Wednesday, I was working with my mother. She had hung a thick scarf over the chair, before she said it I knew what she was going to say. “North-facing room, huh.”
October, the day had started cold. When we got downstairs that morning, the thermostat had been set to 15. Just a little while and we could blow clouds during breakfast. Like every day, we had to wait for the sun to shine through the high windows and our house – a monument from the time of factories and cattle markets, of communism, the prints of Jacob Jongert, handcarts and unfilled roads, but also of film and vehicles, a society on the brink of progress – would heat up to 21st century standards. Free and for nothing, that is, but only for those who could muster the patience. We had agreed to keep it up as long as possible, until the end of October without heating, it was a matter of getting used to. Then we’d been bidding against each other—my mother, child of a family of thirteen, the boys in the attic, icicles on the windows, frost on the covers. My father, one of seventeen, three in bed, horse blankets, extra straw in between – all the while shivering with pleasure from beneath our caramel throws.
I felt my fingers, cold.
Cold also on the news sites, my regular route to productivity.
On one: the Russians and the Ukrainians. Immediately afterwards tractors, inflation, nitrogen, drama politics. Omikron, oh god yes, omikron. Anti-Semitism on television, anti-Semitism in the House of Representatives, anti-Semitism in the mind of a rapper with 31 million followers. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, our communal facilities more and more eroded, the crooks within the gates, a prime minister with no vision nor sense of responsibility and in his shameful wake a suspect who declared in court to have ‘no active memory’ of the time he kicked a boy to death in Mallorca. Above all, the threat of a nuclear bomb, large and elusive, impossible to prepare for, and so I returned to my keyboard.
Coffee first, then.
During the chatter I thought of the knowledge of an acquaintance, who somewhere in recent years had become convinced that if you take a plane to another country, you can bet that taxi drivers there will refuse you because ‘they don’t give you environmental points. Keep up’. I still didn’t know how to properly respond to such messages without giving the impression that I was someone who knew more.
The question that kept coming back in the meantime: had it ever been this bad in the world? No, said one, of course, said the other, and then invariably followed the misery of that time, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Population Protection leaflets, stocks of clean water and candles in the basement, housing shortage, even then, and don’t forget the unemployment is not. And behold, that too passed away. Everything always goes up and down, and now we just happened to go down again. The point was to keep in mind the good citizen, the majority of people, who just want peace and quiet, once on holiday, that the children are doing well. That was the case now, that was the case a hundred years ago, that is how it would always be, unless, yes, unless…
I walked into the living room, where my mother was reading the newspaper. Together we looked out the window for a while. Across the street was a scaffolding against the house. Ko Koelemeijer came running from the yard in his regular jeans, clogs and dark blue sweater. “Just like his father,” my mother said.
She went to make tea, black, piping hot tea.