Gunfire by Natasha Theophilou

Gunfire BY NATASHA THEOPHILOU

Conflict, war, as we’ve learned lately in the Ukraine, can take many forms, and happen for many reasons. The borders of cultures are a mine-field of it.

“Ven you go to a country, you must learn de language,” my diminutive Dutch mother-in-law told me, her earnest round ‘70s glasses looking straight at me. “I am not good at language, but still I learn it, because you live in de country.” There is no hint of entitlement here.

I took her words to heart, and applied myself to my faded blue hardcover “Teach Yourself Dutch”. I have persevered at speaking it in the face of all odds -the odds being the Dutch switching into English the instant they hear your accent.

English I speak at home, privately, Dutch in public. When talking Dutch, I’ve learned to talk about the weather and what I’m doing to my house. I talk about money. I am direct to the point of rudeness. And I wear shoes. A divided emotional geography, an indecisively split identity.

Even more than English, the Dutch love Afrikaans. Time and time again I get ambushed when they hear I’m from South Africa, their forthright features melting, a far-away look in their eyes, a little smile softening their firm lips, “Het is zo’n leuk taaltje.” “It is such a nice little language.” There was a time when I tried to combat this with logic – Afrikaans, I pointed out, has far fewer diminutives than Dutch: where Russian books echo the vastness of their country, trying to prop all of its corners between two thick covers, one in St Peterburg and the other in Siberia, Dutch seems to mirror its smallness, tucking in its toes in words, and as full of acronyms as a government department.

It used to annoy me, still does. Except now I’ve lived here longer, and Dutch is second nature, I find myself conflicted, melting when I hear Belgians saying “gij” and using quaint words like “bediende” (“servant”) for an employee. When I hear Afrikaans now, put down the twitching of my lips into a little smile like a bad dog. Kid talking. It’s difficult to take a kid language seriously. I know an Afrikaans woman who was in agony in childbirth -it went wrong, the child was ok, but she wasn’t. An Iranian father who died after hours in agony on the floor, his daughter phoning and phoning to try to get help, but not being taken seriously, and it makes my blood boil.

As usual, I’m a uncertain, shifting, balancing, Colossus of Rhodes9, one foot on each shore, seeing both points of view.

To make it worse, my natural contrariness impels me to single-handed defend the other side against all odds.

It’s 2010, at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport in Athens, the Greek credit crisis is in full swing, the North Europeans bailing out in buckets, and the Greeks screaming “Troika!” In the Netherlands,

9 The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek sun-god Helios, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was in the habour of Rhodes and at 33 metres high about the same size as the Statue of Liberty.

my Greek hackles rise at the condescending tone used when talking about this Southern European country that hasn’t got it’s “zaakjes in orde” “business in order.” I explain it is a poor country, bankrupt seven times since WW2, can’t devalue now because of the euro, etc, etc. At Eleftherios Venizelos airport, I’m instantly at home: Greek letters, white buildings fresh in the morning sunshine, strong shadows, rubbery sharp-leaved oleanders in shouting pink. My father manhandles my luggage, he’s convinced he does everything better than anyone else, so it’s always easier all round just to do it himself. Before we are at the car he tells me, every syllable bursting with indignation, “I have already received so many cancellations for the conference I’m organizing because of the LIES they are telling in Europe about Greece.” By the time he is giving me a little homily on how to pack a car boot the right way, the sun-warmed smell of new car and oil mixing with his advice of “Large and heavy baggage at the bottom, smaller on top and in between,” my Dutch hackles are scraping the clear, Greek-blue sky.

Being on a border has gunfire coming from both sides, you’re caught in the middle of a Wild West of non-comprehension, misunderstanding, a transitional zone where the laws of both communities are often in abeyance, everyday certainties float about like objects in the nongravitation of a spaceship, you try to grasp them, but they are somehow not where they have always been, you float. There are those who are purveyors of dreams, telling you anything is possible, they should be lined up and shot at dawn. We cannot change in the twinkling of an eye.

