A spontaneous e-mail from Tineke, as she often sent it in recent weeks. “Oh Frank, you should have seen Stommel, the dog, and Alina meet this morning. So moving, so happy to see each other. Without language, just by feeling.” I got her first shortly after my column about Alina, the refugee Ukrainian artist. She was looking for painting space, I wrote, because she was now housed in a small hotel room. Tineke was touched by it and said she had a room available free of charge.
We are now many emails further in our penfriendship. Tineke sends beautiful, lyrical, personal e-mails about small happiness and great sadness. I haven’t met her yet – I promised to do so during my vacation – but I can already form an image. In the meantime, Alina has been sitting for some time a few days a week in the study in her house, painting the carpet protected by cellophane.
There is a story behind that room. Andrei – friend, Russian and interpreter, in that order – was at the first meeting between Tineke and Alina. There she said that it was the study of her husband Renier, who could no longer live with her because of his advanced Alzheimer’s disease. “She feels lonely,” Andrei said. “It’s a pathetic and somewhat uncomfortable situation.”
It touched me too, but Tineke doesn’t think she’s pathetic. She is still “a privileged person anyway,” she wrote. “Renier lives in a nice apartment, is not angry like many others there, is still as courteous. Although he has no idea of the world, of corona, of the war, of the grandchildren, he has remained himself in his own way.” She is especially happy that the room has been given such a beautiful destination. And according to her, Renier had also welcomed Alina warmly at home. In his best Russian – he once did a basic course.
Not Tineke, who asked Andrei during that first meeting whether she should learn some Ukrainian. And the only Russian word she knows is dog. “By Chekhov.” The lady with the dog, so is Tineke. Stommel, the dog, figures in all emails. He keeps Alina company in the study and takes care of communication when Google Translate is too much of a hassle. Maybe, she wrote, Alina just wants to paint in silence. “I’m always trying to imagine what it’s like when everything has been swept away from under you, uncertainty, tension, sadness.”
Alina is happy there, says Andrei, who sends me pictures of the work she makes at Tineke. Tineke bought the first, a still life of some vases in the study, made in three hours on the very first day.
And so I, a capable cynic, go into my holiday hopeful. That shared grief can bring new happiness. That the good people are not sold out yet.
This is the last column of Frank Huiskamp as a replacement for Marcel van Roosmalen.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 12, 2022
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