We took to sleeping in her parents’ bed, the only full-sized one in the house. “If they only knew,” she said one night.
“Won’t your neighbours notice that I’m sleeping over?”
Rachel shrugged. “I told Mom and Dad about you on the phone. I said that you might sleep over sometimes, but that we wouldn’t sleep together. They either believed me or pretended to.”
“They don’t care what the neighbours think?”
“Not as long as the neighbours say nothing to them about it. Which they won’t, because they never speak to the neighbours other than to say hello.”
“If your parents can’t wait to get out of here and go travelling, why did your family move to Newfoundland in the first place?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t because we heard good things about it, because we’d never heard of it at all until Dad told us we were moving here. It was more of a beggars can’t be choosers kind of thing. No offence. Actually, it was more of a man who’s a failure in a country with a perfect climate reckons his chances of prospering might be better in a country where, because of the climate, no one with a grain of sense would want to live kind of thing. Again, no offence. Not even to Dad, who I don’t really think of as a failure. It’s just that he says whatever’s on his mind without thinking of the consequences. It doesn’t matter who he’s talking to.”
She told me that her father graduated in commerce from the University of Amsterdam and then became a chartered accountant, only to have to retire from accounting in his early thirties because of fast-failing eyesight. He moved to South Africa in the hope that a friend in Cape Town, whom he had known when they were children in Amsterdam, could help him get a job with South African Airways—the company his friend worked for. When he was turned down by South African Airways, he applied for the job of lecturer in accounting at the University of Cape Town. Chartered accountants who were willing to forego the private sector in favour of teaching at any level, let alone that of a lecturer without tenure and benefits, were rare. He got the job and, in a few years, rose to assistant professor, but it became apparent over the next decade that, without an advanced academic degree, he would never again be promoted. He completed a master’s at the University of Cape Town but, by this time, had managed to alienate most of his colleagues by repeatedly telling his department head that they were incompetent as teachers and accountants. Given that the tenure committee consisted largely of his colleagues, he was told that he wouldn’t get tenure at the University of Cape Town if he had a fistful of advanced degrees.
At age forty-three, he decided to uproot his entire South African–born family to start all over again elsewhere in what was known as the White Commonwealth at some university where he could be both a teacher and a student until he earned his Ph.D., soon after which, he believed or hoped, he would be named a full professor. He applied for non-tenured jobs at every university in Australia and New Zealand but failed to get so much as an interview. He worked his way down the list of possible institutions until there were none left but those of Canada, every one of which, except a fledgling university in Newfoundland, ignored his letters. Memorial University, which had been founded just six years before, sent him an encouraging reply. He was hired after answering in writing a series of examination-type questions that were sent to him. The university, MUN as it was called, agreed to pay all the expenses of moving him and his family to St. John’s.
In South Africa they had lived as well-to-do people did in Newfoundland. They had servants, a maid and a gardener. South Africans leaving the country for any length of time were allowed to take only a small amount of money with them, so Rachel’s parents sold everything they had, combined the proceeds with their life savings and spent almost every cent on furniture and furnishings far more expensive than they had hitherto been able to afford, the result being that they were house poor before they even got their first glimpse of Newfoundland. Having had a maid and other black servants all her life, Rachel’s mother was as disinclined to keep house as she was inept at it, and her father had lost whatever home repair skills he might once have had in Amsterdam.
By the time I first saw it, the furniture still outshone the house to the point of looking absurdly incongruous. In the very expensive buffet, there was very expensive but ill-maintained china—twelve pieces of everything, all white with a gold trim that was chipped in many places or dulled to near-invisibility. It had arrived at the house fourteen years earlier, packed in large wooden crates, every piece of it intact. The six of them broke up the crates and burned them in the fireplace, which they huddled around for warmth, though it was August—the house was drafty and an August night in Newfoundland was cooler than a winter night in Cape Town—and it was a week before they could afford to fill the coal bin.
Now they had never-burnished silverware, a dining table so long and wide it took up nearly all the space in the dining room, making it difficult to squeeze between the chairs and the wall. The green velvet sofas and armchairs in the front room were pocked with burns from cigarettes and marijuana joints, the never-tended-to damage caused, Rachel said, by four precocious girls who, when their parents travelled, were left to fend for themselves and pretty much ran riot, turning the van Hout house into the neighbourhood’s most popular party space.
There was a dusty, top-of-the-line Steinway piano that none of them ever learned to play. It stood on hardwood that sagged beneath its legs, splintered hardwood with treacherous up-jutting nails, blackened with dirt where one strip met the other. The walls had not been repainted since the van Houts moved in. The curtain rods drooped, so that the bottoms of the curtains lay crumpled on the floor. But 44 was a summer paradise to me.
I lived on the top floor of a five-storey building, in an apartment that had long ago been written off by the owners, who didn’t know that the superintendent rented it out on the sly at half price. It had been a one-bedroom apartment, but the walls of the bedroom were gone, no sign of them remaining but a square black stain on the parquet floor. The super had furnished the apartment with a folding card table, an ancient box spring and mattress, and a sofa whose rear legs were missing, so that it tilted backwards like a recliner. In the bathroom there was another square-shaped stain on the wall above the sink where there must once have been a medicine cabinet and mirror. In the kitchenette, there was a two-burner stove and a half-sized fridge with a freezer that was fully crammed with frost. If I tried to thaw it, the super said, the Freon would escape.
