Judas

by Astrid Holleeder

  During the day, I had a great time at school, but the evenings were still dominated by the Bald Madman, as we privately called him.

  He sat in his large antique armchair, with his wife and children lined up before him on the couch. He could take his pick, and one day it was my sister’s turn. Like Wim, Sonja had reached an age at which my father feared losing his grip on her. Unlike me, she had turned into a “real girl,” with manicured nails, makeup, and a hairdo that could easily compete with Farrah Fawcett’s.

  I loved the way she looked, and I used to watch in awe as she transformed her straight hair into luxuriant curls in front of the mirror. Much to my father’s dismay, she had turned into a beautiful young lady. She worked in a shoe store on Kalverstraat, and that day her boss had given her a bouquet of flowers as a reward for her efforts. She was proud.

  My father didn’t allow her to feel this positive emotion. He assumed the flowers meant she was having an affair with her boss. She was a whore like all women. My sister wasn’t having an affair with her boss, but refuting his assumption was futile.

  Sonja was sitting on the couch. He walked up to her, grabbed her by the hair, and said, “You’re just a filthy whore!” He pulled her arm and slapped her across the face, but she managed to get away and tried to run upstairs to her room. He chased her and got ahold of her again. I could hear Sonja screaming and pleading, “No, Daddy, no! Don’t!” I ran after them and stood in her room, watching.

  In the bedroom was a marble-top antique dresser. I watched my father drag her to it by the hair and slam her head against it. I was sure her skull would crack. I saw her eyes roll back, and at that same moment, my mother and I jumped on my father to pull him off her.

  When we’d managed to get him away from her, he suddenly stood in front of me.

  I looked him straight in the eye and asked, “Why are you doing this? Don’t we do everything you say?”

  He answered my question by slapping me across the face left and right.

  I thought, Go on, hit me, asshole. I had stood up to him, and I knew I’d have to suffer for it.

  I was so afraid that I couldn’t feel any pain. That ruined the effect of his beatings, increasing his rage.

  “Get out!” he screamed eventually. “Get out and never come back!”

  Suddenly I was thirteen years old and homeless.

  By rebelling against my father, I had put my mother in an extremely difficult position. Because I wasn’t allowed to come home, she had to choose between accepting the existence my father determined for her and turning away from her child, or taking her destiny into her own hands and leaving her husband without a penny in her pocket.

  My mom chose the latter.

  Providence—or just good timing—helped her in taking the step. Auntie Wim, our neighbor from across the street, had just found love with Uncle Gerrit, and he moved in with her. My mother could move into his house on Lindengracht.

  “It was meant to be,” she said. She started working as a caregiver for an old lady, and I had a job at the marketplace and handed all my earnings to my mom, and that’s how we got by.

  The four of us lived in the house on Lindengracht: Sonja, Gerard, my mom, and me, less than a mile from my dad. Not far away, but at a safe distance. My mom slept in the living room on a foldaway bed, and we slept in hospital beds given to us by Louis the Scrapman, an acquaintance of my father’s who felt sorry for us. He ran a demolition company and had taken the beds from a hospital that they knocked down.

  The shower was on the balcony. The place was tiny and freezing, but to me it was paradise. No more fear, no more screaming, no more violence.

  I loved every minute of it. But it wouldn’t last long.

  Through the neighbors, my father started pushing for my mother’s return. They felt so bad for him—he looked so feeble and neglected, and he told them he couldn’t live without his wife. He’d do anything if only she would come back.

  The neighbors took this story to my mother. She felt responsible for her marital duties and went to speak with him. He assured her he would change. There would be no more drinking, shouting, and hitting. My mother was all too keen to believe it. Besides, we had to leave the Lindengracht house: Uncle Gerrit and Auntie Wim were having issues, and Uncle was moving back to his house, and it was best if we left.

