In the first years of the war my father simply went on with his horses, he had customers in the east of the Netherlands and they knew they could trust him. In Twente he drove off one January evening and never returned to the campsite. And that’s a mystery. The ultimate facts are missing from the truth about my father, which after all is my truth too. They exist, and they’re powerful enough, I assume, but they’re totally invisible. There’s no voice left that can tell what trap my father was on his way to that evening. Silence. And what happened then, up to the end. Again, not a sound.
The long dry summers with the sunlight till late in the evening among the caravans were reassuring. My father was a versatile man, so they said. He could mow, sheave, fish, and carve wood. In the container under his caravan, beside a bellows, there was a stock of well-maintained tongs and hammers for shoeing horses. His greatest talent was trade. If I go back far enough, I can find something of his calm superiority in my spirit. It must have been in the penultimate autumn that one day people checking the license plates of the caravan or men from the census or something like that came. I am about six and in a little jacket buttoned up tight, with a scarf on, I’m stroking a blond pony with droopy ears as I look at the group in front of our caravan. With their backs to me: three men in homburg hats and someone from the border police wearing a flat metal helmet. Opposite them is my father, shorter in stature than they are. He has pushed the brim of his hat so far down that only his nose and the chin catch a bit of light. Hands in pockets. He doesn’t say a word. Dressed in a rumpled suit and a pullover he waits with a barely perceptible smile until the delegation has got to the point. An audience between the shafts. Amenability. A few yards away a washing line full of clothes.
Then I remember that my father didn’t defy the bunch of them all by himself. Half turned away from him, facing me, stands a solidly built, beautiful woman, with her hair hidden under a scarf. She holds her hands entwined under her breasts, her elbows wide, and is carrying a child on her left arm. Her whole face is bathed in light. Frowning forehead, broad jaws, she has opened her mouth as though she wants to tell me to do something, something trivial, something about the pony, that must be done despite the invasion of the authorities. This is Gisela, my mother, who I think is carrying the two-year-old Umay.
I know more about them.
A few mornings after the disappearance in 1944 my father’s Styrian stallion came trotting up to the caravan in the wood by itself It was on that horse that my mother rode to the police station in Benckelo, and my uncle went with her. They were told absolutely nothing there. Nothing. No one knew anything, so they said. All that happened was that my mother and my uncle immediately had to leave the municipality, leave their illegal site and clear off to one of the big assembly camps, they suggested the one near Westerbork. My mother was pregnant. She wanted to go to’s Hertogenbosch, where her Sinti family was camped. There, after the passage of some months, we experienced May 16, the evil spring day. We had to take the train. By sending me off the train along with my cousin Paulko, my mother ensured that my life would go on normally. I heard later about her end, and that of Wielja and Umay and Leitschie, who was less than two months old.
When that news came, everyone was talking about liberation and I too was in the mood to feel that the worst was over. A mistake. Oh, the cold had been terrible that winter, I won’t deny it, and no one can imagine the way I was chilled to the bone at the time. The news came in November. We’d spent the summer with the farmers in Brabant, without problems, because Paulko was a good thresher, oats and barley with the flail, and I cleaned out the pigsties. September had ended very bleakly and you only had to look at the sky to know what was coming — cold and misery. Paulko wanted to go to the family in Rotterdam. There we lost touch with each other. How and where?
We arrived at the beginning of November and discovered that only a sister of my mother’s, Guta, was still living in Katendrecht with two small children. A week after our arrival the whole city filled up with soldiers and Paulko was caught during a roundup. Auntie Guta and I saw him coming along Hoofdweg with the men selected for transportation. It was early in the afternoon, rain, a terrible throng of women and children. Paulko wasn’t wearing an overcoat, just a jacket, and open shoes. He’d been picked up in the street just like that. Guta put a hand in her bag — Paulko! — and threw him a loaf. All the women did that. They threw packets, ran forward with blankets, and cried, “The House of Orange forever!” until the soldiers had had enough and started shooting. We saw the thousands of men jogging in the direction of the windmills. Paulko had to dig fortifications in the Achterhoek. He survived. A sergeant- major had smashed his nose, he told us when he came back, but apart from that the German army hadn’t been so bad.
