The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  Even the summer couldn’t cure Waldemar’s homesickness for Paramaribo, the breeziness of tropical life, and the river. The colors of the Dutch flowers looked pale in his eyes, and just as it finally seemed to be warming up outside, autumn announced its return. When Christien told him that he would be moving in with her cousin, who had just started a boarding house, he had already given up all hope that things would ever get better for him. By then, it was November again, and he had neither the clothes nor the spirit to face the winter.

  On Tuesday morning, November 20, 1928, Rika and her children moved into the upstairs apartment of the house on Azaleastraat. Waldemar moved in with them that same day. About three weeks after the move, Rika had a photographer take their family portraits for the annual Sinterklaas celebration. The children all looked sadly into the camera. Having been torn away from the island and their friends, they still weren’t used to their new life. Their mother looked serious, albeit a bit slimmer and calmer than in the photos taken earlier that year. Having her own house brought a sense of stability, and now she had not only her children to shower with warmth and care but the boarder as well. Although Waldemar looked exotic with his dark skin, he soon became a familiar face in the house, if only because she cooked his meals, washed his clothes, and changed his bedsheets. Rika found their house guest much too skinny for his height, so she learned how to cook rice just for him and drenched it in the same gravy the rest of the family poured over their potatoes.

  Waldemar flourished in Rika’s slightly chaotic but cheerful household. He enjoyed the buzz of a large family and had endless patience for the children, who listened with jaws dropped to his stories about the wonderfully warm country he came from, where the leaves stayed on the trees, you never needed heavy clothes, and you could go swimming every single day. If his landlady turned on the radio, he’d get a twinkle in his eye, and sometimes they dared to dance. And in the evenings, after the children were in bed, Rika enjoyed having another adult in the house to talk to. True, he was quite a bit younger than she was, but he was a good listener and showed an uncommon understanding for her plight. And there was no denying that he was an attractive man, especially now that he was slightly heftier and opening up a bit.

  “White women are softer,” Waldemar and his friends back home had concluded in one of their worldly-wise conversations about the opposite sex. During his first year in Holland, Waldemar had serious doubts about whether this was actually true; however, during those late-night conversations on the Azaleastraat, he may have started to believe it. His landlady was unarguably loving and warm. She even reminded him of his own mother, who, despite having been poorly treated by her husband and ending up alone, had always been kind and helpful to everyone. Rika’s zest for life and independent nature made her not unlike Surinamese women, and even though she was quite a bit older than he was, she had always been a robust, attractive woman—even more so now that she was taking better care of herself and able to look at him with a smile in her eyes.

  One wintery day in January 1929, the landlady and her boarder photographed each other on the Azaleastraat in the freshly fallen snow. Both had clearly dressed up for the occasion. With his suit, elegant hat, light raincoat, and a cigarette in hand, Waldemar looks straight out of one of the portraits of elegant Surinamese men that Dutch artist Nola Hatterman was painting at the time. Rika poses coquettishly for the camera in her fur-trimmed overcoat, and something in her gaze suggests that her relationship with Waldemar is no longer strictly platonic. One month after the photos were taken, that was most certainly the case, for it must have been early spring when she realized that she was pregnant again—and the only man who could have possibly been the father was her young black boarder.

  Abortion was illegal in those days, but still widely practiced. The fact that Rika chose to keep the baby, despite the strong social stigma against mixed-race relationships, says something about her feelings for the father. In quiet, caring Waldemar, she found what she’d been missing in her marriage: a man who supported her and who would never try to force his will upon her. She was in love and determined to share her life with him. Meanwhile, Willem Hagenaar still hadn’t agreed to a divorce. He had applied for a job in the Dutch East Indies, perhaps in the hope that he and his family could start over in the colonies, where Rika could enjoy the kind of easygoing atmosphere and thriving social life he assumed she wanted. But to her, the news that her legal husband had a mind to leave the country came as a relief—it would certainly make her future with her still-secret lover a little bit easier.

  For once, Rika’s fluctuating weight turned out to be a godsend. She simply wore the dresses from her heavier days and trusted that by the time the pregnancy became visible, her children would be as attached to Waldemar as she was. Her oldest son, in particular, was really getting along with his new housemate. Wim regarded Waldemar as a kind of special friend, someone who had seen the world and with whom he could go on manly adventures. In the summer of 1929, the two of them went on a long camping trip together by tandem bicycle. Much to his delight, Wim got to ride in the front. At Jan’s first communion, the rest of the Van der Lans family met Rika’s boarder as well. They had nothing but positive things to say about him—what a nice young man, and so refined!

  As for Waldemar, he didn’t see anything standing in the way of a relationship with his landlady. In the Surinamese culture, sexual relations were simply not as big of a deal as they were in Holland, and a woman having children from more than one man was considered the most normal thing in the world. Even a considerable difference in age would not have been a major issue back home. And so, that summer he spent day after day with Rika and her children at the beach in Scheveningen, where he perfected the art of open-water swimming and became even darker than he already was. In early September, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday. For the first time since he had arrived in Holland, he felt happy. He came of age just in time for the birth of his child.

