I HAD A Jekyll-and-Hyde father, but my mother had several sides to her also and her moods generally set the feeling of the house. What especially redeemed her in our eyes was her sporadic sense of humour, dispelling darkness as suddenly as the sun lights up the countryside. Then, her quirky, unexpected way of putting things sent us into fits of laughter. The house seemed transformed and evil an impossible reality.
Her wittiness attracted visitors to our house. Even when she was in her eighties and considered senile, she could suddenly throw off forty years and quip about life in the nursing home as if she were out on a picnic. Even though she was mostly sedated to relieve the pain of severe rheumatoid arthritis and the effects of syphilis, visitors were often delighted by her unexpected and funny remarks.
Mama loved music and often switched the wireless on. Classical music made her happy, and when I was little I watched her laugh as she worked, making the most of her day when her husband was away at work and she had the house to herself. She sang children’s songs, war ditties, arias even, and at those times her brightness lifted our spirits.
A very special treat was to go shopping with my mama when I grew tall enough to walk arm in arm with her, as was the custom for women in Holland. It was a delicious closeness for both of us, and she would talk animatedly and cheerfully as we walked and shopped. Life became light again for me too, when I experienced the temporary happiness of forgetting myself.
Mother consulted the priest because she didn’t want so many pregnancies. The priest told her that she had no right to refuse the husband she had promised to honour and obey in holy matrimony. So my mother had to cave in to my father’s sexual demands; but she, the clever vixen, knew how to get back at him, the uneducated one. She had the ability to taunt him with words. He had only brute muscle against the power of her cutting derisive intellect.
My mama rarely approved of anything my papa did. She taunted him so much about playing his beloved violin that in the end he threw it against the wall and broke it. It could only be fixed at great cost, so he sold it to the repair man for a paltry twenty-five guilders—the violin that had been his personal Stradivarius. Did he gnash his teeth then, and weep when no one saw him, for letting his woman get the better of him? Or did revenge find its way through violence?
One day, during a more serious spat than usual, they both forgot that the neighbours would be listening through the walls. My mother mocked him in a loud jeering voice and dared him to kill her. This was something new. The insults had been flying for some time, and now the two of them were spinning in a vortex of bitter reprisal. We six children were crying out loud, sitting forlornly in a row on the kitchen table. Our parents were in full view through the kitchen door into the living room. Papa had the large carving knife in his hands and Mama was saying breathlessly, ‘Go on then, do it! Kill me!’ while she dared him with her eyes. She said it so many times that the only way he could save face was to actually stab her. She let go a scream and we children wailed the more loudly. The tribal bond with our parents was temporarily broken; we were abandoned, floating loose, drifting like flotsam on a churning murky ocean.
The blood brought my papa to his senses. He grabbed a towel and stemmed the flow from her neck. In time, the scar mended very well and was forgotten. I only noticed it again years later, in a photo of her lying in a nursing home bed, looking affectionately at my father, who was holding her hand. That’s how it was between my parents—they truly loved each other and would never part. And yet they could not stand each other. When the stuff of passion can’t be positive, let it be there anyway.
WHEN LIFE WAS not light but heavy, I escaped into daydreams. I had friends who lived with me from day to day—my dolls. I had several and they became alive for me. I talked to them, made clothes for them, put them to bed, gave them flowers and showered affection on them. My clever papa had made me a wooden doll’s house painted a beautiful red. Even though the soft little carpets were the remnants of my pet rabbit, I kept them to decorate the floor. They gave me an eerie feeling of pure clean softness.
Only my dolls saw anything like the real me. I related to them as I would have preferred to relate to the people around me, if I had dared. With my dolls I was an untiringly tender mother, a sister, a child asking for help, a nurse, and a creative problem-solver. The dolls were alive for me until I was ten. When I was eleven, they were sometimes alive and sometimes not—curiously, it depended on how I chose to look at them.
