THE MAN WITH THE BEARD

Shortly after my mother arrived in the Netherlands, Uncle Herbert set off for Canada. A causal link seems obvious — an encounter, or a tin of cat food — but my parents didn’t get to know each other until three years later, so all the signs are that Uncle Herbert emigrated quite by chance immediately after my mother’s arrival.

Uncle Herbert’s suitcases didn’t contain bangles, necklaces, or earrings. No, he’d stuffed them with leaflets and old newspapers instead. The total came to about 40 kilos and was supposed to create the impression that he was an important man, someone with lots of assets.

Uncle Herbert was fleeing his home country, a milieu of narrowmindedness and floury potatoes. He’d left school at sixteen to train at agricultural school in Alkmaar, but never completed his course. Uncle Herbert had other plans — ambitious plans.

‘Business,’ he replied when the Canadian authorities asked him about his reason for immigration. He showed the documents he’d obtained in the Netherlands: his passport, his work permit. Nobody asked him to open his suitcases; everything was fine.

Uncle Herbert had been to Canada the previous year. As part of an exchange programme at agricultural school, he’d worked on a farm in New Brunswick. There, Farmer Jake had introduced him to the language, the labour, the sweat, and last but not least, the dreams. Farmer Jake had bought a parcel of land, and with the proceeds of this land he was going to buy more land, and with the proceeds of that land, yet more land, even bigger and more extensive, on and on until he’d be rolling in it.

Six months: that’s how long Uncle Herbert had stayed in New Brunswick. These months were to determine the rest of his life. Back in the Netherlands he felt confined, trapped by the system. He couldn’t concentrate within the four walls of a classroom. He drifted off while listening to the lecturers’ words, longing for the vastness of Canada, the land of endless opportunity.

Grandpa Luxembourg — not yet a grandpa at the time and based in Zutphen — was dead against his son’s plans. Herbert was supposed to finish agricultural school and then go on to college in Bolsward. The family had no need for adventurers. Studying was the important thing; Herbert had no business outside a library.

Uncle Herbert didn’t obey his father. One early morning in June, without a word, without so much as a wave, he disappeared. Two suitcases were missing, but that’s all he appeared to have taken from home. A week later the waste-paper collector was given a disappointingly meagre stack, but nobody put two and two together and concluded that Herbert had taken the newspapers. Who would do such a thing? Who would cross the ocean with two suitcases full of waste paper?

Perhaps there’s a Van der Kwast with a poetic soul after all. Uncle Herbert was bald and he had a moustache, but aside from that he was nothing like his kinsmen. He was unable to settle in the sodden clay soil of the Netherlands. In fact, he couldn’t settle anywhere. His biography is full of gaps and holes, of vacant rooms and inhospitable plains.

My mother always worried that I’d take after Uncle Herbert and become a deadbeat, a vagabond, the black sheep of the family. And if truth be told, it’s always been my secret wish to follow in Uncle Herbert’s footsteps — big steps down long roads, taking me ever further from civilisation.

Business — that’s the reason Uncle Herbert emigrated to Canada in 1969. He had no concrete plan, and didn’t need one, either. There were plenty of opportunities. He’d assured his friends and classmates that he was going to be a millionaire, but they all just shook their heads. That’s narrowmindedness and floury potatoes for you. But he didn’t need their consent to become a millionaire. One day, you’d need a plane to see all of his land.

The first place where Uncle Herbert popped up was Petrolia, Lambton County, Ontario. It was a small town, with a population of 5,000, one high school, and five churches. More than a century earlier, James Miller Williams had struck oil here: a black jet from the earth that marked the beginning of the oil industry in North America. Fortune-seekers from around the continent overran Petrolia, digging and drilling all over the place. To this day, oil is pumped up from the same fields; the landscape home to a perpetuum mobile of pumpjacks.

Uncle Herbert put down his suitcases in front of the biggest office in town and knocked on the door. When a fat man answered, he held out his hand and introduced himself as Herbie. It’s what Farmer Jake used to call him, and it’s how he’d be known in Canada: Herbie van der Kwast, businessman.

He introduced himself, explained where he was from, and said that he’d heard Petrolia was in need of visionaries, entrepreneurs with grand ambitions.

‘I’m your man,’ Uncle Herbert said.

