‘Hullo.’

‘Hello.’

‘Good morning, boys and girls… books on the desk… by tomorrow they must all be neatly covered… preparation for playing your part in society… discipline… hard work

I listen to the flood of words, then obediently bring out a book, open it and look at the figures, signs and formulas. I feel dizzy and slow-witted and bend feebly over the letters: A is to C as B is to A.

‘That boy over there, yes, you.’ I quickly put on a knowing, intelligent expression, but blush hopelessly. ‘You look as if you’d seen a cow in a pair of knickers flying over the chimney. Didn’t they teach you to count beyond ten at your last school, you ninny?’

The class sniggers politely.

The words and the tone in which they are said cut right through me, I have never been rebuked with such scorn before. My throat tightens and I start to splutter and cough. The boy beside me snatches his books away. Will I have to put up with this sort of thing for a whole year? I remain in a state of confusion until an older lady comes in to relieve the first teacher.

‘The English language, boys and girls,’ she says, ‘is one all of us can of course use to good effect these days. I take it that some of you are familiar with quite a few English expressions. Is there anybody, for instance, who hasn’t yet spoken to one of our liberators?’ A few arms go up, all of them girls’. Before I know what I am doing I have raised my hand as well.

She starts reading out sentences from English for Beginners and tells us to say them aloud as she writes the words up on the blackboard. I look at her face, the curly grey hair, the calm grey eyes above the dark blue jumper.

‘My name is Mister Brown. This is my house and that is my wife.’

She pronounces the words with exaggerated emphasis, pausing between each one. With droning, sing-song voices we repeat them after her, sentence after sentence. The sounds I make become lost in the general chorus.

‘My name is Mister Brown. This is my house and that is my wife… Say it: Walt… I work in the city… Is okay, no problem… She works in the kitchen… Hold it, yes, move. Goon… Time is going fast. In the evening I come home… Faster, don’t stop, come on… My wife holds my hat… We sit at the table… Oh, is good, is good… We drink tea with a biscuit… Baby, I love you. Come on, smile.’

They all rushed out in front of me and I let them pass. I waited until the corridor was empty and only then did I leave.

I walk past the iron fence. The spikes stab the air and mark out the path. The shadows over the sand have gone and most of the playing children are back home.

The sky is overcast, suddenly the city looks drab and inaccessible. I stop for a moment at the De Clerqstraat crossroads. In the distance I can see my classmates disappearing, all hurrying home as fast as they can.

I hesitate. What am I going to do?

A tram goes by, boys from my class are hanging on and leaning out from the footboard, yelling and swinging their satchels daringly. I watch the tram undulating over the humps of the bridge and on down the empty street.

My name is Mister Brown. This is my house… I feel a few drops of rain and button up my shirt. Carry on walking, now.

…and that is my wife…

Modern Day

I put all the papers scattered over the table to one side, and push the plate I have filled in the kitchen into the space I have made. Mustn’t make a mess.

Leaning on one elbow I read some more in the book I happened to pick up yesterday. But I am disappointed, I cannot recapture the impression it made on me years ago. Even so, I read on in the hope that the sense of excitement and admiration I felt at the time might return.

I pour out a little stale wine and swallow my food mechanically. ‘Don’t eat with your chin in your hands all the time,’ I can still hear her say. Time after time I had bent over a book in the middle of lunch, cramming bread into my mouth absent-mindedly. When my mother finally snatched the book away I would rebelliously turn the jampot or the box of sugared caraway seeds round and round to read and re-read the labels.

After five minutes, or a quarter of an hour – how much time has gone by? – I notice that I have read two pages without taking in anything at all, just a blur of isolated words without meaning or connection. I push my plate away. Almost six o’clock. There is to be a talk on the local radio to which I want to listen. I turn the small set on and re-read a few pages of the book. The announcer says that tomorrow it will be thirty-five years since the Allies liberated the Netherlands.

‘At the invitation of Amsterdam City Council a group of Canadian veterans are visiting the capital. A few hours ago they were welcomed by a small but enthusiastic reception committee at Schiphol airport. Tonight they will be attending a dinner in the Royal Palace on the Dam, where tomorrow there will be a wreath-laying ceremony in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix.’

