Excerpt 3

…about the need of a “comforter”

 

The young Meindert Boorsma is not only named after this grandpa, he also bears his nickname: Meindert “Birdie.”

   On the day that the old Meindert became Grandpa, he made a very special bird whistle for his namesake.  The material consisted of an ancient cow rib from the Hichtum terp,*  a couple of tin copper plates, and a nail-hard knot of ebony wood.  From that wood he carved the mouthpiece.  When he tried it out he knew that it was good.  The old man was already known then as the Stradivarius among bird whistle carvers.  The little instrument was placed in the cradle of the little boy with the hope that he would become just as sharp a field man as his forebears.  …  

When the old man first heard how his grandson could imitate the lapwing so lifelike and later also the godwit and the redshank, he didn’t believe at first that he wasn’t listening to a real, living meadow bird.

For Ytsje and the boy Meindert the day of wool gathering comes to an end.  It turns toward evening when the two saunter toward home with a bagful of sheep’s wool.  And then Meindert hears in the distance the call of the golden plover.  “Come, they must not see us, let’s crawl behind the field gate over there.”  The boy digs up his bird whistle and gives a kind of shy answer to the plover.

   “Ytsje, I pretend to be a kind of uncertain plover.  I say that I don’t dare to travel alone, that I’m a lost soul in need of help.  I want them to take me along on their flight.”  Again Meindert puts his whistle to the lips, and then quite another song emerges.

   “What are you doing now,” Ytsje whispers sharply.  “You’re not imitating the golden plover but the lapwing.  Why did you all of a sudden become a lapwing?”

   “It’s like this, with the bird migration another kind of bird accompanies nearly every flight of golden plovers.”  He’s hardly got the words out of his mouth or a whole flock of birds streaks over them.  “Look, this time there’s a lapwing among them.  Such a solitary one goes along as a comfort-giving bird.  It’s like Grandpa said: ‘On dangerous travels one cannot do without a comforter.’”

 

* In Friesland, an artificial dwelling hill is called terp (plural terpen). Terp means "village" in Old Frisian and is cognate with English thorp.
Historical Frisian settlements were built, as far back as 500 BC, on artificial terpen or mounds up to 15 m height to be safe from the floods in periods of rising sea levels. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many terps were destroyed to use the fertile soil they contained to fertilize farm fields.  But some are largely preserved to this day.

Excerpt 2

Excerpt 2

 

Meindert introduces Ytsje to what he has learned about nature and birds from his grandpa; and that knowledge will apply to migrating people too, as the story unfolds.

 

“Ytsje, pay close attention to nature.  Notice how the lapwings at the end of September begin to flock together.  Does the girl know why the birds do that?  They gather to make plans as migrating birds.  They pose the question to themselves: Where shall we spend the winter, where and when should we commence the big journey?  Today or tomorrow they will depart from us, and we from them.”

   “And next spring they will come back,” adds his little female friend.

   “Exactly.  You’re right.  Listen, Ytsje.  In the beginning of March we will see the first lapwings returning, then they will entrust to us their nests and the first laying of their eggs.  They do that because we as people of the field protect and take care of the meadow birds.  We really are the housekeepers of the whole business.  Do you know, Ytsje, that the first lapwing egg is always laid here before noon on March 19? That has to do with the light; the days are lengthening then.  In March, winter will still try to stay on its throne, but the springtime can then no longer be held back.”

   “How does the boy know all that?”

   “I learned all these kinds of things from Grandpa.  Right after the terrible hard winter of 1837 he found the first lapwing egg in the whole country, and do you know where it lay?  Between two small ice floes in a ditch.  It was in the field of Mensonides, and that's a man who records everything that happens through the weeks.”

   “Oh, my goodness.”  It’s been as music to her ears.

   “Well, my girl, that’s enough for now.  Yes.  I like it too, you don’t learn these things in school.  This is how Grandpa thinks of it: the behavior of persons has much in common with the migratory bird; both dislike short days and long shadows.  But all right, a person is not a bird; a person cannot take his soul along like the migratory bird on long journeys across the ocean.  That is why Grandpa avoids long ocean journeys.”

 

The Comfort Bird

The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra  [tr. H J Baron]

 

This is how the book starts, way back in the 1860s, when emigration promised deliverance from the bleakness of poverty and prejudice.

 

Excerpt 1

 

“Your mom passed away.”  Ytsje Wytsma is six when she hears these words from a neighbor lady.  The children in the village explain to her what that means:  “Your mom is dead.” 

A couple of days later the old squat tower tolls the bell indicating a woman’s death.  …   That evening her dad puts her to bed for the first time.  He promised to tell her a fairy tale, but it turns into a story without beginning or ending.  “My dear girl,” Sibbele Wytsma stammers while he tucks her in, “fairy tales aren’t real.  Our work is going to have to pull us through.”

 

“After the death of my mother, who in the end was suffering from severe cramps, I fortunately found a very good father,” Ytsje would describe it much later.

