Taken knocks from all sides, he has. That scar is from two wounds, you know. One from the war and the other from them goings on he’s involved in. Take a good look next time you see him, he’s in a sorry state. Not to mention that leg of his!’
I burst out laughing and she looked at me as if she had been served a meal she hadn’t ordered. ‘You must admit, he’s not a pretty sight.’
‘I have a letter for him, from my father. Could you make sure he gets it?’
She frowned as she took hold of the envelope. ‘Quite a size. What’s it say?’
I shrugged. She placed the envelope back on the desk.
‘Wait a bit, that’s my advice. The letter your father sent a while back fairly upset him. He wasn’t himself for a time. One minute he was strutting around all pleased with himself, the next he was flying into a rage over nothing. Then came the telegram announcing your arrival, and that left him in a bit of a tizz, too. I don’t need to know the details. His bad temper’s his own business, even if Heinzi and I are the ones who bear the brunt of it. If you want to get off on the right foot, I’d keep this to yourself for now.’
Her voice changed key in these final sentences, took a dive from high to low, and I realized it was more than just her appearance that made me feel at home with this woman. She spoke the indignant Frankish border dialect I knew so well. If anything were to happen to me at Raeren, I knew I would cling to her like a lost child. Together we stared at the strokes of my father’s pen, the careless hand in which a doctor scrawls his suspicions on a letter of referral, as if illegibility might soften the blow.
-
3
My father loved to jot things down. He always had a pencil or two concealed about his person to scribble notes in the margins of the day. Nothing but twin primes?! on the bill from the baker. Argumentum ad misericordiam in the newspaper. Flushing half a tank will suffice on the lavatory cistern. ‘Just a sec’ was a pet phrase of his, often uttered as he leaped to his feet and his mood brightened. Many of my father’s discoveries were preceded by the words ‘Just a sec’. He would set about repairing the radio and end up reinventing the ear trumpet. Or he would find a new Bryozoa fossil on Mount Saint Peter, one that on closer inspection turned out to be half of a fossil he knew well. A practitioner of non-monotonic logic, his corrections were primarily directed at himself, cacographic messages that steadily filled the house. An addendum was scribbled on the cistern: i.e. approx. two seconds. After all, from the outside it was impossible to tell when half a tank had been flushed. This was not nitpicking or penny-pinching. He had simply discovered that the cistern was too large for its purpose. He would spend entire evenings writing and crossing out in chaotic piles of thin exercise books. He didn’t even miss them when they suddenly vanished. ‘Another set of problems laid to rest,’ my mother would say as the pages lay smouldering in the hearth. One opinion on any given subject was enough to last her a lifetime. She formed them instantly, an advantage true believers have over scientists. What had those two ever seen in each another? My mother apparently took to piety after I was born. For an entire week she lay wide awake in the bed where she had given birth to me, insisting she would never have to sleep again because she was already dead. She felt no urge to suckle me and when they brought me to her she would fly into a panic, convinced her cadaverous state was contagious. Expressing her milk made her gag. ‘Can’t you smell it?’ she would yell at the astounded maternity nurse. ‘That milk has long since curdled!’ Eventually my aunt sent for the priest and he prayed my mother to sleep. ‘From that moment on,’ said my father, ‘I woke up next to a complete stranger who happened to be your mother.’
They had a dreadful marriage. Housemaids came and went, their departure always ushered in by my mother’s sobbing fits. As soon as I heard her lashing out, I knew another maid was on her way. Father was no stranger to histrionics either. On more than one occasion the neighbourhood was treated to the spectacle of him marching out of the house with a huge suitcase, swinging it so demonstratively through the air that anyone could see it was empty. It was all about the grand gesture: ‘Your mother and I are getting a divorce.’ In the end, my father packed me off to Aachen with the very same suitcase, but the first time he stood on the doorstep with it we took a walk together and he told me about the war.
In 1914, he had interrupted his studies at the Municipal University in Amsterdam and travelled south to serve with the Red Cross in the city of his birth. He made no claims to heroism. Taking care of the wounded provided him with a unique opportunity to gain practical experience and exempted him from mobilization. But before long the front had advanced so far south that the staff of the emergency hospitals in Maastricht soon found themselves bored to tears. Six months later my father was on the train back to Amsterdam. He resumed his studies and became a medical doctor, the highest possible achievement for a young man from his non-academic background. He would have liked nothing better than to study for his PhD, even though it involved sitting an extra state exam. But then I came along and a doctor’s house became available in the Wyck neighbourhood of Maastricht. The Spanish flu came and went, and after that traffic accidents provided him with most of his patients. In a city without traffic lights, the number of motor vehicles was doubling annually and everyone was making up the rules as they went along. Competition with trams and rival bus companies was fierce, and bus drivers resorted to recklessness to give them the edge. The horrific injuries he saw reminded my father of his wartime experiences. As a GP his sole responsibility was the patient’s long-term recovery. Mr Bonhomme came to grief under the wheels of a Studebaker owned by the Kerckhoffs brothers and drank away his phantom pain in the public house. My father went down to collect him when the landlord complained of the stink.
‘Daddy?’
‘Mmmm … ’
‘When will Mr Bonhomme’s leg grow back?’
‘It won’t. In fact, there’s every chance his other one will drop off.’
‘Jacques, please! Keep a civil tongue in your head.’
Without my mother around, I could well have become a very strange child indeed. She preserved the peace and quiet of the domestic routine. Not a day went by without my father dreaming up some new adventure. Off to the summer fair in Beek, making our own pottery in the Preekherengang, shutting Grandma’s goat up in her box-bed, scaring the wits out of unsuspecting citizens by jumping from behind the Helpoort and shouting ‘Boo!’ For Christmas he gave me a little monk that peed apple juice when you pressed his head.
Sport did not interest him in the slightest. To this day I have no idea why he took me along to the Amsterdam Olympics. We stayed with an aunt—or at least I called her ‘Auntie’—who looked like Clara Bow. When we went out together, she slapped a cap on her mop of black hair and slotted one cigarette after another between her painted lips. My father was the picture of contentment as he strolled down the street with a lady on either arm. At a stall he treated us to Coca-Cola, tasting it first with a sceptical frown. What was it made of? Was it suitable for the ladies? Auntie Clara Bow insisted we go to see the fencing. My father thought this a very bad idea. The matches were not even held in the stadium but in a hall out front, where later all hell would break loose when a fight erupted between the spectators after a boxing match. The mood at the fencing was boisterous, too. See, said my father, combat sports are contagious. The spectators are infected by the aggression on display, proving this is not sport at all, simply an excuse for a common scrap. Auntie Clara Bow gave him a kiss and that was enough to bundle him through the entrance. She knew a remarkable athlete would be fencing that day: Helene Mayer, die blonde Hee as the Germans liked to call her. She had the allure of a film star, not unlike Auntie Clara Bow herself.
When I saw Helene Mayer for the first time, I was filled with the kind of adoration that can make a young girl queasy. I was ten, she was seventeen. Helene was a demigoddess,
