Aar, not Aart! I didn’t know much more than this first name detail about the writer Aar van de Werfhorst, whose name was simply Piet Jansen, when I read his novel. The winter crows fished from a sky blue painted street bookcase in Nijmegen. It was a beautiful cabinet, with ‘Leaves’ in beautiful letters above the door, leather straps for ‘magazines’ on the inside and an otherwise plantless compartment for cuttings on the side. Ideal starting point for a section in which a book is taken from one of the countless street libraries in the Netherlands.
The winter crows from the blue box had already had a long life, in Groenlo. The Public Library in Notenboomstraat had bought the paperback there in 1977 – and later wrote it off. For decades, Groenlo readers have become acquainted with the wonderful opening scene in which Van de Werfhorst (1907-1994) describes how seven men, the winter crows, after their work on the peatlands, slowly move home across the field between the Lemelerberg in the west and Sibculo in the east, a placeholder that the writer will continue to repeat like a mantra. “Their silent journey through the desolate land,” writes Van de Werfhorst, “as if heaps of earth that had come alive were moving there, was unspeakably melancholy.”
It’s melancholy The winter crows certainly, this beautiful book from the beautiful cabinet. Van de Werfhorst writes short earthly sentences about the seven men, who are led by Gait Aalvanger, a man with the gift of looking into the future and seeing things from the past, like a medieval monk who still wanders through the fields. The other men in the team are briefly introduced, there is a drinking organ, a murderer, a seventeen year old. They bear names like Wessel Donker (“who was as black as his name indicated, but who had a light soul”).
In this way, Van de Werfhorst seems to be preparing everything for a story, an adventure perhaps, about these seven men and their mutual relationships. But then the writer does something crazy. He causes the boat in which the winter crows are crossing the canal to capsize. All seven drown. As a reader you sit there in a bit of a daze, as if the orchestra leaves the stage again after tuning the instruments.
That’s an appearance, of course. The men are not really gone. After the death of the seven, they appear one by one to their wives, after which Van de Werfhorst interweaves the stories about the mourning with their life stories: how the drinker became a drinker, the murderer a murderer. One story is even more beautiful than the other. Van de Werfhorst practices a particularly earthy kind of magical realism, there between Sibulco and the Lemelerberg, where the peat workers try to deal with the blows that life simply deals. He writes unemphatically how the dead Wessel Donker comes before the coffin and is placed on three chairs in the room, under a Christmas star. That turns out to be the place where he once lay listening to the babbling of his newborn daughter, a daughter whose life ended in an urban tragedy. Van de Werfhorst guides you through it in calm, intimate sentences. A wonderful writer.
Would you like the discussed copy of The winter crows to have? Send an email to ombudsman@ nrc.nl; the book will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 15, 2023 newspaper.