Nine Open Arms

by Benny Lindelauf

  nine

  open

  arms

  benny

  lindelauf

  translated by

  john nieuwenhuizen

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support

  of the Dutch Foundation for Literature

  This edition published in 2014

  First published in 2004 in the Netherlands by Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V.

  Copyright © 2004 by Benny Lindelauf, Amsterdam,

  Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V.

  This English language translation © John Nieuwenhuizen 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia, www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 585 9

  eISBN 978 1 74343 341 6

  Cover and text design by Design by Committee

  Cover photos: girls © Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images; house © Sandralise/

  Bigstockphoto; garden Bigstockphoto

  Set in 11/14.5 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For my mother, Mia Lindelauf-Boonen,

  who gave me a grandmother who never ran out of stories,

  and for Guido Bosua, my friend,

  who always wanted to hear her stories.

  ‘Boy, may smoking this cigarette kill me, if it is not true.’

  —Dien Boonen-Erkens, storyteller / life artist

  contents

  Part One

  Nine Open Arms

  How the house got its name

  Gruesome treasure

  The tomb in the cellar

  The opposite of worrying [1]

  Disasters

  More disasters

  The curse of the wandering disc

  Hibernation

  The opposite of worrying [2]

  A table full of better-luck-next-time cigars

  More riddles

  They’re just beds

  The secret of the hedge

  Waiting for pigs to fly

  Something to loosen his tongue

  Discovered

  A long road

  Part Two

  Nienevee from Outside the Walls

  Ask if she was welcome

  Ask who was given a townies’ welcome

  Ask who should know her place

  Ask who could set fire to water

  Ask who built her a house

  Ask who waited

  Part Three

  The Wanderer of Sjlammbams Sahara

  Townies’ Welcome

  Ten Open Arms

  A homesick saint

  Restless

  The order

  The Virgin Mary in an armchair

  Squeak-creak

  Disappeared

  In a tangle of arms and legs

  No sjiethoes

  The wanderer of Sjlammbams Sahara

  Fight

  Memories blowing about

  Tell me why

  Two drops of water

  One foot

  The opposite of worrying [3]

  Glossary

  Translator’s note

  About the author and translator

  Part

  One

  Nine Open Arms

  how the house got its name

  At the end of the road stood a house. We weren’t the first to go and live there or the first to give the house a name. We had no idea yet about Nienevee from Outside the Walls and Charley Bottletop. But if it hadn’t been so windy that day, we would have been able to hear those two signalling to each other, drumming with their bones, deep under the ground.

  When we went to inspect the house there hadn’t been any rain for seven weeks. It was the end of August 1937, the day after Saint Rosa’s Day. A strong, hot wind blew. The Dad and our four brothers walked ahead, pushing our large handcart. They had tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths to keep the dust out. Not that it was much use, because nasty sharp little stones were blowing about along with the dust.

  Sjlammbams Sahara was the name of the dirt road, which began as a paved road in the town and led towards Germany. That long, meandering road had another name, a name nobody could or would remember. We knew of course that sjlamm was wet coaldust, cheaper to burn than coal, but why this road was nicknamed Sjlammbams Sahara we didn’t know.

  With every step, we left the town further behind. My sisters, my grandmother and I listened to the cursing of the men in front, Muulke filling in any curses the Dad left out. The dust didn’t bother us. We carried an umbrella the colour of lead and were watching our feet, the way they moved in and out of the shadow of the umbrella.

  ‘But mark my words,’ the Dad shouted, ‘once the wind drops you’ll see what a magnificent spot this is!’

  ‘It’s mostly a big heap of nothing,’ Muulke wailed. ‘And you can’t make something from nothing.’ She nudged me, but I kept quiet. We called her Muulke, little mouth, because really her mouth was so big.

  As we walked on, the new cemetery appeared on our left. A row of dense fir trees screened the graves. The trees stood close together and had been so carefully pruned that the row looked like a long straight wall. Compared to the way Sjlammbams Sahara kept veering from left to right and back again, the tight hedge looked a bit like a stern grown-up.

  When the road suddenly entered a cutting and became particularly bumpy, the Dad encouraged us with stories. He had to shout to make himself heard above the wind. ‘Just imagine,’ he roared, ‘in autumn this is going to be covered in a carpet of leaves. And in winter! Frost all over the fields! Trees covered with gently falling snow! We’re going to live in a Christmas card, believe me!’

  It turned out he was dreaming, because no leaf ever lay on that windswept road for more than one second. In autumn, Sjlammbams Sahara was one long mud bath. Not to mention winter, with its snowstorms and ice-cold wind. But, like so many other things, we didn’t know that yet.

  ‘Fresh air, as much as you want!’ the Dad shouted from behind his handkerchief. He went on to list some more advantages, but gradually he seemed to tire of his own words, because his voice became weaker.The wind snatched his sentences and hid them in the trees. ‘Why don’t you say something, Mother Mei?’ he tried eventually.

