My life
Everyone was glad the war was over.
It was time to celebrate! Nine months later a baby-boomer was born
in Bussum. That was me. They say my father was a lot more nervous
than my mother and paced the corridors of the hospital. Sometimes
I think men have more talent for grand suffering, while women's is
more practical. At any rate, without that war, I wouldn't be her,;
a debt I repaid years later with a novel.
In the beginning we lived with
a host of other family members in a Pippi Longstocking type villa
in Hilversum. With so many uncles and aunts squeezed into one house,
living together was a continual exercise in peaceful coexistence.
But no blood ever flowed. Plenty of tears though. Actually my tears,
when my favourite plushanimal Hazelien was ripped to shreds by my
aunt's Boxer. There was no blood but piles of sawdust. It was a tragic
sight; the carpet covered in sawdust and here and there a remnant
of hare. At night in bed I longed for her ears. I never attempted,
like the famous children's book heroine, to fly away out of the attic
window. But the attic, with its secret rooms and smell of dry wood
and old books, was certainly the perfect place to do so in imagination.
There were those who had used the
war to get rich. Not my parents. We moved to Amsterdam when I was
three and there wasn't even money for a tram ticket. What luck! We
covered the many kilometres between our house and our great-grandfathers
on foot. As a reward, he would bounce me on his knee let me look through
his little spy mirror at the Albert Cuyp market below. And what's
more I developed extremely strong leg muscles.
All those kilometres of Amsterdam
pavements have left me with a life-long compulsion to walk. Roll out
a shadowy path before me and there's no holding me back. Show me a
lovely little goat path and I'm off. The great thing about walking
is that you can do it anytime of day or night, and you don't have
to join a club and chase some ball. It's also a great counterbalance
to writing, which is primarily an exercise in sitting still.
But I have noticed I'm becoming
more demanding. There seem to be endless new paths needing to be trod,
leading to ever less known horizons. And because you can't just fill
up your supermarket trolley with paths like bottles of whisky, now
and again I have to cross an ocean to reach them.
My father was a chemist. He worked
in a laboratory for Organon, where new medicines were developed. Over
dinner I would sometimes hear about all kinds of diseases. One of
his specialities was muscle atrophy. Between the potatoes and the
yoghurt, I learnt how lucky I was to be able to do whatever I wanted
with my arms and legs. The hospitals were full of children whose muscles
were slowly fading away. It was a distressing image, enough to turn
me into a hypochondriac. With every slightest pain I was convinced
atrophy had hold of me too. Why should other children, who perhaps
did their best more than me, get it and not me?
Because of Organon we moved to
the Brabant countryside, near Oss. That was a completely different
world from the one we had left behind. My mother felt like we had
emigrated. Pure Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Brabant plains! We had
only just arrived when the neighbour lost an earring. He searched
hopelessly for it everywhere. It didn't seem so bad to us, one little
earring more or less. But how naïve we were. What a lot we still
had to learn. You can't shoot straight with just one earring!
One day television entered people's
lives. Some consider the atomic bomb and the landing on the moon to
be the most revolutionary phenomena of the twentieth century. They
search for them in the bigger picture, in something on a greater than
human scale, and miss the small things: a screen in the corner that
provides picture and sound, so that you can enjoy the atomic bomb
and the landing from the luxury of your own home.
My favourite children's program
was The Binoculars. It showed you how children lived in other countries:
Chinese children eating with chopsticks in Mao jackets, African children
swimming half-naked in a muddy river, Swiss children coming down the
Alps with school satchels on their backs. I wanted to be all those
children. Best of all the Swiss one, because of the mountains. I have
never understood why Holland is so flat. From the start I knew that
there was something not quite right about our landscape, but only
on seeing the Swiss mountains did I understand what.
The things innocent children's
programmes can set in motion! Thanks to The Binoculars I now live
in two foreign countries, Portugal and France. There are hills and
mountains galore, all types and flavours - with or without whipped
cream on top. If there is such a thing as "the landscape of the
soul", then I've found it. Although "Where you are not,
there's happiness" still comes over me in waves.
I cover a great deal of terrain
with my dog, a Breton spaniel who has worked himself effortlessly
from stray to aristocratic lodger. He gets just as grumpy as I do
if we skip a day. He decides where we go, the choice is sometimes
too rich for me. What'll be today then, I ask. The hills with the
magic stones, the river, the red cliffs, the sea, the beach with the
cacti, the lagoon, the path to the well, the cave or the little mimosa-lined
lane? If he says river, river it is. He knows better than I do. In
general the pattern of our walks is: whatever lies behind the next
hill keeps us going.
I used to think I had to become
something in life - I mean have a real profession for which you first
have to obtain qualifications and then go for an interview. I spent
some time pouring over incomprehensible texts before I realised that
I simply wasn't cut out for a real profession.
Writing as a way of staving off
mortality? I'm just happy if the reader, a year on, still remembers
the dog that became grumpy if a day went by without a walk. The fact
that this dog had an owner who loved The Binoculars as a child is
less important. Although, it would be nice if that information lingered
on in their minds for a while; if only because it was all so beautifully
written.
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