From: IK OMHELS JE MET DUIZEND ARMEN (I EMBRACE YOU WITH A THOUSAND ARMS) by Ronald Giphart

Translation: Stacey Knecht
Published by Podium NL

Represented by
The Susijn Agency, 64 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7QH
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pp. 11-14

Amsterdam, early this morning
It took ages for the light to turn green. In my rearview mirror, I could see Samarinde behind the wheel of her ancient BMW. She waved. Our caravan was on its way to Schiphol and here we were, at the end of the night, in some godforsaken place, waiting until we could move on. For no reason I pressed down the brake pedal, still looking in my mirror. In the reddish glow, Samarinde was more beautiful than ever. I released the pedal and the glow disappeared. I stepped on the brakes again. A warm gleam on Samarinde’s white teeth. Her smile as vague as in Maris’s painting, Ecstasy. There’s a Japanese expression, mukushoh (Samarinde once told me): laughing with the eyes. Samarinde mukoshoh-ed at me.
Next to Samarinde was Meija, who was just leaning over to take something out of the glove compartment. She, too, entered my phantasmagorical glow. Meija smiled at me – not her fashion model’s smile, but purely and sincerely. Every girl, I thought, is beautiful in brake light. And then I thought, as my hand curled into a fist: what a great opening line that would make for a novel I’d probably never write.

Every girl is beautiful in brake light. I haven’t written to you yet about Samarinde. About how everything had changed, all because of her. For the first time in eight years I cleaned up my room, all because of her. I chucked out all my other women and didn’t feel a thing, I sat on my balcony for hours enjoying the sultry chill, the sounds of evening and the overpowering scent of love in my clothes, all because of her. I ordered take-out roti (which I’d never done before) and it tasted delicious, all because of her. I thought of her, all because of her. And whenever I thought of her I had to sigh, I’m not kidding. The smell of wood-burning fires was her, the music from my loudspeakers, her, the glow of the rose-colored evening sky above the city, her, my pillow, forever her.
It had all started on her first night-shift, this Crash Crush, and was nourished by the rare occasions when she came to have tea with me in my porter’s aquarium, by the moment when we, for no particular reason, walked arm-in-arm to the night kitchen and an enormous banner flashed into my mind, at the entrance to the X-ray department, that read: NOW YOU LEAN TOWARDS HER AND RAPE HER MOUTH WITH YOUR TONGUE – after which, of course, I did nothing.
Because the stupid thing goddammit is that for months, months, I didn’t make a fucking move. I didn’t have the nerve. What had gotten into me? I thought about her, I sang her praises to Monk & Thijm, to total strangers, to the check-out girl at the Dagmarkt on the Biltstraat which is now an A&P, and since desire requires foresight, I cycled, walked, crawled, flew, glided, skipped, bounced, cartwheeled, and drifted past the Wingerd Café and the hospital just to see her, yet in spite of all this I still hadn’t thought up a damn thing. And by ‘thought up’ I mean writing long letters, showing up unexpectedly but strategically with a serious injury or a festering ulcer, tattooing her name on my forehead, flinging myself onto the cold stone floor in front of a crumbling altar in a drafty church to ask her out for dinner (how romantic), dragging her by the hair to a bar and getting her loaded, enrolling in medical school and then the two of us starting a hospital where we were the only ones they treated – that kind of thing.
I mean: this woman was beyond incredible – a doctor, no less, who deigned to go out with a bespectacled ‘writer’, the Eternal Night Porter. After another terrible, gory night at the hospital we finally kissed, just the teenytiniest of kisses, outside her front door, quietly, so no one could hear, quieter, Giph, and don’t get off your bike, Giph, and no, I don’t have any tea (too much of a tough guy to say: doctor babe, yousmellsogoodyoufeelsosoft), come on Giph, further down the street, more kissing, my hand on her sweater, I didn’t know what to do next without making the situation more painful. She said: ‘I don’t know if it’s such a good idea, what we’re doing, I mean, the hospital…’ I said I didn’t know either, though what I really wanted (who gave a crap about that shithouse?) was to undress her, or in any case lift her up, very gently, and then slowly, solemnly, carry her to the nearest park, lay her down among the jasmine, lilacs, buttercups, sprinkle her with dew, close her eyes and gaze at her, for several hundred years or more. I think I was just horny.
She asked me not to tell anyone, about our little kissing session, and I thought: what does she mean by that? Later on I cycled home, my emotions zipping around every which way. Should I be happy, or not happy? I throw things at other things, and let that determine my life. Along the river Vecht I saw a sign saying NO MOORING. I decided to throw my chewing gum at the sign. If I didn’t hear a metal click, then everything was over and despite our mouth music she felt nothing for me, the whore; if I did hear the tick of gum against the sign, we’d share eternal love – for at least two years. I (grown man) threw my gum into the dark night, toward the Vecht. My destiny sounded. Everything had changed, all because of her.