The fat man didn’t react immediately. This was the first time in his life a bald man with a moustache had greeted him with the words, ‘I’m your man.’ He was reminded of an article in The Petrolia Topic about loose morals in Amsterdam. Without realising it, the fat man reached for the doorknob and explained that the only vacant position was that of a part-time secretary: three days a week.

Uncle Herbert thanked the man for his valuable time and picked up the suitcases with newspapers. He made his way to another office — less big, less lofty — but here, too, he found a man who looked more than a little surprised. Uncle Herbert didn’t lose heart, picked up his suitcases again, and walked from office to office. But wherever he went, the story was the same. There was no business to be done in Petrolia.

Uncle Herbert was late — more than a century late. Perhaps he lacked my mother’s powers of persuasion, or her rolling pin.

The only person prepared to give him work was a Presbyterian corn grower just beyond the city limits. It was harvest time. Uncle Herbert could start right away.

‘I’m your man,’ he said with enthusiasm. If a paperboy could become a millionaire, then why not a corn-picker? One day they’d be writing about him, about Herbie van der Kwast and his incredible career.

I’m writing the story now, because nobody else is doing it, because nobody else is familiar with it. To be honest, I don’t know the whole story myself, all the details, all the facts, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the broad strokes that form the outline of a life. And it’s the mind’s eye that perceives things in this black void: a farm, a tractor, pylons on the land.

The farmer gave Uncle Herbert a small room in the attic and denim overalls with copper-coloured clasps and buttons. ‘Strictly for workmen’ it said on the label near his chest.

Uncle Herbert spent six days a week on a combine harvester, under the scorching sun, surrounded by acre upon acre of corn. When I close my eyes, I can picture him sitting there: happy and a long way away. On his own. It’s as if my imagination is taking me by the hand, pulling me towards those golden fields: the rattling cylinder, a cloud of yellow splinters, and birds pecking the soil behind the combine harvester. They don’t fly up as I walk across the mowed stalks. There’s a sensation of freedom, of disappearing. When Uncle Herbert turns around, he looks at the trail he creates in the corn — a trail that will no longer be there at the close of day. I wave at him, but I’m invisible — that’s the downside of fantasy.

On the seventh day, the church bells rang and Uncle Herbert was hauled out of bed. The farmer and his wife were going to the Sunday service, and he was expected to come along. In the wooden pews, he listened to a sermon about Jesus having shown the way, and man having to follow. The farmer and his wife nodded; Uncle Herbert bit his nails. The church reminded him of the classrooms in Alkmaar, prompting him to drift off on the preacher’s words.

Three Sunday services later, the harvest was in. The land was now bare and darker in colour. The farmer moved differently, more calmly, and life moved indoors, where the machines were dismantled. Uncle Herbert learned the workings of an engine. These were days of oil and tar and heavy tools. The two men ended up with black hands and black faces. Their backs groaned.

When evening fell, Uncle Herbert would sit down under a tree, feeling exhausted, and look up at the sky. He taught himself to interpret the clouds, the sudden change in wind direction. He was now a man who could name engine parts and predict the weather.

Sundays were spent indoors: first in the wooden church pews, and then at people’s homes. The farmer and his wife would introduce Uncle Herbert to other members of the community, people whose paths in life were as straight as the creases in their clothing. They were hoping he would meet a woman and build a life with her. They regarded him as their son, the child they were never able to have, which God had never given them.

Every Sabbath, they would go visiting in their Sunday best. Uncle Herbert drank tea and listened to the interminable clinking of teaspoons. He was usually placed between the farmer and his wife. In an armchair to the left sat the lady of the house, to her right her husband, and right across from him would be the daughter: a girl of barely 20 — sometimes extremely pretty, almost always ugly, with bushy eyebrows and the teeth of a horse. Few people, a closed community: inbreeding.

‘Would anyone like another biscuit?’ was a much-heard question from the lady of the house.

By the time a year had passed, the farmer made him a proposal with tears in his eyes. He wanted Uncle Herbert to become his partner, so he’d later be able to take over the business, including the land, the machines, the farm.

The farmer pointed to his golden land: all for his ‘son’.

