benefit of the doubt (columns from 1986)
freddy h.
On 8 September 1943, one day before I
started Class One at Willemspark School, my mother taught me how to tie the
laces of my shoes. My father – some time later – taught me that disbelief is
the first step towards philosophy. My younger sister brought her friends home
with her from school, and I, if it so happened, fell in love with them. This is
what people call a protected environment.
Lying in bed in
the evenings, I used to read books about boys who had been left in the lurch by
their parents and had to go out and steal. They only had one comrade, a
faithful mongrel who, when things had gone wrong, was not allowed to accompany
him to the orphanage. This sometimes caused me to weep.
Much later, when I
had considerably wiser about how things fitted together, I lived for quite some
time in the Oudezijds Achterburgwal precinct, among people who mostly did not
come from a protected environment. In was during that period that I first met
Freddy H.
He had keen, peering
eyes with which he saw everything; he had of course been brought up in an
orphanage and had seen many prisons from the inside for offences you wouldn’t
even get a mini ticking-off for. I dared to do everything I didn’t, without
that making his inner life inaccessible to me. He was a jack of all trades, a
survivor, a recycling expert. Long before Gertrude Stein, he already knew where
you could get hold of second-hand roses, so to speak. Through his eyes I saw
for the first time what we leave behind us, set aside, renew for no reason.
Because we made
the same sort of relocation, I still see him. And nothing has changed, he knows
of Dutch roof-tile rejects that are still quite ok,
he knows of a small junk dealer that can dispose of cooker hoods and tram
casings for next to nothing, he can fetch flintstones free of charge and he
knows where there’s a batch of timber lying in a remote plot of woodland. I
say. ‘But that must belong to somebody.’ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘me. I got it from Mr
Lodeweghes, who at last wants to clean up his patch of woodland.’ Mr Lodeweghes
is a mysterious friend of his, who can claim to own half of the Netherlands as
his personal property.
We go out there. It’s
not easy nowadays to get the Massey Ferguson to engage in conversation (here I
would like to make use of the occasion to demonstrate my love of and respect
for the cliché. Clichés are the loveliest forms of language that exist. All of
us feel this, and that is why they have become clichés. Imagine an aphasic
engine block in deep meditation. You come along with your conjuring human hand.
He resists, but in vain, you get him to speak, you cause him to engage in
conversation, he converses. An engine that converses.), because the starter is
a bit dodgy. When I join two copper-coloured protuberances, as indicated by a
certified mechanic – I use a hefty screwdriver for this operation – the
starter gives some signs of life and deep in the bowels of the mechanism a
wound-up, rumbling sound is heard. After this, I quickly have to perform an
ordinary start – for this thirty-five-year-old tractor that is in itself a
exceptional act – and then he keeps running for the most part. He converses.
We drive through
rolling countryside, between the villages of L. and B., it is France, but
without the language and all that hassle at the border. It is autumn, the maize
has been ensilaged and lies in winter storage. I occasionally read that a
writer calls the sky soft blue; he is right, it really does exist, it is soft
blue. In a recently harvested field an old woman is collected corn cobs, there
is an iron basket next to her. Farther off, a boy and a dog. The woman is
holding a cob in her hand and greets us. Freddy H., who is standing up on the
trailer, bawls out a return greeting above the racket of the engine: ‘Stuff it
up your cunt!’
He gives her a
friendly smile as he says this, the woman smiles in return. What a nice man.
She hasn’t made out what he said, that’s at least something, but I feel it’s
impolite even so. Why then do I have to laugh at this? Perhaps because my
mother, along with the laces, said that I must never use any dirty words at
school. Freddy H. doesn’t observe any such agreements. He does whatever he
wants to.
A little while
later I hear him bawling once more – for me to stop. He jumps down, clambers
over the barbed wire into a meadow. He walks through the tall grass, straight
towards a spot where there is nothing to be seen. A dead duck lies there. He
gives it to me – a present. He is generous. I want nothing to do the duck. ‘Botulism,’
I said. ‘No, mate, are you off your chump, it’s been winged. He pushes breast
feathers aside and uncovers the shot wounds. At the same time, he reels off a sophisticated
recipe, for he is also a gourmet and a cook. (I can only boil an egg.) He doesn’t
insist all that long and takes the duck home with him.
The next day he
tells me exactly how he has got the duck ready and gives me the details of the special
Tuscan compote that he has prepared. The wine comes from a cask that he has got
from Lodeweghes. He reads disbelief on my face, but doesn’t know that this is
the first step towards philosophy.
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