I kept my doll’s house in an open flat space halfway up the staircase, close to the ceiling. The area was big enough for a mattress and one day I persuaded my parents to let me sleep there with my family of dolls. However, a nocturnal visit from my papa, or maybe the nightmare of it happening again, made me wet the bed. I never mentioned it, and nothing was ever said to me about it. This was both a relief and a disturbance, because it must have been noticed by my mama, who washed my sheet and put a clean one on the bed. Why didn’t she say something? Was she suffering from having to square things in her own confused mind? Didn’t she know what was happening? Did she choose not to know? Instead of protecting me, she grew bitter and as I grew older began to regard me as a rival, calling me degrading names like vuile dweil, filthy rag.
MY MOTHER HAD to find some way to absorb the roughness she sometimes received at the hands of the man who demanded his marriage rights. One day she was nursing a mysteriously sore foot. It was never explained to us children why it was bandaged, or why she couldn’t move from her chair. She whimpered whenever anyone came near her foot, and cried and rolled her eyes, sucking in her lips in pain when I accidentally bumped it. I felt the pain as much as she did: it went up my legs like knives of fire and I cried for her. But not far away was a bitch, growing and feeding on suppressed anger at my mother.
There were times when this bitch came out to bite everyone in her vicinity. I was eleven going on twelve, when my mother realised she was unable to stop me. There was to be a photo session—there were seven children by now—and a real live photographer was coming to our house. I knew instinctively that this would be an opportunity for my mother to show off her favourite son, Markus, the fourth child and her second boy. He had golden curls that were not cut off until he went to school, and both my mother and father adored him. Markus could do no wrong, but I knew how to wrong him and I knew how to destroy this special occasion for my mama, who had a much greater investment in how the family looked in photographs than my father did.
Mother was busy with the littlies and couldn’t be everywhere at once, which gave me the perfect opportunity to repeatedly pinch my seven-year-old brother until he cried. With venom that would do a spider justice, copying the way a teacher had treated me, I nipped his pretty cheeks, sinking my fingernails in again and again, until finally the red marks didn’t go away. My idea was to mar his good looks and make him cry so much that it would show on the photos.
The strategy worked, but didn’t go unnoticed by my mother who was furious. She was helpless to undo the situation, but for the rest of that day she slapped my face and cursed me whenever we came within reach of one another. I did not attempt to get out of her way, somehow realising that every slap proved I had won. In the end it was my father who uncharacteristically took command and ordered her to stop, for God’s sake, because the whole house was feeling unbearable.
She now often had to contend with the cold stubbornness of her eldest daughter, who pitted her will against her own when she had the courage. ‘Bullheaded’, she called me. ‘I’m not a bull,’ I would say quasi-innocently, and she fell for the bait to argue the point, saying that I knew what she meant. It was only my constant fear of dying and going to hell that made me repress the worst bouts of rebelliousness that boiled up inside me as if in a fast-heating cauldron, making my heart race and contorting my face as sweat broke out everywhere.
I was hotly tempted to kill both of my parents. I dreamed up elaborate murder schemes, and once almost convinced myself that I’d be able to do it and
get away with it. Then I hesitated, and couldn’t believe how bad I was. The ‘real me’ was this hideous person, who would be discovered when the outer layer of niceness was removed. The core of my being, I was convinced, was rotten. Everything in my religion confirmed it. I couldn’t think any better of myself when I bought a box of chocolates for my mother’s birthday with my scant pocket money, ate one to try them out, and then ate the lot, because it wouldn’t do to give her a box that had been tampered with.
Nevertheless, in spite of everything I still was in love with God. This was not the God of fear and punishment, but a natural feeling in my heart that would assert itself when it got the chance. It might have been God the loving parent, the father in heaven whom a child could imagine to be kind and loving. Some adults in my life were kind and loving—my Uncle Kees, and Pater Janus, and even my own parents and teachers sometimes. When I felt God in my heart, I thrilled with joy to receive holy communion.
