Smoldering Ruins

Note:The Hiemstra tribe is seeking its future in America while the Boorsma character searched for a better life closer by: in Germany and Friesland. [see Excerpt 8]

Both choices will have long-term consequences.

Excerpt 10

End of February 1919.  Johannes Boorsma is Frisian again among the Frisians.  As long as it lasts.  On the way to his small houseboat on the Franeker Canal …he hears the call of the first oyster catcher.  What a mild late winter!  And there is not such good news: he will have to tell his wife pretty soon that he just lost his farm job and is now unemployed.

…

[He’s been humiliated by his employer once too often, and this time he responds in kind, with the inevitable result.]

   When he will deliver the bad news to his Pytsje pretty soon, she will say: “Johannes, my boy, did it have to go this way?”  “Yes,” will be the response, “in this case it had to.”

   As he thinks about it, a twinge of pity shoots through his breast: not self-pity, but pity for her.  Pytsje, with her longing for peace.  She’s the only one who can calm the lion, but she’s not nearly always successful.  And still she’s behind him all the way and gives him all her support.

   It’s a dark, moonless night; the path to the houseboat leads over uneven polder dikes, through muddy tracks, and across wide water-filled ditches.  Crap, he feels the sludge seep into his clogs, but this time his dreams are not to be undone by a couple of wet feet.

   In his dream the image of a magical landscape beneath steel blue summer skies rises before his eyes. … A horse is harnessed to a showy carriage, a flag with stars and stripes is waving in the wind, a couple of children playing between cattle and flowers, swallows high in the air like phantoms against the deep blue.  Does he hear the call of the golden plover now?  You bet, gliding from the mountains comes a huge congregation of golden plovers.  They’ve arrived home after a journey over sea and lands.  And among them, a solitary “comfort bird.”

Johannes feels the mire … run into his clogs again.  What kind of foolish dream was this?  Did this dream awaken a secretly hidden longing in him?  America?  He keeps going, in confusion now.  His dad was according to the mayor not good enough for America; the old man’s longing turned into resentment, if it wasn’t hate.  No America for Dad, then not for me either.  Don’t talk to me about America.  Then Germany is preferable!

   There, in the Ruhr District he lived like a libertine.  … He wanted to become German with the Germans…. He was getting closer to feeling what animated the German, but for some reason or other it wasn’t becoming his home.  After he saw in 1914 the cannon fodder march in columns to the trenches of the First World War, he was back on the home yard.  …

   He came home with a mustache like that of the German Kaiser.  A call to military service lay on Mom’s plush table cloth.  In neutral Netherlands he had to be mobilized. 

…

   In late summer 1915 he saw Pytsje Jongsma come biking up the Warnzer Cliff.  “Where are you headed?” he called after her.  She could’ve just kept biking, … but she stopped.  A handsome young man in uniform laid his hand close to hers on the handlebars.  With his severe, perfectly cut mustache he looked more like a general than a soldier.  And she, she was a tall young lady with eyes the color of the South Sea beneath a north wind-swept spring sky.

   After that they became inseparable.  In mid-September 1916 they biked together to Koudum to give their marriage notice, and that was high time, for on 6 April 1917 a beautiful daughter was born to them.  Lysbeth.  On 24 April followed his honorable discharge from “service with the militia.”  Not enough money for a house, but enough for a little old houseboat.  Pytsje always gave him space, but that evening she said: “For our child’s sake both of us must be responsible and aim for stability.”

   Thus a steady job with a farmer.  And then it started again: from one farmer to the other.  Always and everywhere the pitcher would be filled with water till it broke....

And now he has to deliver the black tidings to Pytsje again.  Fired, while she’s ready to give birth.  …  

Without even an ounce of veal for Pytsje, he stands before the gang plank….  After he lets himself down into the hold, he turns the flame of the lamp higher.

   “You’re late!  The baby is here already.”

   He takes the kerosene lamp from the hook, turns the flame higher and lights the scene  where the voice came from.

   “Good god, Pytsje.”  There she lies, on a mattress on the floor, with a cloth-wrapped baby, the umbilical cord still tied to the mother.

   “It is a healthy child,” she reports calmly.

…

    An hour and a half later mom and child are resting, clean and peaceful.  …

She says: “Are you aware that we received a little fowler?”  And she says his name.

