I had every intention of being born healthy. Around the final stretch of the birth canal, the interested parties had gathered, eager and expectant, but I stalled and made my mother wait another two weeks. She resorted to eating pickled herring to pass the time.
My earliest memory reaches back to my second year, which, according to experts, is quite impossible. Children of that age are not known for forming stable memory traces. Most likely, what I recall is merely a family story worn smooth by repetition.
It was the flood of 1953. The piano had been hoisted onto the table; the water in the living room stood a metre high, and skiffs rowed by men in caps or sou’westers floated past the back of our house, where once there had been a path.
A year later, a different sort of drama played out, no water this time, but ink. My mother found me seated in front of the sideboard, an open inkwell in hand. I had already consumed a fair amount. Thick black streaks ran from the corners of my mouth like a small, accursed child in a silent horror film. She scooped me up, strapped me into the child seat on her bicycle, and pedalled as fast as she could to the family doctor.
He was a stately, towering figure who delivered diagnoses from a height usually reserved for thunderstorms. He gave me an emetic, and I promptly vomited all over his desk.
When I was four, I came down with some manner of intestinal infection. The precise diagnosis has been lost to time. The cure took the form of a diet consisting of minced raw beef and cream, a regimen that hints at limited diagnostic effort. Since I was perpetually hungry and not permitted to join the family at the dinner table, Jonnie was tasked with taking me for walks during mealtimes. If she looked away, I’d raid the rubbish bin for bread crusts. The archival footage of ragged children scraping leftovers from garbage bins during the hunger winter of ’44 is harrowing, to be sure, but at least someone filmed them.
I loathed the diet and clamped my mouth shut. My mother had no luck forcing the mixture past my lips, so heavier artillery was called in.
Enter Aunt Teun.
She was ideally suited to the task: firm of movement, shrill of voice, the sort of woman who could part the waters of the Oude Maas with a single command. She seized me, pinched my nose shut, and poured the vile stuff down my throat. No pre-chewing involved.
From that point on, I honed a particular talent for avoiding her. One sunny afternoon, I failed. My mother and I were having tea with her in the conservatory. The windowpanes rattled as she built toward the climax of one of her stories. Floating in her teacup was a fat bluebottle fly. She crushed it between her teeth along with a biscuit and swallowed.
What followed was a period of several weeks at the local Groene Kruis clinic. I spent my days in bed and was required to nap in the afternoon. To keep the flies at bay, they rigged up a wooden frame above my head and draped it with a white sheet. That system worked, until one bold specimen slipped under the fabric and began battering my forehead.
There was no tea. No biscuits.
I lifted the sheet.
The fly buzzed off.
He could.