God's Callgirl (2 page)

My mother’s younger sister hurried me off to church and duly had me baptised and given Latin names as tradition required. My parents must have felt I needed at least three saints to ward off the devil: I was named Carolina Johanna Maria.

The names also represented my forebears. My first name was after my father’s German-born mother, Carola. I was never called this particular derivative of Carolina, because my brave mother, who disliked, no,
hated
all Germans (barring my father) and snubbed her nose at her husband’s family, said, ‘Carola over my dead body!’ She saved the day by making a minor change in the spelling, and a big change in its implication, and named me Carla.

Carla meant ‘strong woman’, which was just as well, given the karma that awaited me. My mother loved to call me Kareltje when she was in a good mood; a diminutive of the male Karel, from the Dutch word,
kerel
, meaning ‘strong man’.

Being a Catholic baby generally wasn’t too bad, if you were breastfed like I was. I was breastfed until my sister
came along fifteen months later. But times were about to change. Holland would soon go to war. More significantly, there were also family wars looming, those private battles that happen within the walls of houses where children are growing up.

My mother was a buxom but not overweight woman with rich auburn, kinky hair swathed in waves around her head, gracing her smooth forehead and fair face. Her brown eyes were slightly hooded, her eyebrows a perfect arch and her lips full. She had been brought up by devout and genteel parents, and had studied and gained diplomas in sewing, tailoring and teaching. During the war her work as a seamstress on the black market helped to keep us all alive. As a teenager it worried my mother that her family was well off while others around her were so poor. It was a problem easily fixed: she married a man who didn’t have much more than a violin and a handsome face.

My father’s good looks were of the breathtaking kind: he was tall, muscular and perfectly proportioned. His face was remarkably regular. He had a fine, straight nose and grey eyes set in a face without lines. His jaw was chiselled square, his mouth—well, determined might be the best way to describe it. He had a practical mind and knew a lot about how to make things, how to grow plants in a garden and how to mend shoes.

My father was one of many children; by the time he was born his parents no longer bothered with a crib or cot—they kept him in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. He used to tell this story with a touch of wry humour, but the experience seemed to have left him with a never-ending sense of shock and grief.

His birthplace was Kranenburg, a town so close to the Dutch–German border that the inhabitants spoke the
language of both countries, although his family preferred German. They were able to settle in Holland without any trouble when my father was seventeen and claim Dutch nationality.

When war threatened to break out my father was twenty-five. He was conscripted into the Dutch army, where his loyalty was briefly questioned. He had no qualms about fighting for Holland: after all, this was the country that now gave him his bread and living. My father translated his gratitude into enthusiasm for defending the country he now truly considered his own.

His extended family, unfortunately, did not feel the same way. The relatives in Germany, in particular, saw my father’s unreserved allegiance to his new country as an unforgivable betrayal. His own younger brother, Anton, enlisted in the Dutch army but became an informer for the Germans. My father was heartbroken at his brother’s attitude, but unflinching in his loyalty.

World War II broke out less than a year after I was born. My mother became a bundle of nerves, but gradually eased off as the occupation of Holland became an accepted way of life and my father came home from work again in the evenings. The war was just something that happened to people and little children.

AN INHERITANCE FROM
both my parents’ families was guilt about sex—nothing unusual in the guilt-ridden Catholicism of that time, but worth a mention.

My mother’s family line went back to French nobility who had escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution by fleeing the country. In status-conscious Holland they had set themselves high above the assumed
looser morals of the hoi polloi, so when passion overtook my courting grandparents, resulting in a pregnancy, they married in a hurry. My mother told me this when I was about to get married myself (though I was not in the least pregnant), but there was more. My grandmother was walking alone in the fields one day when a thunderstorm rumbled up. She had started on her way home when a terrible thing happened: a bolt of lightning came down right beside her, split a tree and scorched it as black as soot. That was the last thing my grandmother ever saw. She became blind, either because the lightning flash had scorched her retinas, or from shock, or both. Whatever it was, she never recovered and gave birth to her daughter (and later to three more children) as a stone-blind woman.

