*
But we learn to forget quickly. With October comes a local holiday and we head to Leiden without a penny in our pockets to watch other people celebrate what we don’t have the means to celebrate ourselves. The autumn break is a drag. Trysts with girls from the other wing fall through when the group leaders catch on and take it in turns to patrol the woods. My fingers hurt from mastering my first guitar chords. The strings are too far from the fingerboard, but at the time I have no idea that more expensive guitars are far easier to handle.
The best times are to be had at school, beyond the gates of the home. I swap guitar chords from chart hits with the local boys. The Christmas holidays are lonely, but at least it’s quiet in the den and I get to play my first LP over and over, a birthday present from the home. I am mesmerized by The Kinks’ hollow guitar sounds. The muffled strains of Gene Pitney and Roy Orbison filter through from the girls’ wing.
On New Year’s Eve, Phil, Arti and I join a few other leftover boys to watch a pathetic firework display light up the sky above the steeples of the churches we hate so much. There are three in all: Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian and Catholic. The canals and ditches have frozen over, and the rink over by the Vliet is open. We take to the ice on our Frisian skates – wooden blades that keep slipping out from under our shoes – while the prettiest girls pirouette on immaculate white figure skates and the local toughs race around on hockey skates. Then the rain sets in. Not a drop of wine to be had. Back at the home, we shake one another by the hand and it’s ‘Happy New Year!’ and off to bed. I lie awake until the church clock strikes two and the group leader on duty, a blonde of 23, returns from The Club, a cosy lounge for senior leaders over in the girls’ wing. I creep over the cold lino to the duty office and spy on her through the keyhole. The glimpses of her breasts are fleeting and cherished. When I think of them, my bed gets warm and there’s not a mother in the whole wide world I miss. Only the beautiful woman who is not lying next to me. I’ve heard there are children’s homes where everyone has their own room and even a key or a bolt to lock it with. Where you can lie down for a while when you get in from school.
Weekend in The Hague
One weekend, we, the boys, all three of us, are allowed out to visit our mother. Every time we see her, she continues to greet us with an outstretched hand.
‘Well boys, how are you all doing?’
Can we expect a handshake this time, too? What reason could she have for coming over all ladylike?
‘Hey, boys! How’s life treating you? Ha ha ha!’
That question comes courtesy of Uncle Willem. A decent bloke who knows a bit about life. All my mother knows is her clean kitchen counter. And the abuse she took, that too.
With a heavy heart, I climb onto the bus behind Phil and Arti. In The Hague, we take Tram 9 to the far edge of Zuider Park. It takes ages to get there, a long ride back into a dismal past. This time our mother doesn’t introduce herself at all but greets us with the news that she’s just cleaned the house so we’d better not make a mess. We barely recognize our room, so much of our stuff has disappeared. The mantelpiece has been painted white, as if memories can be blotted out by a thick coat of emulsion. Our mother shoos us out to play with our old neighbourhood friends again. Phil and Arti don’t hesitate, but I settle down in the basket chair by the window, overlooking Zuider Park. I am fourteen but I feel old. My exasperated mother exclaims that I’m turning into a recluse, she won’t stop banging on about it. Why can’t she just leave me in peace?
‘Where’s my radio, Mam?’
‘Sold it. I needed the money.’
But my drawings from school are gone too. Nor do I see anything that belonged to Phil or Arti.
‘What do I want with that junk of yours?’ she snaps.
She sold it all off, dirt cheap. Even my stamp collection, my precious stamps with postmarks from the war years, the one hobby I shared with my father. It’s as if she was determined to tidy us away as well. She doesn’t feel like cooking and come dinner time she sends us to the chippy.
I look into my mother’s eyes and feel a strange, sudden fear. I no longer recognize her, it’s someone else I see. It is different to the fear my father instilled in me. I see traces of another madness in her eyes, or years of revulsion that have finally surfaced. Perhaps it’s the worst thing that can live inside my mother: a heartfelt loathing of her own Indo children. I panic and run for the door, down the stairwell, across the road and into the park. God knows where I’m heading – anywhere as long as it’s away from that wretched flat where Phil slept with a knife under his pillow in the days before we were taken away.
