Bitter Herbs
Marga Mingo
BITTER HERBS
A Short Chronicle
Translated by Jeannette K. Ringold
Contents
About the Author
Marga Minco is a Dutch writer who was born in 1920. She debuted as an author in 1957 with Bitter Herbs, which was followed by other famous works such as An Empty House (1966), The Fall (1983) and many short stories. She won the Vijverberg prize in 1957, the Annie Romein Prize in 1999, the Constantijn Huygen Prize in 2005 and the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2019 for her entire oeuvre.
In memory of my parents
Dave and Lotte
Bettie and Hans
Through my head rolls a train full of Jews. I click on the past as if it were a railroad switch …
Bert Voeten, The Train
One day
It started one day when my father said, ‘Let’s go and see if everyone is back.’ We’d been away for a few days. All of Breda had been ordered to evacuate. We had hurriedly packed a suitcase and joined the endless lines of people leaving the city in the direction of the Belgian border. Bettie and Dave were living in Amsterdam at the time. ‘They won’t be affected by any of this,’ my mother said.
It was a long, dangerous journey. We carried the suitcase on a bicycle. Overstuffed bags were hanging from the handlebars. Bomb fragments and machine-gun bullets flew over our heads. Now and then someone was hit; then a small group would stay behind. Close to the Belgian border we found shelter with farmers. After two days we saw German troops driving down the country road and several hours later the evacuees returned to the city.
‘The danger has passed,’ a fellow townsman announced. So we went back with him.
At home, everything was as we had left it. The table was still set. Only the clock had stopped. My mother immediately threw open the windows. Across the street a woman hung her blankets over the balcony. Elsewhere someone shook out rugs as if nothing had happened.
I went into the street with my father. Our next-door neighbour, who was standing in his front garden, came to the gate when he saw us walking toward him.
‘Have you seen them yet?’ he asked. ‘They’re pretty impressive, aren’t they?’
‘No,’ said my father, ‘I haven’t seen anything yet. We’re going to have a look.’
‘The whole city is crawling with them,’ said the neighbour.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said my father. ‘Breda is a garrison town, so you can expect that sort of thing.’
‘I wonder how long they’ll stay,’ the neighbour said.
‘Not long, I assure you,’ declared my father.
‘What about you?’ asked the neighbour. He inched closer. ‘What will your family do now?’
‘We?’ said my father. ‘We aren’t going to do anything. Why should we?’
The neighbour shrugged and plucked a leaf out of his hedge. ‘When you hear what they do over there …’
‘Things won’t get that bad here,’ said my father.
We walked on. At the end of the street we ran into Mr Van Dam.
‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we’re all back.’
‘So it seems,’ said my father. ‘Everyone’s back home, safe and sound. Have you spoken to many of the others yet?’
‘I sure have,’ said Mr Van Dam, ‘several. The son of the Meier family has apparently gone all the way to the French border with some friends.’
‘Oh well,’ said my father, ‘boys like that are always looking for adventure. Can’t say I blame them.’
‘Your other daughter and your son didn’t go with you?’
‘No,’ said my father, ‘they’re in Amsterdam. They’ll be fine there.’
‘For the time being at any rate,’ said Mr Van Dam.
‘Well, we’re off,’ my father said.
‘What did Mr Van Dam mean by “for the time being”?’ I asked as we kept walking.
‘He’s pessimistic, I think.’
‘Just like our next-door neighbour,’ I said.
My father frowned. ‘It’s hard to say what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘Do you think they’ll do the same to us as they did to …’ I didn’t finish my sentence. I thought about all the gruesome stories that I’d heard during the past few years. It had always seemed so far away.
‘Nothing like that can ever happen here,’ said my father. ‘Things are different here.’
A thick cloud of tobacco smoke hung in the small office of Mr Haas’s clothing shop on Catharinastraat. Several members of the congregation had gathered, as if for a meeting. Short, stocky Mr Van Buren swivelled around in his office chair, gesticulating wildly. He had a rasping voice. When we went in, he was talking about holding a special service.
