An excerpt from the story of my grandparents’ emigration

Now, as I write this, the waves of the Atlantic Ocean beat on Portuguese sand, ten meters away from me

It is the same water over which my grandparents left our war-torn continent 82 years ago. Today the water ripples like a calm North Sea, and yet the retreating waves have so much force that they can pull your legs away from underneath you.

I sit against a pointy rock and try to imagine the SS Costa Rica, a Dutch ship that is not even that big compared to the high waves it could meet, as it carries my grandfather and my grandmother to South America.

My grandmother had so wanted to become a grandmother, but died on the morning her grandchildren flew in from Surinam to meet her for the first time, just like her father on Sunday after the church bell had tolled.

My grandfather had fourteen grandchildren. I was the youngest and grew close to him after the early death of my father. I grew to know him well, but of their harrowing adventure I only learned after his death, for to whom is alive, you only listen with half an ear.

They were about as old then as I am now. Such adventurers they were, how brave, and how lucky. They had fallen in love while he taught her German, they were the same age and wanted to marry, but these were the thirties. A horrible depression robbed strong-willed people of their work and faith in the future.

Jochem had taught at Dutch schools since he was eighteen, first boys who were hardly younger than himself, later boys who were in prison for burglary and other offenses. He taught them language and national history, they taught him how to deal with thieves.

‘Burglars don’t like noise, sir. And you must never block our escape route, because then we will use violence to get past you.’

Fifteen years after that lesson my grandfather awoke in the middle of a Surinamese night, by the sound of marbles falling on the floor, one by one, one after the other. He was in the tropics, where the nights are damp, he slept under a mosquito net with his wife, and looked into the darkness of the room, where he saw two figures. Their faces were masked, but their eyes were visible, and they looked straight into his, petrified. One of them held his fingers around the small key of the cupboard, he had turned it bit by bit, which ticked, ticked, ticked in the ill-lubricated lock. They had wanted to be quiet, and exactly because of it had awakened my grandfather, the prison teacher, who knew they didn’t like noise, and who threw the thin sheets off of his body and shouted: ‘Thieves!’ He sought the exit of the mosquito net, turned on the light, and called again: ‘Thieves!’ He grabbed the chair besides his bed and beat it against the wall, again and again. ‘Thieves!’ He opened the window and called it to the neighbour as well.

The thieves had long gone. They left their shoes by the front door, and also the bottle of whiskey they had found.

Everyone awoke because of my grandfather’s alarm, except his oldest son, who had slept deeply and only found out in the morning that there had been a break-in, to his great regret. ‘He was eleven and liked playing detective,’ his sister later told me. ‘That morning he was allowed to stay home, because the police wanted to check his school bag for fingerprints. A small compensation for him.’

The morning after the break-in my grandfather discovered that his steel ruler didn’t lay in its usual place, but elsewhere in the house. I know that ruler. Until the end of my grandfather’s long life that ruler lay on the large desk in his Dutch bedroom. The ruler was about five centimetres wide, a few millimetres thick, and fifty centimetres long. Pure steel. It was heavy and the burglars had laid it ready, just in case. ‘You must never block our escape route, sir.’

Later it turned out that the police were already on the lookout for these masked burglars at the time they stood in the nightly bedroom. They had robbed two single people in their house far outside the city and nearly beaten them to death. Even later, it turned out that these chaps, in the same night my grandfather shood them away, broke into a school, and when they forced open a cabinet and only found ten cents in it, they stained all tables with ink. ‘I think they absolutely detested school,’ my aunt said.

It was a beautiful story which my grandfather could tell in full colour, with more details and perspectives than I now share here, dear reader, and which his daughters keep alive after his death. Apart from being a teacher, my grandfather was also a storyteller. Or perhaps a teacher by definition is a storyteller. He was also a poet and writer, in a small circle he gave away his poetry collections. He was a bright, curious, also sensitive man, who kept his emotions in check and didn’t show them, at least not to me. He was gentle. He cooked vegetable soup with an entire head of garlic, after his wife died, because he had heard that was healthy. He liked sweets and cakes. He was an avid reader of astronomy and Russian poets and the shades in between. As a kid he had lived separately from his parents for six years, at a different continent than them. His hair wasn’t grey like ashes, but white like clouds. He was generous and hospitable, and in my youth one of my two father figures, after my real father, having died before my eyes, couldn’t show me anymore how to be a man.

But before he became a grandpa, he was father, and before he was a father, he fell in love, and before he fell in love, his father asked him, if he would teach German to the daughter of furniture factory Van Zeben.

And he said yes.