It isn’t difficult to imagine what they said to themselves: it was God who had punished my grandmother. God had made her blind because her child had been conceived in
lust
. This was against their fine Catholic sensibilities, which dictated that sexual intercourse was not for pleasure but for the sole purpose of procreation. Yes, God had punished my grandmother in this mortal life so that she would be spared hell hereafter. Her husband, an earnest man, shared the guilt bravely, without having to be struck by lightning. Instead, he had to pay dearly for the nannies to help bring up their children.

My mother, therefore, considered herself ‘a child of lust’ and never felt good about her own sexuality. The uncanny thing is that she too ended up having premarital sex—a repeated act of damnable lust! She confessed all this to me as she grew older and longed for a confidant other than the local priest.
The feeling of guilt
, an insightful friend wrote to me recently,
looks for a way to justify itself.
She married my father, a healthy, handsome, poor and lustful man. Her faith
and vows of holy matrimony told her to obey him—and to obey him meant to submit to his lust. In all other things, it seemed,
he
obeyed
her
, and so they had their trade-off, the basis for many a successful marriage.

This was my legacy. I was guilty from birth by being born a Catholic, naturally evil even before I inherited my mother’s guilt, and later my father’s, in the sexual drive he could not contain. Within a few years I would be in the grip of a guilt so fierce that I would call upon the devil to help me.

SHE’S NOT PERFECT AFTER ALL

MY MOTHER SCREAMED
and my father bellowed as they tried to save the wedding presents. A wonderful tumult of amber and china came falling down around me from the dining table, along with the tablecloth, when all of a sudden my father’s hard hands gripped me, lifting me from the shards. What a shocking feeling! My father’s focus was the loss of the irreplaceable—our future income would never allow for such beautiful and frivolous things again.

I was a most disappointing child. For a start, I ate coal. They wanted to hide this from our relatives and tried to stop me with smacks and terrible looks. But whenever they couldn’t find me, I was in the cupboard near the fireplace, blackening my clothes, the floor and every exposed bit of my body. There were other deeds which made them shout and scream. I loved tearing big strips of peeling wallpaper, just to hear that wonderful
rrrripp
! In spite of likely distressing consequences, I was determined to see what was inside soft toys, especially the teddy bear that made a noise when you tipped it. The list of my disappointing acts was almost as long as each day.

It was scary when my papa grumbled in that big voice of his and said ‘Tch, tch!’ like a hissing train, or words that my
mama didn’t want him to say. ‘
Hou je mond
, Jan!’ she would admonish. ‘Don’t speak like that in front of a child!’ He told me often I was a bad girl. Sometimes when he picked me up I didn’t know if he was going to hug me or hit me. I had a nice papa sometimes, and at other times a papa who made me feel scared. I wanted to be good for him. I loved him so much.

I wasn’t a year old when my father went off to prepare for war in those few months before Holland fell to the Germans. He came back on leave, but was often away. Visiting friends and relatives made up for the lack of his company. My mother loved visitors. The Dutch way of life is a great social institution: everyone is geared up for visiting as if life depended on the custom. For children, visitors were no fun at all. Children suddenly had to become invisible unless they were still small enough to be admired in a cradle or pram.

I was two when a woman visitor arrived. It was summer and the magnificent hydrangeas in our tiny front garden were in full bloom. I loved their wondrous blue colour; the countless small florets that made up their large round heads. I sat under their long stems, watching the sparrows and finches as they hopped among the litter, looking for invisible things to eat. I had been sent there by my mother, who had told me that I’d be able to catch a bird if I put salt on its tail.

‘Would it be mine for
ever
?’ I’d asked. ‘Of course, once you catch it,’ she assured me with lots of nods of her head.

