God's Callgirl (3 page)

My father was also fond of his mouth harmonica. I was in awe of his expertise, but my mother considered it a vulgar thing. She said his repertoire was boring. Poor Dad; for him, it would have been enough if she had never said out loud that she hated it.

It was an inviolable custom to visit one of my two sets of grandparents after Mass on Sundays, except when there was a bombing alert. However, when it came to my father’s parents, Oma and Opa Koekeroe (so called because Opa kept pigeons that crooned ‘
koekeroe, koekeroe
’), they had to drag me there screaming. My father put on his determined face, and my mother—well, she secretly agreed with me, so I wasn’t smacked for dragging my weight along the pavement all the way.

Most of my father’s family appalled me. Except for Oma, they were thin and looking like sticks, as if they were starved of food or love or both, and there were a lot of them, aunts in bobby socks and uncles with clothes that smelled. I couldn’t help but feel dirty in their house. The ever-present smell of pigeon poo didn’t help. Oma waddled and wheezed; Opa was thin and bent and grew a wiry moustache. He wore the same clothes for too long and always had a pipe dangling from his lips or his gnarled fingers. He wheezed as well.

I much preferred going to my mother’s parents’ house, where the furniture was made of leather, where everything gleamed and there were even flowers in vases. There were shrubs growing in front of the bay windows facing the wide tree-lined pavement and the park over the road.

My relationship with my maternal grandfather was rather formal. Although we liked each other, I can’t remember him saying anything to me that made a particular impact. He was altogether a solemn sort of man. My grandfather ran an importing business and was always first in the town to acquire the latest technology: the first gramophone, the first car on our cobblestone roads, the first telephone.

The men would play cards after church, for real money. As they concentrated on their game and drank draughts of whisky, the rich aroma of their expensive cigars filled the room. I delighted in being a part of the intellectual and sensual excitement, going around the table and making tidy heaps of the gambling coins. In this way I was able to participate vicariously in the air of secrecy and luxurious indulgence that pervaded the room. My grandfather liked me being there, my mother objected only weakly, and it meant that I had very little to do with my blind grandmother, who seemed to be for ever in bed due to
complications later in life. She looked very pale and old. I climbed onto her big lace-covered bed once. Her eyes were the colour of some of my marbles, but she couldn’t see me at all. Her mouth did not have many teeth. How did she feel? She didn’t give much away, so my interest faded and I soon left the room again.

In spite of her disability and her illnesses, my grandmother had produced three girls then my Uncle Kees, whom I adored. Grandmother was only fifty-four when she died. She was laid in a casket of exquisite white satin, with madonna lilies all around her. The dining room was temporarily transformed into a funeral parlour, with black drapes on the walls, black curtains and screens. Tall wax candles were placed at either side of her head. She looked so beautiful and peaceful that I went up to her fearlessly, to gaze at her face close up. She had a lace collar under her chin and wore a newlooking black dress. Her hands were folded as if she was praying. I thought she looked better than ever before, if a little paler.

I was shocked when an adult noticed me so close to the corpse and whispered loudly and urgently for me to ‘Come back here’. ‘Here’ was where all the adults stood at a respectful distance from the foot of the coffin, talking softly to each other. I scurried into my mother’s skirts.

Everyone was worried about my grandfather, who was beside himself with constant grief. He followed her five years later.

THE OCCUPATION OF
Holland continued and life went on in its adapted way. I got used to the sight of German soldiers patrolling the streets with threatening guns held tight, ready for use. They were usually young men dreaming
of home, who didn’t relish the vilification thrown at them by daring and outspoken people.

My Aunt Rita screamed at two of them one day, in a fit of fury, when she accompanied my mother and me to the shops down the street. Her husband was Jewish, and she knew many Jews who had been deported by the Germans and never been heard of since. Aunt Rita had to be dragged away smartly by my suddenly forceful mother. We were all glad to reach the alley behind our house and so avoid coming face to face with the men she had insulted from a distance. Aunt Rita ended up sobbing. Her husband, a carpet salesman, was lucky enough to escape deportation and after the war they lived in Amsterdam.