  The beautiful summer gave way to a bleak fall, full of rain and wind. Wim, who had recently turned fourteen, started feeling less and less at ease. He was a sensitive boy, and as the oldest in the family, he had borne the brunt of his parents’ quarreling and all the problems his mother had created for herself since she left his father. He had always been the apple of his mother’s eye, and in The Hague, he became her anchor. He did his best to be the man of the family, but now he was getting caught up in something he couldn’t quite understand. Hushed voices behind closed doors, music playing deep into the night, quiet giggles in the hall, waking up in the morning to the smell of smoke and empty glasses downstairs. And a mother who was so visibly and imperturbably happy, even though she seemed to be getting heavier by the day. At the beginning of October, Rika finally confided in her oldest son: pretty soon he would have a new baby brother or sister. And the best part—the baby would have brown skin, like his friend Waldemar.

  In all her romantic optimism, perhaps Rika thought that the friendship between her son and lover would make things easier. Sadly, this was not the case. The adolescent Wim was deeply hurt. He was at an age when he was just starting to understand the physical powers of attraction between a man and a woman, and he found the thought of his mother and the boarder revolting. He felt intensely betrayed, not only by Rika, but by Waldemar—he had been so friendly toward him, but all the while he’d secretly been after his mother. “The brown kids are coming, and there’ll be no more room for us!” he cried, and refused to exchange another word with the two of them.9

  That Sunday, Wim was on acolyte duty at the church. He emptied the contents of his piggy bank and tucked a copy of the Dutch Civil Code into his white surplice. Halfway through the procession, he disappeared into the crowd and met up with his eight-year-old brother, Jan, at a previously agreed location. Together, they took the train to Rotterdam and then the tram to Hellevoetsluis, where they boarded the boat to Goeree. By the time they reached the island, Wim had run out of money, but he managed to borrow some from o
ne of his father’s employees. They took the last tram to Goedereede. That evening, the two boys found themselves standing before the dumbfounded dike warden, who was even more shocked when his oldest son opened the Civil Code and gravely pointed to a passage stating that a father was required to care for his children.

  When Willem finally connected the dots in his son’s jumbled story and understood why the two boys no longer wanted to live with their mother, he snapped. Not only were his hopes for reconciliation with Rika shattered, the news stirred up his white man’s fear of the black man’s virility—the same fear that centuries earlier had compelled the colonists to declare relations between white women and slaves punishable by death. In the days that followed, Willem arranged for his oldest son to return to school as soon as possible, withdrew his application for the position in the Indies, and informed his wife via a hastily contracted lawyer that he was going to do everything in his power to remove his other two children from her damaging influence.

  The news spread through The Hague society like wildfire. Rika, a married woman, had taken up with a black man young enough to be her son and was about to give birth to a brown bastard baby. It was a scandal of incalculable proportions. For Mr. and Mrs. Van der Lans, who had already had their hands full with Rika, this was the final straw. They cut their daughter out of their lives and hearts completely. Other family members severed ties with her as well. Even her brothers and sisters, who had always enjoyed, and sometimes even admired, their independent sister’s antics, wanted nothing more to do with her.

  On November 17, 1929, almost two years to the day that Waldemar set foot in Amsterdam, his son was born. In Surinamese terms, the baby was a real moksi-moksi: brown with dark curls and bright blue eyes. Rika, whose last name was still officially Hagenaar, was not allowed to give her son his father’s last name, but she did give him his first name. Little Waldemar soon became Waldy for short, but Rika liked to call him “Sonny Boy,” after the sentimental song sung by Al Jolson in the popular film The Singing Fool, which everyone was whistling that summer.

  When there are grey skies

  I don’t mind the grey skies

  You make them blue, Sonny Boy10

  That winter, Willem made one last hopeless attempt to save his marriage. He told his wife he would take her back and would accept little Waldy as well. For someone as proud and bullheaded as he was, it was the ultimate sacrifice, but for Rika, his offer wasn’t even worth considering. After nearly twenty years, the passionate love affair between Willem Hagenaar and Rika van der Lans had come to a bitter end, and an all-out war was inevitable. Willem spent a year’s salary on lawyers to gain custody of his two youngest children, while Rika did everything she could to regain contact with her two oldest sons. But all her attempts were thwarted, not only by their father, but by her own family. As her daughter, Bertha, later noted in her diary:

  I suddenly remember Mama coming to Grandpa’s to visit. We weren’t living with Papa yet. Only Wim and Jan. Grandpa said: Get out of here or I will! Wim and Jan never even came [to see us]. I stood in front of Grandpa and said: I’m leaving, you go back inside. I took my coat and Henk with me and went home with Mama, even though they were my own brothers. We were strangers to each other.11

  For the first time in her life, Rika, who had always been a spoiled daughter of the bourgeoisie, found herself in a bitter state of poverty. It wasn’t that money had never been in short supply growing up, but her father had always managed to make some kind of lucrative transaction that provided them with cash in abundance. She then spent her marriage nestled under the wings of the Rijkswaterstaat, in a luxurious home with an ample income and even a few servant girls of her own. But without her family and husband, she had to watch every penny she spent. She sold her jewelry and everything else of value she owned and mended Waldemar’s threadbare suits and shirts until they were literally falling apart—so he could attend class looking as dignified as possible. She even tried to earn money telling fortunes, which had always been a favorite pastime of hers. And when things got really tight, and her children were going to bed with growling, empty stomachs, she would rent her rooms by the hour to couples.

