In Which We Are Reserved And Utterly Dangerous

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.

+

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

In Which We Heal Ourselves By Proxy

Emergent

by KARA VANDERBIJL

This morning in the emergency room, an elderly woman across the hall from me leaned out her doorway as she poked thin arms through the holes in the paper gown. She had left her own dress on, and her own shoes too; turquoise socks were pulled up over her ankles. She looked at me as if she were squinting through her sunglasses. 

“Hi, do you know how to turn on the television?” 

“I don’t, I’m sorry,” I told her. 

“Do you know, I collapsed on Friday because my ankles and feet were so swollen, and I told my friends to call an ambulance for me, but they just laughed!” 

“That’s awful,” I agreed. 

“Finally the security guard at CVS called one for me, and he carried my bags too, even though the nurse wouldn’t.” She looked me up and down, as if to ascertain what might be the matter with me. I straightened my back instinctively. 

“You don’t know how to turn on the TV, do you?” 

“No, I’m sorry.” 

I inspected my own wound - a deep gash, right at the tip of my thumb. It was the mandolin slicer that did it, in every other way a perfectly ingenious invention designed to make sure your potato slices lie in uniform piles at the bottom of a bowl while you sprinkle them liberally with olive oil and salt. I don’t remember what it felt like to put my finger through the porcelain blade, nor do I remember the sound I made, somewhere half between a groan and a chuckle. Half a roll of paper towels sat spotted red on the living room floor as I brought my thumb to new altitudes above my heart. There was very little pain.

It is a risk of the trade, you might say, an inevitable casualty when a particularly stubborn sort of girl has decided to spend more time in the kitchen cooking wholesome meals. Decisions rarely come without consequences. If you decide to do without convenience, choice made for you, some form of pain shows up punctually. 

I’ve often wondered, crazily, whether ridding your life of the extras - processed foods, sugar, caffeine, stress - any of the things that seem to preserve us in a state of placid complacency, of somewhat-awake mostly-asleep knots sitting not quite ergonomically in an office chair in an airless room - puts you at more risk. I feel more vulnerable with a clean body. I feel more exposed to danger, but danger in the way that it is dangerous to wear a skirt on a very windy day. 

I listened to the lady across the hall chat with one of the paramedics about how her bags were so heavy and her father had just been in surgery and could he bring more water and how could she change the channel and I just kept thinking that the hospital, like the sole possession of a friend’s listening ear or the arms of someone beloved, can make you feel safe and protected. It’s a little bit more expensive and it smells funky and they ask you personal questions about your bowel movements and when was the last time you took recreational drugs. But you can buy care, sort of like you can buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

A few weeks ago I was riding a bike with very little brakes through a dark, warm night to the beach. At one point I miscalculated the width of a ramp and slammed into the curb; I knew it was coming, because the shadow of it became apparent approximately two seconds before my front wheel made contact, and I began to push myself backwards off the seat in anticipation of the pain. I managed to straddle the back wheel rather awkwardly, crotch lifted ceremoniously above the seat and bars that would do it harm, but then the left pedal slammed into my lower calf with a force. My eyes fogged over. I thought blood had been drawn, but when my hand touched the warm spot there was only a throbbing bulb. 

By the morning a bruise had blossomed there. 

It was the largest bruise I have ever had, and fascinating. Resembling a large, noxious flower or perhaps the quivering bacteria that we observe under microscopes (outer, dark membrane, lighter liquid inside), it hugged the bottom of my calf muscle. It was black, then green, then yellow, then black again. It was a bump, an extra surface. It’s mostly gone, now, except for some lingering tenderness and a dark border. The skin is shaded slightly blue. 

Once I have given a title to somebody, everything they do fits under the umbrella of their prescribed role. It allows me to be pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised by the flowering of their character, the variance of their colors. When a serf becomes a knight, both pride and envy wrestle inside of me. I have never been sure where I fit in this schematic, what rags cover this heart. I wonder, am I poorly cast for this part?

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Haruki Murakami. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Unless You Speak From Your Heart" - Porcelain Raft (mp3)

"Something In Between" - Porcelain Raft (mp3)

The latest album from Porcelain Raft, Strange Weekend, was released on January 24th.

In Which The Other World Is Just Beneath Your Feet

Aliens

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Haruki Murakami decided he could write while watching a baseball game in the late ‘70s. Over a period of several months afterwards, he wrote his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in small increments after working 14-hour day shifts at “Peter Cat”, the jazz bar he owned at the time with his wife, Yoko. He composed the first chapters in English, hoping that his limited vocabulary would allow him to produce a pure work of fiction, unattached to what he considered an overly-nuanced knowledge of his native tongue. Unsure of what to do with the finished manuscript, he simply sent it off to the only literary contest in Japan that would accept such a lengthy work, and won first prize.

Still, Murakami felt that this first attempt – and its quickly-penned sequel, Pinball – were weak, and it was not until A Wild Sheep Chase, published in 1982, that he grew confident in his ability as a storyteller. Critically acclaimed, the surreal tale blends a traditional Holmesian mystery with hints of animism and Shinto; it was also the first that he allowed to be translated into English. His mastery of both Eastern and Western paradigms generates a unique chaos in his work that is as much admired by the younger generation as it is criticized by his Japanese peers.

It would be immature to reduce his work to this simple dichotomy, though; for one thing, he embraces several at a time with an imaginary force that has become difficult to find outside of young adult fiction, yet leaves the cosmic questions unanswered with gentle skepticism. Only Murakami could produce a mind-bending thriller like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a fantasy in fairy-tale terms (none of the characters have names, but are referred to simply by their occupation or physical appearance) made chilling by graphic violence, then almost immediately afterwards Norwegian Wood, a haunting coming-of-age story that gnaws with its realism.

