From its very first season, Pension Walda was a smashing success. Known for its somewhat unconventional managers and easygoing atmosphere, the guesthouse became a favorite port of call for performers at the pier, which only made it more attractive to regular guests. Even soldiers on furlough from the Indies and German beachgoers came in large numbers to see “die liebe Leute van Walda”—the dear people of the Walda. Any guests who were drawn in by the establishment’s somewhat German-sounding name weren’t disappointed, for their host, who had recently obtained his degree in German mercantile correspondence, spoke the language flawlessly.
Holland’s neighbors to the east—who just a few years earlier had been viewed as the great losers of Europe—were more than happy to be able to blow their extra German reichsmarks in Scheveningen again. As Holland and the rest of the Western world sank deeper into an economic depression, Germany was rapidly climbing out of one of its own. Everyone agreed that this miracle was largely thanks to the Austrian-born politician, Adolf Hitler, who, along with his henchmen on the Far Right, had noisily stepped into the spotlight at the end of the 1920s. At first, the established order had written him off as a shouting flash in the pan, but within a few years they were standing back and watching in wonder as he assumed absolute power. They say that suffering cleanses the soul, but, for both people and nations alike, this isn’t always the case. The disillusioned masses of German voters found refuge in the National Socialist leader, who exuded the energy and vision they needed to pull their impoverished country out of its slump. And Hitler didn’t disappoint. By the mid-1930s, inflation had stopped, unemployment was virtually nonexistent, and the German economy was running like a well-oiled machine.
Even Hitler’s greatest political opponents were in awe of the man who had accomplished this incredible feat. Perhaps the Nazi ideas weren’t as perilous as many people had feared. After all, weren’t most of the concentration camps for political prisoners being shut down? And Jews and Communists were rarely being terrorized on the streets anymore, were they? Daily life had gone back to normal, and times were better than they had been in years. In Holland, many people hoped a Dutch Hitler would come along and save their economy, too, and in the 1935 elections at least 8 percent of voters cast their ballots for the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist Movement that had been established four years earlier by Anton Mussert. In The Hague and Scheveningen, that number was even higher at 12 percent.
But Rika didn’t need a political party or a dictator to save her: she had created her very own Wirtschaftswunder, her own “economic miracle.” Although she hadn’t been raised to be anything but a housewife, it turned out that she had inherited the Van der Lanses’ flair for business. In the middle of a financial crisis, she somehow managed to turn her little guesthouse into a thriving operation. She had a flawless nose for new opportunities and an inexhaustible drive for getting things done. And, on top of that, she was fearless. When it became increasingly difficult for her landlord to find renters for his expensive apartments, Rika expanded her range of services. Pretty soon she was printing new brochures that read: “Walda Pension and Property Management Company: For the sale, rental, mortgage, insurance, administration and maintenance of homes.”28
Rika continued to cook for her guests, but for the other work in the guesthouse, she relied on Agnes and four cheap Polish maids. In 1935, on the back of a photo for her children, she proudly wrote: “Mama with her employees!”
Even the Van der Lanses had to admit, their oldest daughter—the one who had seemed destined for total ruin just a few years earlier—was doing pretty darn well for herself. On the outside, Rika had always shrugged off the fact that she’d been banished from her family—“They’re a crazy lot. In the end, I couldn’t care less,” as she wrote to Bertha after getting the cold shoulder at a birthday party—but deep down she was troubled by it, and in 1933, she started making frantic attempts at reconciliation.29 “We simply aren’t angels,” she wrote in a letter to her parents on floral stationery. “We all have our good and evil qualities, and we all have our own cross to bear, we’ve all got our work cut out for us.”30
Although Rika was never completely forgiven for all the shame she had brought to the family, and remained uninvited to birthday parties and New Year’s celebrations, from then on, her relationship with her family gradually improved. Waldy frequently went to visit his grandparents—after all, it’s not the little boy’s fault, they reasoned. And especially the younger members of the family dropped by Rika’s guesthouse on a regular basis, where they always received a warm welcome—to them, the house even felt a little glamourous with all the artistic types coming and going. It was always a party at Rika’s, or Aunt Riek’s, and she never made a fuss about anything. If the place was a mess, she would simply say, “Who cares? Let’s just sit with our backs to it, then we won’t see it and it won’t bother us.” And as far as Waldemar was concerned, some members of the family never grew tired of mentioning how he was “in fact”—in other words, despite his skin color—“a proper gentleman.”
