Sometimes I really think that May is the most beautiful month. You think that in June, or in September, but May is so lovely. The colors are so delicate, all those blossoms, the whole world that warms up and seems to expect and promise things. †The sweetest, fairest, yes, little Mei.†
I sat in the train and looked outside, there were a few men standing in allotments, one had a very classical handkerchief with four buttons on his head against the sun, they were talking next to their rake – that’s what I thought, that’s how it was , so peaceful and promising, early May 1940. Just before it started.
Recently I received an email from a relative of nearly 94 who wrote that he believed that World War III was very near and that it could mean the end of humanity. Go ahead. Not that I’m never afraid of that third great war, but I’d rather find such things gloomy, pessimistic. And at the same time I think: he’s been through it before.
Just like my father, who was still a boy at the time, 10 when the war started. He wrote a book about it a few years ago, Cycling without tires, which I was once again reading. What those May days were like in Zandvoort, where he lived, a friendly seaside resort with summers full of children with buckets, German bathers – but now suddenly ‘scumbags’. How a sea mine washes up and the little boy can’t resist touching it and then being startled by it. A child. A mine. Could have ended differently.
Also the conversations, with an NSB boy, for example, who says: „’If the Germans had not come to protect us’ – yes ‘protect’, he really says it – ‘then’, says Peurt, ‘then the English would have come .’” Hey, how familiar this sounds, now you hear exactly the same from the Russian side, but different.
In Zandvoort the houses on the boulevard are being demolished, residents are being evacuated, my father moved to Amsterdam. One day he saw Jews standing on the platform of the Muiderpoort station, with a lot of luggage. “Just today on a weekday, a few hundred meters away from us.” He wonders if there would be children he knows and does not dare to go and see. “Imagine if they should be ashamed because I see them there.”
Everything is very ordinary and very unusual. It can also suddenly be like this, changes often come so suddenly, the phone rings and someone says: ‘sit down’, a message is heard on the radio about an aircraft that has disappeared from the radar, there is a threat in the newspaper.
Such a May full of kindness. Between the destroyed houses of a destroyed city, trees grow pale green, flowers bloom in the remains of gardens. Maybe there’s a floral scent floating around.
The unimaginable can just invade the ordinary, has done so many times everywhere. I can hardly even imagine the feeling of the month of May in winter. Of course you know that the light and the atmosphere change, as you know that humans are capable of the most terrible things, so terrible that the end of humanity, which my very old relative feared, does not seem catastrophic to you in some respects.
But those are some ways. That is not the unreality of that war then, of war now, an unreality that you feel anyway. †What is it, what disturbs the quiet peace/ of May…†
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 9, 2022
#disturbs #quiet #tranquility