Like all of Murakami’s characters, the hero of Norwegian Wood is startlingly ordinary, possessing (in the author’s own words) “something to tell other people, but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.” Toru Watanabe, a student of drama at a Tokyo university, falls in love with two women: Naoko, gentle and mentally troubled, and Midori, larger-than-life. The youthful unrest of the late 1960s paints an almost comical backdrop to Toru’s troubles: Murakami abandons what he perceives as the mindless obsessions of the group for the struggle of the individual — a theme that, while being as familiar to Western ears as a lullaby, rings foreign to the community-centric Japanese culture. The novel sold over two million copies in Japan alone.

For its author, the instant success was a blow: he felt that the book had ceased to be a work of art in favor of becoming a phenomenon, and Murakami had little desire for fame. He escaped quietly to Europe with Yoko, where he spent the next five years, followed by a fellowship at Princeton, during which he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his most celebrated work.

Despite his rugged individualism, Murakami carries a deep concern for his country, one that links him to it almost prophetically. In 1995, two disasters — the Kobe earthquake and, shortly afterward, a terrorist attack by cultists in the Tokyo subway system — lured the writer home again, where he turned his efforts towards a non-fictional account in Underground, a collection of interviews with both the attackers and their victims.

It is initially difficult to say what makes Murakami so memorable. I assume that some of his more subtle artistry is lost in translation, but his writing is straightforward, so simply adorned that it is possible to forget you are reading. His more elaborate descriptions do not immerse the reader into the milieu. Rather, they seem external to the rest of the text, pulling the reader out, drawing his or her attention to a detail that may or may not be vital. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, Murakami dismisses a river as “swollen with snowmelt”, a metaphor that, after a hundred some pages of seamless text, jarred me as much as one of Fitzgerald’s copious oxymorons.

What he avoids in style, he more than makes up for in the construction of his characters. While ordinary, they are unforgettable, and share a sense of deep alienation; they are set apart. Whether by circumstance or personality they suffer intense loneliness, a by-product of their exceptional freedom. “I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik,” shares ‘K’, the mysterious narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart, “even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.”

Murakami’s aliens build a new universe in order to survive, most often metaphorically, and sometimes literally, in the case of his latest novel 1Q84: the protagonist, Aomame, is stuck in a cab on a busy Tokyo expressway: at precisely four o’clock, she must kill a man in a hotel room. But in order to arrive on time she must exit the vehicle and climb down a ladder from the highway to the street. Before she can climb out, the cab driver cautions her: “You’re about to do something out of the ordinary. Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day — especially women. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience before myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

Suddenly, in Aomame’s Tokyo, things begin to morph: a sickly green moon appears in the sky alongside the old one. Dogs explode. Two vigilantes open a shelter for battered women, and secretly kill the men who abuse them. A reclusive, dyslexic teenager publishes a bestselling story. Tengo, Aomame’s childhood love, has sex with the daughter of a cult leader, but gets Aomame pregnant instead. As Tengo and Aomame’s worlds begin to overlap, they telescope further and further away from normalcy, until the smallest routines ring false.

Like the Orwellian universe that inspired it, the Tokyo of 1Q84 sits under the thumb of an oppressor: reality. In the known universe, Murakami argues, signs and symbols lead up to nothing. What we can imagine holds greater power than what we do. Sometimes, what actually happens belies little of its truer undercurrents, like a badly translated book. And Murakami — himself a translator of many of the cult classics that have established our own culture — reminds us to look past what is in favor of what could be.

At the same time, he grounds his readers with the details: food is endlessly prepared and consumed, the process and experience of which he addresses as mundanely as we experience it ourselves. His female characters tuck their hair behind their ears intimately, an immediate and foreign precursor to sex. Often compared to shells, or admired for their almost newborn freshness, these orifices encompass what Murakami’s women represent: virgin territory, a space to fill and colonize, a new order of things. Never, outside of a David Lynch film, have ears been so fetishized.

Like his words, in which the exceptional blends evenly with the typical, Murakami moves between spiritual and visible with ease, a quality that ties him irreversibly to his roots. In an interview with Ben Naparstek, editor of The Monthly, he shared: “You know the myth of Orpheus. He goes to the underworld to look for his deceased wife, but it’s far away and he has to undergo many trials to get there. There’s a big river and a wasteland. My characters go to the other world, the other side. In the Western world, there is a big wall you have to climb up. In [Japan], once you want to go there, it’s easy. It’s just beneath your feet.”

This transition may be as easy as climbing to the bottom of a well to meditate, as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s Toru Okada discovers, or as difficult as disappearing entirely “like smoke” as Sumire in Sputnik Sweetheart. Murakami leaves breadcrumb trails where he can: his novels often incorporate telephone calls and make liberal use of letters to connect his isolated characters. He is also one of the few writers I have read who incorporates computers and the internet into his stories with unabashed poise. What ultimately brings the aliens together is the violence which links them to the world, alternately inflicted on or performed by them, and the uneasy peace they find in withdrawing from it.

It has been called postmodern, but Murakami’s literature — as staunchly as it refuses to fit into any paradigm — is more of a skeuomorph than anything else. Taking cues from what we know as well as our own reflections, his stories squeeze into the shapes we are comfortable with and, like the wind-up bird, invent entirely unfamiliar songs.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about walking. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Anyone Can Fall In Love" - Kindness (mp3)

"Gee Wiz" - Kindness (mp3)

"Gee Up" - Kindness (mp3)

The new album from Kindness is called World You Need A Change Of Mind, and it will be released on May 8th.