My brothers find me on an old wooden bridge in Zuider Park, one of our boyhood haunts. I tell them I’m not going back inside, that they’ll have to call the home. Our mother gives them twenty-five cents and we go in search of a phone box. Phil does the talking. Late that afternoon, the head turns up in person to collect me in his own car. Phil and Arti wave me off and my mother looks on desperately from the balcony she once swept clean of our beloved birds’ nest.
The head is a stern man, strait-laced and averse to personal questions. The one thing he says as he drives me back to Voorschoten is that we are under no obligation to visit our parents. And vice versa.
Island
When the summer holidays arrive, the head summons me to his office. The lanky figure in the blue suit, red tie and black shoes picks up the receiver of his Bakelite telephone and starts calling around to find me a job. Peeling flower bulbs on the outskirts of Voorschoten? No. Working at the paint factory on the other side of the railway tracks? No. He doggedly continues his search and finally gets a ‘yes’. From a dog food factory in Valkenburg. It means getting up at six in the morning. I cycle to the factory with another boy from my group, where we are paid to do all kinds of odd jobs. The cycling is the best part. On the way there, at least, when the world is still sleeping. On the way back, we’re worn out and car after car zooms past us. It’s so late by the time we get home that we’re stuck with the leftovers from dinner.
There’s a girl who works in the packing department at the dog food factory, an Indo girl who is nearly sixteen. I am nearly fifteen. She’s pretty and she’s nice. What does she see in me? A little brother or a guy she could fancy? A lad from a good school works there too. Tall, smart and well-read, he makes a big impression on me, with his deep voice and his mop of sandy curls. If only he were in the children’s home with us. At least then I’d have someone to talk to about books and music. When I return to work after a day off sick, Curly says to me, ‘I missed your dynamic presence around here yesterday…’
I’m pleased to hear it, but I have no idea how I come across to other people. All I know is that beyond the home and beyond Voorschoten, the world is a different place. No place for me. The early starts wear me down and after two weeks I throw in the towel. The only thing I really miss is the Indo girl from packing. She kisses me to sleep each night with those beautiful lips of hers, until she fails to materialize one night, then two, then three… then a whole week… What was her name again? Where does she live? There’s no point wondering. The very idea of a girlfriend from outside the home, from outside Voorschoten, is absurd.
*
I manage to save up enough money to spend a week at a youth hostel on the sleepy little island of Ameland, a trip arranged by the head. Train and bus take me as far as Holwerd, where I board a boat along with a bunch of other kids my age from all over the country. I get seasick on the short crossing and feel like a wimp. What follows is a long, sunless week on a cold, deserted, wet and windswept island. There’s nothing to do but walk and walk and walk. And, circling the island on foot, there’s nothing to see but dunes, grass and birds that don’t interest me in the slightest. The islanders are friendly enough but not in the least curious. It’s like they live on a reservation. We spend our evenings at the youth hostel in thrall to a blond chap with a Christian look about him, a gifted guitarist with the entire Top 40 at
his fingertips. We sing along. With him around, I hardly miss the radio and the record player but he’s not an easy man to access. He gets so much attention from the girls that I never get the chance to ask him for guitar tips. The evening rambles suit me better than our outings in the mornings or afternoons. We carry torches and move through the landscape like figures in a shadow play. A blonde girl from Haarlem walks beside me for a while. She introduces herself as Kristel and has a sharp, witty way about her. She wears glasses and sports one of those cool sixties hairdos with symmetrical locks that curl towards the corners of her mouth. I am reminded of the female teachers back in Voorschoten. It’s the summer of ’66, but we are all bundled up in jumpers and anoraks. One night, a couple of pals and I are caught by the hostel warden trying to sneak back in after a disastrous hunt for a decent pub. It’s past midnight and, brandishing a pitchfork, he chases us into his barn, where we get to spend the night among the hay and the rats by way of punishment. Kristel listens to my tale of woe the next day and asks me schoolmarmish questions about my conduct. During one of the evening walks, she slows right down until she’s at the tail end of the group, where I’ve been strolling along waiting for her. ‘I don’t do tongues,’ she says, just so I know. My first kiss with her is the same as my first ever kiss, in the bushes round the back of the home with a leggy girl who was a year older than me. Kristel has twice the brains of that care home girl and is doubtless on her way to straight As at the grammar school she attends. The letters she writes me in the weeks that follow come without spelling mistakes and sometimes require the aid of a dictionary, which means I have to knock on the door of the governor’s house over by the lake. The man limps over to his bookcase, pats me on the shoulder and limps me to the door to show me out. His dog limps too. They say he had polio and that he once served in the police force.