The only ones who couldn’t enjoy the success and happiness at Pension Walda were Rika’s own children, who were farther away than ever. In 1934, the Rijkswaterstaat had transferred Willem to a post in Groningen. Bertha, who had developed a strong bond with her friends in Goeree, had a particularly hard time moving up north. “We’re a bit closer to The Hague now, but the trip from Groningen to The Hague costs fifteen gulden,” she lamented in her diary. “We’re even more isolated here than we were in Goeree.”31
In the meantime, her parents’ divorce had become final, and Bertha fervently hoped that her father would get married to Jans, their servant, who, under heavy protest, had left her own family and followed the Hagenaars to Groningen. Even though Willem continued to insist that Jans was their housekeeper, his children had figured out by then that there was more between the two of them than he let on. If they were to marry, Willem’s situation would be more or less equal to that of Rika, thereby giving his daughter the moral freedom to rekindle a relationship with her mother. For even though Bertha hadn’t seen her mother in years, she still missed her. One time, when she was staying with her grandparents in The Hague, she happened to pass by her mother’s new guesthouse. Sadly, she wrote:
It was pitch black outside, but somehow my eyes landed on Pension Walda. I didn’t know exactly where it was. Oh, how I wanted to go there. How happy she would have been. We would have spent a wonderful evening together. But before it even occurred to me to get off the bus, we had already passed it. Tonight in bed I’m going to go over the whole thing again in my mind. Why do I still have to ride by my own mother?32
Willem showed no intention of marrying Jans, and he ruled his children’s relationship with his ex-wife with an iron fist. They were strictly forbidden to set foot in their mother’s house before the age of twenty-one, and that was final. And even though Bertha had already finished school by then and had a job in an office, she still had enough respect for her father’s wrath to obey. Once, when she was in Scheveningen with a friend and he suggested paying her mother a visit, she shrieked, “Oh no, my father would never allow it!”
As for Rika, she stubbornly continued writing her weekly letters and sending her children photos and little packages. She made no secret of the fact that she was making good money. Bertha received a fur coat and Henk, much to his delight, received a portable gramophone. Dressed in her Sunday best, Rika would stand in the front yard of Pension Walda and have photos taken with her employees, guests, son, and other family members. The only person who was regularly absent from the photos was Waldemar—no matter how provocative Rika was wont to be, she was careful about putting her young lover on display.
In the meantime, Willem’s once-magnificent career had reached a dead end. The government could no longer afford costly public works projects, and as a civil servant, he was increasingly subject to salary cuts. The more Rika rubbed his nose in her good fortune and the closer his children came to an
age when they no longer had to follow their father’s orders, the more desperately Willem tried to hold on to his position of power. The household battles raged on in Groningen, especially when mail from The Hague arrived. And just as Wim had once tried to carry glasses of water to his parents in the hope of calming them down, Bertha was now the one trying to keep the explosive situation under control by attempting to rein in her mother’s impulsive behavior:
In a week or so, I’ll write to her again. The last letter wasn’t so friendly, but that’s because I can’t tell Mama everything. I can’t write and tell her that I’m longing for her so much these days. I’m afraid she will come here and say: I don’t want my children to be upset. I can really imagine her doing something like that, which is why I have to write in a different tone.33
Finally, she decided to ask her mother to temporarily cut off contact altogether.
