God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  This was my legacy. I was guilty from birth by being born a Catholic, naturally evil even before I inherited my mother’s guilt, and later my father’s, in the sexual drive he could not contain. Within a few years I would be in the grip of a guilt so fierce that I would call upon the devil to help me.

  SHE’S NOT PERFECT AFTER ALL

  MY MOTHER SCREAMED and my father bellowed as they tried to save the wedding presents. A wonderful tumult of amber and china came falling down around me from the dining table, along with the tablecloth, when all of a sudden my father’s hard hands gripped me, lifting me from the shards. What a shocking feeling! My father’s focus was the loss of the irreplaceable—our future income would never allow for such beautiful and frivolous things again.

  I was a most disappointing child. For a start, I ate coal. They wanted to hide this from our relatives and tried to stop me with smacks and terrible looks. But whenever they couldn’t find me, I was in the cupboard near the fireplace, blackening my clothes, the floor and every exposed bit of my body. There were other deeds which made them shout and scream. I loved tearing big strips of peeling wallpaper, just to hear that wonderful rrrripp! In spite of likely distressing consequences, I was determined to see what was inside soft toys, especially the teddy bear that made a noise when you tipped it. The list of my disappointing acts was almost as long as each day.

  It was scary when my papa grumbled in that big voice of his and said ‘Tch, tch!’ like a hissing train, or words that my mama didn’t want him to say. ‘Hou je mond, Jan!’ she would admonish. ‘Don’t speak like that in front of a child!’ He told me often I was a bad girl. Sometimes when he picked me up I didn’t know if he was going to hug me or hit me. I had a nice papa sometimes, and at other times a papa who made me feel scared. I wanted to be good for him. I loved him so much.

  I wasn’t a year old when my father went off to prepare for war in those few months before Holland fell to the Germans. He came back on leave, but was often away. Visiting friends and relatives made up for the lack of his company. My mother loved visitors. The Dutch way of life is a great social institution: everyone is geared up for visiting as if life depended on the custom. For children, visitors were no fun at all. Children suddenly had to become invisible unless they were still small enough to be admired in a cradle or pram.

  I was two when a woman visitor arrived. It was summer and the magnificent hydrangeas in our tiny front garden were in full bloom. I loved their wondrous blue colour; the countless small florets that made up their large round heads. I sat under their long stems, watching the sparrows and finches as they hopped among the litter, looking for invisible things to eat. I had been sent there by my mother, who had told me that I’d be able to catch a bird if I put salt on its tail.

  ‘Would it be mine for ever?’ I’d asked. ‘Of course, once you catch it,’ she assured me with lots of nods of her head.

  So off I had gone to fetch a handful of salt from the open wooden container in the kitchen and had crept under the hydrangeas to catch myself a bird, which would be mine for ever. I sat hunched and very still, with the crunchy salt in my right hand. Sparrows came and went—they flew by so fast! Whirr! Off they went as soon as they saw me. But there was one that stayed to peck at the sand. It didn’t notice me. It was so close…I dropped the salt on its tail and reached over to grab it, but it flew away on very fast wings. No, no! It wasn’t supposed to fly away!

  I ran to my mother and screamed, ‘Mama! The birdie flew away!’

  I knew I was interrupting her visitor, but she had to fix up this shocking event! My lips trembled and tears started to roll down my cheeks. My mother was taken totally by surprise. Then the unbelievable happened: she began to laugh! She had duped me and now she was laughing at me for having believed her. My mother turned to her visitor and together they enjoyed the huge joke.

  Mama! How could you do this to me? But I didn’t say a word; I just stood there with a big pain in my heart and my breathing going hick, hickety-bump.

  The woman left and still my mother ignored me. It was time for her to clear the tea table, then attend to my baby sister, and my disappointment was forgotten. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me or didn’t care about my feelings—in those days, the feelings of children were just not taken into account. She had been treated that way when she was a child. I would grow up and treat my children in much the same way.

  MY MOTHER, A trained teacher, appreciated the then innovative Montessori method of teaching, and although I was only two and a half she decided to walk me to the local Montessori school. Yes, the nuns said, I could begin tomorrow.

  The next day I insisted on going there by myself. ‘No, Mama, leave me alone! I know the way!’ I talked the way she talked to my papa, with a very firm voice and a straight back, and she relented. She followed me from a discreet distance, hiding in the porches of the houses along the way to make certain I didn’t get lost. I surefooted it to the right address and the happiest two and a half years of my young life began on that day.

  It is the smells I recall best from that haven for children: a comforting lavender and talcum powder smell, the scent of oranges—very rare in wartime Holland—and of plasticine and glue, and flowers in vases. There were happy, bright colours, nice clean toilets with basins the right size for little people, and fish in tanks. I thrived there, in spite of the school being run by nuns whose debilitating vow of poverty allowed only the smallest pieces of paper for drawing. Paper was expensive during the German occupation. What could I draw on a piece of paper no bigger than my hand? It was scary to make a mistake and spoil it. The nuns told us that Jesus was poor and that poverty was a ‘virtue’. For me, it was just a relief when art class was over at last.