  Our grandmother waved him away. Jess, Muulke and I glanced at each other. Oma Mei didn’t usually keep her opinions to herself. For instance, when the Dad had announced we were going to have to move again because of his new job, she had given him a very stern look and asked what was wrong with people who stayed in the same profession all their life.

  ‘Opa Pei was an overseer all his life,’ she’d grumbled. ‘What is wrong with that, for heaven’s sake?’ She’d added that all this moving might produce some good stories for the neighbours, but made tramps of her grandchildren, not to mention herself.

  ‘And what are you going to be this time?’ she had asked finally. Her swivel-eye had drifted from left
to right, while her good eye stared at him angrily. We’d long since become used to her weird eyes, but they could scare a stranger to death.

  The Dad had kissed the top of her angry head. ‘Ask what’s the opposite of worry,’ he’d said.

  He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before, it was so obvious, he told us. He was going to become a cigar-maker. Men were always going to smoke. There was more security in it than in silk, which was, after all, a luxury item. And hardware? What could one say in favour of hardware? He named the men who had gone into cigar-making in the past, and who certainly hadn’t done badly since: Nol Rutten, his old school friend. Filip Mols, the undisputed emperor of cigar-makers (and, until recently, the only one who had mechanised his business). Then there was Leon Kamps, in Station Street, and Nol Rutten, his school friend, of course.

  ‘You’ve already mentioned him,’ I’d said.

  ‘Exactly, Fing,’ said the Dad, looking just about fit to burst into song. And hadn’t, he went on to say, this same Nol Rutten just become the second cigar-maker to mechanise, leaving all his old equipment unused? Two good presses, some twenty cigar moulds, the right sort of knives. No cheap rubbish, obviously. Going for a song. The stuff that had helped make Nol great! If that wouldn’t bring good luck! There was just one small problem. It meant we would have to move house, because setting up a cigar factory was not permitted where we lived. It required a separate, sealed space. Only then could you get a permit. That’s what the local council had decided.

  ‘But . . . ’ we said.

  ‘No buts,’ said the Dad. ‘No see first, then believe, but rather . . . ’

  We sighed. ‘First believe.Then see.’

  ‘I assume you know where we’re moving to,’ Oma Mei had said. And when he told us, her swivel-eye started spinning.

  The Dad asking us ‘What is opposite of worry?’ was nothing new.

  But the answer was.

  Last time, it had been silk. Before that, hardware. And every time we’d objected, he’d given the same reply: ‘First believe. Then see.’

  Previously we had lived in an enormous storage loft in the Paardenstraat, and then in Moffels the cloth merchant’s basement. Our last home had been a tiny, stuffy three-room flat on the first floor in a lane so narrow that through the kitchen window we could shake hands with Fie, our neighbour across the lane.

  During the weeks before our umpteenth move, Jess and Muulke had made a great show of hating the idea. They’d slammed doors, shaken their fists, rubbed their eyes, but their hearts hadn’t been in it. They were just going through the motions.

  I didn’t complain. I’d known that sooner or later we were going to go. As always. We were globetrotters within our town. North, south, east, west: we knew our way everywhere, but nowhere did we feel at home, and now it seemed we were about to move again.

  We would have to go to a new school. ‘Because it is closer,’ said Oma Mei. This was nonsense, of course – it was barely an extra ten minutes’ walk to our old school – but Oma Mei saw an opportunity to finally get us into the convent school of the Ursuline nuns. That was a much stricter school than our old one, and the headmistress was an old school friend of hers.

  ‘We all have to like it, of course,’ said the Dad. As if we didn’t know he had rented the place on the spot, afraid someone would beat him to it. Never mind that the house had been empty for years.

  When the road emerged from the cutting, the house came into view. We stopped. Only our brothers kept walking. They were deep in conversation about the future. From the way they were gesturing, I could tell they already saw themselves becoming rich.

  ‘Do they think the place is further along?’ I wondered.

  ‘Further along than this nothing even exists,’ Muulke said, sounding quite upset.

  From here on, Sjlammbams Sahara had one more sharp bend, and then nothing. Well, the road did actually continue and cross the border, but it no longer had a street name. This was where names came to an end. This was where the world came to an end. And it only started up again many, many wheat fields further on, where Germany began.

  ‘Our house,’ announced the Dad, untying his handkerchief.

  ‘At the end of the world!’ exclaimed Muulke. Less than an hour ago she had made fun of Fie because she was going to have to spend the rest of her life in that tiny upstairs flat, while we were going to live in a real house. Nothing much was left of that triumph. Muulke, who usually looked like a doll, with thick doll’s hair and doll’s eyes with doll’s eyelashes, now looked rather like a goblin. Her hair stuck out in wild tufts.

  ‘Can you see the graveyard from here?’ Jess asked fearfully. She was the only one still sheltering behind the umbrella. ‘Please tell me you can’t see any of it.’

