A Time of Birds Read online

  Here, teetering on the edge of my cross-continent journey, I felt disorientated – partly because our ship had tipped us out at the wrong starting point for the Rhine Cycle Route that we had wanted to follow, along the Nieuwe Maas river that joined the Lek and then the Nederrijn, the Lower Rhine. Instead, we were riding beside the Brielse Meer, or Lake Den Briel, to the Oude Maas river and on to the Waal. When planning the trip, I’d been confused by the strands of waterways veining across the map south of Rotterdam, and I’d missed the Lower Rhine path and unwittingly organised our third night in Nijmegen on the Waal. It would take three days of cycling before we’d cross the Waal to the Rhine upstream at Emmerich in Germany – and back on track. In truth, it hardly mattered that we weren’t being faithful to the Rhine Cycle Route: the Maas and Waal are also distributaries of the Rhine.

  But for now, we were spinning our wheels into the unknown, cycling away from the ‘Gateway to Europe’. We hadn’t pedalled far when Jamie stopped, unsure we were on the right path. He stood astride his bike, puzzling over the pile of crumpled pages I’d printed out from Google, trying to locate the right one. If we were confused this early into our journey, how would we make it to Istanbul? But at last, we made it through the threads of cycle paths that criss-crossed the landscape to reach the banks of the Oude Maas, or Old Meuse. Here, the river obligingly provided us with a foolproof map: all we had to do was follow its banks to Dordrecht. By mid-afternoon, we were cycling into South Holland’s oldest city, an island of tall, narrow buildings surrounded by waterways and waders.

  2. Miri and the Israeli Immigrant

  My father would have loved Asher, drawn as he was to characters and misfits. He also liked a man or woman who gifted him a story – and Asher had stories to tell and tales galore to spin. He would have appreciated Asher’s adopted home, too, at least in earlier times when the marshes were occupied only by waders and shorebirds, not unlike our lough. But over time Dordrecht rose from the wetlands to become a thriving trading centre surrounded by the four rivers of Merwede, Maas, Hollandschdiep and Dordtsche Kil. As we cycled into the old town, there was little evidence of the marshes, or the birds; instead there were tall, thin terraced houses that were more glass than brick, furnished with antiques and designer furniture, and backed by marine harbours and canals lined with pleasure cruisers and sailing vessels.

  My father would have enjoyed the daft story behind the residents’ nickname too. In the seventeenth century, when Dordrecht was still a sleepy backwater, two men came up with a cunning plan of Baldrick-esque proportions in order to avoid paying the town import tax on meat and cattle: they dressed their sheep as a human, hoping to pass through the town gates unnoticed. Even if the officials had been taken in by a four-legged hooved animal disguised as Homo sapiens, the hapless tradesmen’s cover was blown when the sheep began to bleat. The town became known as Ooi-en Ramsgat, or ‘Ewe’s and Ram’s Hole’, and its residents as schapenkoppen – sheepheads.

  It seems appropriate then that the equally hapless Asher ended his European wanderings in Dordrecht several centuries later. The down-in-his-luck Israeli arrived in town with no money and nowhere to sleep, but Asher’s quick thinking turned his misfortune around, in an unlikely story of love that should have had little chance of surviving.

  I’d never met Asher before, but I found him on the Couch- Surfing hospitality website and he’d responded to my request for a bed (or sofa) in Dordrecht with the message: Why don’t you stay for the whole weekend and we’ll show you around town?

  Jamie and I headed over a pedestrian bridge into a newer part of town, where historic elegance gave way to featureless redbrick housing. We cycled down a brick-laid road and on past a boy flicking and spinning his football. The street was alive with the sound of children – on bikes and scooters, or idling in corners – and their laughter and shrieks echoed in the spring air. I knocked on Asher’s door, feeling a sense of displacement in this Dordrecht suburb, having propelled myself into someone else’s world. Asher’s wife, Miri, answered with a smile, leading us down a long back-alley to a handkerchief garden stitched with spring flowers where we stored our bikes.