Uncle Herbert vanished the way he’d vanished from Zutphen — without a word, but with a suitcase in each hand. I can hear his footsteps in the night, in the blue morning. He’s the only one on the road, a shadow underneath the stars. Here’s a man who doesn’t want to get married or have children. In the distance, light seeps into the day; in an hour’s time, the farmer and his wife will wake up, waiting for the footsteps over their heads, the creaking of old floorboards. At a T-junction, Uncle Herbert puts down his suitcases in the sand by the side of the road. There are two directions, but whichever car stops will take him down the long road of the land of opportunity. I see him stare at the horizon, and moments later getting into a white pick-up truck. The wheels start turning, and the sand blows up.

The first gap in his biography is three months long. Perhaps Uncle Herbert is a would-be businessman in Hamilton, or maybe he leaves his suitcases at a motel in Markham, Peterborough, or Belleville, to spend his days in a factory making tornado sirens. It’s monotonous work, all this clocking in and out.

Back home, in Zutphen, everybody was waiting for a letter, for a sign of life, nursing the quiet hope that one day he’d be back: their son, their brother, turning up on their doorstep, perhaps without a coat in winter.

The phone rang in the middle of the night. His voice sounded distant, as in a dream. ‘Herbert,’ Grandpa Luxembourg asked. ‘Is that you?’

‘I’m in Ottawa,’ Uncle Herbert shouted. He was in a phone booth on Wellington Street, with cars whizzing past. It was evening, dinnertime, and people were rushing to get home. ‘I found a job,’ he said. ‘I’m working in a laboratory.’ Uncle Herbert explained that he’d been hired as a technical analyst at a dairy lab. He was doing research into lactobacteria. It was a full-time job, with a pay cheque every two weeks.

And then the connection was lost. The phone had swallowed all of Uncle Herbert’s coins. Despite hearing nothing but noise from the underground cabling, the family held on to the receiver for a long time afterwards.

So he’d popped up as a technical analyst in a laboratory in Ottawa, nearly 600 kilometres northeast of Petrolia, as the crow flies. Wearing thick glasses and a long white coat, Uncle Herbert was using the knowledge he’d acquired at agricultural school to carry out experiments and tests. It was a life within the confines of four walls, but anonymous, without expectations, without any obligations. He could always pack his bags and leave. There was nothing that tied him to Ottawa.

He had no plants, no dog, no washing line.

One day, a colleague advised Uncle Herbert to invest in futures. Or did he get his information from a report in the local paper? Or maybe the hotdog seller on Elgin Street had mentioned it. Who knows — Uncle Herbert’s sources were often dubious. He didn’t go in for transparency; if so, anyone could become a millionaire.

And so it happened that Uncle Herbert invested all of his money in agricultural futures: wheat, corn, porkers, potatoes. Vast quantities of them; bushels, tens of thousands of kilos. It’s a great business when prices are on the up. Within months, Uncle Herbert had amassed a small fortune. He used the profits to buy new futures, and in turn used their profits to invest in new, bigger futures.

Herbie van der Kwast, businessman.

He became a rich man — albeit very briefly. A mere flash.

And in that flash he bought houses and business premises, and he opened a large fishmonger’s on 789 Somerset Street West. These days it’s in Chinatown, and known as Ha Long Fish & Seafood Market, but once upon a time ‘I’m Your Fish’ belonged to a bald man with a moustache. Wearing a green coat, Uncle Herbert sold fish freshly caught from the Ottawa River: carp, pike perch, eels, catfish. He worked from dawn to dusk and stank to high heaven. Never before had a Van der Kwast owned a fishmonger’s, and never before had anyone in the family sold live eels, but perhaps a poetic soul is indispensable for this.

Uncle Herbert went bust almost overnight. The potato heralded his demise — not the floury Dutch variety, but the robust Canadian Hunter. A hundred thousand kilos of them, their price going into freefall. Corn followed, as did wheat. Only the porkers were turning a profit, but they could no longer save Uncle Herbert. He lost his houses and his business premises, his green coat and his fish. His sole possessions now were two suitcases. Taking them, he disappeared into the night.