pp. 193-196

Still in the Volcan de Teneguia,
early afternoon
I’m sitting at the bottom of the volcano, in the shade of the young tree I’m leaning against. Gulpje climbs down toward me from the rim of the crater, smiling the whole time. Of all the human facial expressions, only ‘smile’ and ‘amazement’ can be distinguished from fifty yards away – all other expressions are distorted into an amorphous mass (good thing those scientists have researched this stuff!). At a distance of a hundred yards, only the smile is distinguishable, which makes it the indisputable winner of the Great Facial Expression Competition. I don’t know what the philosophical implications are of this, maybe that man is most human when he’s smiling (or something like that – bet you can’t think of anything better).
I watch as Gulpje clambers down. Her T-shirt says: BARBIE IS A SLUT. When she reaches me, she asks, ‘Did you know the average man produces a thousand sperm cells per second?’
Gulpje & I, like I told you 20,491 words ago, both have this thing about useless knowledge. It’s a kind of autism, autismus trivialis. We’ve exchanged hundreds of non-specialist facts (which is actually all we’ve ever done, since we’re fairly incapable of normal human contact). Such as, how opossums can fuck for twelve hours straight. And that the chin is something uniquely human. And that we waste twenty-three minutes a day blinking our eyes. And that we have ten thousand taste receptors in our mouths, most of them on our tongue. And that tears caused by emotion contain twenty-one percent more protein than tears caused by irritation. And that an insincere smile is always asymmetrical.
Gulpje snaps her fingers.
‘Bingo! Another thousand sperm cells,’ she says.
She snaps her fingers again.
‘And another thousand.’
She snaps again.
‘And another. Damn, Giph, in the three seconds I’ve been standing here you’ve already made three thousand new sperm cells. Four thousand. Five thousand. It just goes on and on. Nothing can stop this man. Six thousand. Seven thousand. Unbelievable! What a feat! What happens with all that sperm?’
Gulpje sits down next to me and takes off her sunglasses, which is pretty unusual, because her sunglasses are the only unchanging factor in her outward appearance. Gulpje seems to undergo a complete transformation every hour: her hairstyle, clothes & make-up are constantly changing, but she’s always got her sunglasses on.
‘There are four of you guys here,’ she continues, ‘we’ve been here four days now, so four thousand times sixty seconds, times sixty minutes, times twenty-four hours, times four days is about one and a half billion. Among the four of you, you’ve produced one and a half billion sperm cells since we came to La Palma. Good work. You can be very proud of yourselves.’
Intrigued by this new information, I’m already doing calculations on my notepad. With a bit of multiplication Gulpje & I figure out that, in the last twenty-four hours, the total virile male population has produced one hundred-seventy-two-trillion eight-hundred-billion sperm cells. ‘And believe it or not, Giph,’ says Gulpje, ‘there are porno films in which women get blasted with that much sperm.’
I then figure out that this adds up to more than sixty trillion per year. Gulpje wants to know how many cells the average man produces in a lifetime, assuming he’s able to do his duty for, say, fifty years. Thirty seconds later I’ve got the answer: ‘One quadrillion five hundred seventy-six trillion eight hundred billion, to be exact.’
‘And when you think that the average man conceives two point three children, you can safely say that, statistically speaking it’s a shot in a zillion.’
‘What it all boils down to…’ I conclude, ‘is that only one in six-hundred-eighty-five-billion sperm cells that redeems its promise. You’re right, that’s significantly negligible.’
I fling away the notepad.
‘Still, it could drive you crazy,’ says Gulpje, ‘For instance if you see a guy somewhere, or talk to a man in a bar, you can’t help thinking: at this very moment he’s producing thousands of sperm cells. Is it any wonder he’s trying so hard to get me into bed? It’s a law of economics: what’s produced has to be consumed. Sperm must flow!’
‘So maybe the European Community should award grants to boost the consumption of sperm, because otherwise we’ll end up with a surplus sperm mountain?’
‘Now that’s a pretty stupid remark, Giph, don’t you think?’ she says, and someone standing a hundred yards away would easily be able to see the asymmetrical smile on her face. She puts her hand on my leg and kisses me.

