Hoarding was invented by my father long before the pandemic. All his life he must have felt a permanent threat of hunger like the sword of Damocles above his head. How else am I supposed to explain his astronomical provisions? If bombs fell, the whole family could hide under beds and in closets. There was juice, cake and tin sardine for half a human life.
Vader experienced famine in Morocco in the 1950s and 1960s, when the late King Hassan II held sway over his dozen palaces. With his companions they ate wild cactus fruits and weeds in the verge and hunted everything that moved in the field. Adders could be grilled tasty if you only chopped off the head plus the length of a spread hand, in that part was the poison. He caught finches and wheatears with a worm in a mousetrap. Hedgehogs stewed them with spines and for hours in the cooking pot, but that was wasted effort; you could chew a car tire before.
Hunger drove him first to Algeria and later, after the French massacres, to Europe. After short stays in Germany and France, he found refuge in the Netherlands. in Zwijndrecht. Of all possible European metropolises, the southern wind brought him to this raked, Calvinist sleeping village. Zwijndrecht. A name with exactly the two Islamic food prohibitions: swine and wine. The ambiguity of life in full regalia. But he couldn’t know this, being illiterate with honors.
When after his death his rented house, an Era flat on nine floors, had to be handed over empty, there was no end to the flow of food. We collected seven boxes of garbage bags, five boxes of wet wipes, fifteen boxes of kitchen rolls and toilet paper, seven cases of vinegar, sunflower and olive oil. Meat, bread, pancakes, baking ice cream filled two large freezers. Chests of drawers overflowed with biscuits, candy, liquorice, peanuts, chocolate bars, crisps. Everything was hidden in every possible nook and cranny throughout the house. The scooter shed housed twelve crates of soap, chlorine bleach, and dishwashing liquid, and in the shed below were sixty-three jars of jam and canned vegetables and twenty-seven packs of macaroni, rice, spaghetti, some of them outdated but still perfectly edible. (The best-before date is the biggest commercial lie, Dad also knew.)
Lamb we lugged ourselves. But no matter how many packs of biscuits and vermicelli we distributed, the bottom was not in sight. Father’s house turned out to be a Jumbo branch. In desperation, I rang the doorbell of all the neighbors in the gallery: ‘Please come and do some shopping at Daddy’s house, for free and for nothing.’
For days it was a cheerful coming and going of Afghan families with bags full of sprits and peas. Hans and Paulien found this ‘much more fun than the food bank’.