The second gap is longer. These are years of silence, of isolation; rarefied air and footsteps in the snow. A cottage in Alberta comes to mind, in Swan Hills, Canmore, or Hinton — places along the edge of the wilderness, where temperatures dip below 40 degrees Celsius in winter. There, Uncle Herbert drinks steaming coffee from a mug. In the kitchen stands a woman, petite and with translucent skin. She keeps a diary, and is reserved in bed. She can’t give herself fully; there’s always some diffidence, some reticence. They never fall asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning, the woman wakes up before Uncle Herbert and tries to read his face, searching for salvation, for happiness in the lines around his mouth. But every day she sees the same: nothing.

In summer, Uncle Herbert repairs roofs, with his torso bared and a hammer in his hand. She teaches piano to children without an ear for music.

The woman is anticipating it, the day he’ll leave. She knows it, has always known it. She knew it the day he entered her house with his suitcases. But she was willing to give it a try; you want to have faith. The same is true for Uncle Herbert; for anyone. We hold onto one another against our better judgement.

It takes years — six or seven long and harsh winters. Then spring arrives, and they let go of each other. They don’t say a word; there’s nothing to say. His footsteps on the wet path are the only sound. He follows the wind and vanishes.

The woman cleans the whole house, washing the sheets, the rugs, the curtains. She throws out the towels he used. In her diary she writes: I hope this marks the beginning of my life.

The gap is filled by a great-uncle: Willem van der Kwast — wooden hips, bald, moustache, the works. And yet he differed from the rest of the family in one respect. In every city he visited, he’d look for his last name in the telephone directory: in Groningen, in Leuven, in Hamburg, and in Vancouver, too. And so, during a business trip, he tracked down Herbert van der Kwast, isolated and alone on Canada’s west coast.

The great-uncle ripped the page from the telephone directory and took a taxi to Herbert’s house, an apartment on the second floor of a dilapidated building on Clyde Avenue, West Vancouver. Nobody answered, but the neighbour was so kind to talk to Willem van der Kwast from her window.

‘Herbie’s strange,’ she shouted. ‘He never says hello.’

He discovered three things: Uncle Herbert had no wife, he traded in penny stocks, and he smoked a pipe.

The great-uncle sat down on a bench opposite the house and waited until late at night, but Uncle Herbert never showed up. Maybe he’d spotted Willem on the bench and been shocked by the familiar figure.

‘Maybe he’s dead,’ the neighbour in her nighty yelled before switching off the light.

Willem van der Kwast flew back to the Netherlands, taking the ripped-out telephone directory page with him, and shared his findings with the family.

‘A pipe?’ came the reply from Remich, from Rotterdam, and from Oudewater.

Nobody in the family smoked, and nobody in the family knew anyone who smoked a pipe. But Uncle Herbert had put an end to all that in one fell swoop. What other evolution would the Van der Kwast family live to see? Might Uncle Herbert’s hips be molten, enabling him to dance like Elvis?

Several months later, my father managed to track down his brother in Vancouver. Ashirwad had already been born, while Johan was dreaming of birds and fruits in the womb. There was no sign of me yet. My mother was happy.

Uncle Herbert no longer lived in a dilapidated house, but on a dilapidated boat instead. The cabin had been fixed with tape and plastic carrier bags; the inside smelled of wet cardboard and mould. My father got to sit on the only chair. He explained that he’d been sent by the family. They were worried. Meanwhile Uncle Herbert prepared dinner: tinned kidney beans, heated over a gas burner. Simmering beans and the gentle swell of the water. Uncle Herbert was silent.

‘Have you lived here long?’ my father asked.

‘About six months, more or less.’

‘Will you be staying here?’

‘No.’

A ship horn sounded, far off in the distance.

‘The mooring fees are going up,’ Uncle Herbert said. ‘So I’ll have to move soon.’

My father stared at the food rests in the corner of the cabin. This is what life looked like when its course couldn’t be captured in three words: work, wife, child.

Uncle Herbert gave him the first tin, but its contents were still too hot to eat. My father waited for his brother to sit down opposite him, on the mattress he slept on at night. The two of them blew on their spoons.

‘I was a millionaire,’ Uncle Herbert said, between bites. ‘And I lived with a woman who played the piano.’

‘Mother misses you.’

‘I’m better off on my own.’

‘Where are you going after this?’

‘Somewhere. Canada is a big country.’

‘Won’t you come back?’

Uncle Herbert got up and threw his tin into a corner. He pulled out his pipe. Filling it with tobacco took forever. When he was finally done, he said: ‘What was that you asked?’