As the memory of the coal shed receded, I felt the lightness and cleanliness of confession once more. At my confirmation, I was proud to be a soldier of Christ. I felt able to please God in a way I had been unable to please my father. I imagined myself armed with light and swords made of fire, ready to cut the devil and evil to pieces, marching with fists on flailing arms through the alleyway behind our house, singing, ‘Soldiers of Christ, we march to vindicate Thee’. The German blood in me delighted in the marching rhythm of the confirmation hymns.
By then, I was no longer consciously aware of my alliance with the devil, but it lay there in my subconscious. Two strong opposing beliefs swayed me like a birch tree in a storm, first one way and then the other. I was good, brave and lovable; and it was just as clear at other times that I was the worst girl alive. By the end of my childhood I couldn’t make sense of my own identity: the idea of my goodness was constantly invaded by shameful feelings, proving to me that this was my real self. I had no control over the terrible thoughts of harming and murdering others. It was exhausting, like trying to outrun a bad dream.
Being stupid was somehow the worst. I hated being thought of as stupid, but couldn’t stop acting like a dunce sometimes. The curious thing was that somehow I stopped myself from becoming completely stupid. In class I was frequently caught staring out of the window, apparently not listening, unable to answer a question suddenly directed at me, unable to do a classroom task, but I had an uncanny ability to reproduce class lessons absolutely perfectly at exam time. This puzzled the teacher so much that she related it to the parish priest in charge of religious knowledge, who had noticed the same phenomenon. I had developed the capacity to tune in with part of my brain, while most of the rest of me was somewhere else—even I couldn’t say where that was. Part of my brain was strictly programmed to remember what we had learned in class, at least until the tests. Tests over, I could let it all slip again and wipe the slate clean.
After I’d delivered another perfect score, the parish priest and my teacher stood on the landing leading to the upstairs classrooms, having a discussion. With the instinct of someone used to hearing the creaking of steps in the middle of the night, even when sound asleep, I was able to overhear their conversation, in spite of being out of earshot, by reading their body language and their curious looks. They were amazed by my behaviour and the odd results.
It turned out that they had run out of new prizes and I was about to receive a leather-bound missal for the second time. It was deeply satisfying for me to have this proof and recognition. Although I was apparently good for very little, I had not taken leave of all my senses, nor of my intelligence. Somehow it felt good to understate myself, for my true potential not to be recognised.
Nevertheless, I would often shake in terror of ‘doing it wrong’—and doing things the wrong way seemed gradually to take on a life of its own. It was as if I had sold part of my brain to the devil—and of course I had. Slowly, I lost control. I felt compelled by a frightening, mysterious force to do the opposite of what was expected of me.
At the end of school on a freezing cold day, the senior parish priest approached me. He had a big bundle of papers in his hands and seemed anxious about them. He explained to me that he had an urgent message for the parishioners of Broekhoven One, my home parish, and would I be so kind as to drop a notice in everyone’s letterbox?
I studied the pastor’s face. Why had he approached me and not someone else? Ah! He probably thought I was very intelligent, because he had been discussing my hundred per cent success in the religious test with my teacher.
The priest standing before me would take it badly if I baulked. He was, after all, one of God’s ministers and mouthpieces. As soon as he had recovered from the shock, my parents would then be informed about it. This is what went through my freezing brain as I stood there submissively in the sub-zero temperature of the playground. I gathered from what he was saying that there was some kind of one-upmanship going on between Broekhoven One and the neighbouring parish, Broekhoven Two.
‘On no account,’ said the scheming priest earnestly, ‘must you put any of these leaflets into the letterboxes of the parishioners of Broekhoven Two.’ He went on to explain where the boundaries were between the two parishes. Some of the street names I had never heard of before. How did he expect me to know streets I’d never been to? He was anxious and nervous, and I didn’t tell him I didn’t know what he was talking about because I didn’t want to lose the image of being a clever girl so soon. A bundle of papers was transferred to my hands and I set off immediately, feeling confused and shaking with embarrassment. Even with the best will in the world, I had no chance of getting this one right. All the same, most children probably wouldn’t have got it as badly wrong as I did that afternoon. Dutifully, I went to all the streets and letterboxes that were strange to me—which, I discovered later, were almost all in the wrong zone. I had inadvertently wreaked vengeance on a power-mongering priest who was all too happy to use a naive child. At the same time I had ruined his opinion of me, and disgraced myself further in my father’s eyes. The terror of ‘doing it wrong’ became synonymous with the terror of never managing to be good enough to deserve respect.