But the place suited me. It needed no maintenance and was devoid of all diversions. I didn’t have a TV or phone because I was saving for a grubstake that would allow me to quit my job and write my novel. I’d never had a room of my own, one to read in undisturbed by others. On those nights when I didn’t see Rachel, I sat at the card table, side on to the window that overlooked the parking lot, the window from which, when I looked up from my book, I watched the slantwise driven rain by the light of a distant street lamp. Rachel called the place my garret, a touch of irony in her voice, I thought, as if she was teasing me, the writer who had yet to write a word. She sometimes spent the night. Given the state of the van Hout house, she was unfazed by the state of mine.
In late July, Rachel and I went to the long, sandy beach at Eastport, about two hours from St. John’s. In spite of how fit she was from doing yoga, she was hopeless at running. We ran along the wave-flattened sand at the edge of the water. I ran faster backwards than she could forwards, the two of us facing each other as we ran, she laughing so hard she would stop now and then and put her hands on her knees, out of breath, her sea mist–drenched hair hanging almost to the ground.
In the Malibu, which I always doubted would start but always did, we drove the Irish Loop, a four-hour trip that included a long stretch of the Trepassey barrens, where the car was so hemmed in by fog that we had no hope of seeing, or even hearing, the caribou herd we had come to photograph. But even such futility struck us as hilarious.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
THE EARLY DAYS OF HOUT (1962)
Across the veldt HVH roamed.
(His monogram, a palindrome,
was engraved upon his rings,
as well as many other things,
his tie clip and his money clip,
his pocket flask and pillow slips!)
He liked the look of this new Land,
so it was here he made his stand,
and it was here your parents met,
the best part of the story yet.
You can’t be a proper family
Unless you number at least three.
Soon, our number rose to six,
which left us in the strangest fix.
We made up names night after night
because, by morning, we forgot
which names were yours and which were not.
But suddenly it came to me:
it might be easier if we
referred to you collectively.
We called you Glormenethalee.
“Now there’s a name we won’t forget,
the strangest name we’ve made up yet.”
(Glor)ia was almost eight
by the time she got it straight:
“She is daughter number one,
Car(men) is two more than none,
B(etha)ny is number three,
and last is little Rachel (Lee),
and that spells Glormenethalee.”
—
When Hans said “sun,” the sun came out—
it hid behind what Hans called “clouds.”
When Hans said yes, such happiness—
for certain things were now allowed.
Young Hans said this, Young Hans said that—
soon, this and that were everywhere.
When Hans said “hat,” a hat appeared;
Of course it wasn’t called a hat
until he said, “Let’s call it that.”
As the family grew and grew
the fame of Hans van Hout did too,
at least among his family,
for there was no one else, you see,
in all the land of Hans van Hout
that he could tell the truth about
what happened in the Netherlands,
no one who’d ever understand
what his family understood—
that Hans was brave and Hans was good
but there were secrets to be kept,
things done to people while they slept,
while others looked the other way
so some at least could get away.
When you are forced to compromise,
to serve the truth by telling lies,
when you must abandon some
or else abandon everyone,
you’ll understand why even Hans
could not abide the Netherlands.
We were safe in the House Within—
no one got in, no one got out.
But still there was a constant din
of noises from the Land Without.
Hans sealed the windows, locked the doors,
cemented all the cracks and pores
and thumbed his nose at those Without
who coveted the girls of Hout.
He kept one eye out for the horde
who wanted in, and one eye out—
O, ever-vigilant van Hout—
for those who thought they wanted out.
He barred the house both day and night;
there was no air, there was no light.
You couldn’t breathe or see the sun;
it seemed that Death itself had come.
Hans thought of aught to do but think—
you heard him thinking all night long
of someone who was on the brink
of doing something very wrong.
You heard him thinking through the night
about what was and wasn’t right.
Just when you thought you heard him say
that Wrong would never go away,
Hans said that Right had won the day.
There was the house by day,
there was the house by night.
By day you couldn’t say
what was or wasn’t right.
By night you couldn’t think a word
for even thinking could be heard
in the silent house by night.
I tell you now, there’s nothing worse
than knowing how the universe
is fixed for sheep that cannot sleep
because you count them every night
and always get the number right.
The five of you, each one a ewe—
I might as well be counting you.
A drink of rum might knock me out
but there is never drink about.
I’d never think of sleeping pills—
I haven’t yet and never will.
Why do they say, “If walls could speak?”
As certainly as floorboards creak,
these walls can speak, they always have—
some things they say are very bad,
but that is not to say untrue:
walls tell the truth, you know they do.
They never say that I am good,
no matter how I wish they would.
From deep inside his inner ear,
Time is the sound that Hans can hear,
the sound it makes as it goes by.
He cannot sleep and that is why
he drowns out Time with other sounds—
the ones he makes while making rounds,
as if I have it in my head
that you don’t hear me leave the bed,
open the door, creep down the stairs,
the creaking stairs that no one hears.
I walk about the rooms below,
roaming from window to window—
I never bother with the lights:
I like to stare out at the night,
recalling this, recalling that,
though frankly I would rather not
recall at all the kinds of sounds
the Germans made while making rounds,
their boots upon the cobblestones
of Amsterdam night after night,
a cry for help, someone in flight
that ended when a shot rang out
far from the house of Hans van Hout.