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Apparently, the rate of inflation we discovered with the penguins applies to bontebok antelopes as well: they get monotonous surprisingly quickly. At least if they’re as plentiful as in the Bontebok Nature Reserve. And especially if the kids are fervently hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare mountain zebra in stead. (“Mum, were are the zebraaaaas?”)
In the end, you’re not only indifferent to bonteboks; they get kind of annoying. – Really, they’re just glorified cows, said Bruno. At least they seemed to be pretty far from the brink of extinction nowadays.
I hope I don’t come off ungrateful, though. This land blows my mind in so many ways. I’m not getting used to these landscapes, either. Majestic.
And I’ve never seen a sky this big.
Mpho from the Kopanong Bed & Breakfast in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, took us for a leisurely stroll around the neighbourhood we were staying in. We visited a kindergarten and a shabeen tavern made of plates of corrugated iron.
People invited us into their houses and shacks. We posed for pictures with them. – Say Khayelitsha! Mpho shouted before pushing the camera button. There was real pride in her voice.
- It’s a good thing your children get to see Africa at such a young age, she said. In the same tone someone would say it’s good for them to drink their milk daily.
It takes about 10 minutes to get used to wild penguins wobbling around you on the beach.
We took pictures of the first penguin we saw on Boulder Beach as if it were Bigfoot. By the time we were getting ready to leave, the kids didn’t even look up from their sandcastles when a cackling flock marched right past them and splashed into the water.
“Sad or dangerous things never happen,” my almost 3-year-old daughter said to me out of the blue, as I was tucking her in for the night last Sunday, in the double bed she shared with her sister in our hotel room in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina.
We had spent the day wandering around the old, eerily beautiful town. The river Neretva, which runs through it in a deep gorge, is a surreal shade of pure, bottle green. Stari Most – the elegant, 500-year-old bridge that was blown into smithereens in the early 90’s during the Balkan war – has been rebuilt meticulously, and the historical center has been restored with great care.
Outside it, you can still see a lot of post-war rubble and other remnants of horror. We walked past a Muslim graveyard with 1993 as the year of death on every headstone, of old and young people alike. Along the former front line stood the numerous, grim skeletons of houses, and the faςades of the ones still left standing were pockmarked by bullet holes and shrapnel scars. We took a few snapshots, feeling guilty about gawking. My daughters didn’t seem to pay any attention to the crumbled buildings.
Around the ruins, life was bustling. Billboards advertised mobile phones and boasted about faster Internet connections. People were going about their business of living, selling, buying, eating, sleeping and raising children, as normal as in any town I’ve ever visited, if perhaps a little subdued by the crisp, cold weather. I didn’t understand how any of it could be possible – not the war, nor the peace afterwards.
“No, they don’t happen,” I now heard myself reply to my daughter, immediately hating the dead weight of the lie around my neck. I should have been able to think of a way to dodge that one. It felt wrong. But I wanted her to go to bed peaceful and happy.
And I wanted to think she really believes it. For a little while longer.
“Sara’s grandma was so old that she died in her bed.”
“Oh… She must’ve been really old then.”
We were driving back home from IKEA. Grim thoughts sometimes plague me, too, after spending an afternoon there. But my daughter, who recently turned 5, didn’t seem to find the topic gloomy at all.
“Sara said that all her brothers and sisters cried. Or one brother and two sisters. But Sara didn’t. And her Mum didn’t cry either,” she continued.
“They didn’t cry?”
Must have been the mother-in-law.
“No. Sara already knows that everybody dies.”
“Oh.”
“Everybody dies sometimes.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“I will die one day, too,” my daughter said very matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, but not for a long time. You’ll have many years to do lots of things before that.”
She didn’t seem worried at all.
“Yeah, I’m only going to die after my own grandchildren are dead.”
“Well, you’ll be really, really old then.”
“And you’ll be dead, then, too,” she said cheerfully.
Nowadays, I have no problem talking about death with my kids. The first time it happened, it honestly freaked me out, but after a few times, you grow a little numb. Children want to know why people die, and when I’m going to die, and what happens afterwards. It’s not always simple, of course. Last summer my daughter asked me if children sometimes die, too. How the hell do you answer that? I dodged by saying that in all my life, I’d never met a child who died, so it’s very unusual.
“What if someone shoots them?” my four-year-old asked.
Now, before I had kids, I thought I’d never lie to them. Yeah, right.
“No-one ever does that,” I assured her.
At which point my daughter declared that when she grows up, she is going to shoot children so that they die. Alarmed, I told her that was a terrible idea. She said she’d shoot them and cut them in pieces and sell them in a shop.
“And people will taste it and go mmmm… yummy.”