As I said, the cold came at the end of November. Rotterdam had started to starve. There was no fuel left. After we’d burned all the wood from the inside of Auntie Guta’s house, we left one morning in the direction of Holland’s southern islands. We planned to hide in the straw barns, we wanted to have immediate salvation — begging from the farmer — in sight.
Under clouds scudding from the west, a woman and a boy pushed a cart with a couple of children shrouded in blankets through an area of plowed fields and water. The weather was harsh that year, colder than usual. In December the freeze set in. Guta was a very strong woman with calming eyes. We walked and walked and sometimes we got something to eat and sometimes we didn’t. We sometimes slept under a roof, among animal noises, sometimes in the snow. One thing’s for certain: The farmers saved us.
There was a severe freeze in January and an icy northeast wind. We were in the vicinity of Rhenen. When it’s very cold you soon get a headache, and afterward, because everything has changed, you feel a drowsy weariness. Water has become ice, and metal feels burning hot. There are moments, when the sun goes down and the sky has become pale red, when you don’t give a damn anymore where you are. Under the roof of a frozen and destroyed shunting yard Guta and we children reached a state of peaceful apathy. We crawled away into a corner, felt that our lives were no longer worth anything, and no longer thought of it.
Then? Then the moaning of the wind like a ghost. Yes, and on one of those mornings when it was still almost dark, a sound that pierced the wailing and suddenly drowned it out with an exuberant quacking that our sleepy souls couldn’t possibly remain deaf to: wild ducks. A whole flight of fat brown teal had landed between the rails in front of our eyes.
By God and his almighty miraculous power, said Guta. What shall we do? She crawled forward on her hands and knees.
So, we caught one and ate it after we had boiled it in a large tin can. How did we get hold of hot water? Well, for weeks and weeks we’d been trading with the houses in the area using coal dust and the cinders hidden in the ground of the shunting yard, like gold. I dug it out with my fingers on the morning of the duck. One day a woman burst into tears when she saw my crooked hands as black as birds’ talons.
Don’t just stand there in the doorway!
We were allowed to stay and eat for a whole week and sit by the stove. When we went off again I was wearing knitted sheep’s wool mittens.
We experienced the liberation in Colmschate at the beginning of April. Guta had already buried her baby by then. There were three of us. We ran across the meadows through fire and a pounding bombardment and dived into a cellar with a couple of families and a German soldier who was also frightened. Ah, and then I saw the war directly through a barred window. For one or two days it went on! If only we could crawl deeper into the ground, said Guta. I looked at the cannon in the farmyard. They barked every minute. Soldiers ran around bent double. If they were hit they simply lay where they were. While grenades flew over the stables and everything shook, the farmer’s wife left the cellar to cook porridge upstairs. Big fire over Deventer way, she said when she came back with the pot in her hands. I saw it through the kitchen door. A day of silence dawned. Then a couple of tanks turned into the yard with a fren
zied roar, greenish monsters with antennae on top like a crab’s. In them sat soldiers wearing olive drab uniforms, helmets and headphones, throwing cigarettes at people. The sun appeared. A flag was already hanging out of the house on the other side of the road.
Oh yes, liberation, and everyone could reemerge and get on with their lives. Back home, back to their life story. May was magnificent that year. In the countryside the orchards were in blossom and the rivers rippled in the wind. In the course of the summer, people who had been deported started to come back. There were very few of the Jews and Gypsies. It turned out later that of the Dutch Gypsies, almost all Sinti who’d been arrested, only sixteen women and fourteen men returned, no children. Paulko and I were reunited in August with the help of the Red Cross. After that we could not believe that nowhere, not in The Hague, not in’s Hertogenbosch or IJsselstein or Oldenzaal, were there any of our people camped.
