“I think we should,” she said decisively.
I still wasn’t sure, but she was already looking around for something to stir the ash with.
“I’m thinking we need a letter opener or something like that, I’d rather not use a piece of cutlery, that doesn’t seem right.”
I also glanced around; I didn’t have a letter opener.
“What about one of those sticks for stirring paint?”
Without hesitation I closed the lid of the box again and went to my studio.
“Don’t you trust me?” she asked. I pretended not to have heard her. She didn’t repeat her question.
When I returned to the living room I found her looking at the photos on the wall.
“Are these your parents?” She pointed to a photo from the eighties, my parents head-over-heels in love, holding a baby.
“Yes, that’s my parents.”
“And this tiny thing is you?”
“Yes, that was me.”
She looked at me and glanced away. I went over to the box and opened the lid slowly. Then I gave her the wooden stick.
“You want me to do it?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes.”
She stabbed the stick into the ash and moved a heap to one side.
“No doubt about it, this is paper ash,” she said.
“Are you positive?”
“Yes.”
She moved another heap aside and then we saw it: there was something else beneath the ash.
Karen Abrams sat down and invited me to sit beside her. She had taken over, she had made herself at home, and I thought it was good. I took the chair from the opposite side of the table and moved next to her. She scooted her chair closer to mine.
“This way we’ll both see it at the same time,” she said as she inched the box to the edge of the table. It made me think of two kids secretly dissecting a lizard for the first time, and how afterwards they swear never to do it again.
Karen Abrams looked at me and put the wooden stick into the box. She carefully made a crater in the ash so we could see what was underneath it.
“See it?”
I nodded. She blew gently on the crater she had created. An iron ring appeared beneath the ash.
“There’s a secret compartment under there,” she said excitedly.
I knew Karen Abrams wanted to lift the ring. I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until there was nothing left to discover, but I hadn’t thought she’d be so quick to act. She put the wooden stick down on the table, rubbed her fingers together, winked at me, and put her hand into the box. Her first, gentle attempt to pull the ring didn’t do a thing, so she pushed her chair back, gathering her strength, placed her left hand on the edge of the box, and give the ring a yank with her right.
It made a soft, hardly audible sound, a slight click made by the separation of two parts, which had been together for a long time: the sound of something opening.
Then I saw black ash flying around my dining room. It started above the box and spread around the room. Little black spots that floated to the ceiling and descended, dark little particles that flew toward the windows and into the glass, falling on the edges of the window frames. Ash that stuck to the walls, and came to rest on the sofa. In silence.
Karen Abrams opened her hands in front of her like a tray. Flakes of ash fell on her palms and her fingers. She had a steel ring around her right index finger, attached to a small panel of wood.
We looked around in silence. A constellation of black holes appeared on my pale wooden table, surrounding the box. I didn’t dare look into the box until the dance of the ashes had ended.
When the air had cleared, Karen Abrams brushed off her arms, and the ash on her hands fell to the ground, too. She carefully laid the wooden panel on the table and we both looked inside the box.
We were stunned into silence.
“Biztresa,” Karen Abrams said, smiling.
“Bistraze?” I said.
What was hidden in the box was a word. A word we couldn’t pronounce.
Him
When we returned from our first holiday together in Spain, Willemien’s parents offered us a house they had bought in Someren. Willemien lost her temper and accused her parents of trying to keep her in town, and said that we’d find somewhere else to live.
I liked the idea of living in a house in Someren at first, and I was a little appalled by Willemien’s rejection of such a generous gift.
“We don’t need their help,” she said emphatically.
“We don’t need it? What do you mean? How are we going to buy a house? You don’t want to live at your parents’ while I’m living at the camp forever, do you?”
“We can find a house without their help, where we want to live: Eindhoven!”
“Why Eindhoven? I know this town, I know how to get around . . . Lieverd, I don’t want to start all over again somewhere else.”
“In Eindhoven you’d be closer to Philips, you’d save time on the commute.”
She was right, but I had my own logic. I didn’t want to be too far from my compatriots at the camp: they were my friends and they kept me grounded. In Someren I could walk by a bar and meet people I knew, just like at home. Eindhoven seemed like a real city, a big place where no one knows anyone, and the idea of feeling like a newcomer all over again made me anxious.
The next day I spoke to Father Driessen, to ask his advice about what to do, and he helped me much more than I had hoped. He told me Philips was building new camps in Eindhoven and Maarheeze.
“Maarheeze will open next month but Eindhoven will probably take until next year. The camps will have better facilities and as soon as they’re done they’ll relocate everyone. The camps in Someren will be taken over by other companies.”
“Where is Maarheeze?” I asked, surprised. It had never occurred to me that the camp in Someren might cease to exist as I knew it.
“It’s south of Eindhoven, about twelve kilometers from here.”
“If everyone’s in Maarheeze and I’m staying at my inlaws’, how will I get to work? The Philips bus won’t pass through Someren anymore, will it?”
