SONJA AND I ARE WALKING ON SCHELDESTRAAT WHEN I RUN INTO Netteke at the ice cream parlor. I remember her from the Palmschool, where we had our English classes during grade school.
She was the strongest girl in her class, and her classmates had decided that she should fight the strongest girl in our class: me.
Poor Netteke, cheered on by her classmates, she had just enough courage to fight me. She followed me to the cigar store.
I wasn’t aware of her mission and thought she also was going in to buy something.
“Hi,” I said when I turned around and saw her standing there.
“Hi,” she replied timidly, and dashed out of the store.
“She followed you because she wanted to fight you!” my friend Hanna, who was there with me, said excitedly.
“Oh,” I said, unimpressed.
“Yeah, but she didn’t dare. The chicken. You know her father is in prison? I’m telling you. In England!”
“Oh,” I replied again, not getting what one thing had to do with the other.
Netteke was from the Jordaan. Of course people talked about her father being in prison, but that was more of an observation than a judgment. The Jordaan was the bottom of society; you were lucky if you could feed your family. It wasn’t the way you earned your money that mattered, but how much.
Netteke was the first girl I dared take home with me. In the daytime, when my father was away, we’d eat butter cake at my mother’s table. And so Netty met the rest of my family.
“Your brother works?” she asked the moment we were outside and saw Wim driving up in a Mercedes.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“No,” I said. I really didn’t know.
“My father knows your brother,” said Netteke, in a conspiratorial kind of way, and I quickly did the math. My brother drove an expensive car without me knowing if he had a job, and he and her sketchy dad knew each other.
Netteke was trying to say my brother was a crook.
My father once had different plans for Wim. He wanted his eldest son to be an honorable, respected citizen, and the job of a policeman fitted that description perfectly. His eldest son should join the police force.
My father had enlisted him, and Wim had an interview the next day. That evening my father, in his own special way, went on to “instruct him” to behave decently and be polite. He went about it a bit too diligently, and Wim ended up with a black eye and a fat lip. He refused to go to the interview like that.
Maybe Wim’s life would have turned out differently if my father had left him alone that one time and he had gone to the interview.
But what Wim did for a living, and in what way that was criminal, I had not the faintest idea. I saw only parts of his life:
Wim with Cor, smiling, at the dining room table my mother had spread with bread, sandwich fillings, and steak she had to get for them, after they’d come back from the gym in their expensive cars.
A visit to the house of his Surinamese girlfriend, who was a showgirl and who showed me all her makeup and glittery underwear.
The day he took me to the red-light district, where he bought me a milkshake with whipped cream on top at an Italian ice cream parlor and I had to wait for him to come back.
The brown chunk of something he showed me as a little girl, which I later understood was hash, because many kids at school smoked it.
From these fragments, I couldn’t see Wim doing anything nasty or wrong. On the other hand, my father, shouting out loud that Wim was no good, did something nasty and wrong every evening.
“How terrible,” Netteke says at the ice cream parlor, when I tell her about Wim and how we’ve testified. “So what happens now? And how do you deal with this?” she asks.
She doesn’t use the word “death,” but her meaning is clear. Indeed, how do you deal with it, and let me name it: an approaching death. I act unconcerned, and in the meantime, I scan the environment for possible contractors: that’s how you deal with it.
“You try to stay alive as long as possible, that’s all.”
The conversation is a painful reminder of what different directions our lives have gone in since those childhood days. She lives, whereas I just survive. Still, I don’t think of myself as less happy. I just enjoy other, slightly smaller things.
“So you’ve got a nice life?” Netteke asks. “What is it you do?”
“I really like to have my cup of coffee around here in the morning.” She looks a bit pitying. Was that my idea of a nice life? I saw her wondering.
“After that I eat a yogurt,” I say, “at a place near here. And in the evening, Japanese food, as often as I can. I love that.”
“You do anything else apart from eating?” she asks with pity in her voice.
“No,” I say, “actually, that’s the only thing that makes me happy. The small things in life, you know.”
“But why don’t you just leave?” she asks.
“I don’t like it abroad. I don’t even like a holiday abroad. What am I going to do there?”
She doesn’t understand. “You’re not even fifty, and you don’t find life worth living?”
“I’m actually quite tired of everything. I don’t feel like running away anymore.”
I also don’t want to have this conversation. It doesn’t make me happy. I will never be able to explain satisfactorily why I just have to accept my death. I can’t even fathom it myself. I don’t know why I’ve done this; I only know I felt I had to.
I steer the conversation in a different direction. “How is your mother?”
“Well,” she says.
“Good,” I say. “Well, I’m off. See you soon,” I lie.