‘Come on then! Start! We’ve no time to lose, sweetheart!’
‘Uncle’ Hans turns on a table lamp so he can see me better. I get on my bike and go round once in their silence, I don’t want any music. I stretch out a leg, not looking at them. I can feel their gaze. Settled on my body like a boil. It bothers me and makes me feel tired but I carry on, neither sad nor happy, I will not stop. I twirl around, I’m an acrobat, an agile cat, a beautiful lady. I pedal around the bar. ‘Uncle’ Hans puts out a hand each time I pass, trying to catch me as if I were a fairground attraction. I skid a little but regain control. One more and I’ll stop, I’ve decided. That will be it for tonight.
‘Uncle’ Hans has stood up. And Peter. They’re suddenly in front of me, blocking my circular route. They wedge my front wheel with their feet, grab my shoulders and put a hand over my mouth. I don’t cry out. I knew it. Peter pulls my hands behind my back, takes a forgotten napkin from a table and ties them together, pulling hard, wanting me to wince but I won’t. I stand motionless, waiting. I want to see ‘Uncle’ Hans’s hair come loose, to feel his sticky hands soaked with fear. Let him sweat his desire over me, exposing himself as no one knows him. I want the boil to burst. I’m waiting.
‘Uncle’ Hans sticks out his thick, blotchy, pinky-brown tongue, waggling it like a hissing snake. He takes hold of my face – smaller than his hands – tilts it, and leans over so that his tongue can reach every part of my skin. He is slobbering, licking me slowly from neck to temple, from bottom to top, then starting again. His tongue is a thick, hot body, with a hard, pushing tip, so close but so foreign, so unknown. I don’t move. I leave my hands knotted in the napkin, leave my face to be smeared with his saliva, let him do it.
‘What’s going on here?’ shrieks Aunt Alice as she comes into the lounge.
‘Nothing, nothing!’ replies ‘Uncle’ Hans. ‘We’re playing with Sylvia!’
Aunt Alice comes closer, slender, quick and unafraid. She slams on light switches as she comes, making the bar as bright as daylight, then raises her voice.
‘Sylvia, go straight back up to your room. You need to take care of your sister, she’s not well. Quick now, it’s late!’
I turn towards her, pulling with all my strength on the napkin still binding my hands. ‘Uncle’ Hans has stood up again and is leaving the room without a word, head bent. Peter follows him. Aunt Alice watches them go, mute, then sees the napkin fall to my feet. She hides her head in her hands with a great groaning sigh and repeats, her voice softer and slower: ‘What’s going on? …’
I am out of there.
I was nine years old. It was in my parents’ hotel, where I grew up – the Commerce Hotel, Station Square, Utrecht. That was the chaos of my young life.
‘Uncle’ Hans is the manager of the hotel, which belongs to my paternal grandmother. The whole family lives or works here – my parents, my aunts Alice and Mary, my younger sister Marianne and the baby, my brother Nicolas.
The hotel boasts no stars but it is rather elegant, with its high ceilings, Persian carpets and art nouveau style.
‘Uncle’ Hans is appreciated for his rigour. He is steadfast, hardworking and clean, his nails perfectly rounded from frequent filing. He’s the right-hand man, he opens and closes the hotel with the clockwork regularity of the station trains. ‘Uncle’ Hans has that inhuman ability to repeat impeccably the same mechanical actions day after day. His face betrays neither fatigue nor pain, just a slight smile. He intrigues me. He must be a robot, resembling a man without quite having the right expression, hiding under his smooth mask and shiny head a lifeless body, activated by strings and held together by steel rods and tightly fastened screws rather than blood and tears.
‘Uncle’ Hans is not an uncle but the head employee of the hotel. He owes his nickname to the trust my parents have placed in him, to his daily presence, and to the calm and protective impression he makes. It was my mother who first called him that. With the name she gave ‘Uncle’ Hans a stake in our family, hoping to encourage that solitary man to attach himself – to us, our good fortune, and our hotel.
‘Uncle’ Hans does not like me. I am the boss’s daughter. His secret rival, an idle girl sprouting up before his very eyes with my lazy blossoming charm, the kid constantly under his feet, a growing obstacle, an unformed body arousing his desire.
I often eat with him and the sous-chef in the kitchen. I am already making my preferences clear, gently but firmly. I don’t like onions, carrots or mustard, those adult items I’m supposed to force down my throat ‘like a big girl’, as he says. He likes to watch me grimace as I chew. The mustard pot is huge, family-size. It goes from table to table acquiring layers of congealed mustard on its rim, some browner than others, scored by marks where the spoon has lain. Leftovers. I don’t want any mustard.
One refusal too many and ‘Uncle’ Hans’s eyes go all red. He grabs my slender neck and squeezes it until my body goes rigid, then shoves my face into the pot.
When I’ve had enough to eat I push my plate towards the middle of the table with infinite slowness, looking elsewhere. I take advantage of any distractions to secretly push the plate as far away from me as possible.
‘Uncle’ Hans catches me at it, and stabs his fork into my arm. Hard. I scream and run to my room. The pain is intense. The blood is seeping through, making four red spots on my arm. I rub them as you scrub a stain, but it doesn’t make any difference.
I hide the wound by crossing my arms: my first pose.
I tell my mother how ‘Uncle’ Hans forces me to finish disgusting plates of food. She replies that I have to do whatever ‘Uncle’ Hans tells me, it’s for my own good.
I hit on a different strategy. I decide to spend any scraps of money I earn from serving or making beds in the chip shop next door. The chips are fat, greasy and delicious; they crunch and melt in my mouth as I savour their soft hearts, alone or with my sister Marianne.
We behave like starving orphans, and the kind owner gives us extra large portions. We are free, happy and sated.
When my skin turns brown in the summer, the four spots from the fork are reborn – one at a time, in a neat little row, from the most distinct to the faintest.
Aunt Alice told my mother all about the scene she’d interrupted in the bar: my hands still bound, the blushing discomfort of ‘Uncle’ Hans, his tousled hair, the way he left, stooped and staggering, looking such a hypocrite. My mother told my father.
‘Uncle’ Hans was dismissed the following day, with no explanation other than my mother’s shattered and contemptuous gaze and the rage written all over my father’s closed face.
My mother didn’t want to know the details, she didn’t ask me a thing. She doesn’t want any trouble. She would rather sweep away evil as she does dirt – straightforward and effective.
My mother will remain shaken for a long time, thinking deeply about the roots of vice and men’s ability to conceal it, to cover evil with a pleasant mask. Can good also contain evil? My mother’s simple, two-tone world was quaking, the black and white blending to create new shades, new shadows.
I watch Hans leaving. I’ve triumphed over the robot. He is deathly pale, demolished, seemingly finished. For a moment, as the door slams behind him and the freezing air floods in, I feel a tinge of regret. Is the sentence too harsh, more than I’m worth?
The