   He nearly loses his voice when the boy’s name is announced: “Meindert, Meindert Birdie.”

He has the Boorsma habit of checking out the weather before turning in for the night.  This time he does so only to breathe in his deep happiness all alone.  With his back turned to the cold north, he’s staring in southwesterly direction, and a feeling descends on him that there, in that black emptiness lies their future anchoring place.  Back in the old polder…nearly at the end of the world, … on the mill yard of the small farmer and dreamer Freark Smink.  ....  As miller he would have only one boss, and that’s the wind.  However rough and changeable that gentleman could be, Johannes “Kaiser” would adjust himself to it. …

   “All is settled,” he says in German, when with a feeling of full contentment he takes one more look at his wife and children that night.

   It’s almost midnight when Johannes Boorsma thinks of one more thing.  He raises his bike from the hold, pushes it through the marshy ground to the roadway, and pedals to Hichtum to tell his old mother Willemke that there’s a Meindert again.

…

His employer, Freark: “There comes Her Majesty ‘Meadow and Water,’ with the Kaiser himself at the helm. … The mill and the living arrangements are free.  As far as that goes, you can move in there tonight if you want.  And what’s expected from you?  Milling!  For the rest it’s up to you….” 

   Johannes plunges ahead: “Free living on the mill yard, four liters milk per week on top of that; at the expense of the polder commission, you shouldn’t get stuck with that, Freark.  On these conditions I’ll see to it that here in the Skar children will never come home again with wet feet.”

   …

And now the farmer would like to know what Johannes thinks of the “current Germany,” where after WWI “the ruins are still smoldering.”

   “Dear Freark, there will come a time when the Germans will lash out again.  I know, you’re leaning toward the broken gun, but not I!  After the signing of the Versailles peace treaty in 1919 I don’t believe in peace anymore.  With that treaty the Germans are even more humiliated; as losers they’re being undressed by the French and now as well by a growing power like America.  That’s going to turn into war again.  I’m telling you: humankind and war are inextricably connected.”  

   “But Johannes, do you know how many young people fell in action within a couple of weeks just by Verdun?  More than 200,000!  Every one of them a fine young man!  Such a thing should never, never happen again.  Get rid of the guns!”

…

The Twenties.  Never before has Johannes Kaiser lived so long at one and the same address as on the mill place by Freark Smink.  The milk route for the Workum Cooperative “The Good Expectation” flourishes and delivers a basic income.  Day in and day out the milk cans of eighteen farms hustle through the hands of the Kaiser.

All goes well, until the milk factory Board outsources the milk route anew.

 “Now what?”

 He’s out.  …

... The next day the Kaiser has vanished. … all of the Heidenskip community knows about the silent exodus: “They appear to live now in that little houseboat that for ages has lain in neglect ….”

It is now 1929.  Johannes and Pytsje in the meantime live with their six children in a larger and newer houseboat.  Its name “Meadow and Water” has expanded to “BICYCLE SALES AND REPAIR SHOP J. BOOMSMA.”  In the evening the … paper is tossed through the boat door, once a week supplemented with the Sunday edition of the Rheinische Post.

   A couple of years later.  In Germany the ruins continue to smolder and the wounds continue to smart.  That’s how it’s put in the Rheinische Post, but according to the Kaiser, [pontificating in the local tavern,] it won’t be long before the roses will bloom again.  “...

   “What are you talking about, Kaiser!”

   “Let me tell you exactly what I mean.  In the end, you and I will need the national socialists in Germany.  When they get in power, then the farmer and his hired man will both ride in the same kind of beautiful car.”  The farmer who’s listening after this will pedal past the Kaiser’s Repair Shop, even if he has two flat tires, for the farmer in no way wants to ride in the same car as his hired man.  And that’s how Johannes Meinderts Boorsma, on the way to his ideal, relegated his own fate to the dustbin.

…

Dakota

Excerpt 9: a continuation of my translation of Speerstra’s The Comfort Bird.

On Wednesday morning, 1 March 1911, the Noordam glides past the Statue of Liberty into the New York harbor.  It is clear, cool, and almost windless.  While Ellis Island – the island of tears – lies waiting a bit farther on, here and there a tear is already wiped away.  But in the huge customs warehouses everything runs like clockwork.  After three hours all passengers, except for a few with medical, administrative, or personal issues, have set foot on American soil.

