Excerpt 12 from The
Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra; tr. by H.J. Baron
Johannes Boorsma has gained a cruel enemy; his thriving
Bicycle and Repair Shop has been hit by the depression in the 1930s.
…
It finally comes
down to the fact that the Bicycle Sales and Repair Shop is barely making
it. In the 20s the pace was still
steady, but since the dry summer and the three fall storms of 1928 it’s been
trouble. Not that the people of Workum
and surroundings had much awareness that right after Thursday, 23 October –
Black Thursday – the stock market collapsed here too. There had been a winter, and they had felt
that. The winter of 1929.
It became icy
cold. Johannes and Pytsje could barely
keep the stove burning. The whole month
of February they sat close to the stove in their coats. The frozen canal between Workum and Bolsward
creaked with frost; it became quiet on the country roads.
…
On the Workum
schoolyard his son was tagged as “the son of the Kaiser from the little
houseboat.” Time and again he had to
defend himself and his brother and sisters till blood flowed. With both fists. That morning before school started his
attackers drove him into the corner of the schoolyard, and when he had finally
fought himself free, he saw the school principal standing motionless in the
school door. At that moment Meindert
made up his mind.
…
“No, I’m never
going back to school. Never! I can take care of myself.” He’s not going to humiliate himself by
telling his parents about the taunting and the bullying.
“They want to keep
our kind of people dumb.” Johannes
Boorsma breathes heavily and his words come out hoarse. “And this way they’re going to succeed too. Because, dammit, we don’t have enough
education. My dad as a kid gathered
shitty tufts of sheep wool to stay alive and on the rebound I sat under a cow
when I was only twelve. And then I
recently had to place our own daughter, our Lysbeth of twelve, with a
farmer. My child in a cow barn bed with
manure on its doors. Isn’t there ever
going to come an end to this slavery!”
The Dad turns back
to his son and says, now more quietly: “I’m willing to crawl on my knees, boy,
if you’ll go to school and get an education.”
“I don’t want Dad
to crawl for me, I want to take care of myself.”
“Can’t you get it
through your head then that knowledge is power?”
“I don’t need
power!” The boy is shouting now. “When ten big boys together want to beat me
up, there’s no use.” The boy rushes out,
grabs his leaping pole from the flat roof, takes a run-up, leaps across the
canal and heads for the fields, in search of freedom, justice, and work. Yes, work, for he’s not afraid of that. Working, he can be anybody’s equal.
…
When his son comes home around bedtime, a mother stands in
the door trembling with worry waiting for him.
…
He speaks: “I just placed myself as junior farm helper with
Tsjipke Goslinga. The boss said that I
can take lessons on the side in Parrega.
For the rest I can take of myself.”
…
On an early and dark morning in November 1930 he may go
along with his dad to catch golden plovers with a clapnet by the Heidenskip
Skar.
…
The dad tells him
about the grandfather: “I’m telling you, the man in his youth carved a bird
whistle out of a cow bone and dolled it up with little copperplates and it
became a miraculous instrument. When it
was finished, he could imitate any meadow bird, and so amazingly beautiful and
realistic that the birds thought of him as a bird.”
…
The boy speaks:
“Grandpa wanted to travel with the birds to faraway lands, but he thought that
he would then have to leave his soul behind.
In his heart he wanted to go to America, but because of that he held
back. Dad would have liked to go to
America too, but because Grandpa didn’t go, you stayed here too.”
…
It’s quiet for a
long time, then the boy says: “When I’m grown up, I’ll travel anywhere.”
“Then you should
know that in a flight of plovers, sometimes a bird travels with them to comfort
others. One who undertakes a long
journey needs comfort.”
“Mom is my comfort
bird. For the rest I’ll take care of
myself.”
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