Immigrant's Affliction

March 15, 2007

The village where I grew up was a green refuge in a vast urban zone punctured only here and there by meadows filled with ruminating cows and guarded by pollarded willows sadly leaning over the silvery ribbons of drainage ditches. Or, from a less enchanted point of view, a pit of provincialism so stubbornly mired in the clay, sugar beets, and Brussels sprouts that not even the immediate proximity of advanced civilization could make a dent in its backwardness. To the children of the village, however, it was a giant water park without entrance fees and very little in the way of adult supervision.

Meuse DevelWaal

Community garden

Heerjansdam lies at the confluence of the rivers Meuse, Waal, and Devel, in the low-lying country of southern South Holland. People say Inuit have 50 words for snow and just so I grew up with an endless vocabulary for the equally endless incarnations of mud. There’s “griend,” the mud that appears when the tides are out and the Meuse retreats to its narrower bed. And “bagger,” which is the mud occasionally dredged out of the Waal. Giant bubbles appear in “bagger” ice in winter, and you just have to kick through each and every one until you misjudge and go all the way through and find yourself standing knee-deep in the mud. “Modder” is what you track into the house when you forget your mother’s injunctions to leave your shoes at the back door. “Blubber” is much more watery. It can be found in the puddles on the streets after rain, and you can draw your hopscotch field with it if you run out of chalk. The “klei” in your garden kills the rhododendrons, your dad says. It makes your clogs so big you can pretend you’re snow shoeing in Switzerland when you’re supposed to pull the weeds from the strawberry patch instead.

Bridge over the Devel

As I remember it, we were always outside, wild and free, engaged in elaborate adventures fueled by our books, and going home—cold, wet, and very filthy—only when the light failed or dinner called. Sometimes the games came to a premature conclusion when we lost a boot or a clog to the mud and had to hobble home to a certain scolding. But when things went well, we played Robin Hood and Ivanhoe near the railroad bridge over the Waal. We went on fishing expeditions near the old cloisters at Develsluis, telling each other stories about the secret underground tunnels to the church nearby, and about the cursed or haunted farmhouse near Kijfhoek.

Kijfhoek church

We rarely got ourselves in serious trouble, but it seems we generally operated at the very borders of adult tolerance. If we cut in back of the public school to get to the graveyard, the headmaster would yell at us and shake his stick in the air. If the car men saw us near the switching yard, they’d chase us off yelling and cursing, so we hid behind the levees and crawled on our bellies where the cover was sparse. Occasionally, we’d get caught running across thin ice on the canal behind the mayor’s house (to see who would go through first), and then the mayor’s wife would tell our parents. We stole matches and potatoes to roast and hiked all the way out to the meadows near Kijfhoek, but we never had wood and the grass was too damp to make a decent fire. We “smoked” the cigar-like seed stalks that grew in the reeds by the Meuse until we were thoroughly nauseated.

It survives in my mind as a landscape in which history and geography merge into a single fuzzy ball, like the clutch of yarn a kitten swats across the living-room floor. It was my home, a place made up of stories that I carry with me wherever I go. It is the world as it was supposed to be, the world that never was, the immigrant’s affliction, a stew of mawkish delights that stands in the way of truly feeling at home wherever I am now.

Marijke Rijsberman

If you have any thoughts to share with me, please drop me a line at marijke@interfacility.com