…

   There they go, finally feeling the solid ground of the Land of Deliverance under their feet.  …

The real America.  They’re standing in Grand Central Station, ready to begin their train journey.  To the city of Sioux Falls. 

It becomes a matter of patience, the journey lasts 33 hours. 

But then they’re welcomed by a bright late winter sun; and there five adults are standing with eight children in the middle of America on a nearly forsaken platform.  Each one looks around cautiously, one even more worn out than the other.  The shortage of diapers was supplemented in the train with pieces from Grandma’s flannel undershirt and underpants.  And still the old lady acts as if she knows nothing of the letter in the pocket of her undershirt.

…

It’s sixteen hours later, in the late night of 5 March.  Douwe and Nammen look at the station clock of Yankton and note that their watches are still in sync.  An old lady with a basket stands in the wooden station building.

…waiting for them in front of the station are two large covered wagons and a one-horse-drawn flat wagon, with the moving crates already loaded.

“Namminga folk to Springfield, Hiemstra folk to Running Water,” the driver cries with a shrill voice. 

…

That morning at half past seven Douwe and Geartsje with their three children reach the address in the area of Running Water.  Farther ahead, in a depression, the Missouri River

lies glistening in the first light of morning.  It’s almost too much for Geartsje again.

In what kind of town or region did Nammen and Lys with Grandma and the kids end up?

   They themselves happened to arrive on the Ulbe Eringa Farm.  They can promptly pull up at the breakfast table.  Eringa’s prayer sounds like a sermon in a cathedral. 

…

   For the exhausted Hiemstras there’s bread with pork lard, but no rest.  And neither diapers.  For Eringa was only responsible for the welcome, the sermon, and the stories.  “Well, I’ll bring you now to the Wijnia Farm, there’s plenty work there for a farm worker and his wife.  All right!  We’ll see each other again in church tomorrow.”

   That same afternoon around mealtime they find themselves with the three little children on the Wijnia Farm.  Again, Geartsje doesn’t dare to mention sleep; and after all, for the first time in her life she’s lodging somewhere.  But Douwe takes the chance.  “It’s high time that my wife and kids get a little sleep in their system.”

   But no, the dinner table is ready.  “The river!” Wijnia begins, “we can’t quite see the Missouri River from here, but sometimes we can sure hear it. Watch out, I’m warning you now!” 

…

Wijnia plants himself at the end of the long dining table and closest to the pot.  There is his own chair of command.  To silence his large household the man merely needs to hem.  As one very much in charge, he looks around, and commands:  “Respect for God!”, folds his hands, and in a wide-ranging prayer makes mention of a blessed trip from Hichtum to Springfield.  Amen.

…

   Douwe …glances at the forsaken prairie through the small window.  The way the land looks here must be the way it first saw light after the Flood.  He feels himself drenched in a wave of emotion, and he thinks to himself: we shouldn’t have done this.

   An hour and a half later Douwe Hiemstra, formerly milker in Hichtum, is farm worker and Geartjse a help for day and night on the Wijnia Farm in Running Water.  It lasts for a week, …then: “Wijnia, I can make a lot more on the Lee Nickel Farm, so I’m going to leave with wife and kids.”

   “Then off with you!”  Wynia is getting angry; his other half stays milder: “Oh, how ungrateful!”  She says it while she snatches the plates off the table.  What Douwe says next is nothing Geartsje has heard him say before; he quotes Meindert Birdie: “It’s been drummed into me here: Whoever makes himself a sheep is going to be eaten by wolves!”

   When the Nickel boys pick them up the same day with horse and wagon, they stand ready, fully packed. …

A half year later Douwe and Geartsje move for ten dollars more a month to the Tommy Jones Farm, and after that it’s on to the large town of Avon, for there they can acquire eighty acres of good farmland for a moderate price.  First rent, of course.  As one who came from Penjum, Douwe seeds it first with wheat, but by harvest time the price of grain has gone south.  After a couple of months Geartsje’s household ledger is in bad shape.  Poverty.  If the oldest children hadn’t come home twice a week from the Thys Bakker Farm with a gallon of soup, they would have been at hunger’s door.

