny little bicycle, shouting, ‘The opposite of worry, the opposite of worry!’ And then it started raining cigars – bent, thick, hollow, cracked – useless cigars. They fell on my head, and it hurt. I started digging a hole to hide in, but suddenly two pale hands reached up from the black soil. They grabbed me and pulled me down into the ground. Soil got into my mouth, my nose, my eyes, and then everything went black.
the virgin mary
in an armchair
When we walked into the schoolyard, I could tell straightaway that something was going on.
‘Why are they staring at us?’ asked Jess.
‘Who’s staring?’ asked Muulke.
‘Everybody,’ said Jess.
‘Kwatsj, sjiethoes,’ said Muulke.
But it wasn’t nonsense.
Just before we had to line up, a girl came up to Muulke and me. I vaguely knew her. She was in her final year.
‘Is it true that Jess is going to be the Virgin Mary?’ she asked.
We looked at each other. It wasn’t the first we’d heard of this.
‘Says who?’ asked Muulke.
‘Everybody,’ said the girl. She looked at us darkly. ‘I would look out if I were you.’
‘Look out? What for?’
The bell went.
The day after Oma Mei had said Jess needed to get used to her wreckbone limitations – that it wasn’t for nothing that ‘heart’ and ‘hard’ were so similar – she had gone to see the headmistress, her old friend.
‘The sisters still need another Virgin Mary,’ Oma Mei had said when she returned.
‘And what does that Virgin Mary have to do?’ asked Jess.
‘I don’t know about the other Virgin Marys,’ said Oma Mei, ‘but you have to sit in an armchair.’
As far as we knew, a Virgin Mary in an armchair had never been part of the procession before. Marys usually stood in a papier-mâché grotto on a float, holding a bundle of rags in their arms – or else they had to kneel for two hours in front of a fretwork mountain landscape. They always wore an iron hoop round their middle attached to the float so they couldn’t fall off.
That hoop, and Jess having to stand or kneel right through the procession, were of course out of the question. But Oma Mei had suggested an armchair with a good straight back could work, and a grotto could easily be built around that.
I doubted whether Jess was really pleased with this idea.
‘The doctor has told me there are straighteners that don’t squeak,’ Jess said.‘They have elastic straps instead of leather ones with buckles.’
‘All very nice,’ was Oma Me
i’s reply. ‘But with our debts we can’t even afford to buy a shoelace, let alone a new straightener. And I can’t really see what that has to do with the Virgin Mary, anyway.’
‘Don’t you want to be the Virgin Mary?’ I asked her when we were alone.
Jess was silent.
‘It would be good fun, though, wouldn’t it?’ I grumbled. ‘Imagine – there are lots of angels, at least a hundred .. . but there are only three Virgin Marys.’
‘Just leave me alone,’ Jess had said.
It was time for recess. I met Muulke on my way out of the classroom. We signalled to each other, because we weren’t allowed to talk in the corridors. As soon as we got outside, Muulke started complaining about the chicken feathers for the angels’ wings.
‘I have to start all over again,’ she said. ‘Just because a couple of them aren’t on quite straight. As if angels always have their wings perfectly tidy.’
She looked at me imploringly.
‘Don’t even think about it – I have my own to sew,’ I said.
‘But it all gives me a terrible headache,’ said Muulke. ‘One of these days I’ll go really blind.’ She peered at the statue of the Virgin Mary in the courtyard. ‘I’m sure my sight is already getting a lot worse,’ she said hopefully.
‘Where’s Jess?’
‘And then it will be your fault.’
‘I can’t see her.’
‘No point asking me,’ said Muulke furiously. ‘I can hardly see anything.’ But she looked around all the same. Neither of us could see her.
‘Maybe she’s being kept in,’ said Muulke.
We knew that didn’t make sense – the only one who was forever being kept in was Muulke. I was too scared to ever do anything forbidden, and Jess was always spared because of her wreckbone. I suddenly felt uneasy. I remembered the girl who that morning had told us to look out.
Was it my imagination, or were people looking at us out of the corners of their eyes? Were they whispering behind our backs?
We stopped.
‘There is something strange going on,’ said Muulke. ‘Come on, we’re going to look for her.’
Nine Open Arms Page 15