‘Never mind,’ my father replied. ‘Forget it.’

The next day he travelled back to the Netherlands, to baby Ashirwad and my mother, to domestic life and the familiar Indian food.

‘What’s that I smell?’ my mother asked at the table.

‘Mmm,’ my father said. ‘Tandoori chicken.’

My mother shook her head. Although my father hadn’t done any autopsies for over a week, my mother could still smell death. Pregnant women have a highly developed sense of smell. ‘I smell corpses!’ she said.

Uncle Herbert left Vancouver not long afterwards. The penny stocks had brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. The mooring fees had been raised, and a rental apartment was unaffordable. He was forced to seek his fortune elsewhere. Chance lent a helping hand.

On the day Uncle Herbert was due to leave Vancouver, he met an Austrian man who’d bought a marble quarry in Slocan Valley, more than 400 kilometres inland. He was planning to quarry the marble himself and sell it on the market. But he couldn’t do so on his own. The Austrian man took a step back and looked Uncle Herbert up and down. ‘You’re my man!’ he eventually said.

Uncle Herbert knew it: the suitcases, the 40 kilos of newspapers he’d been dragging along for a decade across half the continent, had finally done the trick.

And so he became a partner in a marble quarry he’d never even laid eyes on. The Austrian lifted the suitcases into the trunk and together they drove to Slocan Valley. It took them nine hours, traversing deserted highways, winding roads, and mud tracks right across Canada’s unspoilt nature. The good news was that the marble was of the highest quality. The bad news was that the transport costs were too high to make the venture profitable.

‘That’s just like Uncle Herbert,’ my mother would say later. When she finally met him, he still had the same talent: the talent to be in the right place at the wrong time; or in the wrong place at the right time; or quite simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Within six months, the marble quarry went bust. Uncle Herbert disappeared down a dark hole. Nobody knew where he was. He was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Not a single telephone directory in Canada listed his name. Uncle Sharma had to haul himself through days of scorching heat and dust before his dream came true. Uncle Herbert wandered through an inhospitable landscape, through days of wind and ice, and more likely than not he’d abandoned his dream by now. He roamed across mountains and plains, land so vast you could only take it all in from a plane. He was the only person for miles and miles, but it wasn’t his land. It belonged to the caribou, the chamois, and the bears; to solitude; and to the wind in the forest that slowly acquires a voice.

And then, completely out of the blue, he turned up on our doorstep on Jericholaan: a lean man with a beard and a black beanie on his head. My mother jumped out of her skin. She refused to let Uncle Herbert come in. ‘Help,’ she screamed. ‘A tramp!’

‘I’m Herbie.’

‘I’m calling the police,’ my mother yelled, the way Grandma Voorst had done when she’d mistaken us for kidnappers.

Uncle Herbert explained that he was my father’s brother and that he’d come all the way from Canada.

‘Impossible,’ my mother said. ‘Nobody in the family has a beard.’

True — a Van der Kwast didn’t grow a beard. The moustache was our trademark; a beard was unthinkable, taboo even.

My mother wasn’t having any of it, and so Uncle Herbert had to wait outside until my father came home from work. My brothers and I spent the whole day indoors. Our mother had told us that if we ventured out, we’d be robbed of our shoes.

From our position behind the first-floor windows, we watched the man with the beard. He had no suitcases with him; in fact, he didn’t have anything with him. When Uncle Herbert spotted us, he waved. My mother quickly drew the curtains. ‘Don’t look,’ she yelled. ‘Don’t look! It’s bad for you.’

At six that evening, my father came home and walked into the living room with Uncle Herbert. We boys were expected to shake his hand, but none of us had the guts.

‘This is your uncle from Canada,’ my father said.

Then all three of us burst into tears. My mother came out of the kitchen and comforted us with the words: ‘Don’t be afraid. Uncle Herbert only looks like a tramp.’

He smelled of soil, of clay, and of something I couldn’t immediately place, unlike my mother.

‘What’s that I smell?’ she asked during dinner.

‘Mmm,’ Ashirwad said. ‘Snakies.’ His face was almost completely red. He sucked the strands into his mouth, sometimes ten at a time.

‘What is it I smell?’

My father pressed his arms against his body and carried on eating as best he could.

