I waited patiently. I had no idea what Nienevee’s story had to do with my father and grandfather. But I knew that Oma Mei was going to tell me. She was going to tell me everything, and all I had to do was sit there until she stopped speaking.
‘Both of them were dreamers of the worst kind,’ said Oma Mei.
I stared at her. ‘Opa Pei as well as the Dad?’
‘Your grandfather was the greatest dreamer. If they’d held a contest, he would have won easily. A hundred and twelve trades, a thousand and thirteen disasters, that was Opa Pei.
She stared at the photo, and I looked, too. I saw her good eye glide over my grandfather. Over his silk vest and the felt hat.
‘But Opa Pei was a successful supervisor, wasn’t he?’ I was confused. ‘All his life?’
Oma Mei didn’t look at me.
She took out her handkerchief, blew her nose, called herself to order and then started telling. This was no grand dramatic history of traveller woman and her impossible love, but a small story. About Pei, the dreamer, and the woman who’d thought she would be able to control him. About jobs and occupations that never lasted for more than a few months. About money that always ran out too soon. About promises and more promises. And about the demand Oma Mei had made of him when she finally, finally became pregnant with the child she hadn’t dared hope for anymore: get a steady job or get lost.
‘He was apprenticed to a cousin,’ said Oma Mei, ‘who was a prominent builder. So Opa Pei became a student. A student supervisor at forty-two years old. I was pleased he had steady work, even though it didn’t pay much. But I was ashamed, too. He laughed about it. That’s when that photo was taken. He had swapped clothes with his cousin, to tease me.’
I had another look at the photo. So that was why the man standing behind Opa Pei was laughing. He wasn’t a workman at all. He was the builder himself.
There was another silence. Oma Mei shifted her foot with a groan. Then she heaved a deep, deep sigh. I smiled at her, but I didn’t think she’d seen it.
‘It happened a year after that photo was taken. Opa Pei’s cousin got the job of moving Nienevee’s house. But just the week before, he had accepted another order, an important order, and he had sent his supervisor to deal with that. So he left Nienevee’s house to Opa Pei. And of course it went wrong. Terribly wrong.
She took her handkerchief and blew her nose again. While I waited for her to continue, I looked out the window and saw Muulke crossing Sjlammbams Sahara carrying a broom. Piet teetered on Eet’s shoulders, trying to get hold of a photo that was stuck on the top of the hedge. Sparrows flew up from the branches and disappeared into the corn.
Oma Mei cleared her throat.
‘What happened then, Oma?’
She laughed scornfully. ‘Better to ask what did not happen. First he forgot to prop up the house when they were taking it down. So when they were chiselling the bricks, one of the chimneys came loose. It collapsed and came within a hair’sbreadth of crushing one of the men. Instead, the chimney fell on top of the porch.’
‘So that’s why there is that crack in the stone,’ I said.
‘And that is why the porch stayed behind in the cemetery,’ said Oma Mei. ‘It couldn’t be used anymore. They were going to provide a new one and remove the old one, but that never happened. As so many things never happened.
I thought about it all. More and more things were falling into place; more and more riddles were being solved. The puzzle in my head was now clear. Apart from one thing.
‘I still can’t understand why the front door of Nine Open Arms is at the back.’
‘That was the last, and probably the worst, mistake your grandfather made,’ said Oma Mei. ‘When he moved the house, he simply moved it along in a straight line. As if it was a cardboard box that was in the way. It just never occurred to him to turn the house around so it would face the road again. And when your grandfather’s cousin came to have a look, the building was so far advanced that they decided to leave it as it was.’
‘And so the front door became the back door,’ I said.
She was silent.
The clock in the living room struck the hour. Outside, the hunt for photos was just about finished. I heard Krit and Sjeer talking, about money and all the things they imagined lay ahead.
I took her hand. Her calloused hand had unexpected soft spots. I had always known that, but for some reason I always forgot.
‘Oma.’
‘Yes, kendj?’