  My mother went back to my father. I was forced to live there again. I hated her for it. She hardly had any money, nowhere to live, and young children to take care of, but back then I didn’t sympathize with her at all. I only understood her when I became a single mother myself.

  My mother had barely crossed the threshold when the terror started again. After my “rebellion,” I had become his main target. I tried to be away from home as much as I could, but if I didn’t sleep at home, he took it out on my mother. Wim had left the house years earlier, Sonja hadn’t returned with us but lived on Van Hallstraat, and Gerard spent most of his time at his girlfriend Debbie’s. I couldn’t leave her alone with the Bald Madman. Out of fear he would beat her to death at some point if I didn’t, I slept there.

  Like before, the terror often lasted through the night. He’d walk in and out of my bedroom, screaming and scolding. I hardly got any sleep, and still I had to perform at school and in basketball. I played in the National League (well, I sat on the bench, but at fourteen I proved quite promising). Everything I had accomplished for myself was in jeopardy, just because my mom had hoped this man would actually change.

  I got so run-down that I wasn’t able to feel any fear, only hate. I looked for a way out of the situation and found it in a large, sharp kitchen knife I hid underneath my bed. I intended to murder him.

  “It’s nothing but self-defense,” my friend Ilse said when I told her about my plan to stick the knife into his belly. Ilse knew just how bad my father was.

  “You think so?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “You should just do it.”

  Ilse said it would be better to stab him straight in the heart. But to me aiming at his belly seemed easier, as it was the size of a bouncing ball and protruded a good deal. The question was, could I make a deadly hit that way? I could see that stabbing him in the heart would be more effective, but it also required more precision. What if I missed? It had to be spot on. What if he took the knife from me? He might kill me. I spent many nights pondering how best to kill my father. I even practiced in my dreams. Yet I couldn’t find the right time to take action. He was never drunk enough, he stood too far away, and he moved too quickly. I couldn’t succeed in killing him. Not because I didn’t want to, but because fate decided otherwise.

  From the time I was thirteen until I turned fifteen, my father was stationed in the village of Lage Vuursche for work. He had become impossible to work with. He was always drinking during working hours, in a perpetual state of drunkenness, having conflicts with everyone because his megalomania led him to believe he was in charge of the entire company.

  After years and years of misery, they’d finally gotten fed up with him. He had to leave the advertising and promotions department. My mother, brother, and I wondered how bad things might get if my father was without a job and my mom couldn’t pay the bills.

  The Heineken company came up with an elegant solution for the man they could easily have fired on the spot for misbehavior in the workplace. He was transferred to a place where he would run into few people and his terrible conduct would cause as little trouble as possible. He was given a second chance—another job, at full salary, in a beautiful wooded area.

  It goes without saying the Bald was deeply hurt by this move. In his mind, he was the most devoted employee a company could wish for, and he should have been rewarded with respect and a promotion. In reality, he was a boozed-up, aggressive, quarrelsome subordinate who was lucky not to have been fired long before, and we knew all too well that he should be thanking his lucky stars that he was still employed by Heineken at all, given his record of troublemaking.

  Meanwhile, my fath
er’s change of job didn’t interest Wim in the least, and he didn’t take any notice of it. He didn’t want to be drawn into our misery—once his misery, too. He’d never discuss the Bald, and he’d come by only when he wanted his washing or ironing done.

  At his new workplace, my father rapidly began displaying his megalomanic territorial instincts again. When he had started at his new location, he had taken two geese with him for company, who had reproduced into a huge, annoying colony.

  Everyone in the area was bothered by the noise and shit they produced. Management ordered him to get rid of the geese, but my father didn’t comply.

  Out of rage, he wrung all their necks and dumped some of the carcasses on his direct manager’s doorstep. This was not appreciated. My father came up with the idea of blaming me.

  Every day when I got home, I had to sit in front of him and he’d ask me why I’d put those geese on his manager’s doorstep. When I replied I hadn’t, he told me not to lie, for he himself had seen me there, in a tall black coat—his coat!—carrying the dead geese. He’d never do anything like that, but the blame was being put on him.