  On March 31, 1930, in The Hague’s circuit court, Willem officially denied that he was the father of Rika’s mixed-race love child. Shortly afterward, Rika, beaten down by lack of money and the dead-end situation, gave up the fight. It had become clear to her that no judge was going to grant custody to an adulterous wife and her student lover who didn’t even have the means to care for their own baby. Perhaps, she reasoned, it would even be better for her older children to grow up together with their father in that beautiful house on the island, where faithful Jans would surely see to it that all their material needs were cared for. Then they could spend their vacations with their mother and half brother.

  Bertha was allowed to finish out the school year in The Hague, but on June 2, a chaplain from Rika’s church brought Bertha and four-year-old Henk back to Goeree.

  I still remember that on the last night before I left I got out of bed and asked Mama: Is it really the last night? The suitcase was lying there next to my bed. Mama said: “Sis, try to get used to it and write me anything that’s in your heart.” I went back to bed. But then I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop. I felt so empty.12

  Years later, Rika would confess in a letter to Henk that letting him and her other children go was the biggest mistake of her life. “I never should have done it,” she wrote.13

  On October 29, 1929, a few weeks before little Waldy was born, the New York stock market crashed, bringing an abrupt end to the prosperous, carefree 1920s. By March the following year, more than eighteen million people were out of work. The Depression spread around the world like an oil slick. In Suriname, it was a final death blow to the already ill-fated economy and to any hopes the local people had of a brighter future; in the Netherlands, it struck like a thunderstorm at the end of a beautiful summer day, delivering one unexpected blow after another while everyone trembled and tried to find shelter.

  Waldemar and Rika had no work, no money, and no friends. The fact that Rika had sent off her own flesh and blood to live with their father so she could be free to gallivant with her lover—or at least that was the version of the story circling around The Hague—had drained any remaining credit she might have had in the family circle. All Rika and Waldemar had was the baby and each other; there wasn’t a soul who would give them a cent—and this wasn’t just because of their difference in age and culture; it was also due to the belief that black men weren’t ones to stick around. Sooner or later, the handsome young black man would be off in search of greener pastures, leaving Rika and her mixed-race baby to beg on the streets, or worse.

  By the summer of 1930, Rika and Waldemar had fallen so far behind on their rent that they were evicted from the house on Azaleastraat. The only person who couldn’t bear to see them out on the streets was Rika’s sister, Jo. She agreed to take the young family in until Waldemar had earned enough degrees for a fighting chance on the job market. He had given up on his preuniversity program by then and was trying to earn a degree in business correspondence as quickly as possible as well as pass the practical exams in commercial science. But no matter how tight things were for Rika and Waldemar, there was one thing they would not sacrifice: the parcels for Rika’s children in Goedereede. Week after week, the fat envelopes addressed in Rika’s elegant handwriting arrived on the island, often packed with dried flowers, as Rika wrote: “I can’t live without flowers and sweet children.”14 For Henk, who couldn’t read yet, she sent postcards with pictures of Shirley Temple and Queen Astrid. She wrote about her daily life in a tone far more cheerful than her situation actually was and always asked for details about the children’s lives, as if they had only been apart for a few days rather than almost an entire year.

  Tell Henk he better be good because Mama is saving up for a pretty box of stationery. And Sis, you’re back to school again now, aren’t you? Did you like sl
eeping late?? You did, didn’t you? I’ve been looking forward to a postcard from your field trip all week. Or didn’t it happen? Don’t get too crazy on your bicycle. Now you can really enjoy this beautiful weather on it. Let me know soon if you moved up a class in school. And what are you playing on the piano—any little pieces yet? That’s wonderful, Sis, I would be absolutely delighted to hear you play sometime. My handwriting isn’t very good, is it? The little one is on the floor right now playing at my feet.15

  Once a month, Rika splurged on a roll of film for Waldemar’s only luxury: his Leica camera. The best prints were invariably sent to Goeree, most of them with captions on the back: “Think of us often!” Or: “For my sweet Sis—Little Waldy having a ball while his papa tries to snap a nice picture of him.” The dozens of photos Rika sent to Goeree are a montage of the new life that Rika had so desperately wanted her children to be a part of. But at the same time, they were also a protest against a divorce that was turning out to be much more definitive than she ever could have imagined, for the deeply wounded Willem Hagenaar was absolutely determined to erase the woman he had once loved so passionately from his life and the lives of his children. Rika had forfeited her maternal rights when she gave up the custody battle, and Willem had done everything in his power to keep her visitation rights to an absolute minimum: two hours once a year at a neutral location—not her house. Once, when her longing for her children became too much to bear, Rika traveled to Goeree, but the adventure turned out to be such a drama that she thought it better for the children not to do it again.