  Asher arrived late in the evening after a day of lorry driving. He sank into the chair and called for coffee, chin sagging into tired folds, his skin sallow and eyes hollow. He didn’t look like a man who liked to dance, as his online profile stated, but when the caffeine kicked in he came to life, teasing Jamie and me.

  He looked at Gertrude, my ‘classic’ bike, and shook his head: ‘Helen, this is a bike to cross town, not Europe.’

  I laughed. He was right.

  Asher seemed determined to fill the house with travellers. More CouchSurfers arrived the following evening, and I helped Miri make bourekas – a combination of the Jewish empanadas and the Turkish börek invented by the Sephardic Jews who’d settled in Turkey. Earlier, I’d asked Miri if she would cook us a Dutch meal. She wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Dutch food is boring. Just potatoes, vegetables and a lump of meat!’

  It was difficult to counter her argument as we filled filo pastry triangles with Israeli feta cheese and minced lamb, the scent of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, coriander spices and toasted sesame seeds permeating the whole house – a taste of our final destination at the start of our journey.

  When the bourekas were ready, seven of us squeezed together around the small table. Asher looked around, ready to hold court.

  ‘So how did you and Miri meet?’ I asked him.

  ‘On the boat from Israel to Europe.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘Oh, no – not romantic!’

  *

  Asher had met two Dutch girls on the boat from Haifa. On disembarking, the women gave him their Dordrecht addresses. Miri wrote on one side of a card, her friend on the other.

  Asher set off across France alone. At his first lodgings he helped himself to the bowl of ‘complimentary’ croissants on his table, then those from other tables. When he went to check out, he was presented with a bill for all the croissants he had eaten: the total amounted to his entire travel savings. Penniless, Asher hitch-hiked to Paris, taking up residence behind a railway station locker. Eventually, he scraped together enough money to travel to Amsterdam, where a friend had promised to get him work. But when he arrived in the city, he could find neither his friend nor a job. Winter had arrived and a biting cold wind swept over the lowlands. Somehow, Asher found himself in a country lane near Dordrecht on Christmas Eve. Snow began to fall and the temperature plummeted even further. Then through the darkness, he saw headlights. Asher flagged the car down.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ the driver asked.

  Asher had no idea, then remembered the girls from the boat. He pulled the card out of his wallet and handed it to the driver. The man read the side with Miri’s address on and drove him there. She took him in, but Asher still couldn’t find a job. His dream of settling in Europe was unravelling and he realised he’d have to return to Israel. Miri accompanied him to the station, but when they reached the platform, the train was pulling out. It was then Asher had an idea: he turned to Miri and asked if she would marry him.

  ‘No strings attached,’ he said. ‘Once I have my green card, you can divorce me. I’ll give you to midnight on Wednesday night to decide. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll take the train on Thursday morning and return to Israel.’

  Asher went to stay with some friends and waited for Miri’s call. By late Wednesday night, Asher still hadn’t heard from her. Three minutes before midnight, the phone rang. It was Miri.

  ‘All right, I’ll marry you.’

  It was a marriage of convenience that became a love affair. But just as Asher’s life seemed to be coming together, the relationship fell apart. The couple went to the council office to file for divorce, only to be told that a cooling-off period was compulsory in Dutch law. All they could do was register their intention and come back in two weeks. The day before they were due to return to the council office, M
iri phoned Asher.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. The divorce was off.

  In 1995, Asher and Miri welcomed a daughter to the world. On Asher’s birthday in 1997, Miri gave birth to their second child, a son. Twenty years later, they were still together.

  *

  Asher was a natural raconteur and joker. It was difficult to know when he was serious and when he was jesting.

  ‘Noah’s Ark is right here in Dordrecht,’ he said. ‘Not in Turkey, not on Mount Arafat, but just behind the house on the river – one minute away. Yes, really. Come, I show you.’

  Asher was already on his feet and heading out the back gate. I followed, no time to gather my shoes, running down the path after him in my socks. He turned a corner onto the river promenade and stopped abruptly.

