I must understand that simulation is all and if simulation is all I am not guilty; that here in Madurodam, under the bright skies of Madurodam, I am guilty of nothing; that it is all a matter of perspective, that things are big if we experience them as big and small if we experience them as small; that for us, the inhabitants of Madurodam, the magpies that alight on our rooftops are more dangerous, are in-com-pa-rab-ly more dangerous than the boy’s sudden, inexplicable, hate-saturated scream that had just caused me a pain disproportionate to its significance.
It was late afternoon. The sunset was magnificent, the sun pouring its warm terra-cotta glow over everything. I was walking toward the woods, my feet scarcely touching the ground. It was unusually quiet: all I could hear was the occasional whoosh of a passing cyclist. I saw the kerchiefed women sitting on the grass like mother hens, their broods all around them. My nostrils swelled with the scent of newly mown grass. I entered the woods. It was so sparse I could see the blueness of the lake through the trees. Although it was August, autumn was in the air. I sucked that air into my lungs greedily as I walked. I can’t say for sure how long I walked and how long it took me to reach the clearing….
…in the wood that was covered with luxuriant patches of wildflowers; an extraordinarily limpid brooklet frisked through its center; the sun’s gold pierced the densely interwoven branches of the surrounding oaks. Sitting on a stump near the pond was a healthy, robust girl with black eyes. Her copious hair was gathered at the neck, a summer shift of rose muslin drifted along her well-proportioned body, a small, simple cross hung on a black ribbon round her neck, and before her on the grass lay a hat and a songbook. Sitting opposite her was a flock of the sweet village children, all of whom, lads and lasses both, boasted such lively, gay faces and bright eyes, such clean, white garments that it was a pleasure to gaze upon them. Many of the lasses had woven wreaths of wildflowers for their heads. Raising her hand, the young miss beat out the rhythm of a song for her charges, who attended, rapt, to her index finger until her tiny mouth opened and the most beautiful sound emerged. It was truly a glorious sight: the young, festive faces, the lads rocking their heads animatedly in time to the song, the lasses, more subdued, holding their backs straight as candles, and in their midst that intelligent face glowing with a smile of satisfaction, those sharp, black eyes keeping watch over each lamb in her care. Not far from the schoolmistress sat two lasses weaving a large wreath of green leaves. Once they had finished, they rose, tiptoed over to her, and placed the wreath on her head. When the song was over, the children swarmed round their teacher like bees, shouting as heartily as their voices would allow. The schoolmistress rose, placed her hat on her head, and made her way out of the wood through the crowd of cheering children like a fairy in a fairy tale.
EPILOGUE
Life is sometimes so confusing that you can’t be certain what came first and what came later. By the same token I don’t know whether I’m telling this story to get to the end or the beginning of things. Since living abroad, I have experienced my native language — which, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,
Rustles, rings, resounds, and rumbles
Thunders, roars, reverberates—
as a stammer, a curse, a malediction or as babble, drab phrase mongering devoid of meaning. Which is why I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch. It’s not easy. I swallow words, regurgitate vowels and consonants. It’s a losing battle: I fail to convey what I want to say, and what I do say sounds empty. I’ll come out with a word, but can’t sense its substance, or I’ll sense a certain substance, but can’t find the word for it. I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a language that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.
Life has been good to me. I’ve learned to leave my curtains open. I’m even trying to consider it a virtue. I’ve enrolled in a Dutch course. Like my classmates, I overuse the personal pronoun ik. For beginnings the world begins with ik: Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië. Ik loop, ik zie, ik leef, ik praat, ik adem, ik hoor, ik schreeuw…For the time being ik doesn’t commit me to anything: ik is like a children’s game, it’s like hide-and-seek. People say it’s easiest to hide out in the open. In the Dutch mountains. Behind that tough little i and k.
True, my nightmares have started up again. Now I dream of words, not houses. In the dream I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me. They are usually monologues reflecting my fickle moods. I go through them with a fine-toothed comb. They are long and painful, a never-ending list of complaints. I am often awakened by a painful doglike whimper, my own. In the dream I populate the space around me with words. They burgeon and wind round me like lianas, they spring up like ferns, climb like creepers, open wide like water lilies, overrun me like wild orchids. Their luxuriant jungle sentences leave me breathless. In the morning, ravaged, I can’t tell whether to construe their lexical exuberance as punishment or absolution.
But life has been good to me. Paul and Kim, the American couple whose children I take care of four days a week, pay me more than a decent wage. I’ve become an expert in nursery rhymes and counting rhymes: ours, the English ones, and even a few in Dutch. The children know En ten tini, sava raka tini, sava raka tika taka, bija baja buf. And Eci peci pec, ti si mali zec, a ja mala vjeverica, eci peci pec. They know Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. And Amsterdam, die grote stadt. Die is gebouwd op palen. Als die stadt eens om-meviel, wie zou dat betalen…. Paul and Kim never fail to introduce me to their friends and relatives: “This is Tanja, our babysitter. She’s wonderful with children. She really has a way with them….”
My mother is doing fine too, if “fine” is the word for it. She perks up whenever I phone. She tells on life the way children tell on one another: she pulls out her list of complaints and goes on about her diabetes (which she calls “the sugar curse”), her arthritis, the high cost of living…. She never asks about me: I’m just there to register the complaints. I’ve made peace with my role and grown used to our one-way dialogues. I’ve learned not to let it hurt too much.
Goran’s father is no longer with us. “They might as well have stuck him in a garbage bag!” said Olga, sobbing into the receiver. “A garbage bag!” He’d fallen into a coma, so she called for an ambulance, but the paramedics couldn’t get the stretcher into the elevator, so they had to wrap him in a blanket and carry him down all ten flights. He died in the hospital a few days later. She told me all about it when I phoned with my condolences. “Though it had to end somewhere,” she added in an odd voice, thereby putting a sad yet apathetic end to the incident.