It’s because they went down a chimney
My grandma used to say that insanity is doing a thing over and over and over and over again, and expect a different result each time. She wasn’t wrong, my Oma Nettie. Bit old, bit odd. But not wrong.
If I had to guess, I’d wager that she had read it in one of her mailbox books, the poorly abridged ones that she used to receive once a month, cheaply packaged in thin manila envelopes and always vaguely smelling of mildew. Unwanted and unnecessary. For years she received them, once a month, as punctual as the surgical excision of her bank account to pay for them. Over and over and over and over again. Because she refused to figure out how to unsubscribe to that home book delivery scam.
She hated those books, we all knew she did. Was embarrassed by them, the way they stacked unevenly on the bookshelf and made all other legitimate books around them, the various Dostoevsky and Mulisch and Allende and Reve, cheap by osmosis. But she didn’t want, or couldn’t, admit it to herself. Not after so many years. Tell yourself a lie long enough, and the cost to recognize it as such quickly becomes steeper that adjusting the rest of your life around that lie to make it real. And, of course, getting rid of them was a consideration so alien to her very being that no one had ever dared to suggest she do so. She was from the generation shaped by the long Hunger Winter, during which people had to eat whatever was available, which often was nothing. A generation that had had to decide whether the boundary between pet and food is really set is stone. You don’t throw away stuff when you once wondered whether steeping tire rubber in hot water makes it chewable.
And so each new manila envelope was inevitably, inescapably, unavoidably met with Oma Nettie’s enormous smile and ooohhs and aaahhs, a little child discovering the pile of gifts left in front of the door by St. Nicolaas. But when you live long enough with someone, picking up the small nuances that separate façade from genuineness becomes as easy as skinning a rabbit, as we say in my part of the world. Which is certainly peculiar in itself, as rabbits are notoriously hard to skin. Go figure.
The last time that Oma Nettie lectured us about her philosophical stance on insanity was the day she received the book about the Dutch sugar trade. The book with the drawings of human beings shackled to each other and piled on top of each other down in the hold of VOC ships sailing towards the West Indies.
That day two other things happened—Robbert’s face paint would not wash off, and Oma Nettie’s heart pumped for the last time—which had been both unconnected and intimately related to that book. To that drawing.
Because, see, that book was the November addition to her stack. And November around here means kids getting excited about the imminent arrival of St. Nicolaas and his horse and his ship and his helpers. The Pieten. The Pieten and their cookies and their silly costumes and their painted faces. In black. Painted in black.
It’s soot, it’s because they went down a chimney, is what some people argued. People who believe that all traditions should be upheld no matter what.
Weird how soot looks incredibly like blackface, exaggerated lips and frizzy hair and all, others argued. Go figure.
Robbert, my brother, was of the former. Stop being so sensitive, not everything is a human right violation, was his motto. And the motto of his group of friends, normal in all the possible ways that normality entails, including engaging in conscious efforts not to make waves and certainly, oh certainly, never question what normality means in the first place. Just be normal. And normal people are not that sensitive, they don’t worry that everything is a human right violation. Just chill, sis.
And so that day, the day the book about the sugar trade arrived, the opening of the slightly mildew envelope coincided with Robbert slathering his face with shoe polish. Black shoe polish. Like each year. Just to celebrate St. Nicolaas, you know? And be normal. All his friends were doing the same, they were just going for drinks and celebrate. Normal. No one would bother us, he said, all will be fine. Like each year. Just stop being so sensitive, sis.
Sitting at the other end of the table, across from Robbert and his tin can of black shoe polish that smelled like petroleum and turpentine, leafing through the book about sugar trade she just unearthed from the mildew envelope, Oma Nettie told me once again her stance about insanity. Over and over and over again, and yet expect a different outcome.
And so Robbert went, after stamping a quick kiss on Oma Nettie’s head and telling her that yes yes yes yes they can discuss about people shackled to each other and piled on top of each other down in the hold of VOC ships sailing towards the West Indies later, later, when he will be back.
And when he came back after a few drinks and laughs, normal, and went into the bathroom to get ready to go to bed, like all normal evenings, and realized that the black paint on his face would not budge, not even by a smidgen, no matter how much he would wash bathe sponge mop wipe scrape grate graze scuff or scratch, and after he stormed into the kitchen and started shaving away lumps of his face with the carrot peeler, his eyes bulging and quivering with madness, it was at that point that Oma Nettie stood up, walked to the shelf, set the sugar trade book next to Anna Karenina, and stopped living.
Alex Nai is a political communication researcher at the University of Amsterdam with extensive, award-winning expertise on the dark side of the mind, political radicalization, and extremism. His fiction has been published in Cleaver, Litro, Umbrella Factory, and new_sinews. alexnaifiction.com.
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