I’m so glad her uncle and aunt are child psychologists. If she’s still sticking to that plan by next summer, we’ll set up some kind of intervention.
We were arriving home now. It was already dark. All this talk about death had made me drive slower than usual.
“I’m going to live with you when I’m a grown-up,” my daughter said.
“I know. You’re going to clean our house.”
It’s all part of her plan to grow up to be Cinderella.
“Yeah. And if Owen doesn’t want to live in our house, I’ll marry someone else.”
“Good thinking.”
Owen’s a brawny little fellow in her class, who hit little Louise very hard when all the children were fighting over the piñata sweets at my daughter’s birthday party. I like little Dirk much better. He has a crush on my daughter. And he was the only boy who didn’t refuse to eat the cupcakes we made for her class on her birthday. All the other boys said they were too sexy, because they had pink icing and tiny butterflies and Disney princesses on top.
“I promised Owen we’ll get married when we’re grown ups.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“But if he won’t live with us, I’ll just marry someone else.”
Dirk! Dirk! I was thinking, but I bit my tongue.
She’ll just have to figure out some things by herself.
“My t-shirt is not sexy!”
“It is too!”
“Are you saying it’s sexy?”
“It is sexy!”
I walked into the living room to find my daughters, 2 and 4 years old, in a heated debate just about to turn violent. The topic didn’t exactly surprise me. The concept of sexy has been popping up in our household lately, ever since the kids in my 4-year-old’s school taught her the word. It’s an insult. The little boys annoy the little girls by claiming pink (their all-time, unanimous favourite colour) is ”sexy”. Last time I heard it had ended with the girls running away screaming and the boys following them, yelling: “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” My daughter came home that day seething with indignation.
“Do you even know what sexy means?” I asked the girls now.
After a moment, they had to admit they had no idea.
“So, how can you call something sexy then?”
Mum 1, kids 0. But now they wanted to know what it means.
How do you explain the idea of sexiness to people who don’t know what sex is? My oldest is aware of the cell-level mechanisms of procreation as well as the workings of pregnancy, because she asked about it last summer and I explained. She still tells me sometimes how she finds it such a pity that it doesn’t work in the neat way she had imagined: that men give birth to little boys and women to little girls. But as far as I know, she has no idea yet that something called sex is (well, most of the time) involved in the process of making babies. Even if she does (never underestimate the schoolyard as a source of less-than-accurate information), I don’t think it would have helped me much here.
In the end, I just told the girls sexy is something grown ups like to look at.
“Eww,” was their spontaneous reaction, as if there was something inherently icky about grown up preferences.
But ever since this discussion, the word has substituted “pretty” when my daughters want to flatter me.
“Mum, that is a sexy shirt.”
“Mum, your nose ring is so sexy.”
“Mum, you look sexy today.“
It doesn’t help one bit that hearing it never fails to crack me up. My guess is the girls believe they have found the ultimate compliment. My husband gets his share, too. According to his wee daughters, his whole wardrobe is steaming hot and his soul patch is smoking. (As it is, actually.)
I’ve decided not to make a fuss about it, although I really wouldn’t mind if the girls scrapped the word from their vocabulary before we visit my in-laws on Christmas. I suppose I just have to practice keeping a straight face and not reward them with attention whenever they call me sexy. After all, they quickly forgot the “we will, we will f*ck you” song my oldest had picked up from school as well.
At least I hope they have.
A friend of mine sent me a message yesterday: she had bought my book.
Among all my friends and family, she and her husband are the first people to actually hold the book in their hands. She had been moving fast (which is impressive for someone eight months pregnant), because I myself had got word from my editor only a couple of hours earlier, saying the book is printed and out in stores now. My box of copies has been mailed to me here in Holland. It will probably arrive some time next week, which means everyone else will have seen the book before me.
“You will celebrate it, won’t you?” my friend asked.
I know I’m supposed to, and I really should. Celebrating endings is good for the soul. But the thing is, I have been asked this same question so many times during the entire novel-writing process. One thing I learned all along is that there are no endings in it. No natural moments of closure. No point in time when the whole thing is finally completely finished and you can put it down and party. That moment you see in movies and on television when you type “The End” and yank triumphantly the last page from the typewriter? It never happens.
“You’ll celebrate now, won’t you?” I was asked when I had more or less finished the first draft. But there was never a moment when I was really done with it. I didn’t even finish at The End, because I had written the ending earlier. And when the whole story was written down, I went back and added some. Deleted some. Changed things. Undid the changes. At some point I had a draft decent enough to send to some selected people for comments. They all got slightly different versions, though – depending on when I sent them their copy – because their comments led to more changes. I was too busy to celebrate.
