Excerpt from Niemand keek omhoog, from the chapter ‘My Mother’, translated by Paul Vincent Evelien Vos, Niemand keek omhoog, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2019, 174 p.
As a girl my mother looked like Anne Frank. She had the same nose and the same dark eyes which in photos had something at once melancholic and cheerful about them. She had to cycle twelve kilometres to and from school, because she was the only one from the village who was allowed to go the high school, and she got reasonable marks, because she was bright, but also had a fear of failure. Her father was the vicar of the village and a stern man, quite unlike my own. She once told me after a couple of glasses of wine that her father had slapped her face when the village brass band came past and she danced out of the house and waved her arms in the air. ‘Behave normally,’ he had roared. My grandma was an alto with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra for a year, but my grandad made her give it up, because she was out of the house too much.
When I was small I often observed my mother. When she sat in the garden with her face towards the sun, when she put lipstick on in the reflection of the shed before we cycled to school, or when she laughed so much on the telephone with a friend that I could see her fillings. The fathers of my friends behaved more comically when she was around. ‘I’m the luckiest person on earth,’ she sometimes sighed. ‘I have a house, a husband and a healthy son and daughter. It was as if she were not talking to us but to herself. As if she had to convince herself.
She did things she didn’t like as little as possible. For example, she didn’t like cooking, so she peeled a few kilos of potatoes once a week and we ate them five days in a row. She didn’t work, but nor did she like having tea ready when we came home from school and asking questions. She was always doing 1