God's Callgirl (5 page)

Our toilet was a simple thunderbox, which was emptied into the backyard, which in turn grew magnificent vegetables. The smell of the box was so offensive that I learned to defecate in a big hurry, to get the job over and done with before I had to breathe. When my father was on the toilet it was unbearable even to be out in the open courtyard. Maybe it was his cigar-smoking, or his meat-eating, or the beginnings of the cancer in his bowels—or his frequent bad temper. Whatever the cause, the stench was overwhelming.

The coal shed doubled as a workplace for my father, who made and mended our shoes and created toys for Christmas
and birthdays. My father was so good at toy-making; that was his Dr Jekyll side. He made me a go-cart, a wonderful doll’s house and a rocking horse, and he painted them in bright colours. We were told that Black Pete, Saint Nicholas’s helper, also hid in the coal shed, to find out if we were being good children or not. He was only there in the few weeks before 6 December, which is the children’s feast of Saint Nicholas in Holland. But most of the time I felt safe in the coal shed, visiting my papa occasionally to watch him at work.

One day he called me in there and shut the door quickly without turning on the light, so that the only light that came through was between the uneven planks at the bottom of the door. His hand was rough on my shoulder and I could feel it shaking as he pulled me further inside, his fear transferring itself in a sickening rush to my body. I had never seen him like this before.

My father’s face was contorted in a terrible way and he could barely get his words out. His hands found their way first around my shoulders, shaking them violently, and then suddenly around my neck as he began to strangle me. His tone was ugly, reminding me of the kind of talking that was not allowed in our house. Oh, the intense sorrow at this sudden rejection, with no idea of the reason. Couldn’t he see my face? I adored him! My papa!
Please don’t do this, Papa! I’m your little girl! Don’t hurt me! I love you!
But my father was very afraid. He could not see his six-year-old daughter suffocating in his hands; all he wanted was to make himself feel safe.

‘Don’t talk to anyone about this…’ he panted, poking a finger into my mouth to indicate what he meant, unable to say what had never been admitted to in daylight. The words came thickly from his twisted mouth, reverting to the
dialect he had learned on the streets. ‘Don’t talk about it! Especially not to the priest! Understand? Nobody!’ The veins in his forehead were standing out and his eyes were wild. He was grinding his teeth. Suddenly, he let me drop to the sooty floor. I fell in a bundle at his feet, unable to answer, pulsing one moment with the hopeless desire to plead, the next with the desire to die, until finally I was overcome by fear of actually dying.

He couldn’t see me in the dark, didn’t know whether I had understood, so he kicked at me, demanding an answer. He kicked me low on the spine and I sat up somehow. All this happened very quickly. He bent over me, and he was the devil and the dearest person in the world all rolled into one. I nodded soundlessly, not knowing how to breathe, utterly confused, not understanding what it was about my father’s doings with me that was so very bad of me. Not for a moment could I imagine that my
papa
was bad. No, for him to treat me the way he did, I must have been a very bad girl indeed.

I lay down again in the dark shed, exhausted. He strode out and let the door fall shut. In this moment of complete distress, I could not call my mother. I closed my eyes and passed out.

When I came to, a panic rose from deep down in my stomach, a primal fear of ever being discovered. I could never confess my guilt, for I understood quite well that I was not to talk to the priest. I was a bad girl who could not be forgiven. All I could do was cover up my badness somehow from all the people around me. Even if I succeeded in convincing people that I was all right, I couldn’t win in the end because
God
knew my blackness. I was terrified of death, because I believed I would go straight to hell. I was only six and knew no better.

I walked around as if in a fog. More than half of my waking awareness was busy trying to handle the wild feelings in my body. My life became more and more dream-like as this turmoil enveloped me. It became difficult to tell whether I was dreaming or not. I would wonder in terror whether I had really done the chore, my homework or any other task, or had I only dreamt it? I would do things twice because I couldn’t make out what was real.

Oh, the terrible noise inside my head, my ears, my soul! I was haunted, imprisoned. Father Janus had become my friend. I had started to trust him and talk to him, but now there could be no more talking! I could not turn to him or to any other priest, could not confess, could not turn to God.