*
Years later, during a reunion at the home, the governor tells me that he used to work as an immigration official, charged with arranging the reception of repatriates from the Indies. That he sat at a desk somewhere in The Hague stamping forms. That among the repatriates were people with no passport and no proof of where they came from. On rare occasions, there were people who couldn’t speak a word of Dutch.
‘So what did you do with them?’
‘We issued them with a residence permit and after that we gave them a passport. No point kicking up a fuss about that kind of thing. Didn’t have the time. No one was ever sent back – it simply wasn’t done.’
In other words, my father could well have run into Indonesian enemies in the back streets of The Hague. It wasn’t just the stuff of nightmares…
*
In my letters to Kristel, I skirt around awkward questions prompted by the double house number in my address: 96–98 Leidseweg. Eventually I have no choice but to tell her – to my shame – that I am a ‘pupil’ at a children’s home. She writes back to tell me her father has no problem with that at all, that any shame lies with my parents and not with me, and that I am welcome to visit for the weekend. I don’t dare ask the head, afraid he’ll say no, but I set a date anyway, knowing that I won’t be able to go through with it and I’m only making trouble for myself. One week later, Kristel sends me a letter listing all of her parents’ preparations to make my stay a pleasant one. I can’t bear to write back. I tear up all her letters and even her photo, afraid one of the other boys will find it. I curl up with the radio or kick a ball around the playing field, help the gardener and, when there’s nothing left for me to do, I get permission to play my guitar up in the dorm. I am not allowed guitar lessons; the head is convinced that I won’t stick at it. He doesn’t like music, though he does like dancing. All a dancer needs is a beat, an endless loop of crash, bang, wallop. Melody is neither here nor there.
For the duration of the summer holidays, two groups are combined into one. That means Arti is in with us for a change. He too receives a guitar from our father, who continues to visit us faithfully, while Ma has gone off to Germany with Uncle Willem. The rough and ready man from Scheveningen is working on the construction of the Olympic stadium in Munich, and my mother makes coffee for the Dutch builders. The summer fades fast and for the first time we visit our father in Delft.
Weekend in Delft
Hey, Pa, I don’t know how you remember this episode, but as I recall it went like this… After the arrival of a hefty German matron in your life – the first woman from your book of German contact ads to show willing – us boys were given permission to visit that flat of yours on Bosboom-Toussaintplein in Delft.