GETTING OLDER AND A LITTLE WISER
QUESTIONS ABOUT RELIGION and the soul plagued me. I had to know what my chances were of making it to heaven. I asked the priest in the confessional about the punishments for various sins, but he would sigh, or get impatient and tell me to ask someone else. I would go to confession again and ask why God put a tree in the garden of Eden if he didn’t want it touched? Couldn’t he have put it somewhere else? And what was so bad about learning the difference between good and evil from the forbidden apple? And what was limbo again? What did the souls do there? And purgatory—was it really the same as hell, except that one day you got out of there?
I asked my parents similar questions. Why did God punish people if he loved them and forgave them? Why did good people suffer? How many days would you get in purgatory for being rude? They tried to give me answers carefully, looking at each other to see if the other agreed or had a better idea. I would check up on them a few days later by asking the same question, watching them closely for signs of slipping up.
Alas, though it was my intention to finally get things straight in my head, I had inadvertently set a trap for my parents’ uncertainties, and I gave up on adults at the tender age of eight. I decided that adults didn’t have answers, so there was no point in asking them any questions. I started on the dangerous path of figuring things out by myself, reasoning with the information that I had gleaned and intuited. Given that most of this was superstition at best and a bastardisation of the truth at worst, I was bound to arrive at some bizarre conclusions. I am a water sign, a Scorpio, and given to arriving at immutable conclusions, a tendency aided and abetted by the Germanic blood in me.
MY PAPA HAD wanted a son as his first-born. He must have said this to someone in my presence, because I caught on pretty early and tried hard to be a boy for him. I carried things that were
far too heavy for me, to show him how strong I was. My heart was soft, but I couldn’t show it. Instead, I would have to be stronger than any boy around my own age and prove it by fighting him! An innocent newcomer to the street would be brought to my house by the neighbourhood kids, eager to see a contest. It always ended with me triumphantly standing with my foot on the poor fellow’s quivering back, while the kids cheered in awe and reminded themselves not to mess with this crazy girl.
I had three brothers before we left Holland to come to Australia. Adrian was the eldest; he was strong but not assertive. He came running up to me one day with terror in his eyes because Henk, who was fourteen and the biggest kid around, a fellow with a meaner and more calculating streak than any of us, was chasing him. Adrian ran up and buried his head in my chest. I promptly put my arm around him and waited for the tall bully to round the corner. When he did he ran into my fist. It hurt, but it did the trick: Henk went sprawling and ran away with a bleeding nose. That evening his parents came around to abuse my parents.
The only problem with this sort of superiority was that I had no real friends. I wasn’t exactly feared—I never went out of my way to pick a fight—but inside I felt like a cripple, believing that no one would bother to make me their friend if they really knew me. All I had was a doubtful prestige.
I regularly won the annual running races organised by parents for the local kids. We ran around the block. It was a very big block, including a farm and several shops. Sometimes I strained so hard that I felt close to apoplexy, but not to win was unthinkable while my papa was watching. I just had to win for him, and the whole neighbourhood seemed to know this too and cheered me on. Afterwards I would look up at him breathlessly, showing him the bottle of sherry or whatever that I’d chosen as a prize. I was white with anxiety and exhaustion: Now, Papa, will you think I’m good enough? Now will you respect me? I didn’t care that the prizes I’d chosen were things I couldn’t use myself—my papa could use them; that’s what mattered to my love-starved soul. He laughed, my papa did; he was proud of me. I was fainting with pleasure and with an inexplicable pain in my heart.
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