“You’ll celebrate, won’t you?” I was asked when I had a version I was happy enough with to send to some publishing houses. But in stead of celebrating, I went back and improved some bits (horrified by the thought of having sent such a flawed version to anyone!), so that other publishers I sent it to a few months later got yet a different version.
I kept going back to the manuscript until the first positive reply from a publisher finally came, after several months of rather depressing waiting. The novel would get published!
“You’ll celebrate now, right?”
I admit those were giddy days – but I also immediately started to call other, slower publishing houses to get competing offers. After that, I had to compare them. When I finally chose a publisher, I found myself immediately in talks with the editor they assigned to my book, negotiating some unpleasant changes she wanted me to bring in. The moment of celebration had slipped past me again.
Last June I finished the revisions the editor had asked for and the (several) improvements I wanted to make myself that the editor hadn’t objected to. I guess it should have been a moment to celebrate, but rather than that, I sank into a week-long grey despair – the slump people often go through after an intense creative period. And it’s a good thing I didn’t jump the gun anyway, because in August, the manuscript was suddenly flung back onto my desk for some small but significant last minute revisions some people somewhere had suggested (one of them being me). That was a messy process, requiring negotiating back and forth with my editor, and again I could never yank that last page out of my typewriter (or even wait impatiently for the printer to slowly spit it out, hopefully without yet another paper jam).
So it didn’t end with a bang – I think the very last bit was some worried email I sent to my editor saying: “OK, I guess I’m just going to trust your professional judgement on this.” Woohoo. I’m sure someone suggested celebrating then, too, and I did fly off to New York with my husband shortly after that – but I wasn’t thinking about the book or about rewarding myself at that point any more. I just wanted to put the whole thing out of my mind (and to spend a few days away from my exhausting little angels). And whenever a fleeting thought about the book passed my mind, it was in anticipation of the moment it would finally come out.
So, now’s the time to celebrate. Again. But should I celebrate now that I know the book is out there somewhere? Or next week, when I receive my box of copies? I’m opting for the latter, but it might be just me wanting to put off writing “The End” for a little while longer.
Perhaps because it makes me feel like I should get started with something new.
I went swimming last week, and saw what must be the Oldest Swimming Man in Holland in the pool. Or at least he looked like he could enter the contest.
I swam past him several times, until at one point I accidentally kicked him in the hand. I turned to apologize, and he winked. I don’t mean winking like old men sometimes wink at young(er) people: “You kids!” It was most definitely a very, very flirty kind of wink. I swallowed a pint of chlorinated water and finished my laps still grinning. I guess if someone is 90+ and still afloat, it is just to be expected they also have the zest to flirt with people 60 years younger.
Another encounter with old people. The ancient nutty woman living next door rang our doorbell at 5AM this morning. She was shouting half-hysterically about some music she heard from the house next to hers and demanded we came to her apartment to hear it, too. My husband is a sweet guy, so he got dressed and went with her.
There was nothing to hear, of course. Silence. Like you’d expect – and prefer – at 5AM.
- You hear this? It’s been going on all night!
My husband said he couldn’t hear anything. The woman was indignant.
- What, am I crazy then?
Old age. I know it will happen to me too. I’ll start to hear non-existent music. I just hope it will be the kind of music that will make me feel like getting frisky with young people, and not the kind that keeps me awake at night when the rest of the world sleeps.
I need a nap.
The thought came to me as I was watching the throng of tourists on top of the Empire State Building: they really don’t look like they are having fun.
Sure, it was early morning, we had all queued a long time, gone through security checks, waited for several elevators while enduring manic sales pitches from people selling recorded guided tours with Danny DeVito. But still. The Empire State Building. Great visibility, just a tad chilly in the shadow side, New York City at our feet. And we all looked… well, kind of grim.
The crowd I was part of consisted of people from all over the world, and most of us bore the same expression on our faces. As if we were dutifully fulfilling an obligation: Visit the Empire State Building. Look in all four directions. Maybe with Danny DeVito, if you don’t mind spending a few bucks, or just the map of Manhattan, if you like to know where things are precisely located. Or otherwise just wait for a spot at the railing, peer around, see if you recognize anything, take a few snapshots, repeat three more times and get the hell out.
You see the same thing going on at any tourist attraction all over the world. The few people grinning at their companions (and their camera lenses) with genuine excitement are vastly outnumbered by people who are far less enthusiastic. Shuffling their feet, looking around mildly disappointed by how small / dirty / expensive / crowded / commercial / crumbled the thing they came to see is, still a little pissed off about how high the entrance fee was, how the A/C of the tour bus broke down on the way there, or how they got cheated at the currency exchange. Leafing through their guide books to see where they should go next.