I just wrote a long letter to Mama. It will make her so happy. I also sent a photo and told her the truth, that she shouldn’t write anymore. Maybe later things will be different.34
By the summer of 1935, the parental visitation arrangement was back in effect, and Rika sent a short letter to Groningen once a year to ask when she could see her children. The reply began with “Dear Madam” and included nothing but a date, time, and location. On the agreed-upon date, Willem brought his daughter and youngest son to the train station in The Hague, where his ex-wife would be waiting for them with little Waldy at the Hotel Terminus. She no longer dared to take her children home with her, so they would go to Het Roomhuis, a well-known restaurant in the Haagse Bos. But Rika wouldn’t have been Rika if she didn’t give Willem a little wave from inside the taxi. He would just stand there waiting at the tram stop, his face tight, trying in vain not to see the woman who had once been the love of his life.
For Henk, the annual visits to The Hague were fairly incomprehensible. He had only vague recollections of the mother he had been torn away from at the age of five, and to him, she was nothing but a strange, sweet-smelling woman who sent him nice presents and loving letters. While she and his sister were racing against the clock to catch up, Henk was left to play with little Waldy—a perfect stranger who just so happened to be his little brother and looked up at him with wide, expectant eyes. He understood little of what was happening, but early on he did try to get his sister to explain the situation to him:
Yesterday Henk came and sat down beside me. It was just the two of us in the room. I told him there was a package from Mama. He said: Why don’t we go there anymore, Sis? Did you know she came to Goeree? While we were swimming. She was wearing a pretty hat. Sis, I would like to go back and see her again. It’s all so strange, Sis.
Now you can see he’s picking up on things too. He only talks about it with me. I say: Papa and Mama don’t like each other very much, and it’s better this way. It’s better for Mama and better for Papa too. But don’t forget that you must always love Mama, Henk, because you have only one father and one mother. Then he crawled up onto my lap and wrapped his arms around me. I was quiet for a long time. Yes, Henk said, but they are angry at each other. Absolutely not, I said.35
In the meantime, Rika’s two older sons, both stubborn Hagenaars, refused to have anything to do with their mother. When Wim and Jan ran into their mother and half brother by chance in Scheveningen in the summer of 1936, they looked away and acted as if they were invisible. Appalled, Bertha wrote: “Imagine that your own children, who you brought into the world, just walk past you. It’s enough to make anybody crazy. I can really see it from Mama’s perspective.”36
But Rika refused to give up hope of being reunited someday. As pugnacious as ever, she wrote on the back of a photo of Waldy sent to Groningen: “If the boys only knew how much he loved them, they would regret every day that they just passed us by!!”37 One day, the boys would break free from their father’s iron grip and make their own choices, and perhaps then they would see that their mother’s soul wasn’t as black as they had been told all those years. And so, she kept up her provocative ways and continued sending loving letters and photos with captions such as: “Hello Sis, hello Henk, hello Jan, hello Wim, lots of love from Waldy,” and “Remember your mom. I’m always with you! Mama.”38
Just as Waldemar’s ancestors had come from every corner of the globe, by the mid-1930s, their descendants had spread out in all directions. Hilda sent enthusiastic letters from the Dutch East Indies, where life was almost better than it had been in Suriname during the gold rush. And Waldemar’s brother, Decy, was living in central Venezuela, where he had built his own power station. Occasionally, a letter would arrive in The Hague filled with his macho stories and photos of “Decy the tiger hunter.” Lily, the beautiful baby of the family, had been sent sulking to Brazil by boat in 1930. The family figured that the only person who could handle the spoiled damsel was Koos Nods himself. Once there, she married a business associate of her father’s and lived in the small city of Ouro Prêto, “Black Gold,” where Koos had worked his way up to mayor and rode around on a donkey, inspecting the village. He was now in his third marriage, this time to a German painter who ran his hotels.
