At a quarter to one, the bus drops me off at the entrance of Grandpa’s nursing home, a meaningless three-storey building behind a parking lot. It is bleak, gray, windy, rotten weather. ‘Go and see grandpa as soon as you get back to the Netherlands,’ my aunt emailed me during my holiday in Lisbon. “He forgets everything!”
I’m 45 minutes late because this morning I had a relationship crisis and three deadlines, one of which I missed. I take a deep breath, straighten my back, stub out my cigarette in an ashtray next to the entrance, and step through the sliding doors with my kindest, most harmless grandson face.
Grandpa – ‘Mr. De Jong’ – is sitting in the dining room, says the lady at the reception, a huge room filled with white, white-haired elderly people who all look up the moment I walk in. Grandpa is sitting at a table with three men. He appears to be the eldest and most depressed of the four, an emaciated version of his former self. I suspect he feels like I sometimes feel at birthday parties where I don’t know anyone but the birthday boy: in a panic. But as soon as he sees me, he springs up and seems to spring to life, the way I used to bounce when he and Grandma picked me up from daycare. “Shall we go to my room?” he asks.
As we walk out of the dining room, Grandpa’s roommates unashamedly study us. I pretend I don’t realize anything, because that’s how it’s been all my life when Grandpa and I show up together somewhere. A white grandfather with a brown grandson, many people find that complicated. While, really, folks, it’s not that complicated at all. All it takes is a lovemaking. You can too.
We are both relieved when we reach his room. It does feel a bit like home. The hall of fame with photos of the grandchildren that used to hang above the sofa is now displayed in an open shelving unit. The curtains with bright pink roses from the living room hang in front of the windows. In the windowsill is a Toal and Taikena ‘Tiedschrift for Grunneger culture’ which we threw away at least ten vintages while clearing Grandpa’s house.
The house was sold three months after Grandpa moved into the nursing home. We had a few weeks to clear it out. The Persian tablecloth, the long and short cutlery that absolutely had to be stored in separate drawers, all those things with rituals attached that I had taken for granted all my life, suddenly it was nothing anymore. garbage. Rubbish. I saved the clock, cutlery, and stool I was sitting on when Grandma tried to convince me to date my best friend after my mom told her I had a boyfriend. The rest went to my aunts, the thrift store or the bulky waste. And then the one place in my life where in 35 years nothing had ever changed, my ‘normal’, the place where I always understood where I came from and who I was, was just an empty shell. To pass on to another family. I took one last look at the garden and then I cried for three weeks.
To Groningen
I want to go back to Groningen. To the world of the black-and-white photos that always hung in grandma’s sewing room and now, next to my Surinamese ancestors, are on my desk: stern looking men and women in traditional costume, cows, mills, meadows and farms. I want to ask Grandpa about the lessons he learned from the people who gave him life. One of them, a distant cousin, Grandpa tells us, did something with cement crypts. “Do you know how cement is made?” he asks. I make the mistake of saying no and for the next fourteen minutes Grandpa has a monologue about calcium hydrogen silicate, mortar and excavators. With furrowed eyebrows, in a rather snappy tone, because that’s how Grandpa talks about the things that really get him excited.
I look at the picture of my grandmother, on the windowsill behind Grandpa, where she looks like I should be looking now – sleepy. And I think of what my mother had said with a laugh when I told her the idea for this column: “Life lessons from Grandpa? What do you want to write about that? How do you file your tax return?’ I thought that was typical of my mother, so negative, but I now understand what she meant.
‘Cement is the raw material for concrete, you should know that too’, Grandpa continues and he looks at me intently, as if he is checking me.
I nod. ‘Interesting. Shall we go back to the beginning?’
Grandpa was born in 1929 on a farm in – he clears his throat – ‘the village of Briltil in the province of Groningen. Do you know where that is?’
‘Of course,’ I say, to prevent Grandpa from listing all the surrounding villages and hamlets. To which he says: ‘You must know that, because it is close to …’ and he starts listing all the villages and hamlets in the area.
Cows
Grandpa’s parents had cows. They were milked by hand. They also had pigs. They were slaughtered once in a while by grandfather’s grandfather, who was a house butcher. And well, that was a party. “Of course you wanted to see that!” The pig’s throat was cut out and then it bled to death.