‘I smell garbage bags!’ my mother said. ‘The smell of garbage bags is spoiling my appetite.’ She listed everything she could smell: banana skins, mouldy cheese, chicken bones.

I could smell it too, the smell of garbage. It emanated from Uncle Herbert, but it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. He carried on eating. He had a huge appetite. My mother gave him three large helpings before confiding in me: ‘Uncle Herbert is even poorer than a rat in Delhi.’ My father whispered in my ear: ‘But he’s really happy, because he never married.’

After dinner, Uncle Herbert pulled out his pipe and filled it with tobacco.

‘What’s that?’ Ashirwad asked.

‘That’s unhealthy,’ my mother said. ‘It turns your body black inside and then one day you drop dead.’

Uncle Herbert put the pipe in his mouth and got up from the table. He walked into the garden. Looking over my shoulder, I saw him standing on the grass. Small grey clouds escaped his mouth. They were smaller than those of Uncle Sharma — not winding lines, but little smudges, full stops, as if there was no story.

‘It’s something tramps do, too,’ my mother said. ‘Smoking, that is.’

Johan and Ashirwad would never touch a cigarette, cigar, or pipe in their life; they’d always steer well clear of smoking. In fact, Ashirwad can fly into a rage when you light a cigarette anywhere near him. Sometimes he’ll suddenly start yelling to an innocent smoker at a bus stop: ‘Go away! Otherwise I’ll turn black inside!’

I’m the only one who has allowed the comfort of tobacco into his lungs, as well as the mysterious smoke of hash and marijuana. But it wasn’t my thing, however desperate I was to belong with all those guys who refused to be trapped in the system, with the young men who viewed the world as their enemy, and who looked good in old clothes, in shabby coats and frayed trousers. I was too well-behaved, too much of a mama’s boy.

Uncle Herbert stayed with us on Jericholaan for two nights before travelling on to Remich, to Grandpa Luxembourg. My mother gave Uncle Herbert a rolling pin to take along. She showed him how to use it as a bat. ‘Raise it up in the air,’ she explained. ‘And then bring it down hard on his head.’

We’d never see Uncle Herbert again, but my mother reminded us of him often enough. Whenever we refused to brush our teeth, her voice would boom through the bathroom: ‘You’ll end up just like your Uncle Herbert!’ The same would be yelled when we came home late, didn’t eat fruit, or refused to go to bed. From a pedagogical standpoint, Uncle Herbert was valuable in the extreme: the kind of monster who’ll always be scary.

When I got low marks in school, my mother came charging into my room, shouting: ‘Your Uncle Herbert always had low marks, and he’s come to nothing.’ And later, when the first shadow of a beard appeared on my chin, she came after me with a razor: ‘You’ll end up in the street! You’ll be begging just like him!’

At times it felt as if my mother’s sole task in life was to keep us from turning into Uncle Herbert: a deadbeat, a vagrant with a black beanie. Her life’s work could be destroyed by us fleeing across the Atlantic and entering the wilderness, just like Uncle Herbert.

The man with the beard is known to have popped up in two more places. The first location was Silverton, the tiniest hamlet in British Columbia, no more than a handful of houses along Highway 6. Keep driving and you don’t miss a thing.

Uncle Herbert had stopped. He joined the voluntary fire brigade, which was never called out. On Tuesdays he worked as the local family doctor’s clerk, and sometimes he helped out as ambulance driver. He lived with a woman called Judy, who had two children from a previous marriage. It was all explained in the missive that came through the letterbox years after his visit to us. It was a rectangular envelope with large stamps and a blue Airmail sticker.

At first, my mother kept the letter from us, but then she must have decided that the missive provided a valuable pedagogical lesson.

‘This is what happens,’ she shouted. ‘This is what happens when you don’t brush your teeth, your marks are low, you grow a beard, and you reek of banana skins. You end up in a little one-horse town with a divorced woman with two children.’

In my mother’s eyes, there was nothing worse than divorce. It was one of the reasons she never warmed to Grandpa Luxembourg. But neighbours who split up weren’t spared, either. We were no longer allowed to play with the children of divorced parents. If they turned up on our doorstep, my mother treated them to a sermon that ended with — you’ve guessed it — ‘In India, nobody gets divorced!’ Who knows, it may well be the reason why my parents are still together. Divorce is shameful.

