Willemijn

(How to dominate an onion, or No crumpet for breakfast, or How a mother amplifies her voice in their daughter's.)

Willemijn was the smallest girl in grade 5, in my son Veer’s class at primary school. She was so tiny that the teacher often registered her as missing when counting the children as they entered or left the classroom. Fortunately, they discovered that Willemijn had a voice. And what a voice it was.

“Willemijn, are you back inside?” the teacher would often ask after playtime.

Then the children would crawl under their desks, press their fingers deep into their ears and wait tremulously until they heard Willemijn’s “YEEEEEES!” reverberating through the classroom.

“Ah. Very well,” said the teacher, and she sat down at her desk as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“Everyone please open your language books to page 3.” She said.

Then the children came out from under their desks, sat down obediently on their chairs, picked up papers, that had blown off their desks, from the floor, a few children put some fallen plants back on the windowsill, everyone glanced across Willemijn to the blackboard, and the class began.

So what was the case?

Somewhere inside Willemijn’s wee body was a ship’s horn.

One of those really big ones that ocean liners have, so that in foggy weather they can warn all the smaller, more manoeuvrable ships, and the big ones too, that they’re around and you don’t accidentally bump into them.

Willemijn’s mother, who herself could only whisper so that no one in the schoolyard, except for Willemijn, would hear her when she said something, had once found such a ship’s horn at a flea market and stirred it into Willemijn’s yoghurt at breakfast one morning.

“ You should try it out first, dear,” whispered Willemijn’s mother when she saw her daughter’s suspicious face above the bowl.

Then she turned back to the kitchen sink to pour them a cup of tea as inconspicuously as possible, and Willemijn took a bite.

“Beloved Almighty Father up in Heaven, please let her teeth hold out,” Willemijn’s mother prayed silently above the kitchen sink, stirring a spoonful of honey into each cup of tea.

Behind her back, Willemijn’s teeth crunched on the ship’s horn, and her mother heard her daughter – who was not so much obedient as extremely curious – spooning one bite after another into her mouth.

As she scraped the last of the bowl and licked her lips, her mother finally turned back to the breakfast table, smiled tenderly, set the tea down in front of them and whispered, “Tasty?”

Willemijn briefly pondered a response, then felt a burp rising and opened her mouth.

Willemijn’s mother just about managed to clamp her hands around the cups, inside which the tea sloshed against the porcelain in foaming waves. The walls of the living room, the glass china cabinet, the windows: everything roared, rumbled, rattled and clattered, as if a hurricane were blowing through it from front to back.

Outside on the street, the alarms of parked cars blared and the neighbours hung out of their windows and scanned the direction of the Amstel river, to see if perhaps a cruise ship, one of those floating flats, was breaking through the Berlage Bridge.

But they saw nothing, so they went back inside and closed the windows.

“Come on, darling, finish your tea,” whispered Willemijn’s mother, “it’s a quarter past eight, we have to leave for school in a minute.”

Willemijn drank her tea, slipped off her chair and said in her normal voice: “Can I just have a crumpet again tomorrow?”

Willemijn didn’t necessarily use her ship’s horn all the time.

But if she was completely overlooked again, or if the teacher was searching for her while standing right in front of her, then she found it quite useful.

In grades 5 and 6, the children had ‘school gardens’. These were located behind the dyke next to the Weesper canal, a twenty-minute cycle ride from school.

Each child had a small garden measuring about 0.80 by 1.40 meters, and in early spring, all those children’s fingers had dug holes in the earth and filled them with various seeds. Carrots, radishes, tomatoes, leeks and onions too.

Willemijn’s garden was Veer’s neighbouring garden, that’s how it came about.

Shortly before or shortly after the summer holidays, who is to say, the weekly trips to the school gardens were the most enjoyable. That was when all, what those verdant little fingers had sown, was reaped.

Veer had a beautiful bunch of carrots - one of which had two legs under one tuft of leaves - radishes, a cauliflower, a potato or three and a few beetroots.

In Willemijn’s garden, the gardener stood with two determined little fists tugging at the green hair of what had to be an onion. On either side of the hair stood the heels of her red gardening boots.

Willemijn bent her knees and stretched out her arms, leaned her body rearward and threw her blonde head into her neck, and with all the willpower she had, she pushed against the most stubborn square meter of clay on earth, groaned menacingly and pulled with all her might on the green strands.

The earth bulged slightly, a lump of dry clay rolled into Veer’s garden, and otherwise nothing happened.

Veer put his bag of harvest on the ground, stepped into Willemijn’s footsteps, wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled along.

“One, two!” he shouted, and two sworn children’s bodies hung from the hairs of the underground onion and booted the globe away from them as if it were a malicious dream that had come to grab them.

A sandy cough sounded from where the onion’s ponytail protruded from the ground. Two grains of earth rolled aside in startled silence.

But Willemijn had grunted, and when Willemijn grunted, there was a risk that the ship’s horn would blow, so the boots of the other school gardeners hurried to Willemijn’s garden, stood in a united row with their heels in the sand and put their arms around each other’s waists, and when the last boots were in line and all knees bent at once - like a centipede trained by the Marine Corps - a hundred children’s mouths chimed in once more: “one, two...”

Willemijn groaned, and her head turned as red as Veer’s beetroot, which soon rubbed off on the faces of the heads behind her.

The tail of the onion stood straight up as if there was iron wire in it, the garden gnomes puffed and groaned, little clouds of steam wafting from their nostrils, the earth creaked wearily, seemed to bulge for a moment and then closed hermetically around the onion again, teasing and convinced of its own invincibility, like a much bigger child who has taken a toy from someone else, one it is already too old for, but which it refuses to give back out of pure obnoxiousness.

But then, while the queue behind Willemijn had already collapsed exhausted on the ground and Veer was the only one still clinging to her waist, Willemijn blew the ship’s horn and the earth - in sheer shock - let go of the onion.

“.....THREE!” Willemijn bellowed, and the earth’s crust burst open between their boots, giving birth with such force to an onion the size of a well-inflated football that it flew backwards in a parabolic arc over the heads of Willemijn and Veer, who were tumbling backwards onto their bottoms, and then landed with an exhausted sigh on the sand, in the middle of Zoë’s garden, who had already ridden home half an hour ago with her harvest in a plastic bag on the back of her mother’s bicycle.

Willemijn and Veer bent over the giant onion in disbelief, then squeezed it into a canvas shopping bag, divided the handles between them and dragged it behind them to the gate, where Willemijn’s mother whispered that she would make French onion soup that evening, with one of those baguettes with melted Gruyère on them, floating like a little vessel, in the broth.

Veer had glanced over his shoulder and noticed a crater in Willemijn’s garden, which could easily accommodate the entire class in the event of a sudden civil war breaking out. The school gardeners filled ten large wheelbarrows with soil, piling it high, and drove in a convoy along the path to the pit where Willemijn’s garden had once been. As a joke, they shouted obscene words into the depths and then tipped their wheelbarrows into it, with a frivolity as if the minutes in a gardener’s life consisted entirely of filling identical craters with identical wheelbarrows of soil.

That evening, we ate the cauliflower and the carrots, which were delicious. Veer got the one with the two legs. He spread some ketchup on the ends to make two little red boots and then ate them.