“Oh no!” I say.
‘Yes, very special,’ says Grandpa, ‘you didn’t see that every day.’
The farm had no electricity when Grandpa was born. “They didn’t even know there was gas in the ground!” The stove burned on peat and charcoal. In the winter there were frost flowers on the windows.
“And did you sleep in long underwear?” I ask.
‘No! Just under a few blankets. Long stockings, you still had them.’
At the back of the stable was a ‘poo box’, a hole in the ground, that was the toilet.
‘Apparently some people think that farming is wonderful,’ says Grandpa, ‘but it was always clear to me that I wanted something different.’
Half a mile from Grandpa’s farm was a dairy. There were six or seven factory houses for the people who worked there, their wives and their children. The women were housewives, the children wore patent leather shoes and bows in their hair (at least that’s how I see it). And their houses had electricity. ‘That’s how I knew that another life was also possible,’ explains Grandpa.
Technical college
His older brother Durk would inherit the farm, leaving grandfather free to take a different path: from the age of 16 he went to the higher technical school in Groningen. He cycled 14 kilometers to the big city and back six days a week. ‘That was the beginning of my own life. You could say.’
There is a portrait photo of Grandpa from that time. He looks like some kind of movie star: white blond hair, neatly combed back. Freshly washed, in a spencer and a shirt. He looks a bit naughty, or is it rather arrogant? As if the world was made for him. She was.
According to Who what where?, a booklet with an annual overview from 1948 that I found in grandfather’s attic, in the third year of grandfather’s education at hts, the Netherlands consisted for 48 percent of grassland (a picture with cows) and 12 percent was uncultivated (a picture with houses) . Of the Dutch population, 20.5 percent worked in agriculture and 37.5 percent in industry. I also found one Who what where? from 1962. Grandfather and grandmother had been married for eight years, my mother was 3. This booklet contains lists of ‘European automobiles’, graphs showing air traffic from Schiphol and photos of the first people in space.
Grandpa nods. ‘The world changed and I went with the times. Although I don’t know if I realized that when I was 16.’
In 1954 he found a job with an American oil company and left the countryside for a new life in the Randstad. I picture his mother and father, in peasant smocks, swinging in the yard of their farm. Grandpa drives down the street, his life changed forever, leaving the old Netherlands behind on the farm road. Everyone with tears in their eyes. Etcetera. But Grandpa says, “I don’t think they were so concerned about my leaving.” So that moment never happened.
In the Randstad, grandpa got an apartment in a neighborhood with houses that were specially built for employees of the oil company. Thirty years later, I was born in the nearest big city, between blocks of flats, raging cars, asphalt and concrete. The Netherlands of my great-grandparents from Groningen no longer existed then. I’ve only been given a few scraps of it, and I’ve always romanticized it.
Grandpa’s brother’s son was the last farmer in our family. He stopped when his back started hurting. Today he is a postman. The farm where Grandpa was born is now a luxury house along a highway.
‘Has something beautiful also been lost in your parents’ world?’, I ask Grandpa.
“Oh, it was a hard life.”
“What was the most important thing they taught you?”
Grandpa finds it hard to say. “They weren’t so prominent.”
“Were they happy?”
“Well … does it always radiate that way?”
Feelings
Grandpa’s parents didn’t talk about their feelings. And Grandpa never thought about what he left behind. Still, he and grandma certainly gave me something of that, I realize as I look out of Grandpa’s window at the highway and the gas station. For a few years, Grandpa and Grandma took me and my nephew every summer to a campground near the village where Grandpa was born. When I think of those holidays I see cow parsley, purple flowers, narrow paths covered with shells, ant nests, wasps, cows, grandfather in front, grandmother in the back, in the sun, on a bicycle. And then I feel, smell, taste what is beautiful about the country in which I was born. Grandpa and grandma showed me that. As they could, without words.
Grandpa points to the clouds above the raging cars: ‘Sheep in the orbit of the sky indicate wind and rain.’ That’s what his mother used to say about these kinds of skies. And indeed: an hour later I’m in the bus stop typing an unctuous message to the client about the missed deadline and it starts to storm.
From: Raoul de Jong: Conversations with grandpa, De Bezige Bij; 88 pages; €17.99.