There was still my mother. Maybe
she
would do something to make it better. But she was too busy to sit down with any of her children to ask how we were feeling. There was never an intimate chat. She just didn’t have that kind of time.

So I came up with my own desperate solution after the horror of the coal shed. Someone bad like me could turn to the devil and make a deal with him. With a fervent wish to buy time and avoid the flames of hell, I prayed to the evil one because I needed to rely on someone bigger than myself. ‘Lucifer,’ I began hesitantly, terrified of offending God still further by this switch in allegiance, ‘I need your help. I am a very bad girl. I am so bad that God is not my friend any more. I want you to be my friend. Please help me not to die.’

My heinous prayer to the devil came out of the deepest desolation and abandonment. After a while, I felt that my prayers had been answered.
I survived
. But the guilt at my betrayal of God was terrible. It stopped me from breathing
and eating, and I started to get things wrong, which in turn meant being derided by my father and the children at school. ‘The idiot! That homework she handed in was four days late!’ I arrived back late from lunch one day, after getting stuck in my baby brother’s high chair. Why did I ever try to sit in it anyway? I couldn’t get out of it and my mother’s amusement at my expense had made me more desperate. I slunk back to school, to be faced by the locked steel gates. There was now only one way to get back in: I had to knock on the convent door and ask a nun to lead me through to the adjacent playground. She took me through in silence. I noticed that the nuns were making communion wafers; so that was where they came from, those white wafers that became the body of Christ!

Back in class, I couldn’t explain clearly to the teacher what had happened. I stuttered my story several times over: ‘I-I-I was stuck in the
kakkestoel
!’ In my confusion, I used the colloquial for high chair; literally, the chair for shitting in, since it had a hole in the seat for a baby’s potty. The other children understood, and they couldn’t stop laughing. The more they laughed, the more I got it wrong.

My father did not know that his six-year-old daughter had gone to the devil. In my despair, I thought the devil to be a better ally than a punishing God. Every time my papa came to me at night, I thought I would die from suffocation. I wasn’t able to face a hell worse than the one I was already in.

The recurring nightmare which I had begun to tell to Pater Janus was now strangled in my throat. I felt that the best course of action was to be as inconspicuous as possible, preferably invisible. More than ever, I felt obliged to get up very early in the morning and go to Mass (I never missed Mass unless I was seriously ill and couldn’t walk). I had to
eat, and go to school, and do my chores, but it was too dangerous and stressful to interact with anybody. I felt like a trembling weed, tolerated in the garden of life if nobody noticed me.

I could no longer bring myself to play with other children in the playground. I watched with agony, longing to join them when they skipped in teams, or hopscotched, or sledded along the icy paths they had made with buckets of water on the frozen ground.

When I was a few years older, I did sometimes join in, especially sliding on the ice. You had to take a run-up, then launch yourself onto the thin strip of ice and try to make it to the end. At these times I glowed with contentment. But for two winters, while I suffered from cystitis caused by contact with my father’s unwashed penis (though, for reasons clear only to himself, my father never penetrated me), I couldn’t play outside for fear that the infection would get worse. I watched my classmates play from the corridor windows on the first floor, sipping warm milk from a thermos flask.

MY GROWING THINNESS
was eventually noticed. My mother could see that there was something seriously changed in her daughter, but if she ever suspected the cause (because she did know her husband), she did nothing. My father, who watched his sturdy girl wilt and grow woefully thin, hid his terrible knowledge from himself. And so his eldest daughter, once so wickedly wilful, was brought to the doctor because she was inexplicably listless, underweight and wan. I was sent away to a health resort a few months after the war ended, to recover alongside emaciated war orphans and shell-shocked children.

I spent six miserable weeks in an institution run by nuns in an incongruously military style. They were harder, it seemed, than the nuns at my school. I was so homesick, so ill with pain in the whole of my gut, that I couldn’t eat. In the refectory, the voice of an invisible all-seeing nun would boom out from a hidden loudspeaker, paralysing me with, ‘Carla, eat that up! Don’t try to pass it to your neighbour!’