  ‘I can see the dead waving at us,’ said Muulke. ‘Hooo!’

  Jess tried to stick her fingers in her ears and hang onto the umbrella at the same time, but that wouldn’t work. A gust of wind hurled the thing into the air and set it tumbling along Sjlammbams Sahara.

  ‘Well?’ asked the Dad. ‘Well?’

  In front of us, half hidden by trees and shrubs, rose a wide, red brick wall. Right at the top were two tiny attic windows, the size of tea towels. Then nothing for a long stretch, then down below, among the tall weeds, two little cellar windows.

  A few bricks in the wall were crumbling and sat at odd angles.

  ‘Well?’ the Dad said again.

  I stared at the wall, trying to think of the right words.

  ‘Where’s the front door?’ asked Jess.

  For a moment I thought the Dad would search in his pockets absentmindedly, the way he always did when he’d lost something. We all kept staring at the wall. There was no front door, or any other kind of door, even though this side of the house definitely faced the road.

  ‘Round the corner,’ we heard Piet’s voice call.

  We walked round the corner. Was that supposed to be the front door? Those few slats covered in flaking green paint? The doorhandle hanging loose? There were some small windowpanes in the centre, one of them broken.

  The key didn’t fit the lock.

  ‘I can’t understand . . . ’ said the Dad, looking from the key to the lock and back.

  It was Piet who shouted again. ‘The next corner!’

  And there, indeed, was the front door: a proper front door of solid oak, with a peephole and a brass doorknob with dents in it.The only thing that spoiled the effect was four holes in the wall, just above the door.

  And now the key did fit – if only you could reach it, considering the bottom of the door was at knee height.

  ‘They must have been worried about floods.’ Piet grinned.

  And with that our four brothers, Piet, Eet, Sjeer and Krit, climbed inside with extravagant groans and breathless gestures.

  ‘A front door at the back, a threshold at knee height,’ the Dad said cheerfully. ‘Is this a house full of surprises or what?’

  We walked through the hallway. The window shutters were closed and the only light came through the stained-glass fanlight. It looked as if the floor was covered in diamonds and sapphires.

  Four doors led off the hall. ‘We’ve never had so many doors all to ourselves,’ we whispered to each other. That whispering wasn’t put on.

  At the end of the hallway, a broad stairway with carved banisters led up to the first floor.

  ‘Are we allowed up there?’ Jess asked doubtfully.

  Muulke clacked her tongue. ‘Of course, sjiethoes,’ she said. Chicken. ‘The whole house is ours.’ She raced up the stairs, but stopped abruptly when, halfway up, a step suddenly gave a loud wailing sound when she stood on it.

  ‘And this is your room,’ said the Dad.

  My sisters and I gasped for breath.

  ‘Our room? For us? Just us?’

  The walls were whitewashed. The timber floor was bare. As if the room was waiting to be ours. When we’d lived in the storage loft, the Dad had made a room for us,
out of curtains he’d hung from the rafters. But this was a real room. With a window! We tried to open it, but we couldn’t get it to move.

  ‘That’s for later,’ said the Dad.

  Later, when we were all sitting in the living room, when coffee was perking on the kerosene stove we’d hauled along, it suddenly felt as if we were already living there. Even if there was a large crack in the living room wall, even though the floorboards were full of holes and splinters, the house was cool and it smelled safe.

  By the end of the afternoon, Oma Mei, tired of being a crosspatch, had sat down on the Dad’s overcoat. She leaned crookedly against the wall and snored clean through all the first words of all the first conversations in our new house. The left side of her wrinkled face was white from the plaster wall.

  ‘If Oma Mei can sleep here, anyone can,’ said the Dad.

  And our father carefully wiped the whitewash from his mother-in-law’s cheek with his handkerchief.

  That evening, from the kitchen window in our old first-floor flat, we solemnly shook hands across the laneway with Fie. Muulke cried, then Jess cried, and finally I did, too.

  Fie’s parents came over and gave us a bottle of cherries preserved in brandy. ‘To celebrate.’

  ‘Nothing much to celebrate for a while yet,’ said Oma Mei sombrely. ‘But thanks anyway.’

  You should have seen the bustle the next few weeks! The dust that swirled around! You wouldn’t believe how all the furniture, one piece at a time and accompanied by much swearing, was heaved in across the high doorstep.

  When everything was in place, Oma Mei covered her mouth with her hands and called, ‘Look at us! Just look at us now!’ No one could understand why she was crying, but she had to be comforted anyway.

  We were all standing in the living room together – Oma Mei, the Dad, our brothers, Muulke, Jess and me – looking at the nine chairs and the round table: a little island surrounded on all sides by a sea of bare boards.

  Muulke, Jess and I tried to work out how long the room was by standing next to each other, legs and arms spread wide till our fingers hurt from the stretching. Starting at the front of the room, we each had to take three turns before we reached the back wall.