So off I had gone to fetch a handful of salt from the open wooden container in the kitchen and had crept under the hydrangeas to catch myself a bird, which would be mine for ever. I sat hunched and very still, with the crunchy salt in my right hand. Sparrows came and went—they flew by so fast!
Whirr!
Off they went as soon as they saw me. But there was
one that stayed to peck at the sand. It didn’t notice me. It was so close…I dropped the salt on its tail and reached over to grab it, but it flew away on very fast wings. No, no! It wasn’t supposed to fly away!

I ran to my mother and screamed, ‘Mama! The birdie flew away!’

I knew I was interrupting her visitor, but she had to fix up this shocking event! My lips trembled and tears started to roll down my cheeks. My mother was taken totally by surprise. Then the unbelievable happened: she began to laugh! She had duped me and now she was laughing at me for having believed her. My mother turned to her visitor and together they enjoyed the huge joke.

Mama! How could you do this to me?
But I didn’t say a word; I just stood there with a big pain in my heart and my breathing going hick, hickety-bump.

The woman left and still my mother ignored me. It was time for her to clear the tea table, then attend to my baby sister, and my disappointment was forgotten. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me or didn’t care about my feelings—in those days, the feelings of children were just not taken into account. She had been treated that way when
she
was a child. I would grow up and treat my children in much the same way.

MY MOTHER
, A trained teacher, appreciated the then innovative Montessori method of teaching, and although I was only two and a half she decided to walk me to the local Montessori school. Yes, the nuns said, I could begin tomorrow.

The next day I insisted on going there by myself. ‘No, Mama, leave me alone! I know the way!’ I talked the way she talked to my papa, with a very firm voice and a straight
back, and she relented. She followed me from a discreet distance, hiding in the porches of the houses along the way to make certain I didn’t get lost. I surefooted it to the right address and the happiest two and a half years of my young life began on that day.

It is the smells I recall best from that haven for children: a comforting lavender and talcum powder smell, the scent of oranges—very rare in wartime Holland—and of plasticine and glue, and flowers in vases. There were happy, bright colours, nice clean toilets with basins the right size for little people, and fish in tanks. I thrived there, in spite of the school being run by nuns whose debilitating vow of poverty allowed only the smallest pieces of paper for drawing. Paper was expensive during the German occupation. What could I draw on a piece of paper no bigger than my hand? It was scary to make a mistake and spoil it. The nuns told us that Jesus was poor and that poverty was a ‘virtue’. For me, it was just a relief when art class was over at last.

For the poor people in our district it was a solace to be told that God had a soft spot for the luckless, the struggling, the deprived and the needy. We were poor because my virtuous mother obeyed her husband’s will in bed, which produced more and more offspring to feed and clothe during and after the war. In twenty years she produced ten children in all, with two miscarriages as well.

Sunday being a very special day, a day of no work or chores for anyone, not even my mother (except she would still cook meals), I would make a beeline after lunch for the large wooden box protecting the bakelite radio, and sit on it. It stood next to the front-room window, just where the brown velvet curtains draped to the floor. How wonderfully cosy to wrap that soft warm curtain around
myself! And to feel the music going right through my whole body! I was in heaven on the days when it rained outside or was blowing a gale, spending hours wrapped up and unnoticed on the classical music box. That’s how I absorbed rhythm and harmony, passion and beauty.

It was also on Sundays that my father would take out his violin and play the few tunes that he knew. His musical education had been interrupted when his children arrived and he had to work hard to support his family. Going to war also did nothing to further his musical knowledge. So he played the same tunes over and over again but with the greatest pleasure, and I admired my father from the bottom of my heart. Paganini’s
Carnival of Venice
, which gave him leeway for some creative variations, was one of his favourites.

It was my mother who eventually became annoyed by his playing. She hated him showing off, and the fact that he never seemed to tire of being pleased with himself, playing the same tunes over and over. My mother had a thing about the evils of pride.