  For the poor people in our district it was a solace to be told that God had a soft spot for the luckless, the struggling, the deprived and the needy. We were poor because my virtuous mother obeyed her husband’s will in bed, which produced more and more offspring to feed and clothe during and after the war. In twenty years she produced ten children in all, with two miscarriages as well.

  Sunday being a very special day, a day of no work or chores for anyone, not even my mother (except she would still cook meals), I would make a beeline after lunch for the large wooden box protecting the bakelite radio, and sit on it. It stood next to the front-room window, just where the brown velvet curtains draped to the floor. How wonderfully cosy to wrap that soft warm curtain around myself! And to feel the music going right through my whole body! I was in heaven on the days when it rained outside or was blowing a gale, spending hours wrapped up and unnoticed on the classical music box. That’s how I absorbed rhythm and harmony, passion and beauty.

  It was also on Sundays that my father would take out his violin and play the few tunes that he knew. His musical education had been interrupted when his children arrived and he had to work hard to support his family. Going to war also did nothing to further his musical knowledge. So he played the same tunes over and over again but with the greatest pleasure, and I admired my father from the bottom of my heart. Paganini’s Carnival of Venice, which gave him leeway for some creative variations, was one of his favourites.

  It was my mother who eventually became annoyed by his playing. She hated him showing off, and the fact that he never seemed to tire of being pleased with himself, playing the same tunes over and over. My mother had a thing about the evils of pride.

  My father was also fond of his mouth harmonica. I was in awe of his expertise, but my mother considered it a vulgar thing. She said his repertoire was boring. Poor Dad; for him, it would have been enough if she had never said out loud that she hated it.

  It was an inviolable custom to visit one of my two sets of grandparents after Mass on Sundays, except when there was a bombing alert. However, when it came to my father’s parents, Oma and Opa Koekeroe (so called because Opa kept pigeons that crooned ‘koekeroe, koekeroe’), they had to drag me there screaming. My father put on his determined face, and my mo
ther—well, she secretly agreed with me, so I wasn’t smacked for dragging my weight along the pavement all the way.

  Most of my father’s family appalled me. Except for Oma, they were thin and looking like sticks, as if they were starved of food or love or both, and there were a lot of them, aunts in bobby socks and uncles with clothes that smelled. I couldn’t help but feel dirty in their house. The ever-present smell of pigeon poo didn’t help. Oma waddled and wheezed; Opa was thin and bent and grew a wiry moustache. He wore the same clothes for too long and always had a pipe dangling from his lips or his gnarled fingers. He wheezed as well.

  I much preferred going to my mother’s parents’ house, where the furniture was made of leather, where everything gleamed and there were even flowers in vases. There were shrubs growing in front of the bay windows facing the wide tree-lined pavement and the park over the road.

  My relationship with my maternal grandfather was rather formal. Although we liked each other, I can’t remember him saying anything to me that made a particular impact. He was altogether a solemn sort of man. My grandfather ran an importing business and was always first in the town to acquire the latest technology: the first gramophone, the first car on our cobblestone roads, the first telephone.

  The men would play cards after church, for real money. As they concentrated on their game and drank draughts of whisky, the rich aroma of their expensive cigars filled the room. I delighted in being a part of the intellectual and sensual excitement, going around the table and making tidy heaps of the gambling coins. In this way I was able to participate vicariously in the air of secrecy and luxurious indulgence that pervaded the room. My grandfather liked me being there, my mother objected only weakly, and it meant that I had very little to do with my blind grandmother, who seemed to be for ever in bed due to complications later in life. She looked very pale and old. I climbed onto her big lace-covered bed once. Her eyes were the colour of some of my marbles, but she couldn’t see me at all. Her mouth did not have many teeth. How did she feel? She didn’t give much away, so my interest faded and I soon left the room again.

  In spite of her disability and her illnesses, my grandmother had produced three girls then my Uncle Kees, whom I adored. Grandmother was only fifty-four when she died. She was laid in a casket of exquisite white satin, with madonna lilies all around her. The dining room was temporarily transformed into a funeral parlour, with black drapes on the walls, black curtains and screens. Tall wax candles were placed at either side of her head. She looked so beautiful and peaceful that I went up to her fearlessly, to gaze at her face close up. She had a lace collar under her chin and wore a new-looking black dress. Her hands were folded as if she was praying. I thought she looked better than ever before, if a little paler.

  I was shocked when an adult noticed me so close to the corpse and whispered loudly and urgently for me to ‘Come back here’. ‘Here’ was where all the adults stood at a respectful distance from the foot of the coffin, talking softly to each other. I scurried into my mother’s skirts.

  Everyone was worried about my grandfather, who was beside himself with constant grief. He followed her five years later.

  THE OCCUPATION OF Holland continued and life went on in its adapted way. I got used to the sight of German soldiers patrolling the streets with threatening guns held tight, ready for use. They were usually young men dreaming of home, who didn’t relish the vilification thrown at them by daring and outspoken people.

