Part 1 — Childhood
‘Life, in its deepest essence, is a perpetual shipwreck. But to be shipwrecked does not mean to drown. The poor mortal, onto whom the waves fall, rows with his arms to stay afloat. This reaction to the danger of downfall is culture.’
José Ortega y Gasset
Chapter 1
I lay on the couch in our living room, I was eight years old, fluffy pillows embraced my back. I was reading a Tintin, I held it upright on my belly, the covers bent, my fingertips around the edges. It was a warm day, so the windows were open and the smells of our Amsterdam square hung in the house as well: diesel, elderflower, deep-frying fat, summer dryness.
In a chair by the window sat my mother. Lace curtains fluttered in summer breezes, now let in sunlight, then again kept it out, so that the shades of her hair changed color all the time. But its feebleness, the greasy shoulder skin, the dullness in her gaze, the sun didn't change them. Her eyes may have been olive green, they were also the eyes of a mother, they stared into nothingness. She had been sick, she had had to vomit during a forest walk, but now she was feeling better, I had asked her so before I started reading my comic book, and she had nodded. And while I read, she rose from her sagged chair and laced up her hiking boots. They stood next to her chair, high shoes that she'd bought a few months earlier with me, for a mountain hike in Spain that in the end we never made. I thought that she wanted to walk that afternoon, so I threw my comic book on the table and rolled on my belly and fell on the floor and rose and ran to my room and stepped in my shoes. We often walked together, and I liked that, but when I came in the chilly hallway, my laces yet untied, she had gone and the front door was closed. “Wait,” I called, and I tied my long laces, it took fifteen seconds, and she was the one who had taught how to do it. I pulled the front door towards me, but the doorway was deserted.
Where had she gone?
I ran down the worn away steps and stared into the street. Bicycles against house fronts, garbage bags around lamp posts, not a mother in sight. I ran to the shopping street that passed through our square, to the bakery where we bought white bread for breakfast, almond pastries for tea time, and baguettes for soup.
'Hi Maria,' the baker said, she grabbed my armpits and lifted me from the floor. I landed on the steel kneading table, amidst heaps of flour, it smelt of warm bread and cleaning agent.
'Would you like to have some biscuits?'
I grabbed some from a plate, broken biscuits that she didn't sell anymore, but gifted to neighbourhood children. Her face was warm like a mother's lap.
'Have you seen mama?'
'She was here this morning for a half a white loaf.'
I shook my head. 'I mean, just now.'
'Just now? No.'
'Then I must go.'
I jumped off the kneading table, ran past a stinky dog that lay by the entrance, searched in all the places where mama and I came, at the butcher's where it smelt of meat, death, and listlessness, beneath the plane trees, by the chess tables, by the homeless man with faded clothes and a toothless speaking of 'hello little friend,' and when I then shouted 'Hello Pieter,' his happy face like a child's.
'Have you seen mama?'
'Yesterday, she seemed worried.'
'I've lost her.'
'Go search, you'll find her.'
And so I ran to the bus stop, where every half hour a bus left for the sea, which I often took with my mother and Alfred. The three of us stuffed on one bench, behind the glass by the middle door, coarse sand scouring your thighs and crunching under your sandals. And then, two stops before the bus station, jumping out the bus, walking through the woods, all the way to the beach, the calm one where if it was windy we could find shelter in a dip in the dunes, where mama's lush curls blew in her face when she smiled at me, where the sea deepens slowly, but we weren't allowed to swim past the ropes between the small buoys. Mama who rubbed suncream on my face and back and arms, and then her own legs and shoulders, we who hid the freckles on her back behind thick white cream. And then building towers of wet sand with buckets and scoops and protecting them against the rising water and then tearing them down before the sea managed to do so. Searching for special stones in the sand, running to mama with them, who inspected them from an arm's length, because she hadn't bought glasses yet, and then throwing them back in the sand. Eating ice cream at three o'clock, fries with sour mayonaise for dinner, and then walking, tired but glowing with happiness, through the forest, mama squeezing my hand, the sunlight warming your back and its golden colours on the tree crowns in front of you. Waiting at the bus stop, later than you were ever awake before, while mama sings songs, hands out caramel candies. Falling asleep on the bus. Mama who carries you home, into bed. Those were happy memories for me, that's why I hoped she would wait on the iron bench. I ran around the corner of the street, the bus approached, but the bus stall was deserted.
Where was she?