  I might be getting a “higher” education and all that, but I was still a retarded brat, and I couldn’t make him pay for my deeds. He tried his hardest to brainwash me by repeating the story over and over. He got my mom involved by saying she’d told him she’d seen it, too.

  He was so convinced of his own story, I’d almost start to believe him by the end of these sessions.

  Once, when I was fifteen years old, I came home from a training camp. I noticed our front door was boarded up. While I stood looking at it, Auntie Wim called out to me. “Come in before your father sees you!” she said, and pulled me inside.

  She told me my father had kicked in the door, and Gerard and my mom had fled because he’d gone completely out of his mind again. They had found refuge in a house on Bentinckstraat.

  At Auntie’s, I heard what had happened. The Bald had come home drunk again. I wasn’t there, so he started pestering my mom by doing a cleanliness inspection. Our house had a ground floor, two stories above that, and an attic. On each floor, he’d swipe two fingers over the surfaces of all tables, cupboards, every spot that could be dusty, to check if my mother had dusted properly.

  Of course, being a devoted and terrified housewife, my mom always had.

  Since he couldn’t find any dust, he continued on, looking for ways to make her life miserable. He didn’t mind creating a domestic failure by pulling the bed linen out of the closet and then asking why it was such a mess. My mother could never win this game.

  “What’s that, in the ashtray?” he’d asked her sharply.

  In our household, no one smoked, and because this ashtray was unused, my mom had put a savings coupon in it. He screamed that that ashtray wasn’t meant for these things and started opening all the cupboards and throwing their contents down the stairs, from the second to the first floor. Crockery, cutlery, side tables, chairs, anything he got hold of went down because she hadn’t cleaned up the house neatly enough and now she had to do it again.

  Gerard, who had been in bed upstairs, came running down at the sound of my father, my mother’s screaming, and the noise of breaking crockery. He saw my father trying to throw my mom down the stairs, and something snapped inside him. He stormed toward him. The Bald made an attempt to lunge at him, but Gerard hit him right in the chin.

  He fell backwards, slamming the back of his head, and lay motionless for a few seconds.

  With one blow, Gerard had put an end to his dictatorship, and shockingly the Bald seemed to accept it. No one in our family had ever dared to go at him physically. Not Mom, not Wim, not Sonja, not me.

  Gerard, the quiet, timid boy, had stood up to my father.

  Honestly, I’d never have expected this from him, and I was eager to get all the details of how he had taught the Bald a lesson, but, quiet as he was, he just said, “There’s nothing good about it.” That’s all I got, and all I needed. Gerard was my hero, and I was glad I hadn’t been home that night. I might have grabbed the kitchen knife from under my bed after all, and who knows how that might have ended.

  Gerard didn’t just save my mother from my father, but me from myself as well.

  After that, Gerard, my mom, and I fled my father once again. My mother would never return to him. I had finally escaped. Peace, at last! That’s how it seemed. But this long-awaited peace and quiet brought its own issues.

  I had gotten used to tyranny. The abuse at home had been a daily routine. I didn’t know any better. Constant vigilance was my normal, and crazily enough, I had grown comfortable with that state. Such continual stress shapes your mind, your senses, your emotions. The coping mechanisms I had been using since I was little to survive in my family were all I knew; they were who I was. Now the family order had dissolved and I didn’t know how to function.

  After he’d left the family, Wim had found a new home in the criminal underworld. Here was a warm nest in which he could bask in what he was used to: tension, aggression, violence. A world that called on his urge for survival and self-preservation.

  Sonja, too, had managed to continue her life in the old way. She had learned from the Bald that a husband has complete control over his wife’s existence, and she saw this teaching confirmed in her evolving relationship with Cor. Her life revolved around him. She was at his beck and call all day long. Gerard coped in his own prudent way. He’d been accepted into his girlfriend Debbie’s loving family.

