“A woman’s work is never done”. Karoline helping out
at Eduard’s house. (St. Jan’s Klooster, about 1989)
Recently my sister Karolina, who lives in that wet and rainy country called
Holland, honoured me with a visit. She is a splendid woman and we get along
famously these days, except for those occasions when she wants to interfere with
my life style of which, I fear, she does not seem to have a high opinion. I do
have to admit though, our relationship has not always been as harmonious as it
is at present. She was, if I am permitted to say so, a bit of a pain in the
posterior when we were young. When we quarrelled, which was often, she’d hit me
over the head and me being much smaller (we differ four years in age), I could
not reach her head which infuriated me. She prefers to forget these things. “Its
not convenient to remember such trivialities” she says. Besides, the coincidence
of having the same father and mother meant we had a lot more in common. For one
thing, we were raised “with a book”, while our two younger brothers, because of
circumstances, were left to fend for themselves. When they were growing up,
nobody had the time to study the learned tomes but in spite of that, they have
become good law abiding, intelli-gent Dutch burghers who are able to speak
English and use their personal computers.
My mother, Karolina and “little me” on the steps of
our house in Bandung. (about 1931)
I have to elaborate on this. When we were small, our parents, who were both
teachers, intended to do things the proper way. They wanted to show the world
what modern children of the thirties should be like and so they ordered all the
pedagogic literature they could lay their hands on and raised us as instructed
by the manuals. The result was a pre-Dr. Spock disaster. We disgraced my father
by being stupid in school and we could not get along with each other at all in
those pre-World War II days in Indonesia. My father was so embarrassed about
this that he used to tell my mother: “Those children of yours will never amount
to anything.” In that frame of mind he tried to deny responsibility for our
existence. After all, I was the only European boy in the whole elementary school
at one stage and my sister went to my father’s high school where other teachers
would complain about her. A good example of my sister’s impossible behaviour
was, as I related two weeks ago, that she refused to eat carrots and that she
hid under the bed where my enraged father could not get to her when he went
after her with his bathroom slipper.
Karoline and me in the sun. “L’enfant terrible”
Eduard in de shadow. He refused to pose for the picture. (Tondano, 1939)
One of the first atrocities Karolina committed which I am still able to recall,
was when we lived in Cheribon, Java. As usual, my father had brought home a
stack of his students’ exercise books to correct. In the afternoon when my
parents were having their siesta, as most people did in the tropics, we sneaked
into his sanctuary in the annex of our house and there Karolina showed me a new
trick she had learned in school. She took an exercise book from the stack,
opened it up on an unspecified page, dipped her pen first in the Prussian blue
ink and dropped a large blot on the open book and then she repeated the process
with some cadmium red ink my father used for the corrections. Then she slapped
the book shut. The result was wonderful - the invention of the original
Rorschach test in full colour. Large, weirdly shaped dark blue and red spots
flowing into each other, covering most of the text the unfortunate student had
so painfully and neatly written. We were delighted. It stirred our imagination
and creativeness. My father as may be expected was far from amused and although
I can’t recall what he did to my dear sister - she denies remem-bering the
incident - the punishment must have been awful. Now, after all those years, I
often wonder with what excuse my poor father pacified the irate students.
It was also in those days and during the siesta as well, that she lost the keys
to the house in a drain, workmen were digging around it and I remember that
there was a lot of unpleasantness when my parents woke up for tea that afternoon
and could not open the lock on the front door.
Another occurrence for which she was not directly responsible and only passively
involved has become a family saga. When she was fourteen or fifteen, and we
lived in Tondano at the northern tip of Sulawesi, Indonesia, we were visited by
a young man of a slightly riper age, the son of our grocer in the coastal town
of Menado. Something stirred between my sister and the youth and while - to my
sister‘s mortification of course - we were discussing this development at the
dinner table one night, my younger brother Eduard mentioned that Karolina’s
beau, Josef, sported a faint shadow of a moustache on his upper lip. My mother,
in jest of course, casually mentioned that chicken manure was the thing to make
it grow faster.
The next day, while we and some of the neighbours children were standing around
the two budding lovers, Eduard suddenly crept in to the circle with a
mischievous smile, carrying a large dried leaf topped with some chicken
droppings which he - in spite of our efforts to push him away - aggressively
shoved under Josef’s nose with the message that it was beneficial for his manly
growth. As may be expected, the romance never survived this disgraceful and
embarrassing incident. It was, quoting Graham Green: “The end of the Affair.”
Before anybody accuses me of gross indiscretion, the above was published with
full permission of the lady herself who had a chance to have a glance at the
first draft just before she returned home to her loved ones in the low
countries.