‘It sounds like a good plan,’ my father said.
‘Will all that praying do any good?’ asked Mr Haas’s son. Apparently, no one had heard him, as his remark was ignored. I was sorry I’d come here with my father, for I realised it would be a while before he could get away. Since I didn’t feel like sitting in that smoky room, I went through the hall to the shop. No one was there. I walked past the counters and shelves filled with clothes. As a child I had often played there with Mr Haas’s children. We used to hide behind the coats and the boxes, adorn ourselves with the ribbons and remnants from the workshop, and play shop after business hours. The same smell still hung in the air, sweetish and dry, the way new textile smells. I wandered through the narrow halls to the workshop and the stockroom. It felt like a Sunday. No one would come and buy anything today or be measured for a new coat. I sat down on a stack of boxes in a corner of the workshop and waited. The room was rather dark because the shutters were closed and the only light was coming from the hall. A coat, with the tacking thread still in it, was hanging against the wall. Perhaps no one would ever pick it up now. I took it off the hanger, put it on, and looked at myself in the mirror. It was much too long.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ It was my father’s voice. I was startled because I hadn’t heard him approach.
‘Trying on a coat,’ I said.
‘This is no time to be thinking of a new coat.’
‘I don’t want this one anyway,’ I said.
‘I’ve looked everywhere for you. Are you coming?’
I took off the coat and hung it back up. After sitting in the dark so long, the bright sunlight made me squint. The streets were busy. Many unfamiliar cars and motorcycles drove past us. A soldier asked somebody in front of us how to get to the market square. It was explained to him with much waving of hands and arms. The soldier clicked his heels, saluted, and set off in the direction that he’d been shown. German soldiers were now passing us constantly. We calmly walked past them.
‘You see,’ said my father when we were almost home, ‘they aren’t doing anything to us.’ As we passed the neighbour’s gate, he muttered again, ‘They aren’t doing anything to us.’
Kloosterlaan
When my sister and I were little, the other children used to call us names as we were leaving school. They’d frequently be lying in wait for us at the end of Kloosterlaan. ‘Come along,’ Bettie would say firmly as she grabbed my hand. Sometimes I’d meekly suggest taking another street or turning around, but she kept walking, pulling me along, straight toward the jeering gang. Lashing out right and left with her schoolbag, my sister forced her way through the pack of children who punched and pushed us from all sides. I wondered why we were different.
‘My teacher says Jews are bad,’ a neighbour’s child who went to a Catholic school once told me. ‘You killed Jesus.’
At the time I didn’t even know who Jesus was. I once saw my brother fight a boy who wouldn’t stop calling him a ‘kike’. The kid only shut up when Dave knocked him down. When Dave came home with a bleeding head, my father showed us a scar on his temple that he’d got during his school years when a kid had scratched him with a nail. ‘In Twente where I grew up, they also used to call us names,’ he said.
I had a friend who used to pick me up on our way to school. Her name was Nellie and she was light blonde. She always remained standing on the doorstep but never came in. If the door was open, she would peer into the hall with curiosity. ‘What’s it like in your house?’ she asked one day.
‘Come in and take a look,’ I said.
But she didn’t dare because her mother had forbidden her to enter a Jewish house. I was eleven then, old enough to be able to laugh it off. I told her that my father used to eat a soup made out of little children, which my mother had cooked for him. After that my friend would come in secretly, without her mother’s knowledge.
When we were older, we hardly noticed things like that any more. Children under ten are often crueller than adults. I remember that we had a maid who had to ask her priest’s permission to work for us. The priest gave his consent and even told her she didn’t have to eat fish on Friday, which was lucky for her because on Friday evenings we used to have elaborate dinners with all sorts of meat dishes.