“Don’t worry, now that you’re married the company will help you find a house in Eindhoven. Lots of Philips employees live in the De Strijp neighborhood, and when a family leaves, they offer the house to other employees. Recently they found a house for a guest-worker from Middelbeers who brought his wife from Spain. You need to speak to your contact in HR. He’ll help you.”
Just like when I decided to sign up to go to Holland, the day I decided to ask for a house in Eindhoven was preceded by a night full of strange dreams. This time I dreamt that we were going to live in a house with extraordinarily large windows. I arrived home after a long day of work and the door opened and closed behind me of its own accord. The house said good evening to me and the flowers in the garden turned to watch me arrive. There were books on the shelves that tried to push their spines out past the others, inviting me to take them. Everything was alive. Through one of the windows I saw my house’s chimney going over to the neighbor’s house for a chat. Although Willemien didn’t appear in my dream, I knew the house was hers, that she had planted the flowers and chosen the books herself. When I awoke I knew that we’d end up in Eindhoven.
I spoke to the HR boss and soon they had allocated us a house. A few days before they moved the camp from Someren, Willemien and I moved to the workers’ neighborhood, De Strijp. Employees of a cardboard factory from Helmond moved into the camp that had been my home.
Willemien’s parents rented the house in Someren to a Dutch family, but only for a year, because they still hoped that Willemien would come to her senses and accept the gift. But we never returned to Someren.
We lived in De Strijp for more than ten years. That first year there were very few Spaniards in what was a pred
ominantly Dutch community. They had moved from the rural northeast of Holland years ago to work for Philips, and gradually they moved to other parts of the city, to homes they bought, making room for new immigrants.
In the years that followed I ran into compatriots from the Someren camp, as well as others from different camps, whom I only knew from work. I’d see friends, who had always been single, walking down the street with their Spanish wives. The neighborhood filled up slowly, because in the beginning the Dutch government permitted only the wives to come, not the children. Later, I’d see the same friends with their Spanish wives, followed by three or four older children who had been waiting in Spain for their parents to get permission to reunify the family.
Once in a while, very seldom, I imagined I was one of them, and that Mariana had come to live with me, along with two totally Spanish babies. But the vision vanished, never to reappear, on the day Willemien told me she was pregnant with our first son.
Willemien knew from the very beginning that it was a boy and we’d name him Arjen, after her older brother, who’d died from an illness at the age of ten.
I understood her decision and I accepted it, despite the fact that I wasn’t used to being told how things were going to be without having any say in the matter whatsoever. But she had a good reason, and the name was easy to pronounce, though it would be difficult for Spaniards to read. I sent my family a postcard with pictures of Eindhoven, and on the back I wrote the boy’s name, though he was hardly the size of a chickpea in Willemien’s belly:“His name will be Arjen, which is pronounced ‘Á-rien.’” And I told them about Willemien’s brother, to explain why their first grandson would not bear my name, which was my father’s and my grandfather’s, too.
Although I had thought I was doing the right thing as a father-to-be, proudly announcing my little one to my family, Willemien gave me a telling off when she learned I had told my family our son’s name. In Holland you don’t reveal a child’s name until it is born. It was frowned upon to ask an expectant mother what she was going to name her child: it was bad luck to say the baby’s name before it was born.
From that day I stopped thinking of my son by his name, because I was afraid I might let it slip.
And then one day in May 1966 I became the father of a blond, blue-eyed boy. He looked like an angel, and that’s what all our Spanish neighbors in Eindhoven called him, because they still hadn’t learned Dutch and couldn’t remember my son’s name.
Suddenly this tiny, bleating creature commandeered our time, our space, our thoughts, and our hearts. I no longer went to work in the factory to send money to my family in Spain, I went so it would be possible for this bleating creature who grabbed my finger with his soft, pink hands to eat, grow, speak, and walk.
A lot changed when our first son was born. Willemien’s parents realized that their daughter would give them grandchildren who would babble away in both Spanish and Dutch.
Arjen grew up in a street along with boys from Extremadura and Andalucia, and attended school with pale, blond boys. Soon he was speaking perfect Dutch and Spanish.
After her maternity leave ended, Willemien had a hard time going back to work, and though she continued to design clothes, she reduced her hours to be with the boy and to study art history on her own. Some afternoons she’d go to the Van Abbe modern art museum with Arjen and return with her eyes sparkling, hiding ideas that it would take me some time to discover.
A few months later she began painting pictures in the attic, and when the weather permitted, in the garden. She bought an artist’s easel, paints, paintbrushes, and lots of canvases, and she began wearing a painter’s smock, which became more colorful by the day. Sometimes I’d come home from work and she was coming down from the attic with a smile on her lovely, red lips, which meant that she’d finished a painting.