Yes, should go. Tourism is full of obligations. We arrive some place new, with a few days of our precious holiday to spend, and with the vague feeling that we have to use them well to maximise the experience – to really see the place. We take our cues from guide books, brochures and touts. The efficient ones among us get organized, have a timetable, manage to do the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and l’Arc de Triomphe on a single day. Others take the guided tour or hop on a sightseeing double decker. We all feel the urge to gather photographic evidence, with which to bore our friends and family afterwards. Here’s me in front of Taj Mahal. Here are the kids at the Great Pyramids. This one the tour guide took of all of us, it’s a little out of focus but you can see the Colosseum on the background. And, yes, here we are on top of the Empire State building. Squinting grumpily – it must be the bright sunlight, or the fact that queuing up there took forever.
Most people are just unhappy most of the time, a friend of mine once said – quoting the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I think. I wondered about that in the long queue back to the elevators. Travelling pushes us from our comfort zone, into the sea of the unknown. Maybe we just try to do what we feel is expected from us. Dreading to hear upon returning: ”Whaaaat, you went all the way there and you didn’t see X? That was the best part!” Or we are afraid of being like those people who stay in all-inclusive resorts and never budge from the pool. They could have been anywhere, we sneer. They could have saved their pennies and gone to the spa in the neighbouring county.
The Empire State building was the first and last bit of heavy duty tourism we did during our stay in New York. We had left our copy of the Lonely Planet at home, and never really missed it. My Mom had told me Ellis Island was a must see, but somehow we never made it to the ferry. We didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty, and didn’t even take the Staten Island ferry that passes it. We saw the statue standing in the distance from Battery Park, though, while a gathering of Wiccans were chanting behind us, celebrating their harvest weaving ceremony. We got merrily lost in Chinatown. And we did catch the city from some other unexpected angles (especially when my husband lost his passport). Every now and then I saw a tour bus and the thought crossed my mind: what am I missing?
Not a lot of fun, I assured myself.
With a tinge of appropriate guilt.
My daughters, 4,5 and 2,5 years old, don’t speak any English, but they are curious about the music I listen to. What are those people singing about? I often tell them little stories about the songs, sometimes based on the lyrics or the video, or just images the music calls up in my mind. I love the way the girls sit and listen attentively to the songs afterwards, trying to hear my story in them. And sometimes they make requests. Like today.
”Play rock music!” (Despite the seemingly unlimited choice, I have already learned the only thing they will settle for is Nirvana’s Unplugged album.)
”Play the one where that man climbs up on the roof and sits on the chimney to warm up his butt,” asks the 4-year old, giggling. (Damien Rice: Coconut Skins)
”Play the one with the ghost girl,” whispers the 2-year-old, wide-eyed. ”The song where there’s a ghost outside the window and she wants to come inside… and then the boy lets her!” (Kate Bush: Wuthering Heights)
”Play the one with the fairy who’s throwing away all her forks and knives.” (Björk: Hyperballad)
”Play the one where the man is driving and he sees an airplane come closer and closer from behind and it flies really low over his car and CRASHES,” asks the 4-year-old excitedly. (Clinic: Come Into Our Room – and no, I have no idea how I came up with that story, but it really seems to appeal to my children)
”Play the one with the girl who works at the bank.” (The Velvet Underground: Sweet Jane. Both girls join in on the chorus at the top of their lungs: ”CJ!”)
”Play the one where Chris Martin has baby Moses in his arms and they’re dancing really fast and the baby laughs and laughs.” (Coldplay: Speed Of Sound – hey, don’t look at me like that, my oldest went through an intense Coldplay period when she was 2 and there was nothing we could do about it. Her favourite song was Politik! And she came up with this particular mental picture by herself, after numerous queries about the singer and his family. No tabula rasa proponents in our household, they really have a mind of their own.)
But sometimes there just isn’t enough information.
”Play the one with the angel,” the girls demand. What angel?
”Mom!!! The angel!!!”
I recall vaguely that some time ago, I told the girls some little musical story about an angel, but I have no idea who or which song it was. We try Tori Amos. No, it’s not her; she’s the one with Rice Crispies and a bunny. Cesaria Evora? No! Suzanne Vega? No, no, no!! Björk?
”No, she’s a fairy! Mom!!”
I can’t find the right one. Big disappointment. I plop the outraged kids in front of the telly to calm them down with the same soothing Polish animations I grew up with, and go make flatbread and veggies for dinner. The musical requests are over, for today.
PS. If anyone has suggestions for angel music, I’m all ears. (Although I might not dare to bring up the topic with my kids any time soon. They have poor tolerance for bad DJs.)
