We used to sing all the time. During birthdays on both sides of the family, when friends came over for dinner, or just together, well into the night.
The evening determined the song. In the case of the Brabant family, the ‘Droomland’, the voices of the elderly great-uncles with their beautiful, almost Sicilian heads, became clear and brittle.
With my family, my mother and her sisters, three Indian women, all cheekbones, Cartier watches and jingling bracelets. The backs straight, the diction slightly affected, ‘Brandend Zand’ by Grönloh or the heartbreaking ‘Jantjes Vuile Fingertjes’ with jubilant pathos. Heartaches that have often long been forgotten by their Dutch peers.
With Willem’s brother and his wife, after several mean sgroppinos, Don McLean’s good “Babylon,” four-voiced and pious, with red heads, conducting hands, outrageously out of time.
And then the many evenings in our house in the Jordaan, chained to the kitchen table because the baby was sleeping. ‘The Pastoral’, and that I then wanted to be Ramses and Willem had to warble ‘I like the copper color of your light’. Or ‘Jojo’ by Jeroen Willems. And then after a sentence like ‘I’m completely orphaned, I live in our dreams’ addressing each other in tipsy seriousness that not one person of his quality existed anymore ‘no, but SERIOUSLY JJ now Willem’. At the end of the evening I always tried Brel’s ‘Vesoul’, stumbling over the words, Willem patient to the end, drumming his fingers encouraging the beat on the table and eyes like chinks from sleep and drunkenness.
The song was the solution to everything. Death, which we flew into on mournful evenings with heaps of friends. They all came to roar, eyes moist, with grief of their own or pain borrowed from us. Or sex, if I suddenly demanded ‘The Elephant Love Medley’ by Moulin Rouge, because Willem has such a great Ewan McGregor in the house, and I also like to say no with Nicole Kidman’s whispering vocals five times. , before she completely surrenders to him.
When we moved to Haarlem and more children joined, the singing stopped. Remarkably, our family members, perhaps it has something to do with the lonely corona years, have also lost their song. In our house it has something to do with a three times greater chance of waking someone up, or no longer being able to annoy yourself as a cargo bike parent with the idea that you are ‘naked in the hurricane’ or having breakfast with ‘a small beer’.
But when I put Ezra to bed the other day and he asked me if I could sing something nice, I burst out to my own surprise in ‘She understands the art of belonging to me, in my body she has made room for two’. Afterwards he sighed deeply from under his Donald Duck duvet. Every evening since then, in the silence of a tired house, where Willem is rummaging downstairs and his little brother and sister are already snoring, I sing a song that touches on a suddenly distant past in my life. Suzanne, Mathilde, poor Piotr and his eerie cry, he absorbs it, in earnest and with glittering eyes.
And so we practice conspiratorially for the years when he is free and allowed to be pathetic. The best years, if you ask me.