I thought. There was something I wanted to say, but at first I didn’t quite know what. But as I looked at her, the words started coming by themselves.
‘I don’t really mind.’
‘What, kendj?’
‘That Opa Pei wasn’t a real supervisor.’
She looked at me silently.
‘Maybe it isn’t such a good house,’ I said. ‘But it is his house. Well, a bit, anyway. And that’s why it really is our house.’
‘Our ruin, you mean,’ Oma Mei said scornfully.
But she kept looking at me.
And I looked back at her.
I went on looking back at her.
The swivel-eye didn’t move.
Muulke stormed into the room. ‘We’ve got them all. Almost all. There’s one stuck behind the drainpipe, but if I climb out of the attic window . . . ’
‘Don’t even think of it,’ said Oma Mei. ‘Boys aren’t girls and girls aren’t . . . ’
‘Boys,’ the three of us sang together.
Muulke looked from me to Oma Mei. She grinned. ‘Are you still fighting?’
That was what Muulke was like. She would ask anything, say anything, always speak her mind. I never knew whether to be dreadfully jealous or terribly relieved that I wasn’t more like her.
She plonked herself down next to Oma Mei. ‘So was I right? Was there a tragedy or wasn’t there?’
‘A tragical tragedy,’ I said.
I’d wanted to say it as a joke, but that didn’t work. It wasn’t a laughing matter to discover that tragical tragedies really existed. And that sometimes they happened closer to home than you had thought.
one foot
In the procession on Saint Rosa’s Day, I was the neatest girl, Muulke the untidiest and Jess the most radiant.
We walked in a long, straight file, all the schoolgirls in step, looking solemn. Before the holiday, Sister Angelica had shown us how it was done, a devout frown on her smooth, fleshy face. She’d given everyone a gentle pinch on the spot where the devout frown should be. The marching we had practised in the schoolyard. Sister Angelica had hummed a slow four-four time.
‘Yadadeeda, dadadeeda.Yadadeeda, dadadeeda. Keep your place and close the gap. And keep your place and close the gap. Yadadeeda, dadadeeda!’
Saint Rosa’s Day was overcast, and there was hardly any wind. There was a storm brewing. The altar boys led the way, swinging their censers, trailing small clouds of spicy, pungent holy smoke behind them. Then came the thin, high-pitched prayers of the sisters, alternating with the low voices of the parish priest and the brothers, then the bishop under his canopy, which was carried by four acolytes. We followed.
In Put Street, we walked over the coloured-sand pictures of the Holy Virgin and Rosa of Lima.
‘Yadadeeda, dadadeeda,’ Sister Angelica hummed softly, but she was herself rather out of step. Her pink face shone with excitement.
We passed the small house altars, which the bishop blessed one by one. Through Putse Gate, we left the town. Step by step, we came closer to the Kollenberg hill and the chapel of our homesick saint which sat upon it. High above us, the linden trees rustled. We came past the roadside stations of the cross, and the garden of Gethsemane, built of bricks – Van Wessum’s bricks.
Yadadeeda, dadadeeda.
I saw Muulke had hiked up her dress, because she’d stood on the hem.
And I saw Jess, radiant, holding her head up high, her back straight.
The button-chewer had wrought another mirac
le.
Two weeks after the Crocodile’s stories had been blown all over Sjlammbams Sahara, Oompah Hatsi had disappeared. He wasn’t in the cemetery, he wasn’t hiding in the hedge, and no trace of him was to be found in the town, either. He seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Thirty good cigars had vanished from the workshop with him.
But that wasn’t all.
‘I’ll be . . . ’ the Dad exclaimed.
Our brothers scratched their heads.
In the windows of the workshop sat the frames of the flyscreens, as usual – but the wire netting itself was gone.
‘What on earth does he want with that?’ asked Sjeer.
And Piet opined that crazies would always be crazies.
We couldn’t make head or tail of it until we found the hessian sack on a chair in a corner of the living room. There was a sheet of paper pinned to it with an inscription, in small, graceful letters: ‘For Jess.’