“It takes three generations to adapt to a new culture,” a cultural psychologist told me at a staff outing of Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland 10 . I wonder – with differences of religion and, unfortunately, outward characteristics such as colour, the “natives” can resist the new inhabitants trying to get a slice of their land, the newbies hold onto their Mother Country, far longer. A friend in South Africa, there since she immigrated at eight: “I’m English and proud of it - I’ll never be anything other than English!” The English still seeking, and finding, a Holy Grail11 of superiority.

After over thirty years in The Netherlands, I am still a struggler and a straddler: an observer, always more or less on the outside, looking in. I’m over-familiar with the greener grass of the neighbour, prone to dissatisfaction, but with cultural Realpolitiek12, I don’t expect haves to give up what they have to the have-nots.

The interior emotional geography, the one influenced by books and films and our extra digital globe, internet, can be even more complex. My bookish and painfully shy mother named me after Natasha in War and Peace13, a light-hearted extrovert who had a hobby of making men fall in

10 Dutch Organization for help to Refugees.

11 The Holy Grail was a cup, dish, or stone with miraculous powers in legends of King Arthur: providing eternal youth, or sustenance in infinite abundance; by analogy, any elusive object or goal of great significance may be perceived as a holy grail by those seeking it.

12 Realpolitik are diplomatic or political policies based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than moral and ethical premises. Also used pejoratively to imply political policies that are perceived as being coercive or amoral.

13 War and Peace (1869) is a literary work on history and philosophy by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy which remains an internationally praised classic of world literature. It is about the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society.

love with her. At least it gave me the motivation to read the book. Once read, I acquired the fortitude to tackle the others Russians, and became an addict. So when I heard of a book on Russian culture called “Natasha’s Dance”14, I started on it. I haven’t finished it yet. But as a Dutch-GreekEnglish South African, I have discovered a striking cultural kinship with the Russian nobility in the time of Peter the Great.

Peter the Great decided to modernize Russia and make it Western, including its people, the nobles (serfs, after all, weren’t people.) He built them a new city, St Petersburg, and did everything to compel them to adopt a new, more European way of life. Their new social manners were entombed in an exhaustive manual on etiquette, adapted from the German original, “The Honourable Mirror to Youth.”15 Even their palaces were a form of theatre, with halls of mirrors so they could check their performance - the point was not to become European, but to act like one, to appear European. These Europeanized Russians developed a conflicted identity, the layout of their palaces mirroring a divided emotional geography, with formal, grand public rooms, and cosy, informal private rooms. And they had to speak French. Except after 1812, they wanted to speak Russian again, which they struggled with.

We of the back and forth are familiar with this.

Tolstoy16 himself idealized the peasants and loved to be with them, but in the introduction to War and Peace he proudly and unreservedly says he is a noble, with a noble’s sensibilities. During the day he laboured with his peasants in the fields on his estate Yasnaya Polyana, then returned to his manor house for dinner served by waiters in white gloves. He himself was aware of the ambiguity. I’d say he tried, but found it difficult to be a peasant.

From “Natasha’s Dance” again: “Orthodox and pagan – yet a rationalist: an educated Russian could be all these things. It was part of the Russian condition to master such conflicting strands within oneself and fashion out of them a sensibility, ways of living, looking at the world that were perfectly at ease with each other” (Figes, 2002, pp. 324).

A new son-in-law, our family is now Greek-Dutch-South African-Colombian, with a drizzle of Englishness – at a certain point, identification with a country is not a soothing massage of belonging, but a case of embracing the conflict. From Tolstoy’s conflict came some of our greatest literature, the gunfire of War and Peace. For me too conflict is a postage stamp to creativity, my own land of letters, the paper kingdom where I try to make sense of it all. Conflict, I’ve found, is identity too.

14 Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figues (2003) is a cultural history of Russia examining how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia--its character, spiritual essence, and destiny.

15 The Honest Mirror of Youth, or Indications for worldly manners, collected from various authors" (1717) was a Russian literary and pedagogical work of the early 18th century, published by decree ofPeter the Great.

16 Leo Tolstroy Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 9 September 1828 –1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, Tolstoy's notable works include the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina(1878), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction.