by Daša Drndic
Andreas Ban drinks tea near the University in Café de Jaren, which is as big as a beer hall, with Frank van Vree, who will be moderating the launch of Andreas’s book. Frank researches memory and remembering and is writing a book, In de schaduw van Auschwitz (In the Shadow of Auschwitz), and talks to his students about memory and remembering, about what fragile, unreliable and sometimes capricious phenomena they are; how they take on many different forms — tame and wild, truthful and deceitful — when they are chiseled into monuments, transposed into films, when they are photographed, when they make fiction and history, when they are sealed in documents. As far as the Second World War is concerned, Auschwitz has become a point by which to calibrate behavior, the symbol of a tolerant society, says Frank van Vree, but alongside Auschwitz there are many stories, deliberately forgotten or tendentiously distorted. Then Frank got onto his bicycle, rode to his car and drove off. I live with my family in the country, he said, quiet and green there.
Do you talk with your tutors about fascism? Andreas asks his fourth-year students, and they just look at him and say nothing. Then someone says, No. Then someone else adds brashly, It’s not in the curriculum, it’s not online. Immediately Andreas wants to start an argument, but instead he hands the students a short text by Umberto Eco, a little piece about ur-fascism, to warm them up, and they read it out loud in the class, and Andreas Ban asks them, Are there any elements of fascism in Croatia? after which silence bursts into the dark aura of fear. These students are registered for various subjects — history, literature, philosophy, languages — they weave, twist, wind, dabble, scratch around in facts, after which they turn deaf and set off into the world terrifyingly muted. The majority. So, when the past and present unexpectedly leap up in front of them in a feverish embrace, in an embrace of love and hate, blindness and passion, when they smirk at them in their dreams and waking hours, they swat them away as though they were horseflies, plug headsets into their ears and shake their heads. Like puppets on a string, they wait for someone to give them the gift of movement under the skies of the unmoving.
One night, into Andreas Ban’s half-sleep strolls Leeuwenhoek, the guy born in Delft in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the whole business of how he develops the microscope and with it discovers bacteria, parasites, blood corpuscles and much more, and Andreas sees too his mother’s old microscope from her student days, in a huge wooden box which magically disappears in the 1950s (sold for five kilos of oranges), and which Andreas Ban and his sister open piously and secretly, so as to observe through its lenses their first paramecia and amoebas, those single-cell protozoa inhabiting muddy marsh waters, which change their shape as they walk on false legs, which are in fact, simple as they are, very complex and greedy protozoa that resist any artificial, laboratory engineering of their own species.
The Prix Goncourt for 2009 is won by the French-Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye for her novel Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women), and so there is a meeting held about the Goncourt prizes to which Andreas Ban does not go, because at the same time in the Academic Cultural Center across the road from his building there is a discussion about the thirty-one-year-old Afghan politician, activist and fighter for the rights of her nation and especially women, Malalai Joya. There is a lot of information about Malalai Joya online, about what she is fighting for and how, where she has given talks, on which continents, at which universities, in what forums, in which international papers she has written; which prominent names, from Chomsky to Naomi Klein to journalists, parliamentarians and politicians, have spoken about her anticorruption activities, offering her (moral) support. But something here does not add up. It is as though an absurd drama is being acted out behind the scenes of Western civilization, a burlesque to prick the conscience of the world, a conscience dulled by many of those who support Malalai Joya. The book that Malalai Joya writes with the Canadian journalist Derrick O’Keefe, published in the US as Raising My Voice and translated into many European languages (with titles such as A Woman Among Warlords or Au nom de mon peuple), is being launched that evening by De Geus in its Dutch edition. One can enter the hall only if registered in advance, at the door there are security personnel or plainclothes police, and there are more in the audience. As a member of parliament, in 2003 Malalai Joya took the microphone and, demonstratively removing her black scarf, used the three minutes she had at her disposal to let fly a volley at the so-called democratically elected Afghan government, in particular its wartime leaders, profiteers and criminals (who enjoy the support of the US and members of NATO). Then a campaign was launched against her. In 2007, Malalai Joya was deprived of all political rights and thrown out of parliament, after which she survived several assassination attempts and was quite ironically offered the protection of the United Nations Security Forces. Nowadays she travels incognito in a burka, is guarded by armed professionals and has no permanent address in Afghanistan. Andreas finds it touching and exciting to observe this young, fragile, beautiful woman completely spellbound by her mission. Using the language of agitprop, demonstrations, anger and accusation, a simple language without circularity, without nuances, a language that has the effect of a mantra, with one sharp thought at its core — the one about “the freedom of the people” — a language comprehensible to her half-educated and manipulated “brothers and sisters,” a language carrying the burden of an almost fanatical belief in “a better tomorrow,” the language of revolution and revolutionaries, which still rings in the ears of fifty-year-olds and those even older, and whose faded traces sink into the dug-out crevasses of history, a direct language, almost flaming, used by this decisive woman, the embodiment of all stereotypes of a woman revolutionary, to address her indifferent and spoiled audience which cannot think of a better plan for frittering away a rainy evening. Childishly utopian, spoken almost in a trance, her final call to her drowsy Dutch audience rings out (an entreaty Malalai Joya probably addresses to all the assemblies of Western civilization before which she stands): Rise up against the intervention of your country in Afghanistan, let us fight for our freedom on our own; we have thrown off the Taliban, we will throw off Karzai. I want to live, but I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of silence. And to those who wish to remove me I say: You can pluck a flower, but you cannot prevent the coming of spring. If they kill me, they will not kill my voice, because it is the voice of all the women of Afghanistan. I am just a symbol of the struggle of my people and the servant of their ideals. If they kill me because of what I believe, then let my blood become the inspiration for emancipation and my words be a revolutionary paradigm for the generations to come. This pathos-filled, somnambulist, archaic and cliché-ridden rhetoric uttered in the midst of a shallow, consumerist civilization, whose greatest concern is the ecological separation of waste, seems to be the only possible rhetoric for the disenfranchised and uneducated. That is why what Malalai Joya is doing in her country is more important than the way she presents it in the Western market, because those are goods the Western market does not buy: Malalai Joya’s illegal schools for girls, schools in cellars and private houses during Taliban rule, her sharp public condemnation of religious fundamentalists, her childhood spent in Iranian and Pakistani refugee camps (after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), her struggle against the inclusion of former mujahideen in the current Afghan government, and, not at all unimportant, her awareness, her public admission of the importance of her own education which will procure her a rhetoric on a par with that of prominent Western politicians and thinkers who now bow paternalistically before her.
After that performance that will do absolutely nothing for Malalai Joya and her people, Andreas Ban goes for a drink with Rashid Novaire. Rashid Novaire is a Dutch writer with a fine oval face and skin the color of white coffee, born in 1979 to a Dutch mother and a Moroccan father. In 2005, Rashid Novaire appears in Zagreb and Zadar at the European Short Story Festival, and the literary journal Zarez publishes two of his poems (“India” and “Herons in Cairo”). Rashid
Novaire writes novels and poetry. In the bar, Andreas and Rashid do not talk about literature, or perhaps a bit, obliquely. Rashid talks about a book that is lying in his belly, buried, and which, as time passes, is turning into a clump, heavy and painful. Rashid is beginning to break up that clump by collecting pellets of his family’s past. In 2008, his novel Roots comes into being. Thus Andreas discovers:
Once upon a time there was a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Polish woman of German origin. From Danzig (?). At the beginning of the Second World War, after the German invasion of Poland, bewitched by the Führer’s promises about the upright future of the upright Aryan race, this fair-skinned, blue-eyed Polish woman of German origin resolves to make her contribution to that future. She commits no crimes, she does not inform on any Jews (if she does, Rashid will never know), she just gives birth. So this Polish woman of German origin brings ten children into the world and for her effort receives Hitler’s Cross of Honor of the German Mother, das Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter, popularly known as das Mutterkreuz. Because, as the Nazis liked to say (and in a similar vein the Catholic Church claims), Your body is not your property but the property of your family — your homeland. After the war, this proud Polish woman is not driven out of Poland with all those Germans who stumble around Europe looking for somewhere to settle down. But her children leave, one after another. The daughter of the by now elderly Polish woman of German origin starts a family in Amsterdam, where her daughter falls in love with a young Moroccan immigrant and they have a son. The son becomes a Dutch poet and prose writer, while the old Polish woman of German origin renounces her granddaughter because she marries a man of “impure” blood, color and race. However, the old Polish woman of German origin dies soon afterward — so no problem. That granddaughter is my mother, says Rashid. You never know where you are with history, you never know where the truth lies. In what actually happened or in what we would like to have happened. History is a dangerous seductress.
Andreas Ban casts a glance around the bar. He looks behind him. The bar is full of guests, and noisy. A small bar with the patina of a dangerous past. A frowning barman. At the counter stand big fair-haired men, muscle-bound men with tattoos, men of stiff military gestures. Andreas Ban sees how he and Rashid shrink, slip off their chairs. A strange wind blows through the bruin café, it gets dark and cold. From somewhere in the distance comes that famous maudlin “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” Imagination can play all sorts of tricks on us, says Andreas Ban, let’s get out of here. But expand the story of your great-grandmother, he says. And visit Poland.
Guido Snel takes Leo and Andreas to the Turkish restaurant Diwan, in the Jordaan district. They eat all kinds of snacks, they are brought ten dishes with food for picking at and dunking. Some of the foods are familiar, meatballs for instance, tarator salad, ajvar, but some are new to Leo and Andreas, and spicy. The pieces of baklava are unusual and slip down the throat. When Andreas Ban had strolled through Jordaan on his own (before Leo came), although all the tourist guides describe it as a lively and picturesque workers’ district, there had not been any liveliness anywhere. It was windy, clouds hung like rags from the bare branches, the canals were murky. The shops were shut and little balls of gray winter silence rolled across the squares. As he walked, Andreas had stumbled across a relatively small statue of Theo Thijssen (1879–1943), the Netherlands’ best-loved children’s author. Theo Thijssen stood outside the Theo Thijssen Museum, in fact outside the house where Thijssen was born, which Andreas Ban does not enter. The statue of Anne Frank is small. Andreas does not visit the Anne Frank House either, because there are too many people lining up outside the museum and Anne Frank has been turned into a populist Dutch brand as though she belonged in Amsterdam’s Madame Tussauds. A writer from Turkey who had lived in this literary Amsterdam apartment before Andreas had been to the wax museum and had his photograph taken in an embrace with Obama. The photograph of the Turkish writer had been fixed into a virulently red frame, but he had forgotten it on the fridge.
The night that Leo and Andreas walked to Jordaan with Guido, it sparkled everywhere, as though it was New Year.
In The Hague Andreas also visits a large historical photography exhibition and an exhibition of the Blue Rider,** then once again sinks into a deep blue depression because of the times he is living in. It is cold in The Hague too. Andreas Ban spends two days staying with his friend Zoran Mutić, otherwise from Sarajevo, plunged in Zoran’s family war story which he already knows in detail, but still, he always wants to hear it again. Zoran is a first-rate translator of poetry and prose from modern Greek, yet in The Hague he now translates documents and indictments, all kinds of bureaucratic legalistic tangles; instead of dealing with lyrical souls he concerns himself with crooks and collects films that he will not get around to watching and books that he does not have time to read.
On the way to the Gemeente museum (while Zoran is at work), Andreas Ban catches sight of a telephone booth in which a smiling Stalin is waiting, illuminated by a table lamp with a pinkish-white shade. What if, instead of Stalin with his twisted wing mustache, that syphilitic degenerate and pervert with his stubby sawn-off mustache had been crouching in the telephone booth, the guy who had caught venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908, after which he imagined that God Himself had sent him to eliminate the “Jewish disease” that was raging throughout the world?
In The Hague Andreas Ban goes to lunch with Joško Paro, the Croatian Ambassador at the time. First Andreas Ban and Joško Paro talk about literature, then about agreeable activities such as learning Dutch and painting, then they move on to Tudjman and the 1990s, Andreas is initially tentative, then relaxes completely, because Joško Paro turns out to be a critically minded collocutor, so the salmon they are eating slips merrily down Andreas’s throat. Afterward, when Andreas goes off to his launch, Joško Paro says, Be careful, the Dutch are very direct people. After the launch, Paro’s warning is clarified: a middle-aged man approaches Andreas Ban and says, I’m a psychologist, what you wrote is good, but your reading was terrible, promise that you’ll never read like that again. Better that than Croatian artificiality, constrained politeness.
After the launch, Mirjana Staničić from the Croatian Embassy invites Kirsten from De Geus, Zoran and Andreas to dinner in a businessmen’s restaurant, where all the guests are men who speak softly, dressed in dark suits and expensive shoes. It looks conspiratorial.
In The Hague Andreas Ban does not manage to see the sea. Zoran says, You can’t swim in the sea at Scheveningen, it has currents that sweep people away, never to be seen again, so why would you look at it? and Andreas trusts Zoran.
In The Hague Andreas Ban also visits an exhibition of Czech glass because it is on his way, and as he looks at those creations full of imagination and color, not exactly appealing heaped up like that, he recalls the 1960s when people used to travel from Yugoslavia to Czechoslovakia for ugly crystal glasses, jugs and cake sets, and then arrange them in glass-fronted cabinets, mostly for prestige and wonderment.
In The Hague it is below zero. Snowflakes sprinkle the days. Ellen Elias-Bursać, who also translates for the Tribunal and books as well, when she has time, takes Zoran and Andreas to De Boterwaag Café to get warm. As far back as 1682, butter was sold in De Boterwaag Café, so in the middle of the café that looks more like a beer hall with its old stone floor, stands an authentic weighing machine from that period, a huge decorative object, wrapped in nostalgia, around which the customers eat and drink tea.
Chinese New Year falls while Andreas Ban is in The Hague, festivities and din, crowds everywhere, especially in the Chinese quarter. The Chinese quarter sprang up on the terrain of the former Jewish shtetl of impoverished Ashkenazy immigrants. That is why Ellen Elias says, I have my own Jewish story, you know. That was something Andreas Ban did not expect. There in The Hague. Those stories running after him like little ducks sliding over the frozen lakes and canals, then stumbling on the hardened Hague soil. Ellen�
�s family was originally from Krakow, and before the Second World War most of its members moved to America. Some did not manage to leave and they simply — vanished. As soon as he had returned to Amsterdam, Andreas received a photograph from Ellen Elias of her grandfather Nathaniel M. Elias, a New York chemical engineer who, as a witness for the prosecution and on behalf of several government agencies of the United States, testified in Nuremberg at the I. G. Farben trial. And there in The Hague, as they are wandering through the Chinese quarter, Ellen says, Come, I want to show you something.
They enter a small urban park with leafless trees and step onto the empty children’s playground surrounded by new four-story apartment blocks with red and yellow facades. In the middle of the playground are six shiny climbing frames of various heights that resemble chairs (there had been seven, one was stolen). It is only when one gets very close, when the gaze focuses on each individual rung, that one notices, written in crooked children’s handwriting, with letters of unequal size resisting order and severity, male and female names and beside each name in brackets a number indicating age. According to an explanation written on the ground nearby, Andreas Ban discovers that these are the names of some of the two thousand and sixty-one (2,061) Jewish children from The Hague consumed by the war, many of whom “played here and went to school across the road.” Andreas Ban discovers that the Nazis had taken these children, two thousand and sixty-one (2,061), aged between six months and eighteen years, from their parents (the parents were rounded up a few streets away), and from the open space in front of the school, precisely on the site of this “playground,” sent them in special wagons first to Westerbork concentration camp or to Vught transit camp, then to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. The monument is the work of the artists Sara Benhamou and Eric de Vries and was erected in 2006. Later, Andreas Ban researches several families from The Hague to find out where and how the parents, brothers and sisters, the relatives of the children who had been taken away had ended up. In some cases deaths were shared, familial, sometimes the mothers died with their daughters and sons, sometimes the children died alone.