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.
…
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