Nine Open Arms
Page 20
‘But really lovely,’ said the Dad.
‘But a long way away.’
They didn’t say it in angry voices. More as if they were both travellers, each in a different spot in the world, each in a different place in time, and the only way to find each other was to listen to the other – to keep listening, again and again.
‘So,’ said Oma Mei when the gravestone had been scrubbed, the letters of the Mam’s name cleaned, the roses taken care of, the weeds pulled up and fresh flowers put in the vase.
She packed up her basket. She held the rag she had used for cleaning in her hand. ‘A rag for her rag-doll heart,’ she said, carefully folding it into quarters and putting it away.
In the bus, on the way back, I sat on the wide rear seat again, squashed among my brothers and sisters. And again, I smelled the scent of diesel, of sweat, of eau de cologne, but this time I smelled something else, too. Something that gave off a scent, but that wasn’t anything in particular: the scent of time to come. The opposite of worry had finally arrived.
glossary
NAMES
Eet (pronounced ‘ate’): short for ‘Etienne’
Fing: short for ‘Josephine’
Jess: short for ‘Agnes’
Krit: ‘Chris’
Lame Krit: ‘Crippled Chris’ or ‘Lame Chris’
Muulke: ‘Little Mouth’ – as a nickname it means
something like ‘Mouthy’ or ‘Bigmouth’
Nienevee: a nickname for a sulky or listless child
Oma Mei: ‘Grandma May’
Oompah Hatsi: unclear origin and meaning, though a
broom-seller of that name lived in the city of Sittard once
Opa Pei: ‘Grandad Peter’
Piet: ‘Pete’
Sjeer: ‘Gerard’
WORDS
iepekriet: ‘shrew’, ‘fishwife’
kendj: ‘child’
kwatsj: ‘nonsense’
leeveke: ‘darling’, ‘sweetie’
miljaar: ‘blast’, ‘damn’
sjiethoes (plural sjiethoezer): ‘coward/s’, ‘chicken/s’
sjlamm: wet mixture of coaldust poor people used to
burn instead of coal as it was much cheaper
straat: ‘street’ (Dutch)
ulezeik: literally ‘owl’s pee’ – so, something insignificant,
a trivial matter
translator’s note
Benny Lindelauf, the author of Nine Open Arms, was born in 1964 and grew up in the town of Sittard, in the province of Limburg in the south-east of the Netherlands. Sittard is in the narrowest part of Limburg, squeezed between Germany on its east and Belgium on the west, and its location has affected its sometimes tragic history and the lives of the people who have lived there. The town in Nine Open Arms is modelled on Sittard.
As a child, Lindelauf used to love listening to stories told by his grandmother. The children in Nine Open Arms – four almost adult brothers and three much younger sisters – are ‘half orphans’, as their mother died some time ago. The family struggles to make a living, supported by their forever optimistic but often vague father, the Dad, and their feisty and cranky grandmother, Oma Mei, whose stories they love but often have to beg for.
The story is built like a jigsaw and told in stages, starting in the late 1930s, moving back to the 1860s and then coming back to the thirties. Nine Open Arms is the name the family give to the house they move into in the 1930s. There are many mysteries about the house, its history and the people – all somehow connected – who lived there at different times.
Lindelauf uses some colourful words in colloquial Limburgish to bring the characters, the place and the times to life. I have kept some of these words in the English translation because they add to the flavour and liveliness of the story. A glossary can be found on the following page.
The Dutch often use nicknames, some highly inventive, and few people are known by the often long names first given to them. My full name is Johannes Antonius Maria Nieuwenhuizen. I was always known as Jan, but became John soon after my family of thirteen arrived in Australia from Holland in 1955. Most of the nicknames in the story are also explained in the glossary.
Muulke (a nickname meaning something like ‘mouthy’ or ‘bigmouth’), the wildest of the three girls, loves to imagine ‘tragical tragedies’, and Benny Lindelauf has created just that in this heart-warming and often funny, multi-award-winning book.
John Nieuwenhuizen
February 2013
about the author
Benny Lindelauf is a multi-award-winning Dutch children’s book author who has published twelve books in Holland, several of which have appeared in translation. He also teaches creative writing to adults and children. Nine Open Arms has been translated into six languages, including Czech and Korean, and both it and its Dutch sequel, Heivisj’s Heaven, have won multiple prestigious prizes in the Netherlands. Imagination, wit and drama are crucial ingredients in Benny’s stories, woven together in an exceptional way. He once said: ‘Writing is actually like moving from one house to the next over and over again.’
about the translator
John Nieuwenhuizen is an Australian-based, award-winning translator of Dutch and Flemish literature. He has a high profile, in particular in educational circles, as the translator of books such Falling by Anne Provoost, which was on VCE and HSC reading lists for many years; The Baboon King by Anton Quintana, for which he won the Mildred L Batchelder Award for the best children’s book in translation (USA); and The Book of Everything by Guus Kuijer, for which he was shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation (UK). John was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion in 2007.