‘That’s just like your Uncle Herbert,’ my mother said, once she’d calmed down a little. ‘In the wrong place at the wrong time.’

But Uncle Herbert wouldn’t see out his life in Silverton. It was an intermediate station, like all places were intermediate stations for him. Sometimes he’d stay in a town a couple of days, sometimes several years. Estimates on how long he stayed with Judy varied. If she held him tight, the subsequent gap would be smaller. If her heart and her arms failed to get a grip on him, the gap would be a gaping chasm.

It was in this gap that we grew up. As Uncle Herbert drifted around Canada, I studied economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, while Johan did research in Morocco as a physical geographer. For Ashirwad, time stood still. He sat in front of the window and looked out, at the world in which he’d never drive a car and never kiss a girl under a tree.

My mother sat by his side and answered his questions.

‘Where’s Johan? What’s Ernest up to now?’

‘Johan’s doing research in Morocco and Ernest’s studying to be an economist,’ my mother explained proudly. This would be followed by: ‘One day you’ll go to university too.’

Her pride evaporated the moment Johan returned from Morocco with a beard and a car full of desert sand. Sitting next to him was a dazzlingly beautiful girl: long, dark hair, high cheekbones, emerald green eyes. A princess from the Sahara. He’d married her in a small village in Sehoul: a place of huts and sand; no-man’s-land.

‘Everything’s been for nothing,’ my mother wailed. ‘Everything’s been for nothing.’

The desert princess didn’t receive a warm welcome. My mother went straight to the kitchen. The next moment Johan had a bump on his head. It was his first. There wouldn’t be any roti on the menu for the foreseeable future.

There was only one thing worse than getting divorced, and that was marrying a Muslim. ‘How could you?’ my mother yelled at Johan. ‘Muslims chased us out of our home and robbed us of all our possessions. Girls had to cut their hair and wear boys’ clothes or they’d be raped. We had no food, no roof over our heads!’

The last mouth had spoken — the mouth that had been forced to drink the milk of a goat. Pucha.

With one hand Johan held his princess, while he held the other pressed against the bump. ‘Mum …’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘Mum,’ my brother repeated.

‘I’m not your mother anymore.’

Johan and his wife left. They drove out of Tiberiaslaan with the engine screaming.

She was alone again, my mother — with her tears and with Ashirwad.

A week later, I was the proud owner of a bump, too. It turns out that a broken rolling pin is still an excellent weapon. I’d come home because I’d run out of food in my student digs, and because there was something I wanted to tell my parents.

‘I’m quitting my course,’ I said over dinner. ‘I’m going to be a writer. My first book is coming out next year.’

My mother slammed her fists on the table, sending the plates flying. We were eating penne with tomato sauce for a change — it must have been a special offer. Ashirwad didn’t like it much. Getting the penne into his mouth was beyond him. The slippery little pasta tubes kept rolling off his fork.

‘Effing tubes,’ he muttered, as my mother ran into the kitchen. ‘Bloody effing tubes.’

I failed to dodge the blow; in fact, perhaps I wanted that bump. Johan had one, so I had to have one too. It was the only way to break free from my mother.

‘Everything’s been for nothing,’ my mother wailed again. ‘I sacrificed my life for you. I was always home after school. I took you everywhere. I did everything for you.’

‘I’m writing a book,’ I replied, ‘I’m not dying.’

But my mother didn’t hear me. Her world had collapsed. My brother had married a Muslim woman, I wasn’t going to finish my degree, and Ashirwad was Ashirwad and would always remain Ashirwad.

‘I can’t show my face anymore,’ my mother sobbed. My father wanted to wrap his arms around her, but was swatted away. ‘Keep your hands off me!’

My father quickly snatched the rolling pin off the table. He knew how to dodge blows; he was quite the expert in the field.

But there were other weapons. Before long, the first slipper whizzed through the air. My father ducked just in time. But the next one hit his nose. Slipper number two always hits the target. When a second later a metal trivet flew through the air, Ashirwad began throwing stuff, too. ‘Effing tubes,’ he shouted, as he hurled his plate across the table. My plate of pasta wasn’t safe, either. My father’s face was dripping with tomato sauce.

The bomb had exploded; our family was finished, just as the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz had prophesised.