The Dad was amazed. ‘Did you know he could write?’
When Jess carefully opened the sack, we all breathed in at the same time.
Oompah had carefully removed the netting from the screens and stretched it over wire frames. Feather-light, delicate wings he had made, beautifully symmetrical in shape, with embroidery on the netting in mother-of-pearl, sky-blue and gold.
And so Jess got to be an angel after all.
The people watching the procession were rather baffled by the new Mary. There she was, stuck in a papier-mâché grotto that was far too small for her. On her head sat a coronet that didn’t fit, and in her hands a rather creased cardboard heart-of-love.
‘There is no help for it,’ Mother Superior had said despairingly a week before. ‘I really can’t let Tonnie go as an angel. She’s practically bald on one side. We’ll just have to let her be Mary. Then she can at least cover her head.’
‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’ we prayed. ‘Protect us against contagious diseases.’
And Muulke, who made sure she kept up with the Blessed Virgin Mary’s float, muttered with a grin, ‘And against bald spots on our heads.’
Fat Tonnie looked furious, but didn’t do anything. She knew better.
The day after we had found Jess again, Oma Mei had filled her basket with leeks, potatoes and cucumbers from the vegetable garden and told me to come with her. We went to one of the worst, foul-smelling slums in town. The narrow streets were slippery with filth. I had to apologise to Tonnie.
‘And while I think of it,’ our grandmother had said after she handed the basket of vegetables to Tonnie’s mother, her voice as gentle as a spring breeze, ‘Tonnie, if you ever touch my Jess again, I’ll come and touch you. And I won’t stop till you’re as bald as a tadpole. Understood?’
Oma Mei didn’t even come up to Fat Tonnie’s shoulders, but her spinning swivel-eye and the seriousness of her words had obviously got through.
The procession was over. Muulke had wrestled herself out of her wings before we even got to the bottom of the Kollenberg hill. Jess kept hers on. I carefully undid them later, outside the church back in town, where they would be kept for the following year. The Dad helped me.
‘Hey,’ I said softly to the Dad.
‘Yes, leeveke?’
‘Have all the cigars been sold?’
‘They sure have.’
‘So are we rich now?’
He grinned. ‘Don’t you worry about that, leeveke. We’re at least rich enough to keep the bank out of our hair for a while.’
He winked.
It started to rain. Fat drops came down from the sky, and seconds later the thunderstorm broke overhead.
We ran to the market square – Oma Mei, the Dad, our brothers, Muulke, Jess and I.
‘If that isn’t our new cigar king,’ shouted Nol.
He beckoned. We came closer, over to where the cigar kings and emperor were sheltering close together under the awning of the Cafe Lejeune.
The kings greeted the Dad. They offered him a cigar from their own boxes. When he flushed because he didn’t know which one to choose and who to snub, they grinned at each other and suddenly looked awfully like our brothers.
The cigar emperor said nothing, but he did nod when the Dad greeted him. He had on a felt hat, and looked just as immaculate as he had in winter.
Conversation got underway while the rain drummed on the awning.
Jess, Muulke and I just stood there.
‘Stand up straight,’ said Oma Mei.
The cigar emperor’s wife was there, too. Her face was powdered, her eyebrows plucked so they were two thin lines, but close up she looked more normal than from a distance. She dabbed her face with her handkerchief, nodded to us and winced at every thunderclap.
‘It can’t be easy for you,’ she said to Oma Mei. Her voice was soft and a little husky. ‘Three growing young ladies.’
Muulke burst out laughing.
‘And don’t forget the four gentlemen,’ said Oma Mei after delivering a withering look Muulke’s way. ‘And one cigar king.’
Then she said it. I don’t know if she was aware of it herself, but I noticed. So did Muulke and Jess.
‘And all that while I’m already standing with one foot in my grave,’ she said.