We were searched for head lice, and for the first time in my life I felt the shame of having DDT powder poured all over my long blonde hair and the taste of it in my mouth. Back home, we were used to the almost daily ritual of picking out the nits. This was a serious business for my mother, the head baboon. From her we learned how to squash the tiny eggs, and the occasional runaway louse, between our fingernails. We never had to use poisons to control the lice we brought home from school because of our proud vigilance. Now I had to endure the nauseating smell of the white powder which was impossible not to inhale.

The nuns even checked how we lay in bed, arms crossed over our chests, not daring to move all night.‘Don’t pull the fluff off the blankets, Carla! And all of you, children, sleep on your right side, not on your heart.’

I wrote away for some lollies, inspired by a girl who had some sent to her for her birthday. Unbelievably, my parents sent me a box of chocolates, and I put them under my mattress. They were promptly stolen and I felt unutterably cheated.

There was a wall that ran the length of the courtyard, dividing the boys from the girls. Mysterious rambunctious boys’ voices came over the wall. Boys I’d never met before. My world had been extremely small; even at primary school the girls were segregated from the boys. These were
strange
boys, and curiosity got the better of me, so one day I looked
through a crack in the wall. Oh, horror! A boy’s eye was looking straight at
me
through the same crack. I ran away around a corner, panting, while my heart galloped like an untamed horse. I was not yet seven, too young to know the word ‘sex’, but sexual guilt could not have lain more heavily on any soul.

I felt so bad that day on the playground that I couldn’t bring myself to receive holy communion the next morning. Every day we were ushered into the nuns’ chapel to attend Mass, and for almost a week I stayed in my seat while everyone else filed to the communion rails. I squirmed in agony lest anyone should question my singular behaviour. The staff were seated in rows at right angles to me, in a good position to watch the children. I was in such a wretched state that I think I would have screamed or fainted if anyone had asked me why I was not taking communion.

Relief came at the end of the week, on confession day. Although the great sin that sat at the bottom of my soul could never be forgiven, I went into the confessional as all the other children did, and owned up to everything else. As a Catholic schoolchild, you couldn’t
not
go to confession: you were herded there like sheep and just had to comply.

The priest seemed not to hear anything I said. ‘I had bad thoughts about boys,’ I told him in a faltering voice. Why didn’t he pick up on my anxiety? Why didn’t just one priest in all my life’s weekly confessions pick it up? Were they preoccupied with themselves? Who can know what goes through the mind of a priest listening to children’s confessions.

Needless to say, I gained no weight while I was in this place of military indifference. The phrase ‘cold as charity’ has a special significance for me. Before we were weighed for the last time, I ate as much as I could and didn’t go to the toilet.
I was anxious to please my well-meaning parents. The scales showed that my weight was still the same. I panicked and begged them to say I had gained two pounds. Naturally they obliged, eager to boost the statistics of their government project.

And so I was put on the train to go home. I was beside myself with joyful expectation. When the train entered Tilburg and I caught sight of my papa from my carriage, I yelled involuntarily with wild excitement.

The train stopped. Looking around, frowning, he couldn’t see me. I ran up and stood in front of him, out of breath, suppressing a sob of love and joy. I so wanted to hug him and for him to hug me! But I didn’t dare risk rejection, and I could not initiate any affection that might invite the wrong sort of advance, the sort that was worse than being ignored.

I still don’t know whether my father deliberately resisted hugging his trembling little girl, or if he was simply oblivious to the moment and his own feelings. He led me to his bicycle; I was to go home riding on the back.

The station wasn’t all that far from our house, but now I was faced with another dilemma: on the back of my papa’s bike I had to hold on to something so as not to fall off. If only he had said, ‘Hold on tight!’, I would have had permission to put my arms around him as we went home, but he didn’t, and I didn’t want to risk being told brusquely to take my arms away. I found something at the back of the saddle to grip with both hands, and managed to stay on, my heart thumping all the way. This was a special occasion! I had been away and had been so lonely. I was so glad to be home again with my mama and papa. For them, my return was a disappointment. Nothing had changed. I was as thin as ever.