pp. 278-284

The advantage of my mother’s being less able to speak was that she also became less obsessive and no longer carried on about a sixteenth of an inch of crooked curtain or a coffee spoon lying upside-down in the drawer. In two weeks’ time, Lotti seemed to have lost all concern for the problems of daily life. She resigned herself to the fact that Phileine and I – mostly Phileine – were organizing everything. Her nonsense rhymes changed from hermetic, unintelligible ..*- impressions to interpretable, one-word statements. It also became slightly easier for her to swallow.
Whenever I tell people about my mother’s euthanasia, they assume that these were ‘extremely difficult weeks’. I myself had thought, months before, that we would have to wring our way through those days with tears in our eyes. The reality, however, was that the weeks between the SCHUPP* and the needle were very relaxed. Once my mother had calmed down and we began dishing up the highlights of her life for her, we were amazed to discover that these weeks, compared with the years before, were a kind of vacation: things were clear & final, things were okay just the way they were.
The aunts & friends who came to visit thought it was strange, and it sounds pretty Christian, too, but we did an awful lot of laughing. Not laughing à la ‘Dutch theater’, with roars of laughter that gradually turned to pathetic sobs – no, the laughter you heard in Lotti’s living room was genuine. My father phoned every day from Washington, and every day we’d look at my mother questioningly, and every day she’d shake her head, smiling: no, we weren’t allowed to tell him anything and no, she didn’t want to talk to him either. Looking back it wasn’t exactly the nicest thing we’d ever done in our lives, but it did give us great satisfaction to fob off my father, under Lotti’s orders, with an excuse. ‘No, not now, Dad, Lotti’s gone into town.’ Or: ‘No, sorry Dad, Lotti can’t come to the phone, she’s having her back scrubbed by this big black hunk.’
It happened to be true: my mother was having her back scrubbed by a big black hunk – a male nurse from the Antilles. This nurse, who had the very un-Antillean name of Jan Willem, was definitely one of the main attractions in those weeks. Since there weren’t many relief workers he was scheduled more than once, and I suspect that my mother, right at the end, had fallen slightly in love with him, because every time we got a phone call that Jan Willem was coming to help the next morning, her eyes turned to flare guns. Jan Willem (two hundred pounds, always cheerful and smelling of coconut milk) was one of the few nurses who interrupted his work now and then to have some fun. And my mother never took much persuading, either. Jan Willem undertook one of his best stunts just a week before Lotti’s death. My mother was still in bed and I was sitting in the living room listening to the radio. Phileine let in Jan Willem, who came up to me with a huge grin on his face and handed me a cassette of Caribbean bands, like Doble R and Trafassi. He told me excitedly to put it on and then disappeared into my mother’s bedroom. We followed. The exuberant music resounded through the apartment as Jan Willem went to my mother’s bedside. Lotti seemed elated by what she heard and her eyebrows moved lightly to the rhythm of the music. Jan Willem pushed open the curtains and cried, ‘Lotti, today is your lucky day!’ Then he grabbed the white hammock that we used every day to lift her. He rolled Lotti over on her side, laid the hammock on the mattress, and rolled Lotti onto her other side. Then he pulled the hammock under her and positioned the mobile hoist over the bed. When the hammock was hanging in the hoist, Jan Willem slowly heaved Lotti up out of bed. But while other nurses would have wheeled her straight into the bathroom, Jan Willem, without warning, made a sharp right and steered her into the living room. The Caribbean music was still playing. Lotti had never been driven into her living room like this before, and she let out a cry of happiness. Suddenly Jan Willem began moving the hoist back and forth to the beat of the merengue. ‘Whoopeeeee!’ he cried, and pushed my mother further into the room, his body swaying.
‘Big load, small load…’ he sang along with Trafassi, ‘Stuff ‘em in dee wash machine! Rrrrrround and rrrrrround she go, mmmmm, rrrrrround and rrrrround she go!’
At the words ‘rrrrround and rrrrrround’ he turned the hoist all the way around, his arms wide. My mother thought it was great. Jan Willem sang the whole song, and the way he moved that hoist, it was if it had been made for the merengue, made to swing.
‘Come on, everybody, dance!’ he shouted to us in his lilting voice, and launched into the next number, by Doble R.
‘What you say, girl?’ he sang, clapping his hands wildly. ‘Whoopeeee! What you say, girl? Come on! What you say we dance the night away?!’
He grabbed Phileine by the shoulders and wriggled his hips. ‘Up with those legs! Watch my toe! You got to shout, everyone know! We gonna dance, you gonna see, this time you won’t get away from me!’ Phileine danced with him, and even I, after a bit of persuasion, let myself be coaxed along. And so I danced with them, all around Lotti, but not for long, because I suddenly remembered, just in time, that I had a Handycam