People sometimes became hungry during the war. The occupying forces would commandeer the pig from your backyard if they got to hear about it, and your vegetables as well. And before them, it was the government who wanted your food to feed the army. Food in the shops was rationed. Each household received coupons dictating how much we could buy of any one thing. Prices were outrageous and black marketeering was rife. I grew up in an atmosphere where children witnessed the importance of subterfuge; where people felt free to talk among themselves in hushed tones, but appeared to know nothing when asked a direct question. The cheerful butcher with round red cheeks brought us pieces of meat that would get him hanged if anyone found out about it, but he went away with shoes that my father had mended for him and a dress for his wife that my mother had sewn the night before.

War made some people enterprising, including me. We all participated in knocking coal off the back of the coal truck. Stealing turnips from the farmers was not allowed, but if you weren’t caught you didn’t get into trouble. Many a day
we children sat in a row on the brick walls of our houses, chomping raw turnips and swedes originally destined for the cows. Things would not really improve until several years after the war was over.

Four children were born to our family during that anxious time;‘God’s blessing’ did not stop coming just because a war was on. In fact, God didn’t seem to notice in the slightest.

My papa was so very handsome, especially in his military uniform, and my mama had a romantic heart. She sang Richard Tauber’s songs along with him when he came on the radio. She sang that he was her heart’s delight. And where he was, she longed to be. She was always breathless with joy to sing songs like that. There is a family photograph taken by a professional photographer of my father wearing his uniform. I have never seen anything more dashing.

In one family photo of my gorgeously handsome dad, my proud prim mother, my younger sister Liesbet and my little baby brother Adrian, the camera catches me as I do a fake whistle. My father taught me how to whistle but I had learned to be careful. Once, when we were sheltering in the cellar under the stairs, I had whistled a perfect imitation of the bomb that seemed to be coming straight for us. I was only four and not afraid of what I could not imagine—unlike my parents, who were holding their breath. My father had lunged at me and closed his hands over my throat—a very effective silencer.

Towards the end of the war my father donned his uniform once more to join the Allied Forces, returning regularly on leave, complete with a truck and a rifle. In those months he was the hero of the neighbourhood. He never had to go to the front line, not only because he was a family man, but because it was understood how difficult it was for him, having all but his immediate family in Germany.

My father brought the truck home whenever he could, sometimes against the rules, because he was an adventurous man who loved to surprise his wife and children. There wasn’t enough room in our narrow cobbled street to properly accommodate it, so he used the vehicle to topple a couple of the myrtle trees in the way.

After lunch one day, he invited all the neighbourhood children for a ride in the back of the khaki-covered truck. This was an experience that nobody passed over and the truck was full with children. I was holding on to the wooden half-door at the back. Deciding to make the most of the fame that was rubbing off on me from my father’s tremendous popularity, I took out a cigar I had recently bought and lit it, to the huge delight of all onlookers, who, of course, all wanted a puff.

My father drove us out of town and into the countryside as far as the little forest where we would often go for a walk and gather wood. When the road dwindled into a path through the trees, he had to stop and turn around. He needed to make a three-point turn to do so, leaning the back of the truck way over a culvert. My face went pale, paler than when I’d felt sick from the cigar, as the truck rumbled slowly away from solid ground and seemed about to plunge into the deep channel. But my father did not let himself or any of us down; he manoeuvred that truck flawlessly and delivered the noisy mob safely home to their parents, who were waiting in the street like a guard of honour.

My father took me on his knee later that day because my mother had heard of the cigar business and told him that I should be reprimanded. Unbelievably, he wasn’t furious. For that one time, at least, he recognised something of his own enterprising self in me, and I became my father’s daughter,
not just the little person who crossed him in ways that he called sinfully disobedient. Perhaps the war had made him a bit softer.

