A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Read Free Book Online Page A

father plays the guitar and sings ‘Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world’ until tears come to his eyes. The child suffers from chronic diarrhoea because the only food in the house is powdered milk. One afternoon, they take the subway to the centre of Amsterdam, and a shocked Surinamese woman says: ‘That child is way too white, man! You need to put it in the sun!’
    On the sidewalk along Rokin, Friso sings Cat Stevens songs. Passers-by toss coins into his hat, and he smiles meekly. His voice is high, a bit nasal. The child sleeps in its wagon.
    When Hunter is five, he goes to school. The teacher reports his language deficiency to Child Welfare. In her report she writes that he has the developmental level of a three-year-old. He prefers crawling on the floor to walking, and has had no inoculations because his father feels that he has ‘the right to go through the childhood illnesses’. Threatened with having the child placed in a foster home, Friso agrees to allow family and parenting support — twice a week, a woman comes by to play with the child and do language games with him; when she is around, the boy sometimes awakes from his lethargy. On Wednesday afternoons, another woman comes to teach Friso some of the rudiments of parenting. Hunter loses some of his pallor and is now able to form simple sentences such as ‘Hunter wants banana’, ‘Daddy is dumb’, and ‘Here comes the seal’. The social workers report that supervision remains necessary, but that the ‘father appears capable of understanding the instructions and carrying them out’. From now on, the home help will visit once every three months, which comes down to an average of only two moments of contact a year: missed appointments are not rescheduled, but simply cancelled.
    So Hunter Walta grows up, a pale, unsure child, under the care of a father who adheres to a form of world-withdrawal that comes down to neglecting himself and his child.
    One morning the bells rings, and Ruth opens the door. ‘My beautiful sister,’ the man in the doorway says. She lets him in, not knowing quite what to say. He has a child with him, hiding behind his legs. She squats down and says: ‘And you, little man, you must be Hunter?’
    At the kitchen table, she asks him why he’s come. ‘Mum gave me your address,’ he says. She looks at the boy. There’s something wrong with him, but she can’t quite figure out what. He is sucking hard on his pacifier.
    â€˜And the gentlemen of the house,’ Friso asks, ‘where is he?’
    â€˜Edward works,’ she says.
    â€˜That has to happen, too.’ He looks around, with the look of a burglar. ‘Nice house, ma’am. And a playground around the corner. Everything in readiness for a child.’
    Somewhere in his youth she lost him. He has elected to be a stranger in her life, in everyone’s life.
    He wants to leave the child with her for a week; he needs to arrange something in Montreux, but he doesn’t say what.
    That evening, she tells Edward: ‘He was gone before I even realised it.’
    â€˜Hit-and-run tactics.’
    They look at the child asleep on the couch, beneath a quilt. His blond Walta hair hangs down over his face; he is breathing through his mouth. ‘He’s a cute kid,’ Ruth says.
    â€˜And his mother, where is she?’
    â€˜She’s French, I believe. Mum said she left Hunter with him. I could always take him up to Friesland …’
    â€˜But?’
    â€˜He’s my nephew. I don’t know him at all. I could take a couple of days off …’
    And so they end up with a child, for a week. Edward can’t stop worrying that her brother won’t show up at all, that he’ll leave them stuck with the child. ‘Ep’ is what the boy calls him. He takes him to the playground in Wilhelmina Park a few times. ‘Ep, uppy-daisy!’ Hunter refuses to climb