I ran to the library, and wind tears on my temples mixed with tears because mama was lost, which I also felt inside. Every Saturday morning we selected books which I read during the rest of the week. Amidst twenty high book shelves five mothers walked, but none was mine.
I ran past my school, the photo shop, the café, searched again where I'd already looked, but she was nowhere, and I started crying, in the middle of crossing the street. I don't remember how the sun scorched, or cars horned, or the summer smelt, because all I thought was where to find my mother, if she didn't want to walk with me.
An extraordinarily old gentleman grasped my hand, led me to a bench. 'What's going on?'
'I can't find my mama.'
'Where do you live?’
'On the square.'
'And is daddy there?'
I nodded.
'I shall bring you to him.'
'No, I want to find my mama.'
'Are you playing hide and seek?'
I looked at him. 'Maybe so.'
'Shall I help you seek?'
His body hung forward, his hands leaned on a cane, his wrists tremored, he frowned his white brows, each as large as my father's sauerkraut moustache.
That man can never run as fast as I.
'I'd rather do it myself,' so I ran to the garden centre where mama worked, to the backroom with the humming fridge and the plastic chairs, where on school holidays we'd have lunch together, but her coworker said:
'She doesn't work here anymore, little one. Come, let me take you home.'
And she led me out, her hand was cold from the spraying water and calloused from the plants, like mama's, and on the parking lot I pulled my hand out of hers, though her skin resisted, and ran to the large train station, to the only platform I ever visited, the one where the train leaves for Spain.
We took it last year. The train crawled past a mountain. 'Shall we climb it,' mama said. I studied her face, looking for signs that she was fooling me, wanted to make me believe what wasn't true, like that she was a man, that she was ninety years, that after breakfast we wouldn't eat anymore, 'noooo mama, that's not possible.' If we didn't believe her, she chuckled, and repeated her words, like that you can really climb a mountain. 'Nooo mama.' The entire ride to those mountains, past those mountains, underneath those mountains she insisted, and back in The Netherlands we bought boots, but that mountain we never climbed. And now I stood by that same train, it was so long that I didn't see the front. I heard bustling, like on a garden party after the second glass of wine, I passed by kissed cheeks, coloured suspenders, lamented embraces, pointy moustaches, women's hands around coffee and newspapers. I hunted for my mother, did she receive kisses, press hands? My head in my neck, for they were taller than I, the people who ignored me, or smiled at me, or knelt, 'who are you looking for,' and mostly I just ran on, but one man grasped my upper arm away from me.
'Who did you lose, little girl?'
'Mama.'
'What's her name?’
'Lisa Garçia,' I knew that very well, even the curl under the C I knew.
The train manager's hand was smaller than the plant lady's, and above all moist and hairy, but also stronger, and so he pulled me into the train. His voice cracked through the phone, the train, and on the platform, saying that Lisa Garçia should come to the train buffers. He lifted me out of the train by my armpits, my skin folded painfully, and he grabbed my childhood hand into his sweaty one. Grown people gazed at us as we moved to the buffers, where mama would wait, kneeling, her arms extended, closing them around me, kissing my hair, the softness of her clothes, the warmth of her skin, the scent of it, full of safety, even if it were sweat from jogging, or buttermilk. Nothing could happen to me anymore, that was what would happen, because she would wait by the buffers, but she didn't, no one did.
We waited fifteen minutes among Amsterdam's residents and Spain's travellers, but mama didn't come. And when the train had hidden and the platform was deserted, the train manager said: 'Where is your home?'
His hand was still sweaty.
'I don't want to go home, I am searching for mama.'
'We will ask the police to bring you home and talk to daddy, alright?'
'No, I can walk by myself. It isn't far.'
'What about mama?'
'Perhaps we're playing hide and seek.'
My hand slipped from his, I left the grand station and ran home by myself, for I was eight years old and strong-willed, but that didn't mean that on the stairs to our front door I didn't wipe dry my eyelids. I pulled the doorbell, and my worries slipped from my mind, for I found myself in a situation in which I had been so often before, in my four remembered years: at the usual opening of the front door my mother stood in the hallway, 'there you are, I just made tea.' That would happen now too, I sensed, and I shivered from release. But next to the open door didn't hang a mother's head, but a father's head, gruff and tired. He said I should come in and go to my room. Around him I felt dejected. 'I don't want to hear you anymore today.' He closed the door between him and me, and the rest of that afternoon of July 23, 1999, the door stayed shut.
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