It was my father’s gruesome job to retrieve dead bodies from the fields and trenches. That was what the truck was for. He had to identify the bodies if he could. Sometimes they were decomposing, and the copper identity disc on its metal chain had sunk into the dead man’s rotting chest. It was enough to shake any man.

TO ME, THE
German soldiers were an enigma—for a long time I could not understand why people hated them. I was not frightened by them, because my father spoke to them when he met them in the street and made them laugh. His fluency in German saved him on several occasions.

Two German soldiers probably saved my life one day when I accompanied my father on one of his wood-collecting trips to the forest. My father had loaded me onto the cart which he had borrowed from a neighbour. It had two bicycle wheels and handles like a wheelbarrow’s for pushing when you weren’t pulling. He lifted me onto some potato sacks to ease the bumpiness of the ride. Later, the sacks would cover our firewood, so as not to attract the attention of any German soldiers who might commandeer the wood for themselves.

The forest was just in sight when the sound of sirens filled the air, warning people to take shelter. The Allies frequently flew over Holland to bomb the Germans out of their complacency. The sound of planes came nearer: there we were, in the open, far away from any shelter, and the bombs would fall at any moment! I was five, old enough to associate panic with these sirens, but still felt calm: my big,
strong, wise papa would surely know how to protect us both. He was not about to turn tail on account of a siren.

My father walked doggedly on for a while, then made a decision. ‘You wait here for me,’ he said, as he lifted me off the cart and deposited me at the side of the track. ‘I’ll be back soon with the wood.’

My papa was going to leave me there by myself? I might be bombed to death and my papa was leaving me? Oh, no, Papa, no, no, no! I sank to my knees and stretched my arms out to him, screaming with absolute terror, refusing to grasp that he could leave me there. My father, the daredevil, laughed and threw me a few potato bags. ‘Cover yourself with these!’ he shouted.

My panic grew even wilder—how could a couple of jute bags protect me? But he was off already and looked back only once. ‘Get the hell under those bags!’ he yelled. I proceeded to worm myself right inside one of them, sobbing with terror, when I heard a sound from the other side of the track, a soft whistle. When I looked around I saw two soldiers in German uniform hiding under the bushes in a ditch. I recognised them by their helmets. The soldiers, both very young with good intentions obvious in their eyes, were urgently beckoning me to come to them. I did not hesitate, but ran into their arms.

I must have fainted, for the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at home to the excited voices of my father, mother and the neighbours. I came groggily down the stairs and saw my father displaying a bandage around his thigh from where a bullet had just been extracted. He had been spotted in the forest by an American pilot who thought he was German and had circled until he scored a hit. I sat down bewildered on the lower steps of the stairs, listening to the hullabaloo.

Such incidents were typical of my father. On home leave from his soldiering duties one day, he dared the Germans to do their worst when once again the sirens were blowing. He lit his pipe and stood outside the back door, leaning against the brick wall. He had just inhaled a deep draught when a piece of shrapnel penetrated the bricks right by his left ear, shattering them and leaving a jagged hole in the wall. When he came inside he laughed at my distraught mother, whom he had successfully defied, and who was now weeping from a mixture of anger and relief. I was nearly six when the most shocking event of the war touched our neighbourhood, one which cowed everyone. I tried to make sense of their agitated gestures and hoarsely whispered words. Ten men had been rounded up and made to stand against the brick wall of the cotton mill, just on the edge of town, where they were shot in reprisal for the death of a German patrol soldier. One of the victims belonged to a family in our street. They had dragged his body home, leaving a trail of blood. Fierce hatred flared against the Germans.

PRIMARY INSULTS

BY THE TIME I
left the Montessori school at the age of five I was able to read fluently and calculate in thousands. I was a rotund and beamingly happy child. Despite a worryingly prolonged case of whooping cough when I was three, I had come through. There were distressing things in my life that happened at night, but when I woke up these nightmares seemed to vanish. A young child lives in the present moment whenever possible, and I was no exception.