The Cold Side
by KARA VANDERBIJL
In the 12th or 13th century, a wealthy Dutch nobleman was captured and imprisoned by his enemies. When they heard the news, three of his servants vowed to break him out of captivity. Since they were not knights they had to use whatever weapons they could find, the commonest of tools. Perhaps one of them carried a saw, or a shovel. One of them, we know for sure, carried an axe.
Somehow, they managed to free their master from prison and in reward, he endowed each one with a coat of arms and a noble name. To the one who had carried the axe, he gave the name van der Bijl, “of the axe” in Dutch.
He was the first to bear my family’s name.
To go from being a servant to a man with a title must have changed my ancestor’s life significantly. Or did it? I wonder if he ever got a sword or if he remained stubbornly wed to his axe. I wonder if he crept back to a predictable course of events, marriage and babies and wars and famine, or if he was a visionary and changed his destiny completely. I find the story difficult to imagine. What is it like to receive a name? Unlike my ancestor, I did nothing extraordinary to claim it — was simply born and swaddled into it one winter.
All sorts of different characters have claimed the name over the centuries, but to be a van der Bijl brings out shockingly similar traits. Struck with wanderlust, our clan covers the globe; I believe that South America is the only continent we have not lived on. Teaching is a primary profession, but many are artists and some do well in business. Every last one is typically Dutch: reserved, curious, tall.
Like his embraces, my grandfather’s stories are ceremonial in their brevity. This, added to the fact that I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen him in my lifetime, means that I can write nothing about him that is not mostly fiction. Facts like exhausted hitchhikers arrive in the occasional electronic letter, on the backs of decorated birthday cards. I construct the narrative carefully with a well-intentioned imagination.
At 82, Adriaan van der Bijl — my “Opa” — stands still tall, still thin, his hair still blond. Framed as I have seen him by his brightly-colored Saskatoon living room, I remember him best in the civilized utopia of his vegetable garden. He sits on a white metal bench that curls like ivy against the back wall, one navy-slacked leg folded neatly over the other, one long arm stretched in repose. Early photographs testify that his cheeks pulled up smoothly to the sharp thin peaks of his cheekbones. In age, gentle jowls fall like weathered leather around thin lips. Years in the sun left spots. He speaks when he has something earth-shattering to say; otherwise his silences weigh like heavy volumes in the breast pocket of a crisp button-down shirt, along with a pair of spectacles and a pen on the verge of leaking.
Recently, I wrote Opa an email asking him to send me some of the slides and 8 mm films he keeps in his basement so that I might tug them, kicking and silently screaming, into the 21st century. I expected resistance because I wasn’t sure he was willing to part with them just yet and because when I send correspondence to Canada, electronic or otherwise, I fully expect it to dissipate on the border, or at least be picked over by customs officers, hungry for foreign idioms and donuts.
He responded with a velocity that denied all of it, sending along a box — originally containing snow boots, size 9 — full of slides wrapped in slips of paper denoting their content. In a corner, the 8 mm cassettes gleam, not as mildewed as he promised. At the base lies a thick binder entitled The Story of My Life. In a smattering of languages, stickers, collages from old newspapers and stiff yellowed photos, my grandfather tells his story to everyone and no one.
Adriaan (far left) with his parents and siblings, 1938
It’s a story of loss: of country, first, when Opa’s father (for whom he was named) moved the family from the Netherlands to Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, so that he could teach English.
Then it is the loss of 1944, when Adriaan survived a blistering Indonesian summer at the hands of the Japanese, overcoming malaria and diphtheria and the cruelty of the women’s camp, but his father and eldest brother did not, removed into another camp, half-clothed, perhaps starved. Only two black and white pages in the binder capture those two years: a photo of stark long buildings labeled “barracks at the river”, and one of a thin blond man in his underwear reaching into a common pot of food. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945 the family returned to the Netherlands. They do not speak of that time.
He lost each of his four children at age six to an American boarding school, where they would learn English at the expense of the French and Dutch he and my grandmother Mijo taught them in their infancy. Tucking them into a tiny puddle-jumping plane, he could only gather them back into the house he built for Christmas and summer holidays. Monsoon rains drummed on the tin roof overhead; the jungle eased in, dark and close, around them. At the flicker of a kerosene lamp, moths as big as his palms flocked inside.
In 1986 he buried Mijo on a hillside in Irian Jaya.
Years later, waving goodbye to friends spread out on a crude landing strip he carved, the helicopter blade swiped the last two fingers from his right hand.
All this, the jungle took back.
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My mother puts a hand on my father’s knee. Perhaps it is Christmas or a birthday. “Daniel,” she says, “call your father.”
