The Fair

In the late fifties, the car park outside the De Passage shopping centre never had more than a few cars at a time. When a fair was held there, this was not experienced as a natural disaster. By the others, at least. I was sent there by my mother to develop my social skills. On my Fongers Heerenrijwiel, which was really too big for my nine-year-old frame, I rode the long way round to the racket. I preferred the bank of the silent river.

A deafening avalanche was poured over you the moment you set foot on the fairground, a nauseating porridge of voices from loudspeakers, Elvis Presley and wailing sirens. It was quite an undertaking to inspect the attractions while simultaneously avoiding the boys from the Wrong Side of Town. They often had it in for me, on account of the Law of Zwijndrecht. Which stated that in a village it was strictly forbidden to possess any intelligence whatsoever. Should you nevertheless show signs of it, you became the target of mockery and aggression. I never encountered fellow sufferers: an invisible hand kept them well away from my vicinity.

The riffraff from the Wrong Side of Town regularly gathered outside the shooting gallery, where the rifle barrels were adjusted so that nobody ever hit the target. From my concealed position behind the candy floss stall, I watched hopefully for a wounded nozem to be carried off on a stretcher.

Due to lack of interest, the big wheel stood mostly idle. On the platform a large gypsy was encouraging a passing father and his little boy to get on. When they hesitated a fraction too long, they were forcibly stuffed into the seat. Meanwhile, passing nozems were gawping at his gypsy daughter, who leaned against the ticket booth with a spectacularly tall hairdo and a filter cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. The boys called out mockingly that her hairdo was taller than the top seat. The gypsy brought the wheel to a halt and chased them off. The father and his little boy sat dangling aimlessly at the highest point, staring into the blank wall of the neighbouring optician.

In the afternoon you sometimes saw a crying child in the carousel. That could never have been me, as I already had quite enough problems of my own. Fortunately, a shrill shriek drifted my way. I climbed into a rickety cart of the sorry excuse for a haunted house, in which you were dragged at an agonising crawl through a barren landscape. From inside you could peer through the cracks in the tent canvas at the world outside. In the cart in front of me a teenager squeezed his girlfriend’s breast, whereupon she immediately set up an illiterate shriek. I considered getting out mid-ride and making my way on foot between the flickering lights and the sloppily knotted sheets that were supposed to represent ghosts. But I stayed put. Creaking, the sheets appeared through a flapping tarpaulin. On the ground lay puddles of rain. Behind the tarpaulin, in broad daylight, I could see a group of ziekenfondspatiënten queuing outside the sweet stall, a towering wall of tooth-enamel-shattering confectionery.

The most pitiful spectacle was the Fattest Man in the Netherlands. Outside the canvas the announcer bellowed his variety act into a microphone. Nobody understood a word, but that was hardly the point. Through the canvas protruded the doughy head of the Fattest Man, who on the announcer’s command placed his leg on a platform to emphasise its circumference, so that only the head and the leg were visible. If you wanted to see more, you had to queue in front of a cramped ticket booth, inside which a stout woman with the remnants of a blonde dye job had barricaded herself. The gaze of the Fattest Man drifted mournfully across the open mouths of the distinguished audience.

I decided to put my social skills to the test by stuffing my lukewarm oliebol into the nearest one.