  I wasn’t suitable for crime like Wim was. All the fringes of society had to offer me was a role as prostitute or gangster moll. And the subservient female role Sonja played held no appeal for me.

  Not knowing what to do with myself, I got aggressive. I’d burst into a rage over nothing. After once locking up my mother in the hallway closet in a moment of panic, I realized I couldn’t go on like this. I had turned into my dad.

  I was sixteen years old, and I ran away from home. Away from the situation that brought out the worst in me. I ended up in a crisis facility, got in a severe accident, went back home, and in 1983, I left for Israel to work on a kibbutz, the only way to stay abroad without having any money.

  In Israel, far away from home, I felt at ease. The constant threat of war caused a pleasant sense of suspense, an alertness I was familiar with. I worked and played basketball, but when I discovered I couldn’t compete unless I was Jewish, I went home at the end of summer to start the new basketball season there.

  Now that my father was gone from our lives, Wim had taken over the regime. He was calling the shots. We had all come “home” again.

  No one in our family had been able to escape from the past.

  I walked back to the house on Eerste Egelantiersdwarsstraat, peeked through the window to see if anything had changed in there at all, but it looked just like I remembered it. The door opened.

  “Are you looking for someone?” a friendly young man asked. “You’re looking so intently.”

  “Oh, no,” I replied. “I was just looking around. This is the house I grew up in.”

  “How nice—would you like to come in for a bit?”

  Go in? Never again did I want to set foot in that nursery of horrors.

  “No, thanks, that’s really kind of you, but I have to go!” I hurried back to my car.

  First thing was to handle Mom’s problem. I got my phone out and sent Wim a message. “Cup of tea?”

  “Okay, thirty minutes” was his reply.

  We didn’t discuss locations over the phone. Doing so would be easy for an observation team to track down and monitor us. That’s why we used code names for certain meeting points. “Cup of tea” meant the Gummmbar, a coffee joint near my office.

  Wim arrived on his scooter, dressed all in black as always, looking sullen and offended.

  “Ridiculous!” He was set off right away. “Won’t even register her own child. Bloody shame! Now what do I do?”

  “Wim, listen. Calm down. Our mother
is almost eighty years old. If you register with her, she might get raided again, or have trouble with the housing association. Mom can’t cope with the stress.”

  “Yeah, whatever—and what am I supposed to do? Fucking egoist. Something has to be arranged, or—”

  “We’ll figure something out,” I reassured him, and we talked until we thought of an address that would be more suitable for him to be registered at than Mom’s. When Wim saw things turn to his advantage, he usually calmed down quickly.

  After talking to Wim, I got in my car and phoned my mom right away.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello, dear,” she said.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Same here. Will you be eating soon?”

  “In a bit. Thanks, honey.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  This was my way of telling Mom that things were dealt with. Wim didn’t have to be registered at her place.

  Now I could finally start my workday.

  Sonja and Cor

  1977

  SONJA WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN SHE MET COR AT OUR HOUSE. HE was twenty. After being friends for a while, they started a relationship. Of course, my father wouldn’t allow it, and so they’d see each other only in secret, at our house when the Bald was at work or away from home.

  Like my mother, Sonja wanted to be a housewife. Every woman from the Jordaan became a housewife. Women with jobs were either pathetic, or married to worthless men who couldn’t even support them. A husband’s quality was measured by the wealth he could offer his wife. Sonja had been training to be someone’s wife since childhood. She taught herself to do domestic chores at a young age: making beds, cleaning house, and doing laundry. I still marvel at how my sister magically turns her kitchen countertop from a dull, dirty surface into shiny black marble. Or how she transforms my living room from a junk shop into a room out of an interior design magazine. It’s a profession, and Sonja loved it. Her life revolved around taking care of Cor; she doted on him all day long.