‘Uncle Herbert,’ my mother sobbed. ‘It’s all Uncle Herbert’s fault. He set a bad example. Now Johan has a beard and Ernest’s packing in his studies. My whole life has been for nothing.’

I shook my head. Uncle Herbert had shown me the way — not the straight, direct way, but the winding path through the wilderness. ‘I don’t want to be like everyone else,’ I shouted. ‘I want to roam around, I want to smell of banana skins, and I want to be penniless!’

That same evening my mother burnt a rubbish bag on the patio. ‘Be gone, spirit!’ she screeched. ‘Evil spirit of Ernest, be gone.’

I never disappeared. I’m still sitting here at my computer. I stare at my screen, picturing things that aren’t there: the bluish haze, the longing to be elsewhere. But I’m inside and not outside, not in the big wide world. My life could be summed up in three words: work, wife, child.

After many, many years, Uncle Herbert popped up in Alberta. He was now working on the Athabasca Oil Sands. Oil-sand mining: work made near impossible in summer by the mud and the mosquitoes, while in winter the earth froze so vehicles could barely reach the remote mines. Uncle Herbert sat on a shovel, digging up the black oil-sand fields. Cold hands, cold feet, cold bones. Some weeks he worked nights, when everything was dark, save for the headlights of giant lorries coming and going.

Did he think of his days in Ontario? Did his imagination pull him back to the golden fields of Petrolia, where he sat atop a combine harvester? Or did he think of a girl sitting opposite him in a living room full of clinking teaspoons? Ensconced in the cabin of that shovel, did he long for a home?

This is where the trail ends. Uncle Herbert’s last letter was posted in Fort McMurray, the only town in the Athabasca Oil Sands. Grandpa Luxembourg received the envelope with the red maple leaf. Oil sand kills the soul, Uncle Herbert wrote. He’d handed in his notice; he couldn’t hack it anymore. I don’t know where I’m headed next. The north appeals to me: the Northwest Territories, Yukon, Alaska. Plenty of opportunity.

I can picture him walking down solitary roads. He has no suitcases in his hands; he doesn’t look like an important person. He’s a nobody. Perhaps a logger gives him a ride, or perhaps he spends three days on a bus and gets off in another province. There’s always work to be had in the wilderness. First-aid posts need to be manned in winter: for six consecutive weeks, with satellite phone the only contact.

There’s an aid post in the west of Yukon. It’s a former US air-force base, with low buildings dotted around a barren plain, caved-in hangars, hundreds of aeroplanes, and tanks rusting away. Uncle Herbert peers through binoculars at the vast emptiness; this is bear territory, but he hasn’t seen any yet. It’s so cold he has to keep the diesel engine of his car running day and night to prevent the oil from clotting.

There’s only the occasional callout: hunters, trappers, Inuit needing assistance. The rest of the time, Uncle Herbert is on his own. He sleeps on a camp bed and warms himself by an open fire. He tries to predict the weather. Sometimes he works a double shift: two-and-a-half months of severe frost. His provisions are dropped from a plane — the plane that overlooks the vast country.

He’s a lonesome cowboy without a hat, without a horse, without cattle. He’s a cowboy in the wrong place, on a prairie of frozen marshland.

‘Just like your Uncle Herbert,’ my mother would say.

At first she didn’t want to emigrate to Canada, terrified as she was of bumping into Uncle Herbert.

‘We’re going to Toronto,’ my father said. ‘Herbert’s on the other side of the country.’

But this didn’t quite put her mind at rest. To this day, she’s worried a man with a beard and a beanie on his head will turn up on their doorstep, swathed in the smell of a rubbish tip. That’s family for you.

I don’t think Uncle Herbert will pop up again. In summer he probably lives in a trailer on some farmer’s land. He doesn’t talk much and grows his own vegetables. These are days of tall grass and blue skies. The winters he spends up north, on his own for weeks at a time. I can see him walking, a backpack over his shoulders, a hipflask at his lips. I can hear his footsteps — clomp, clomp, clomp — removing themselves ever further.

Imagination gives birth to the dream. But I don’t follow in his footsteps. I don’t dare. I don’t have a poetic soul, either.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

Then all goes quiet. Even in the land of boundless opportunity, a man can disappear.