In the garden she painted flowers and windows and houses and Dutch skies, whatever she could see from where her easel stood. But when it was too dark, or when it rained, as it frequently did, she worked in the attic, painting Extremaduran landscapes. She painted what she remembered of my homeland, or she reinvented it.
One day she showed me The Stone-Houses. It was her story about Cuacos de Yuste, told in five paintings.
I liked them because she had painted them, and because they made her happy. But it was hard for me to understand how she could spend so many hours in front of a canvas, applying stroke after stroke. Nevertheless, I was delighted with my new Willemien, who received me at the end of each workday as if I were her hero.
The first few years of our eldest son’s life also brought about a big change in Willemien’s relationship with her parents. She frequently traveled to Someren so her parents could see Arjen, and sometimes she even left him with them for the weekend.
They still had misunderstandings and arguments, but Willemien seemed to have forgiven them for all the obstacles they had placed between her and her dreams, and given them a fresh start. In response, her parents made an effort to appear less displeased by my presence in their family and by the artistic ambitions of their daughter.
When Willemien told her father she had been painting for a long time, the first thing he said was that it was nice she had a hobby, since she didn’t have to spend so much time looking after Arjen anymore. His emphasis on the word hobby was so obvious that the conversation ended there, without Willemien offering her father so much as a glance at some of her recent paintings. She would have loved to show him what she had been able to do with a paintbrush, because her parents loved art and had always encouraged the development of her appreciation for art. But for them making art was a world apart from looking at it. Willemien’s parents believed that artists led strange, erratic lives and didn’t want to see their daughter become a bohemian who neglected her children and stopped visiting her parents.
Until one day Willemien’s father surprised us with an unexpected visit. Well, he only surprised me. He showed up at the front door with his coat over his arm.
“I’m here to see my daughter’s paintings,” he said without even greeting me. I stood there, frozen to the spot. There was a small chance that Willemien might have invited him, but she had just left to pick up Arjen from the neighbor’s house and sometimes she stayed for a chat.
“Willemien’s not here,” I told my father-in-law, hoping he would prefer to return when she was in.
“That’s fine. I only need to see the paintings.”
I still hesitated.
“It won’t take a moment, and then I’ll leave. So as not to bother you,” he insisted.
“Don’t worry, you won’t bother me, sir, it’s just that I think Willemien would like to show you the paintings herself.”
“Of course, but she’s not here, so you’ll have to show m e.”
So I didn’t have much choice. We went straight to the attic. I hoped Willemien wouldn’t come home and find us poking around in her stuff.
In the attic, my father-in-law looked around at ten or twelve paintings, which lay scattered on the floor and against the walls. Fortunately he didn’t touch anything, he just looked around quickly and said he’d seen enough.
When I shut the door behind him it dawned on me he hadn’t said anything about them. I had no idea whether he was proud of his daughter’s creations, or if he’d been disappointed. And since I knew that was what Willemien would ask me if she knew that her father had seen her work, I decided not to tell her about his visit.
A few days later Willemien’s mother called to invite us to dinner. They wanted to introduce us to some friends of my father-in-law. It seemed important to them, so we accepted despite the fact we didn’t really want to go.
Later, we’d regret not taking that meeting my in-laws arranged more seriously, because it changed Willemien’s life. Her father’s friends were a high-society couple who were planning to open an art gallery in Eindhoven and wanted to see Willemien’s
work.
Fortunately no one mentioned the fact that my fatherin-law had seen the paintings. The future gallerists would come over and visit our attic, accompanied by my in-laws.
Her
When I walked through the door I could tell right away it wasn’t a normal Wednesday morning. It reminded me of a crowded airport and I got that feeling I always get in my stomach right before takeoff.
When I got to my floor it all became clear. People were talking in small groups. I quickly joined one, the word “socializing” in my head, aware that my boss would see me “socializing.” But the word was quickly replaced by “debacle.”
It was one of the worst days the organization had had in years. It had come to light that they had lost 730,000 electronic tax returns. Apparently management had known for several days, but they had just gone public this morning. Despite the fact that “our people” were still trying to find the 730,000 returns—because some people still honestly thought they could find them—the news had leaked.
Now it didn’t matter whether we found them or not. The damage was done.
I wanted to research Lianne Pérez-Horst, but nobody touched their computers that day. We went from meeting to meeting, preparing to face the press and for the public’s reaction.
After work I hesitated before deciding to stop by Karen Abrams’s bar. I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to talk to her. It was possible she hadn’t read the newspaper, but it was highly unlikely that at least some of her regulars wouldn’t have heard the news.
I headed toward the street the bar was on and rode past on my bike. It wasn’t very full. If there wasn’t another customer who would butt into our conversation, I could deal with Karen Abrams. I thought about myself alone, at home, the phone ringing off the hook with calls from distant friends and acquaintances who’d be wanting to know what to do now that their tax return had been lost.
I opted for Karen Abrams.
Landing Page 6