I close the book, turn the radio off and go to the window. Across the street I can see a mountain of refuse bags. A woman is neurotically washing every speck from her car parked outside my door. Every so often she inspects the result from a distance and then flings herself back tight-lipped at the same spot.

A flag is hanging outside the hotel. I try to remember if it is there all the time or has been put out specially for the occasion.

Canadians, liberators, Her Majesty, the Royal Palace on the Dam, how often have I heard these words before without the slightest reaction? It is like the book, I read it and nothing in it gets through to me.

For the first two years after the war I commemorated the liberation frenziedly, every single day. Obsessed, like a maniac. Prayer sesions, offerings, supplications, solemn promises – all in the privacy of my small room. For two years I tried to remember features, smells, excitement, fear. Then it all faded away, a slow erosion that went hand in hand with bouts of self-reproach and dejected, silent withdrawal into myself.

‘It’s puberty, all boys that age act like that,’ I heard a relative say to my parents.

I went to school and learnt thing, by rote, then found my vocation and became completely immersed in it. Or had I deliberately buried myself in it?

I made my choice and set to with a vengeance, I tell myself testily.

Until eight o’clock I carry on reading the book that leaves me so cold, then I switch on the television: I want to see those Canadians.

A bus crash, a summit conference. Then: Schiphol, a small group of people crowded in front of a glass partition. The mayor. I get up because the telephone rings.

‘Hello, Govert. No, give me a ring a bit later, I’m busy with something right now.’

By the time I am back sitting down the Canadians are driving through the city on a tank. I see a group of greying men in uniform riding over the Rokin, smiling broadly. The heroes of yesterday. Their ungainly stoutness is emphasised by their uniforms. They have pinned decorations to their jackets. I catch myself looking at them compassionately. They have friendly, blank expressions, ordinary men of the kind you might see on a tram, or in a doctor’s waiting room. Ageing men in their sixties.

Extracts from old newsreels are shown. Pictures I have often seen: soldiers ploughing through the surf, crawling up beaches. The tumult of the sea and the explosions. Boats that are only just under control. I see trenches filled with maimed or dismembered bodies, the black fury of young, driven faces. Then the endless field of white crosses. The madness to which we fall prey time after time after time. What is wrong with us?

When I think back to those days I see myself sitting beside a lean, young soldier in an army car, accepting chewing-gum from a firm hand and inhaling the metallic smell of uncertainty during embraces and contacts I did not want and yet longed for like one possessed. The screen is showing the reception outside the Palace. I kneel on the floor and go and sit right in front of the set to get a closer view of the soldiers. The wrinkles, the bags under their eyes, the folds bulging over the collars of their stiff uniforms.

They aren’t completely bald yet, I think. Why am I dissecting them so mercilessly? Why do I feel so detached from something that swept me off my feet years ago into a state of such excitement?

The army band strikes up some patriotic songs. There they stand, the lost soldiers. A few final flamboyant chords and it is all over. The small crowd disperses, and the veterans disappear into a waiting bus.

A pigeon is cooing outside and picking buds off the hawthorn. Whenever I think of the soldier I still see him as a boy and myself as a child. We have remained as we were, the time in between does not exist. He has nothing to do with the group of men I have just seen leave on the bus.

I sit beside my mother in the boat and watch Friesland disappear and Amsterdam come into view on the other side. I hang over the railing with Jan and look at the eddying water. A warm, carefree day it was, with blue skies and mothers in summer dresses. We had a calm and trouble-free crossing from Friesland to Amsterdam. A detached moment in my life.

I go upstairs and lie down on my bed. The ceiling is a large, pale smudge. Outside, a tram stops with a clang and pulls away again. Summer evening noises, the curtain gently billowing in front of the open window. The soldier leans across me and tucks a letter away in the side pocket of the tent. The naked underside of his body curving upwards, the voluptuous shape, the triumphal arch, has been etched into my memory. For good, ineradicably.