My mother’s doctor had announced one morning over the phone that he & Doctor Schwartzbrunner were going to put the question to her, that afternoon, of whether or not she wanted euthanasia. My mother was, at least mentally, as good as new and had even hinted to us several times that she was waiting for this. While two friends from the Parchment Club were fixing a meal in the kitchen, the four of us geared ourselves up to go into my mother’s bedroom. A sign that important things were about to happen was that our doctor, who had been treating our coughs & pimples for the last thirty years, said that, under the circumstances, we should probably call him by his first name. His name was Dimitri. Phileine replied unflinchingly that, in that case, he could call her by her first name, too.
Lotti had just had her afternoon nap and smiled at us as we came in, not surprised that it wasn’t one of the district nurses who had come to help her. Phileine & I sat down on the edge of my mother’s bed and the doctors pulled up a couple of chairs. Dimitri looked serious, he had prepared a little speech and all he needed now was an overhead projector. He sketched, broadly, her previous history, the sky dive that Lotti’s illness had taken, and her wish to die peacefully before smashing to pieces in some hospital bed.
‘You’ve always fought against going into a nursing home. But the way things stand, it’s no longer possible for you to remain here. You’ve said that you wish to die at home, and if that’s still what you want, we’ll do it the way you want,’ said Dimitri. ‘But you mustn’t feel obligated. If you’d rather not go through with it, that’s your decision. No one is going to force you. It’s your life and you have to decide what is best.’
My mother nodded, smiling (and I could see a touch of impatience in her eyes).
For some legal reason or other Dimitri repeated his speech, in more or less the same words. He explained the euthanasia procedure, how it would go, and then finally asked Lotti if she wanted to die.
Even before he had finished speaking, my mother had said ‘yes’, clearly and without a shadow of doubt.
Dimitri nodded kindly.
‘Well, that was crystal clear,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to ask you to answer me one more time. Just to be absolutely sure that we are doing what you want. Lotti, do you really want euthanasia?’
My mother sighed, though not in an unfriendly way, and said, more loudly this time, ‘Yeeees.’
We all laughed with relief. Phileine hugged Lotti and I rubbed her leg. Dimitri suggested that the euthanasia be performed three days later, on a Friday, so that there would be enough time to order the deathly/ lethal dosage* and say good-bye. My mother said that that would be just fine. Aldo & Dimitri began filling in forms and Phileine asked if she should open a bottle of pink champagne. My mother nodded happily. Phileine ran into the kitchen and came back with a bottle and the two friends from the Parchment Club. The seven of us drank a toast to death.