My father was a religious man who liked having a home in which Jewish law and ritual practices were maintained. It must have been painful for him to see his children gradually abandon these customs in their eagerness to participate in everything and hang around with their non-Jewish friends. Dave, as the oldest, had the hardest time, since he was the first to break with tradition. He made it easy for us, his sisters. I still remember the first time I ate a rabbit leg with a friend in an automat. I was doing something that was strictly forbidden. I hesitated for a moment before biting into it, the way you do before jumping into a swimming pool at the beginning of the season. But if you don’t give up, it bothers you less the second time. During the occupation, the word ‘forbidden’ took on another significance for us. Jews were forbidden to go to cafés and restaurants, theatres and cinemas, swimming pools and parks. Owning a bicycle, a telephone, or a radio was also forbidden. So much was forbidden.
If I’d still been a little girl, I would definitely have wondered if it really was because we had killed Jesus.
During the first year of the war, I fell ill. I had to spend a long time in a convalescent hospital while my parents moved to the city of Amersfoort to live with my brother, who had married in the meantime.
I was in the pavilion of a hospital in Utrecht and was forbidden to get out of bed. For me, the state of war had been replaced by the state of my sedimentation rate. The distinction that the doctors and nurses made with regard to us patients was between serious and less serious cases of TB. Perhaps that was why I didn’t mind my long convalescence as much as I would have during normal times. Only during visiting hours did the war and the latest regulations enter my sickroom. But it was as if it didn’t involve me, as if it were taking place in another world.
Once I started getting better, I could no longer avoid it. I knew that once I left the hospital I would be stepping right back into Kloosterlaan, that the gang of jeering children would be waiting for me, and that I’d have to go through it all again.
The stars
From the window of my room I saw my father approaching in the distance. I’d left the hospital a few weeks earlier. I was supposed to rest several hours a day, but had made a complete recovery.
So far all I knew of Amersfoort was this street. It was in a quiet suburb with new duplexes surrounded by gardens.
My father was walking with short, brisk steps. He doffed his hat with a flourish to a woman picking flowers in her front garden. She apparently said something to him, for he slowed his steps for a moment. When he reached our house, I saw that he was holding a package. A small brown package.
I went downstairs, stuck my head around the living room door and announced, ‘Father’s coming with a package.’
‘What’s in it?’ I asked at the front door.
‘In what?’ asked my father, calmly hanging up his coat and hat after placing the package on the coat rack.
‘Oh, honestly!’ I said impatiently. ‘In the package that you just put down.’
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come.’
I followed him in. He set the package on the table while everyone looked on with curiosity. It had been wrapped with string and he patiently untied the knots, then opened the paper. It was the yellow stars.
‘I brought some for all of us,’ he said, ‘so you can sew them on all your coats.’
My mother took one out of the package and examined it closely. ‘Let me go and see if I have some yellow thread on hand,’ she said.
‘It’s orange,’ I said, ‘you ought to use orange thread for it.’
‘If you ask me,’ said my brother’s wife, Lotte, ‘it would be better to use thread in the colour of your coat.’
‘It’ll look awful on my red jacket,’ said Bettie, who had come over from Amsterdam to stay with us for a couple of days.
‘I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to do it,’ said my father. ‘As long as you remember that they should be chest-high on the left side.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked my mother.
‘It was in the paper,’ said my father. ‘Didn’t you read it? They have to be clearly visible.’
‘Goodness, you’ve brought a lot of them,’ said my mother, handing out a few stars to each of us. ‘Could you get that many?’
‘Oh yes,’ said my father, ‘as many as I wanted.’
‘That’s convenient,’ she said. ‘Now we can save some for our summer clothes.’
We took the coats from the coat rack and started sewing on the stars. Bettie worked very carefully with small, invisible stitches. ‘You have to hem them,’ she said to me when she saw me sewing one on my coat with big messy stitches. ‘It’ll look much neater.’
‘That star shape is really awkward,’ I said. ‘How can you get a hem in these wretched points?’
‘You have to tack the hem first,’ said Bettie. ‘Next you pin it to your coat, sew it on and take out the tacking thread. That’s guaranteed to make it look good.’
I tried again, but I wasn’t as clever with a needle and thread as my sister. My star wound up being lopsided.