For some sums we didn’t need our brothers. Perhaps it was because of that last story of Nienevee. Perhaps it was the Dad standing among the cigar kings, smiling from ear to ear, and for the first time looking as if he belonged somewhere. Or perhaps it was simply because someone had been prepared to listen to her story.
At any rate, something had made our grandmother take half a step away from her grave. And after the miraculous changing of useless cigars into good cigars, after the miracle of Jess becoming an angel after all, perhaps this was the greatest miracle of them all.
the opposite of
worrying [3]
In the last week of the school holidays, we went into the town on the bus. We sat together on the seats at the back, watching the landscape glide by. It was a warm Monday morning, the late-summer wind blowing through the half-open windows. I could smell diesel, sweat and Oma Mei’s eau de cologne.
Our brothers were pointing out cars. They were scoring points off each other with facts and figures about diesel engines and tyre pressures. Muulke and Jess squabbled about who would sit by the window on the way back.
The only silent ones were our father and grandmother on the seat in front of us. Oma Mei was sitting very straight in her Sunday best dress. She was wearing the hat with the rose. The felt flower trembled in the breeze. She looked straight ahead. I saw the small rake sticking out of her basket.
The Dad looked out of the window. He nodded at the road, at the trees, at the houses. Perhaps it was the bumpy road, but I wasn’t sure; perhaps he was greeting all the things he hadn’t seen in such a long time.
After half an hour, the bus stopped at the terminus. There were not many people out in the street. It was too hot and the shops weren’t open yet.
We had to walk for another half an hour then, and as we got closer, everybody became quieter. I tried to work out how long it had been since we’d been here, but for some reason I couldn’t get the dates straight in my head.
It was only a small cemetery.There was no tall hedge around it, only a ridiculously low wall you could simply step over. But we went across to the small gate with its well-oiled hinges.
The Mam’s grave was of unpolished stone. While the stone was not shiny, however, the grave was beautifully maintained.
Maria Theodora Antonia Sofia Boon-Klein
17 April 1903 – 10 October 1928
Antonius Hubertus Wilhelmina Margaretha Boon
3 November 1900 –
I recognised Oma Mei’s hand in the way the pebbles had been raked. The way a small rosebush grew along a low arch. Restricted, but also protected.
‘I think you were going to prove that children are perfectly capable of behaving properly in a cemetery,’ Oma Mei said to us.
Muulke and I went
to get water. Our brothers and Jess helped with the weeding.
Of course it was silly for all of us to try to clean that simple grave all together. We were constantly in each other’s way, but we were very careful not to complain, not to giggle or make stupid remarks. We were determined to prove we were perfectly capable.
The Dad did nothing, and even that looked as if it was difficult for him. He kept standing on one leg, then shifting to the other. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, laughed when he noticed I was looking at him and then walked away, his face twisted.
I looked from the Dad to my mother’s grave, not knowing what to do.
‘He’ll come back,’ said Oma Mei without looking up. ‘Just leave him be for a while.’
Carefully, she snipped a couple of wilted blooms from the rosebush.
Perhaps the thought came to me because we were standing there, in a cemetery.
‘Oma?’
‘Yes, kendj?’
‘Where is Charley’s grave?’
She stood up with a groan. ‘Charley’s grave?’
‘I know where Nienevee’s grave is, but where is Charley’s?’
‘Nobody knows exactly.’
‘What do you mean?’
She handed me the shrivelled roses. They crackled in my hands.
‘Even graves are not forever, leeveke. After Nienevee died, there was nobody to look after his grave. And when, some years later, more money was due for Charley’s plot, there was no one to pay it. So the council cleared the grave and dispersed the bones in the ossuary.
I looked at the Mam’s grave. At her name and the Dad’s. And suddenly, I no longer thought their names being next to each other was spooky. Not quite so spooky, anyway.
Oma Mei had been right. The Dad came back. He looked almost his usual self, and his voice hardly wavered.
‘She rests in the loveliest spot in the world,’ he said.
Oma Mei dusted down her dress and inspected the grave, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.
‘But a long way away,’ she said.
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