He does this after a search for their phone number ends in an unfrequented address book. “Hi Dad,” he says. They talk about the weather and about other people they would not normally talk about except that my step-grandmother Elfrieda is also on the line. My brother and I are brought up. Elfrieda asks for my new address because without fail I have moved since my father last spoke with them. This request, along with her wishes of goodwill, ensures that a birthday card will arrive unscathed, replete with stickers of smiley faces and flowers, folded over a crisp new twenty-dollar bill as you can only find in Canadian banks.
Dad sighs as he hangs up the phone and my mother nods, content. She and Elfrieda occupy what the Dutch refer to as the “cold side” of the family — the side that has been grudgingly admitted through marriage. Yet both women gather bits of warmth into envelopes, stamping them with foreign postage, and sending them halfway across the world to glue people of similar name together.
On the warm side, we bridge the distance with resigned reports of common genes and would be content to not know one another at all except during the occasional reunion or yearly phone call. Our last reunion, two summers ago in the Rockies, revolved around a lack of common language, and the counting of sets of twins, and the proud bright white name tags we were all required to wear. One great-aunt, losing her memories to the onset of dementia, walks around the circle of plastic chairs and grasps hands gently. “And who are you?” she whispers sweetly. The rest of us follow suit, less excusable, less sweet, less inclined to affection.
mijo
My grandmother Mijo’s mother, Camille, was a bastard, conceived on Christmas Eve 1913 when her mother, a Swiss socialite named Madame Leuiset met a Brazilian diplomat at a party. Camille was born in Paris and, to spare Madame Leuiset's reputation, hurried off almost immediately to live with a foster family in Normandy. Her foster father lost a leg in the war, and the family was poor, but they cared for Camille as their own until she was nine, when her mother sent for her.
In 1935, Camille began working as a seamstress in a dressmaker’s shop. One of her colleagues like my great-grandmother so much that she would not rest until she had married Camille off to her son Albert, an actor and painter. French, but of Russian descent, Albert was good-looking and a shameless philanderer. He and Camille had six children together before he left her for another woman: Yves, Michelle, my grandmother Mijo and her twin sister, who died at age 5, and Marie-Therese, the youngest, whom we all came to know as Aunt Tutun.
Newly alone, Camille trained as a midwife at a convent, launching a career during which she would deliver 20,000 babies — and lose only two. When WWII broke out she was afraid the Germans would invade Normandy, so she took her three surviving children first to Marseilles, then to Geneva, where she worked in triage. She kept Tutun with her when she moved back to France, but Yves and Mijo remained in Switzerland with a foster family for the duration of the war.
In Grenoble, a tiny town in the Alps, Camille worked as an administrator in a center for single mothers. She had nowhere to live and very little money, so she moved from apartment to apartment with Tutun in tow, surviving off of food stamps she got at work while many went hungry because of shortages. Thanks to her position at the shelter, she was a valuable asset in the underground mission helping Jews escape occupied France to the Holy Land.
When the war ended, my grandmother Mijo was ten years old and Tutun was five. Once again their mother put them in foster care, this time at a convent so high in the Alps there were no trees. Here, they guarded the nuns’ sheep and watched wounded soldiers come to the mountains for peace and healing. When the sisters caught lice, Mijo cried as they cut off all her hair. Tutun did not.
Mijo met Adriaan van der Bijl at a university in Paris. After she agreed to go to Indonesia with him in 1960, he built her a house reminscent of a Swiss chalet. Mijo hung garlic from the rafters and baked pies in the wood-burning oven. A turkey that disliked foreigners guarded the front yard, and in the outhouse, snakes curled around the toilet seat.
Four children were born.
Opa's wanderlust took the family to the Netherlands, to France, and finally to the United States when his children were old enough to attend high school. In Erie, Pennsylvania the six of them lived in a double-wide trailer through one bitter winter before he decided that he wanted to return to the jungle; its pull on him was unbelievably strong.
We blame our families for seeing us as mere extensions of their lost desires and dreams, but more often we are the ones who limit their stories by viewing them through the fish-eye lens of our own. Sometimes I think it was "away" that called to my grandfather, not the tropics. My father has certainly responded to the same summons, as have I. There is something to be said for adventures purely geographical, for a steadfast devotion to wandering.
When we say goodbye, I hug my family gently. I am crossing an ocean, but it is the hair's breadth between us when we embrace that separates us most. We will not see each other for at least a year.
Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Haruki Murakami. She tumbls here and twitters here.
"Oneness" - Many Mansions (mp3)
"Bright Bliss" - Many Mansions (mp3)
the view from my grandparents' house in mapnduma, indonesia