On a Sunday morning after church, Douwe bumps into a side job: he can become gravedigger for the cemetery of the fast-growing  village of Avon. 

…

   When Douwe comes home one night in 1916, later than usual, Geartsje notices that he’s not well.  He lacks appetite and has trouble sleeping.  It’s as if she sees her own dad in him, father Hizkia who from all the setbacks could also hit bottom.  What if Douwe himself should have caught the deadly flu?  It didn’t take long for the truth to surface: “Geartsje, I can’t take this job anymore, the grief in the cemetery kills me.”  In a week’s time he’s had to dig who knows how many children’s graves.

   And so Douwe leaves the dead of Avon and moves his young family to Norwegian Hill.  There, in the middle of nowhere, a forsaken farm is for sale.  They take it; they don’t ask why it is forsaken.

…

It’s a warm Sunday afternoon in the last part of July 1918, when a hot prairie wind blows around Norwegian Hill; in the hollow the Missouri shimmers in the backlight.  The Rocky Mountains are apparently generous with water again - the river is lively as a deer.  Together the farmer and his wife stroll to the top of the hill and see, deep in the hollow, their wheat field, undulating in the hot wind.  Their golden triangle, the fruit of their toil in sweat and tears.  The crop is ripening, almost three feet high.  Together they walk down the slope toward their wheat field.

   In the distance against the slope the dark red of their house with barn and cowshed contrasts against a steel blue sky.  “Grandma is taking care of the kids,” she says, “I think that she can see us.”

    “What a wonderful promising crop,” he says.

   “Nobody can surprise us here,” she says.  “Come.”  He understands. They do it, in their own ripening grain.

   …

 A good two days later, during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, the barking of the Scottish collie Birdie wakes them up.  The barking becomes a howling cry.  Douwe shoots out of bed and strides on bare feet across the yard.  He hears noise behind the wooden barn.  He goes down, and the murmur turns into a rushing.  The Missouri!  Now he dashes down the hill.

   When some fifteen minutes later he resurfaces in his underwear, Geartsje has come to meet him.  “The Missouri,” he pants, “the Missouri has ripped all of our land with it.  Geartsje, my dear, we’ve lost everything.”  All their hopes and expectations have been torn away, every scrap of land by a roaring river. 

But just as a healthy tree always grows new leaves, so Douwe and Geartsje will gather new courage; that same year they return to the forsaken Tommy Jones farm to try again through hard work and smart farming. 

…

  It’s the beginning of November 1919.  They were able to rent some additional land.  And then the winter hits.  Forty degrees below on top of a knee-high layer of snow.  In the meantime Douwe has more than one in Geartsje: any day now another child may come and this time she is so heavy, she hardly knows what to do.

   …

   Grandma emerges from the side room with birth news: “A great big boy!  I’d say at least ten pounds, and I’m talking about Frisian pounds.  I think it should be a Nammen.”

   A half hour later Grandma is back:  “Another big boy!  Another heavy one.  This should be a Lolke, Douwe!”  Doctor estimates the boys together at nearly eighteen pounds.  And Geartsje is doing great.  “Only, the old doctor is exhausted, so I tucked him in next to Geartsje in Douwe’s place.”

   …

   “As long as I have you here now,” begins Grandma Ytsje Namminga-Wytsma, “I want to give you some good advice: If you as man and wife want to yield to each other’s desire, you should do it after the day’s work in the evening.  Not in the daytime, and never outside, that only makes for hefty babies.”

I Want to Live

Excerpt 7

[Note:  this is an ongoing series of excerpts from my translation of

Hylke Speerstra’s De treastfugel, published both in Frisian and in Dutch.

The book, translated as The Comfort Bird, seeks a publisher.]

(Johannes Boorsma, driven by need and ambition, seeks his fortune in Germany.

It wasn’t easy to leave his parents behind.)

A father in tears, a mother trying in vain to calm the storm.  He remembers that he ran outside and through the window saw the old man sitting in the house, his back turned to the outside world.  Mother brought her son to the small gate by the road.  “Son, wherever you will go, weigh your words.”  The mother and the son, who dearly love each other, shake hands, while the father has his back turned against the evil world.