One day we went to one of the Philips buildings in Eindhoven. Uncle Nikolaus was lying in an emergency hospital there with detached kidneys. He didn’t say a word. Only afterward did I get to hear through him the last facts about my mother, my sisters, and my little brother. And that marked everything that happened subsequently in my life. The train from Eindhoven had arrived in Assen that afternoon. Those who had been arrested, guarded by the Dutch police, were transferred to the train to Westerbork. Arrival in Westerbork at four o’clock. Uncle Nikolaus and his family arrived after eight on a train from The Hague. All the Gypsies had their heads shorn and were robbed of their baggage, jewelry, and violins. The shame of men and women having to undress together in one place is terrible for a Gypsy. After three days the train to Auschwitz. When they arrived there was music played by a nice orchestra. There they were left alive until the end of the month of July. Then the last parade of the last six thousand remaining Gypsies. The Dutch Gypsies were among them. They were selected by doctors. Nikolaus Andrias was young and he belonged with the workers who were directed to the right. To work. He saw Gisela and her children together with his wife and sons in the other group, on the left, destined for the trucks into the forest.
No story is ever told for the sake of its denouement. No one’s life coincides with its end.
Oh, so I’ve noticed, but supposing that end is so heavy, so black and huge that it gets in the way of all kinds of other things? The ordinary things, let’s say, that the child wants to inherit from its parents? When Paulko got married there was a party with a young bull on the spit. When two years after his survival Nikolaus married the daughter of a Kal- derascha from Hungary, Kata, the verbunkos was danced at the wedding. The verbunkos is a dance in two-four time with a rhythm that carries one away and enchants. I may have been ten years old, ten, and for the rest of my life I wouldn’t take a step, not even a dance step, without taking with me what had happened to my father and my mother and the whole procession of members of my family. That’s why I say: The worst part came after the liberation — the reports, the unmistakable last facts.
Can you ever come to terms with those?
They lived on in everything that came afterward. In the homes in which I was placed by child care authorities. In my escapes from them. In the police collecting me from the caravan site and taking me back, under guard and with a stick in my trouser leg, to the institutions where they wanted to teach me to read and write. Education, certainly, with some of the higher things that human beings are capable of. But those last facts lived on in the hours of the night when I lay awake and those when I slept. I was difficult, furious at the smallest provocation. The things that were handed down to me, in me and my daily doings, did not appear so exalted.
Were the measures of the occupation withdrawn? Or of the years before?
When I was thirteen I traveled around with a few members of my family who’d appeared from the border region. We weren’t allowed to camp anywhere. There were always police who drove us away like riffraff! We had to go on, travel on within twenty-four hours, or go back to the place we’d come from. Away from Tilburg. From Enschede. Arnhem! In Arnhem we were camped in two caravans, respectable households, and the police raided us with a squad of thirty men. We were allowed to stay for one night, and the following morning all the roads were cordoned off by policemen with riot shields, dogs with them. The government made trouble for us just as before. You must realize that they were already preparing the law that later came, designed to make us all into citizens and lump us together with the rest of the caravan dwellers. Can you imagine it? The dismembering of our souls? Large educational camps where there was everything: welfare workers, a clubhouse, a soccer field. Oh yes, they came, complete with barriers and a police post. We were told through loudspeakers when it was time to take a shower. Grown men, men of name and reputation who knew their way all over Europe, were rationed to two beers an evening. Because by the wounds of Jesus there were fights! There was no work, of course, after all the scissor sharpeners and car wreckers had been dumped together in one area!
Anyone who thinks up camps also thinks up the good and bad use of those camps. In those sites where there was no place for families to drop by and no one could leave without a permit, there were no bloodhounds. But apart from that, everything was in place to let loose all hell on you again.