  ‘It’s not here! Where have they put Noah’s Ark?’ He looked up and down the river, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Later, around the dinner table, Asher still looked as if he was reeling from the missing ark.

  ‘Don’t believe him,’ their son said. ‘There is no Noah’s Ark. He’s making it up.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Asher. ‘It really does exist. Look, I show you a picture in the newspaper.’

  He rummaged through a stack of newspapers, but to no avail: the article was missing. We continued eating, but just as it seemed Asher had forgotten the ark, he jumped up and beckoned us to follow him.

  ‘Come, I know where Noah’s Ark is. We go there in my car. It’s not far.’

  Asher drove us through the back streets of Dordrecht to the edge of town and took an unmade road down to the river. And there was a wooden vessel moored on its bank, so chunky and simple in outline it looked like a child’s drawing. This was Noah’s Ark: 300 cubits in length, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits tall – built to the exact biblical dimensions.

  I’d sung the Noah’s Ark chorus in my tin-hut Sunday school decades earlier. My father led the Sunday school, gathering the ‘scholars’, as he called them, on the way there until the car was crammed with writhing children. I pumped the organ for the choruses we sang – unusually, as many Brethren halls excluded instruments from their meeting places. The choruses retold the Bible stories in song: Mr Noah Built an Ark; The Wise Man Built His House; even a rendition of the books of the Bible. Then we gathered in groups to listen to our Sunday school teacher teach us the Gospel, pairs of hard benches turned to face each other so that we could huddle in groups according to our age. I was fascinated by the story of the animal pairs entering the ark, two by two, and the dove who flew down to the ark with a fresh olive twig, an indication that the flood was receding.

  And here, on this Dutch river, was a real-life ark looming out of the darkness. It looked too heavy to float as it towered over us, two plastic giraffes standing guard at either end of the boat.

  ‘The ark was built by a rich man from Dordrecht,’ Asher said. ‘He began with half-size, then his friends and family say how good it is, so he builds a full-size one. Like the Bible.’

  ‘What’s inside?’

  ‘Two of all animals. No! Really, he makes a café, two cinemas and has some plastic animals – but real living chickens!’

  It was a strange mix of Bible and kitsch.

  *

  Early on the Sunday morning, Jamie and I, back on the road again, slipped past the ark silhouetted against the half-light – its name, Ark van Noach, lit up in neon lights – and I wondered if I was cycling away from the past or into it. As light filled the sky, the song of the thrush echoed through the branches of woodland on the edge of a housing estate.

  Listen, Helen. Can you hear the thrush?

  My father’s voice was still with me, following me along the Waal.

  *

  3. From Holland to Hollywood

  There was a single blue guitar on the edge of the Dutch village – a plywood cut-out secured to a post. No words beneath it. No advertisement, or name. Nothing to say why it was there.

  We swung our bikes off the main road and cycled past the guitar. We were not in search of music, just coffee. Ahead were pairs of notes, swinging from frames and bolted to the walls and gables of houses. We rounded a corner to see a saxophone and more guitars. What was this? A music convention? A village festival? Towards the centre of the village, names began to appear: Frank Sinatra, The Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn. It was still early Sunday morning and the village was devoid of life despite the musical decorations.

  Asher and Miri’s house in Dordrecht seemed far away now, although our musical village was just a short car journey away. In the dawning, we’d headed out of the Dordrecht suburbs and crossed the river, following the line of the railway. There had been no one around so early in the morning except for a couple with their children, walking the path. Father and son were dressed in Sunday suits and ties, and buffed shoes that reflected the cloud-splattered sky; mother and daughter in long skirts and headscarves, all carrying Bibles. They were on their way to church.

