Anyone who crosses the IJsselbrug from Zutphen arrives in De Hoven. Officially it is a village, but it only appears to have been so since 2015. Before that it was a district of Zutphen. A wonderful reversal; because where growth centers eager to expand are turning one village after another into a residential area, De Hoven has officially been villaged. It is obvious that opinions in Hoveny are divided on this. Eleven years ago signed The Gelderlander testimonies from ‘village people’ who finally felt recognised, but also from ‘local residents’ who felt expelled from the city.
Of course, in such circumstances there are also people who simply enjoy reading a book: De Hoven has relatively ample bookcases and the best-stocked cupboard contains a thin collection of stories by Lin Scholte (1921-1997): Takdiran and other stories from 1977. Scholte was the daughter of a KNIL soldier and an Indian woman and spent the first 24 years of her life – at the age of sixteen she married a soldier herself – in the Dutch East Indies, which is also her main subject. She is no longer read much.
You don’t have to stay in for long Takdiran (which means destiny) to conclude that that is a shame. Scholte tells precisely, for example, about how her mother sat on a table for hours with her as a baby in her arms during a flood. “The water rose under the table top, it lapped against it, the house creaked at its seams and swayed slightly with the wave motion.”
Gunfight
Most of it Takdiran is about Scholte’s experiences after the Japanese capitulation, in the chaos of Indonesian freedom fighters, British troops and groups of Dutch women and children who allow themselves to be carried away in the hope of getting out of the fighting. Then it concerns barracks where everyone is sleeping together on the floor, but where you can also feel some guy’s hand on your leg or end up in the middle of a firefight in an open truck. At that moment, Scholte tells her children (she has two) to make themselves as small as possible and she stands around them protectively. Characteristic of Scholte’s calm, reflexive writing style is that she adds: “Of course it wouldn’t have helped much, I now realize, if our truck had actually been hit.”
Eventually the family ends up in the Netherlands, where the children are introduced to ice cream. That hangs in icicles on the boat on which they sail to Amsterdam in the middle of winter. Kind of like popsicles, mother explains. But why do they hang popsicles on a boat here, the bewildered little ones want to know.
The last – very remarkable – story is about the illness and death of Scholte’s father in 1959. It contains painfully beautiful dialogues between daughter and doctor, in which the latter refuses to say that the condition is incurable and the daughter still manages to get to the heart of the matter with a series of roundabout questions. It also turns out to be a euthanasia story, perhaps one of the earliest in Dutch literature – concluded with a precise and loving description of the final death.