I’ll jump ahead a bit, and that brings me to Guta. I’m talking about the time when Guta, in a camp near Rotterdam, told me her dream. I came home last night, she said. It was summer. The trees were in leaf. I walked toward a fire that had been built in front of our caravan. All my brothers and sisters were sitting there talking. When I arrived they looked up and said nothing more. I recognized them all. I saw that my eldest brother needed to shave his beard and wanted me to get the mirror from the caravan for him. But they kept looking, with those wide-open eyes, until I realized that I had to go, because I was alive and they were not.
That’s what Guta told me that time. And another time she said she hated seeing the pipe of the Pernis refinery from her caravan, she meant the tall pipe with flames coming out of it. She hated the railway line too. And the wire around the camp.
I’ve been through quite a lot on the borders and on the side of the road with the men in matching uniforms who, like God’s own villains, are forever strolling toward you with Article 61 on their stupid faces! God grant I may keep the lid on my rage, but it gets to you, believe me, those eternal gendarme escorts! Even though your papers are more or less in order, even though you’ve got money, ordinary people no longer trust you.
From Belgium we arrived in Best. We wanted to do some shopping. The Best police kept us out of the village with reinforcements from all over the area. By about two o’clock we’d had enough and issued an ultimatum: If we haven’t eaten by four o’clock we’re going to break right through the cordon with our cars. By the time the riot squad arrived from Eindhoven, we were already rolling barrels out of the road. Curse all those bastards and let their ugly mugs be smashed, the police wanted to keep us in Germany at any price! After a while the mayor came. A well-mannered man wearing his chain of office. Oh, and then he and Nikolaus Andrias simply talked, in a civilized way. We’ll head in the direction of Venlo and the border, Nikolaus decreed after an hour.
In those days he’d been living with Kata for quite a while and his son Sanyi was seven. He was friendly to me, but remained timid and didn’t laugh much. When we were sitting together in the evening, he sometimes got a bit drunk and I would see him crying, silently as a decent man, a man whose family doesn’t understand the twists and turns of fate.
This brings me to the summer of my wedding. That was when I met my Ursari family in Bosnia and spent time with people who were brimful of life. The most exuberant of them was Dragica, an old woman from a tribe that went far back in time. She wanted to go on a pilgrimage to the mountains near Suha Gora, because that was where, so she said, the Virgin had appeared. Look, those Ursari weren’t Christians, were not Catholic or Orthodox in the first instance, but followed the Muslim creed. Yet they missed no o
pportunity to worship the Virgin passionately because She, they believed, had the loveliest form, the sweetest smile, the most understanding heart, the most beautiful clothes.
Lad, said Dragica, no trouble is too great to calm your soul. Just to be on the safe side, I observe Ramadan. Pray. Sing with an imploring voice to appease our ancestors, it’s far from safe in this life. We went into the mountains in the burning sun. Among the rocks and bushes the vision was indeed beheld by some of us. And without a trace of madness. I did not want to force my eyes. I simply say that I know very well what it’s worth to have someone with you, on the road, someone to think of and sometimes, when it so happens, to address in words. Someone who can get very exalted.
About three days later I met Parasja. And Dragica saw my look and got angry. By the cheating Devil himself, she screamed, why this one Gypsy woman of all people?
I maintain that we were happy! Imagine us in a caravan built of sheet metal, eighteen feet long. With glass in the doors through which you can see St. George and the Dragon shining. After a year I got rid of the horses and bought an Opel, then a dark green Wolseley with air conditioning and side mirrors that you could adjust from inside. Parasja went into the villages with a fine assortment of combs, elastics, shoe and stove polish in front of her on a tray. She sang, screamed in her Gypsy way, and got along well with my Dutch family, but after six years her fertility still hadn’t been blessed. That was it. I don’t need to say any more about it. When she left, I assumed that that woman would go her own way in my heart, that she would continue making her trail of laughter, walking and singing without ever appearing again.
Duke of Egypt Page 16