  Growing up in Northern Ireland, my own Sundays were filled with meetings, hymns, sermons and formal dress. We were Plymouth Brethren, our meeting house lost in the folds of fields, narrow lanes and high hedgerows. Our church was a simple whitewashed building – although the Brethren saw the church as people, not buildings, and preferred to talk about assemblies or meeting halls. There was no soaring spire, stained-glass window or wood-carved pulpit, just plain austerity. Inside, the Brothers sat on hard benches around a cast-iron wood burner, constantly fed in winter by one of the elders. There were long words (sermons) from the scriptures – filled with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ – readings and prayers, and lengthy pauses that amplified the loud ticking of the old clock while the Brothers waited for the Spirit to move them to speak. By their sides, the women sat demurely in tailored suits and smart hats. There were sober hymns, too, sung a cappella.

  I was always glad when the one-and-a-half-hour meetings came to an end. It was a long time to sit in such sobriety and not wriggle. When I finally stepped out through that low doorway and blinked in the daylight, I inhaled the fresh air deeply, the natural world stirring me more than the sermons and prayers and hymns in the shadowy hall ever could. On summer days, my brothers and sisters and I started out on foot towards home along country lanes, while my father stayed behind to meet with the other elders. Cow parsley, brambles, dog rose and bindweed tangled the verges. I gathered wild flowers and picked blackberries. I preferred the songbirds that accompanied us on our way – the tits and finches that threaded through the hedgerows – to the sombre hymns. Sometimes, we’d walk nearly two miles, almost to the main road before our father picked us up. I didn’t mind. I liked the freedom of the country lanes.

  Here in twenty-first-century Netherlands I was also glad to be out in the fresh air again, cycling along to the sound of warbler, wren and wood pigeon, as well as church bells. The darkened sky looked ominous – a threatening iron bar above our heads.

  As we’d pedalled deeper into the Dutch countryside towards Germany, there had been a slow realisation that I was cycling further and further away from home. I was a vagrant, a traveller of no fixed abode. A sense of loneliness, mixed with excitement, settled in as we rode on. In England, I would have walked into the kitchen by this time and plugged in the kettle, sunk into the sofa, cradling a hot mug of coffee. Here, I didn’t know where I could find a coffee – or even hot water. There was no sofa – just my saddle. At best, we’d find a riverside bench. I thought of the refugees coming in the opposite direction, with their leaky boats and makeshift tents. My journey didn’t compare. But, like them, I was moving through a landscape of unfamiliar faces and we were invisible to them. At the same time, there was also a tug, pulling me eastwards and southwards towards the thrill of the unknown. My temporary migration was an indulgence. Theirs was one of survival.

  At the end of the musical village’s main street, a banner arched over the road with the words ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. I’d hoped to find a café but there was none to be seen
, so Jamie and I dropped our bikes and set down on a low wall beside a corner house, resigning ourselves to sharing a bar of chocolate Tom had slipped into my panniers. We sat in companionable silence, contenting ourselves with a swig of water. Jamie leaned against the wall, sooty hair dishevelled, his thick black eyebrows knitted together in thought. He stretched out long, thin legs. On his second birthday, we’d measured his height. We’d read that if you doubled a two-year-old’s height, you could calculate how tall it would be in adulthood. We worked out he would be six foot eight. Six foot eight!

  ‘Can’t be very accurate,’ I’d said to Tom.

  But Jamie continued to grow at a pace. When he was three, a stranger stopped me in the street to ask why he wasn’t at school. In his infant school, they’d drawn round Jamie’s body to create a giant for a display. By eighteen, he hadn’t quite reached six foot eight, just six foot five. But still his height drew attention, exaggerated by his skinny frame.

  As we shivered in the sun-starved air, a man came out of the house, speaking to us in Dutch. We shifted uneasily on his wall, hoping he wasn’t scolding us for loitering outside his home. Then, noting our blank looks, he switched to German.

  ‘Where have you cycled from?’

  ‘Dordrecht.’

  He looked impressed. ‘And where are you going?’

  ‘Istanbul.’ The word felt ridiculous as it left my lips.

  ‘Istanbul!’

  It seemed absurd to mention a place so far away, so I changed the subject and asked him about the musical decorations.

  ‘We commemorate the liberation of the Netherlands by the Allies every five years in the Netherlands. This year, each house in the village will have their choice of wartime music played over speakers. There’ll be dancing and fireworks. It’s a big event here.’