Dad.  He felt himself tied to his birthplace which he seemingly hated and loved at the same time.  And always longing for a better place.  … The real fate of Meindert Birdie was that he had been born without wings; he had always talked and sung with the birds, even able to fly around a bit with them.  But he caught on that he lacked wings.  What remained was only an anchor which he dropped then here, then there. 

…

What do you want to do, Johannes Boorsma?  Live in fear all your life, or live? …

Johannes , on the way to Frillendorf.

[He finds work, enjoys himself, and is paid well.]

On Sunday evening, 11 August 1912, Johannes is at the door of his old parents in Hichtum.

   “Dad is waiting for you, boy,” his mom whispers.  “He’s close to the end.”

   “Here is Johannes,” his mom whispers while she opens the bedstead doors a bit wider to let in some light. …

   “Dad!”  Two dull eyes that light up and fasten on the son.  He reaches out to his son what once was the iron-strong fist of Meindert Birdie and now seems as if the son is holding all of his dad in that one hand.

   A day later, on 12 Monday August 1912, Meindert Boorsma, age 63, dies.  Laid out with his hands folded on his chest, and hidden in those hands the thing with which he had serenaded his longing for the Better Land.  Johannes had taken the bird whistle back home with him from Germany.  “It belongs with Dad on his last journey, it is the mirror of his soul.”

A Shipful of Hope

Excerpt 8

Geartsje Hiemstra-Namminga feels herself trapped in a haunted no-man’s-land where chaos and confusion reign.  …

   She hears the blast of the ship’s horn.  The 12,000-ton ocean steamer is leaving the dock.  Her stomach churns, then it turns.  A ship loaded with uncertainty and hope.  More than a thousand men, women and children of a hundred different kinds and who knows how many languages.  Torn loose from their roots.  …

Geartsje’s three fall asleep at last: Jacob four years old, Ytsje two, and Hizkia eight months. …

   Some more hours later, deep in the nausea-inducing stomach of the steamship, Geartjse Hiemstra-Namminga stumbles around with three whining kids.  They are wet and dirty, and the lost diapers have not re-surfaced. 

   “The little fella is asking for the breast.”  Grandma is awake and in command again.  “Mom, I feel like I don’t have a drop of milk, I’m dry.”

   “No milk left?  I’ve never had that happen.”  The old lady has a way of hurting her daughter from time to time. …

   Later in the evening there are signs everywhere of the increasing wind.  …

“The Lord will protect us and take care of us.”  And with those words Grandma is going to go to sleep, trying again to get a head start on her rest.  Douwe and Nammen have been upstairs and come back with the news that an icy cold winter wind together with splashing water clouds chased all the happiness seekers from the upper deck.  …

   Something seems wrong with the Noordam.  It is rumored that in such a serious storm it can sail at only half its power, for otherwise it would bury itself so deep inside the enormous waves that it might never surface again.

   “The ship is just trying to stay afloat.” …

Now they discover the bad shape Grandma is in.  Totally done in.  For the first time the daughter has to wash and change the mother.  Geartjse carefully pulls the smelly undervest over her head, and then there’s still a flannel undershirt that needs changing.

   Wait, what is that?  Something drops out of a secret inside shirt pocket.  A white envelope.  A letter.  From Springfield  SD, delivered in Hichtum.  The address written in ink is from none other than Lolke.  Did Grandma in Hichtum hide a letter from Lolke?  She must have.  Why then didn’t she open the envelope?  Because there might have been an inconvenient truth inside?  Geartsje takes hold of the envelope and pretends to know nothing.

Because of the extremely bad weather and other setbacks, the ocean journey takes a week longer than usual, but then the weather improves.  After Grandma too has recovered, her first words are: “Are all of you still here?” …

Later, at night, while Grandma snores her own dream, Geartjse and Douwe open the letter from Lolke in South Dakota, and read:

  “Dear family

   […]Here west of Springfield the summer seemed to run its course so

    ideally, but now by us on Norwegian Hill the bitter cold winter weather

   is getting the best of us.  In the fall we heard little good news from the

   Biesmas who live west of Sioux Falls, and now nothing is heard from

   them at all anymore. It’s not likely that they crossed the Missouri, because

   over there it’s said to be even worse and twelve farm folk were frozen to

   death.  It is so bare and miserable here, every sane person

   is heavyhearted. Think hard before you start, tell our mother that. […]”