 

 

   All of this is part of the grief of Hichtum in the extremely wet, late winter of 1861.  The Leeuwarder paper reports that the high waters took thirty-seven lives.  It is the year that serfdom was abolished in Russia and President Lincoln took the first step in abolishing slavery in America. 

 

When Ytsje is ten, Wytsma takes her out of school in Burgwerd.  Now she can be her dad’s little housekeeper.

 

   She doesn’t get many carefree and sun-drenched days coming her way, but a few she will long remember.  Take that mild and bright September day in that same year of 1861.  In between her work she goes poaching through the fields for tufts of sheep’s wool that are hanging on field gates and barbed wires.  It amounts to little more than fouled little pieces of wool, but the freedom in an open field and the collecting and gathering yields such sweet satisfaction. At home she washes the wool, spins it into thread, and is even able to knit it into underwear for herself and Dad. 

 

   “What are you standing there dreaming!”  It is the child’s voice of Meindert Boorsma, her friend from Hichtum who was her classmate.  “Come on, Ytsje, two can do more than one.”

   Meindert is an orphan who has adopted the old people language of his grandpa and grandma who are raising him.  “Or are you not inclined to look for sheep’s wool together

with a neighbor boy?”

   “Yes, of course.”

   “Actually, a charming girl like you should be going to school!” the boy said like a little adult.

   “And what about you!”

 

   “A boy like me can learn a lot from nature, from the birds of the field, says Grandpa.”  The little man comes from a family of bird catchers.*

   And that’s how the boy and girl spend the whole beautiful September day searching for sheep’s wool. 

* In Friesland, trapping Pacific Golden Plovers was a century-old tradition.  These plovers, coming from Scandinavia and NW Russia, would take a breather in Friesland’s mild winters.

For some Frisians, catching them would become a passion and an artful sport, not unlike fly fishing for others.  They would use a unique device, called the wilsternet, a drop-down net.  These were large but light nets, approximately 4 x 25 yards with an arrangement of pivoting poles and tension ropes that released the net over the capture area when the pull string was tugged by the wilsternetter who sat behind a wind screen at a distance of about 32 yards.

The wilsternetter would attract passing flocks with a whistle that imitated their call, and birds were lured toward the net by stuffed decoys or a life, fluttering bird.

When the attracted birds were about to land into the wind, the net was quickly flipped over with the help of the wind.

For many a wilsternetter this supplemented his livelihood; he would sell the birds to a poulterer for about 50 cents a piece, who would then export the meat to England where it was prized as a delicacy.

When Facts Are Stranger Than Fiction

Literature lovers know that they are expected “to suspend their disbelief” when immersing themselves in the writer’s world of imagination.

Yet, unless the fiction offers “verisimilitude,” the semblance of truth, the reader’s disbelief will kick in and short-circuit the aesthetic literary experience.

The events of De Treastfûgel really happened, though they often sound like fiction.

It’s written by Hylke Speerstra, a Frisian author who also wrote the bestseller It wrede paradys (Cruel Paradise), the stories of Dutch immigrants scattered around the globe.
I translated that book almost a dozen years ago now, and now am translating De Treastfûgel (The Comfort Bird).

 

It’s the story of two families and their descendants who in the 1800s start out in the same small village of Hichtum, Friesland, then find themselves nearly a century later not only on two different continents but, shockingly, on two opposing sides in WWII. The families are bonded by a common metaphor: the figure of the “treastfûgel,” introduced early in the book when Meindert Boorsma, the bird lover, tells young Ytsje Wytsma: “In every flight of migrating birds another kind of bird flies along to lend comfort, for they have a long and difficult journey ahead of them.”  For Ytsje, in her long and difficult life that ended as a migrating widow in disaster-plagued S. Dakota, her treastfûgel was her faith.  For the original Meindert Boorsma’s grandson Meindert, as an unwilling German SS soldier struggling desperately for survival in the disastrous siege of Leningrad and subsequent retreat, his treastfûgel was his father’s bird whistle that doubled as a guardian angel.

 Ytsje Wytsma-Namminga long nurtured what she perceived as a divine mandate: to emigrate to America.  In the early 1900s, as widow now, she with her descendants set out for South Dakota, where floods, disease, fatal accidents, drought, and the great depression made life more cruel than kind. 

Sometime after Ytsje’s death in 1934, her son and family move to Wisconsin for a brighter future.  It is there that Ytsje’s grandson Nanno is drafted into the Army, takes part in the hell of WWII’s D-Day and every major battle after that, then in the “liberation” of Germany, including a concentration camp, inexplicably living through it all without incurring a scratch.

Though the reader knows that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, there is nonetheless some incredulity when the diverse paths of Meindert Boorsma and Nanno Namminga cross among the ruins of Hitler’s land, Meindert a deserter from the defeated German army and Nanno a corporal in the conquering U.S. army.  They revel in their survival and their common Frisian ties and origins.

I hope to share some excerpts from The Comfort Bird in the weeks ahead with the readers of this blog.