That night I phoned Samarinde on her Japanese GSM (I didn’t have the faintest idea what time it was in Japan, nor did I feel like trying to figure it out). Samarinde & I had spoken to each other several times in the weeks before, but I still hadn’t told her anything about Lotti. Now that my mother had said ‘yes’ to Aldo & Dimitri and we had set a date (Friday), I had to tell Samarinde what was going on. She could get to Holland in three days. But her GSM was answered by a recording of a woman’s voice barking out orders in Japanese. After a beep I took a deep breath and was about to say something, when I was promptly disconnected. I tried phoning again, but once again I was cursed at by Kyoto Date’s telephone sister. Then I tried her apartment, where nobody answered at all. I was getting pretty worked up. Apparently the Japanese had exported all their answering machines, because even when I tried Samarinde’s agent, the phone just kept on ringing. I didn’t manage to leave her a message anywhere. Just how low have you sunk when the only way you can reach her lover is by sending an e-mail to her boss, asking her to call you with regard to the approaching death of a parent? Furious, I grabbed my laptop.
Later that night my father phoned from America. Phileine told him to call back in fifteen minutes and asked my mother whether we could tell him we’d set a date. My mother nodded. Phileine also asked if she wanted my father to be there that Friday. My mother slowly shook her head: she didn’t want my father there. He could come that morning and say good-bye, but then he had to leave. Phileine said: ‘Okay, Mom. He’d probably just get in the way.’
It was up to me to tell him, and what I was afraid would happen, happened: my father ‘didn’t take it very well’. I could hear him pacing up and down his Washington suite, as he tried to convince me that, as a doctor, a husband, and the father of her children, he had to be at Lotti’s euthanasia.
‘But Mom doesn’t want you there, don’t blame it on me,’ I said.
‘Is she, is it possible that she doesn’t know what she’s saying?’ he asked carefully.
‘She hasn’t downed a bottle of Chardonnay, if that’s what you mean,’ I said, a bit too loudly. ‘She’s never been more lucid. She just doesn’t want you there, Dad, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m so worried you won’t be able to deal with it.’
‘Maybe you can’t deal with it. We’ve got everything under control, Dad.’
My father said that he’d be flying to Amsterdam that same night. He said: ‘Then we can discuss this like reasonable adults.’ The concepts ‘my father’ and ‘reasonable’ in one and the same context: now that was what I called an oxymoron. Before I hung up he told me that Uncle Bill sent everyone his regards. I couldn’t suppress a roar of laughter.
My father arrived at Schiphol Airport the next night, after which he had Uncle Bill drive him straight to Lotti’s. For over an hour he & my mother talked in her bedroom, while we watched TV with Uncle Bill and chatted about Washington, airplane food, and crashing as a way to die. Lotti wouldn’t give in: she didn’t want him anywhere near her that Friday. He came out of her room, looking dejected. He said: ‘If anything goes wrong on Friday, anything at all, if you have the feeling, even for a moment, that you can’t deal with it, call me immediately. Uncle Bill & I will be waiting out in the car.’

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