We set off in the afternoon and take a bus, then a train, then another bus and to top it all a lift to the twelfth floor. Despite the hair-raising heights, your flat is cosier than we could ever have expected, and you are astoundingly considerate and easy to get on with. Not that you have much choice. Lay one finger on us and there’s every chance you’ll never see us again. Frau Eva has two young kids from a previous marriage and an unfortunate habit of giving them a good hiding every now and then. But boy, can she cook. She serves up sandwiches as soon as we arrive: three slices of white bread piled with ham, cheese, tomato, lettuce, boiled egg, tomato ketchup and mayonnaise. An unbelievable treat compared to the dry brown bread at the home. You tell us that’s all anyone eats in Germany, which is why Germans are all so fat. Frau Eva gets the gist and complains that you shouldn’t talk about her countrymen like that. You grin, give her a Hitler salute and bark, ‘Jawohl!’ We are familiar with your wicked sense of humour and remember all too well how little Ma appreciated it. I begin to doubt whether you and Eva are a match. Nevertheless, the three of us are happy with your matron, moaning non-stop about everything under the sun in her own peculiar mix of German and Dutch. She rivals Ma in the moaning stakes, but that’s the only resemblance. Ma cannot cook. Ma has no desire to cook, none whatsoever. Ma hates cooking. She fries eggs with a dishcloth poised in one hand to wipe away the oil spatters. Frau Eva practically shoves those German goodies down our throats. Dinner consists of soup, fried potatoes, roast meat and all kinds of veg. Mayonnaise and ketchup, forbidden at the home, are staples on her table. Desert comes with lashings of cream. We spend at least two hours at the dinner table with the TV chattering non-stop in the background. At the home, television is restricted to Wednesday afternoons for the younger kids and Wednesday and Saturday evenings for us. The set is switched off at ten sharp by the head, who marches over from his office in the girls’ wing to perform this task in person. There is no leeway. Even if the Wednesday whodunnit only has ten minutes left to run, we have to wait and find out the killer’s identity from our classmates the next day. Your flat in Delft is a different world, Pa. The TV stays on till the final programme ends and the test card appears, accompanied by an ear-splitting whistle. Your turntable never stops spinning either. No one seems to mind that the record player and the TV are blaring away at the same time, not even you. Your typewriter no longer rattles through the evening and into the night. Your record collection is housed in special cases and even includes music I like to listen to: Manfred Mann, the Bee Gees, The Shadows. Your flat knows no official bedtime. While you are sound asleep, I sit with my feet up on the radiator listening to music and gazing out of the window. Far below, trains wind their way towards the lights of Rotterdam and I picture myself in one of those carriages, travelling far beyond the horizon to an unknown country, a place where I can dream like this, sitting and staring out of another window while my records play over and over. I sleep on the couch. The next day I stare out of the window at the trains again, listening to The Shadows and their melancholy guitars. Frau Eva is already busy in the kitchen and stuffs us so full of food that we can’t help but laugh. Sunday flies by and you walk us to the bus stop, talking all the while about your battle with Child Services, your battle with Ma, your battle with the authorities, your battle with the head of the children’s home, your battle against your alimony payments, against racism at work and a bunch of other stuff that means very little to u
s. Battles in which your dagger does not feature, thankfully. We will never see it in your hand again. Your weapon of choice is now your old pal the typewriter, which we will never hear again.
*
It’s already dark by the time we get to Leiden. That’s when things go wrong. We step aside politely to let an old lady board the bus ahead of us. Phil gets on after her and is still standing on the footboard as he drops the fare for our trip to Voorschoten into the tray. But the bus driver thinks our coins are the old lady’s change. Phil begins to protest loudly, while the old lady insists the money is hers and takes her seat cool as you please. The dispute between Phil and the driver descends into slapstick: he jumps up, shoves the three of us off the bus and we end up flat on our backs on the pavement, Phil swearing blue murder as the bus roars off. Glum as can be, we stand there for half an hour waiting for the next bus to arrive. The extra pocket money Frau Eva slipped us as we left all goes on bus fare. We are already far too late when we come running through the gates to the home, and the head is standing there waiting for us in the vestibule.
No one believes our story and the head lets us know in no uncertain terms that it will be a good while before we get to spend another weekend in Delft.
*
You are a soldier at your typewriter. In his office, the head reads me censored versions of your letters, my privilege as your first-born child. I feel like a condemned man being read his sentence and can barely bring myself to listen – why can’t you stop churning out these missives awash with venom, sarcasm and veiled self-pity? And it doesn’t stop there: you stir things up so much that Eva – long patent leather boots, fur coat, lacquered hair piled high like candyfloss – ambushes Ma one Sunday afternoon and claws at her with those long, sharp nails of hers while you look on. Eva is furious at Ma for being such a bad mother: what kind of woman leaves her own children to rot in a cold, Calvinist children’s home? But then what kind of ex-marine enlists his second wife to do battle with his first?
The Interpreter from Java Page 22