  My Aunt Rita screamed at two of them one day, in a fit of fury, when she accompanied my mother and me to the shops down the street. Her husband was Jewish, and she knew many Jews who had been deported by the Germans and never been heard of since. Aunt Rita had to be dragged away smartly by my suddenly forceful mother. We were all glad to reach the alley behind our house and so avoid coming face to face with the men she had insulted from a distance. Aunt Rita ended up sobbing. Her husband, a carpet salesman, was lucky enough to escape deportation and after the war they lived in Amsterdam.

  People sometimes became hungry during the war. The occupying forces would commandeer the pig from your backyard if they got to hear about it, and your vegetables as well. And before them, it was the government who wanted your food to feed the army. Food in the shops was rationed. Each household received coupons dictating how much we could buy of any one thing. Prices were outrageous and black marketeering was rife. I grew up in an atmosphere where children witnessed the importance of subterfuge; where people felt free to talk among themselves in hushed tones, but appeared to know nothing when asked a direct question. The cheerful butcher with round red cheeks brought us pieces of meat that would get him hanged if anyone found out about it, but he went away with shoes that my father had mended for him and a dress for his wife that my mother had sewn the night before.

  War made some people enterprising, including me. We all participated in knocking coal off the back of the coal truck. Stealing turnips from the farmers was not allowed, but if you weren’t caught you didn’t get into trouble. Many a day we children sat in a row on the brick walls of our houses, chomping raw turnips and swedes originally destined for the cows. Things would not really improve until several years after the war was over.

  Four children were born to our family during that anxious time;‘God’s blessing’ did not stop coming just because a war was on. In fact, God didn’t seem to notice in the slightest.

  My papa was so very handsome, especially in his military uniform, and my mama had a romantic heart. She sang Richard Tauber’s songs along with him when he came on the radio. She sang that he was her heart’s delight. And where he was, she longed to be. She was always breathless with joy to sing songs like that. There is a family photograph taken by a professional photographer of my father wearing his uniform. I have never seen anything more dashing.

  In one family photo of my gorgeously handsome dad, my proud prim mother, my younger sister Liesbet and my little baby brother Adrian, the camera catches me as I do a fake whistle. My father taught me how to whistle but I had learned to be careful. Once, when we were sheltering in the cellar under the stairs, I had whistled a perfect imitation of the bomb that seemed to be coming straight for us. I was only four and not afraid of what I could not imagine—unlike my parents, who were holding their breath. My father had lunged at me and closed his hands over my throat—a very effective silencer.

  Towards the end of the war my father donned his uniform once more to join the Allied Forces, returning regularly on leave, complete with a truck and a rifle. In those months he was the hero of the neighbourhood. He never had to go to the front line, not only because he was a family man, but because it was understood how difficult it was for him, having all but his immediate family in Germany.

  My father brought the truck home whenever he could, sometimes against the rules, because he was an adventurous man who loved to surprise his wife and children. There wasn’t enough room in our narrow cobbled street to properly accommodate it, so he used the vehicle to topple a couple of the myrtle trees in the way.

  After lunch one day, he invited all the neighbourhood children for a ride in the back of the khaki-covered truck. This was an experience that nobody passed over and the truck was full with children. I was holding on to the wooden half-door at the back. Deciding to make the most of the fame that was rubbing off on me from my father’s tremendous popularity, I took out a cigar I had recently bought and lit it, to the huge delight of all onlookers, who, of course, all wanted a puff.

  My father drove us out of town and into the countryside as far as the little forest where we would often go for a walk and gather wood. When the road dwindled into a path through the trees, he had to stop and turn around. He needed to make a three-point turn to do so, leaning the back of the truck way over a culvert. My face went pale, paler than when I’d felt sick from the cigar, as the truck rumbled slowly away from solid ground and seemed about to plunge into the deep channel. But my father did not let himself or any of us down; he manoeuvred that truck
flawlessly and delivered the noisy mob safely home to their parents, who were waiting in the street like a guard of honour.

  My father took me on his knee later that day because my mother had heard of the cigar business and told him that I should be reprimanded. Unbelievably, he wasn’t furious. For that one time, at least, he recognised something of his own enterprising self in me, and I became my father’s daughter, not just the little person who crossed him in ways that he called sinfully disobedient. Perhaps the war had made him a bit softer.

  It was my father’s gruesome job to retrieve dead bodies from the fields and trenches. That was what the truck was for. He had to identify the bodies if he could. Sometimes they were decomposing, and the copper identity disc on its metal chain had sunk into the dead man’s rotting chest. It was enough to shake any man.

  TO ME, THE German soldiers were an enigma—for a long time I could not understand why people hated them. I was not frightened by them, because my father spoke to them when he met them in the street and made them laugh. His fluency in German saved him on several occasions.

  Two German soldiers probably saved my life one day when I accompanied my father on one of his wood-collecting trips to the forest. My father had loaded me onto the cart which he had borrowed from a neighbour. It had two bicycle wheels and handles like a wheelbarrow’s for pushing when you weren’t pulling. He lifted me onto some potato sacks to ease the bumpiness of the ride. Later, the sacks would cover our firewood, so as not to attract the attention of any German soldiers who might commandeer the wood for themselves.