Waldemar was still in Holland. Every morning he swerved through Scheveningen on his bicycle to his job in The Hague, always looking refined in his suit—perfectly tailored to his long, supple limbs—and his impeccably polished shoes; his eyes sparkled. He loved long bike rides in the fresh air, just as he loved long swims in the sea. As soon as the water was warm enough again, he would happily go back to being the tropical boy he once was. Every once in a while, he even felt at home in his new homeland, like the time a coal truck drove past him, and the driver, who was covered from head to toe in soot himself, shouted “Hey, blackie!” “Yeah? Look who’s talking!” Waldemar yelled back in a gruff Hague accent. He came home grinning cheek to cheek—this was the kind of humor he had learned on the streets of Paramaribo. But on gray, wet days in the long months of winter, the luster would disappear from his skin and his eyes would grow dull. Whereas David Millar, who worked in the fast-paced world of aviation, seemed to have inherited Koos Nods’s startling, almost aggressive charm, his introverted half brother was forced to spend his days in a gloomy bank in The Hague, where people were frantically clinging to their middle-class values in these perilous times.
The longer Waldemar lived in the Netherlands, the more he retreated into the role of the perfect gentleman, supremely civilized through and through, politer than polite, whiter than white. In Paramaribo, he could have glided through life as a son of a social elite, but here he was and remained “the token Negro,” constantly having to justify his own existence. He had learned to turn a blind eye to the looks of Rika’s sensation-loving friends and acquaintances and to ignore the condescension of his colleagues and superiors. Smiling, they sized him up with their eyes—but no matter how gentlemanly Mr. Nods looked and how conscientious he was in his work, he would always be a black man from that strange “monkey land” on the other side of the ocean. He couldn’t find comfort or distraction in his work either, for in the current economic climate, career opportunities at mortgage lenders were virtually nonexistent. Many of his colleagues had already gone home to find the dreaded termination notice on their doorstep, so the fact that Waldemar still had his job was not to be taken lightly. The only thing he could do was continue his studies in the vague hope that he might someday get somewhere with them.
But in the meantime, he became serious and very quiet, old for his age, the candor of his early days in Holland all but lost. Waldemar missed the warmth and colors of Switi Sranan, the easygoing way of life in Suriname, where even people in the deepest poverty could still laugh and enjoy themselves. He missed the sun on his skin, and most of all, he missed the warm, languid river he’d loved so much. The only place he could still find the paradise of his youth was in the books that he and Rika read in their rare free time. The Sunday radio book hour was sacred: Zuid-Zuid-West, the nostalgic debut novel by fellow Surinamese expatriate Lode
wijk Lichtveld, better known by his nom de plume, Albert Helman, was being read on the radio and was immensely popular.
Now I am here in a strange city, and tomorrow I’ll travel on, but where to? There is turmoil, or rather a small sense of sorrow that keeps pulling me farther and farther away, that leaves me constantly searching for something old, for something nearly forgotten.
How could I have known back then, my poor Kutiri, that I would take that old sorrow and far-off longing with me to the city, to another country. How could I have known that the little house would be so beautiful under the coconut trees; how could I have known that the high rustle of the long palm leaves would sing even farther beyond the dull roar of the sea. Zuid-Zuid-West calls to mind the dull, shimmering day between the low coffee bushes. Oh, this country, how could I ever forget this country!39
The last contact that Waldemar had with his homeland were a few letters exchanged with his late mother’s family. The Treurniet family faithfully sent their cousin packages with Surinamese spices and food stuffs and kept him up to date on the latest news from the colony, which hardly ever made it into the Dutch newspapers. That’s how he first got wind of Anton de Kom, a fellow ocean swimmer who had lost his job in 1932 and moved back to Paramaribo with his Dutch wife and children. Upon his return, he started standing on the balcony of De Waag on the Waterfront spreading Communist and nationalist views he had picked up in the East Indian student circles of The Hague. Among Creoles, who were still very loyal to Holland, his message fell on deaf ears, but among the exploited Javanese contract laborers, he was garnering so much support that, after a few bloody riots, the colonial government promptly put him on a boat back to Amsterdam.
The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography Page 7
