We’re in the car of my auntie (strangely, the longer I’m back in Holland the more British my word choice becomes) Petra, heading east. We’ve just come from my uncle Harald’s birthday party (conveniently scheduled right next to mine) where I recapped the last few years of my life for various cousins and inlaws and Paul spent most of his time nodding obligingly – he’s a good sport, considering he doesn’t know the language, and they’re good sports too, speaking in English half the time for his benefit. It could be said that visits like these are a family obligation, and I do intend for this trip to be a holiday rather than an elongated Christmas dinner, but still you’re always a little curious how these people who once towered over your crib are faring.
Now we drive through the utterly flat countryside from Noord Brabant to Drenthe. These are provinces, but don’t bother getting an atlas out because all you really need to know is that the journey takes you through a fair bit of the nation. Not that that makes it much of a journey. If you don’t count the incessant traffic jams (so common that we have a word for them especially) the Netherlands can be traversed in about two hours, North Sea to Germany. It’s a tiny place if you come right down to it.
Dutch light plays on the glowing green and yellow paddocks. There are pancakes in our near future (a top priority on my list of typical Dutch foods to consume; a list that I’m a little behind on after my unwell period) but despite this tempting thought we have trouble staying awake. We’re like babies still, rocked into contentment by warmth, movement and rhythm. I was told once that the reason military marches rely so much on drums and steady rhythms is that this reminds us of our time in the womb, listening to our mother’s heartbeat during labour. Clearly that taps into a different part of our psyche than this quiet rumbling in the back of a car. Snoozing against the window, I don’t have much trouble believing it. But we do eventually make it to a pancake boat, after our rather pushy GPS voice threatened us with wrong turns and a dip in the canals on occasion.
In the village of Elim now, at auntie’s house. The silence of this parochial place is spellbinding. Michel – an Amsterdam native, husband to my cousin Maaike and father to Simon, a shockingly cute baby I met at my uncle’s this afternoon – apparently likes to hide out in the bungalow that we’ll be sleeping in tonight, as his deadlines approach and his creativity runs dry. He’s a composer, see. Hopefully the place will have the same effect on me and Paul. I’ll keep this notebook handy just in case. I’ve been given one breakthrough already – I’m starting to think the lingering heaviness in my stomach isn’t illness. Rather, I’m homesick. Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday tomorrow. Maybe it’s the fact that the still water and rolling pastures remind me of the house I was raised in. If you squint a little my aunt even looks like her sister, my mother. Whatever it is, I find myself jonesing for the simplicity of childhood.
I wake up on my 23rd birthday with a heart attack. All the traditional warning signs are there – a tingly, stiff left arm and a pressure on my chest that feels somewhere between a vice and a very brutal massage. It passes away with time, luckily, and Petra’s husband Wybrand, who’s a doctor, diagnoses it as stress and sleeping awkwardly. Paul, meanwhile, has been suffering from back and neck problems as well as an achy head. I sometimes feel we’re less like tourists and more like the walking dead. Or at the very least the walking wounded. I may return to London shellshocked.
Giethoorn smells of memories. Even more than the sight of my old school or the sound of the wind whistling through the reeds its the scent of freshly-cut turf and mouldy straw that takes me back ten years and home. Or one of my homes, anyway. Born in Amsterdam, raised in this water-crossed village in the east of the country, then moving to New Zealand and now living in London, it’s hard to decide where my home and hearth actually is situated. Where the heart is, I suppose, but the heart doesn’t know what it wants.
Anyway, we rent a boat and take off into the maze of little rivers that divides the farmsteads and until recently were the only form of transport in what hyperbole calls ‘the Venice of the north’. Nowadays the locals mostly traverse Giethoorn on foot or bike, and the only people you’re likely to see on the water are Japanese tourists. We chased some of these down the river, waving a spike on a rope around and employing our best piratey rolling rs. One time we got stuck in the reeds and I cut my finger open on the flax, but there’s nothing wrong with bleeding like a good buccanneer. There’s something very liberating about having a boat, even one as minute as ours. You’re your own man, you make the decisions on where to go. Pirates were murderous rogues, I have no doubt of that. But I wonder if there isn’t some truth as well to the romanticised ideal of freedom that drove men, and women, to choose the outlaw life. Musing on such questions, we glide past haunting scenes of rusted farming instruments and actual cars abandoned in the grass. Eventually we come upon a great lake, and on it a pavilion containing a restaurant. The centenarians inside stare at us openly and strangely, but it has begun to rain and the wind blows harder than a Port Royal prostitute. Any port in a storm.
Driving home with dad now. We’re handed over from family member to family member, sleeping in a different guest room each night. There’s something disorientating and unexpected about it all. I’ve got my taste for travel back, and if I had a chance I’d go straight on and see the rest of Europe. Only problem, I haven’t got family distributed all through the continent of whose good nature to take advantage. It is now dusk, blue and purple. The quaint villages and endless green vistas are starting to blend into one. Once at my father’s house I have a relapse of this morning’s heart attack that’s soon cured with some Paracetamol (wouldn’t it be great if proper heart attacks were as easily taken care of?), and I can devote my attention completely to my dad’s very flash and jealousy-inducing home cinema set-up and the film screening thereon. It’s called Don’t Come Knocking, a Wim Wenders film about a lonesome man and drunken fool trying to reconnect with the family he’d abandoned and in particular with the children he’d never seen. A nice, melancholy film to end a nicely nostalgic, slightly melancholy but very beautiful birthday.
So, now I’m 23. Alexander the Great ruled Greece by this age. I wonder what my plan for tomorrow will be?
