Читать книгу Wanderlust: New Adventures in the Northern Sea - Katja Just - Страница 7

After an eventful year, I wanted to celebrate the turn of the year and Christmas 2017 in peace and without much fuss. My parents had announced their arrival over the holidays, and Barbara and Gert were regular guests in the green holiday apartment. New guests had moved in in the blue one, in order to spend contemplative Christmas days on the Hallig, far away from the mainland hustle and bustle.

The day before Christmas Eve there was still a lot to do. A handsome fir tree stood in my “pesel”, as the front room is known on the Halligen, and I was bustling with anticipation between the kitchen, garden and guest dwellings. In front of the house and at the stairs to the parking lot of my car I had attached chains of lights, which in the dark season conjure up a cosy light around my old thatched cottage. Santa Clauses and angels hung out of wood in the hallway, and the candlesticks in the stairwell were already decorated with dark red candles. For me, this is the most beautiful thing about the dark season: candlelight! The warmth and cosiness radiating light from real candles is an absolute must for me. Winter and candles belong together, just like summer and elderflower spritzer.

Also in the holiday flats Christmas flair had moved in. Although I don’t put up any real Christmas trees there every year, I do put up a Jul tree, a typical Frisian Christmas tree made of wood. It consists of a small wooden frame which is wrapped with fresh boxwood twigs every year. In addition, a chain is attached to it. Depending on how much effort you want to make, you can use a ready-made amber necklace or a raisin necklace freshly wound on a string. A sticky and time-consuming, but effective affair. The design of the chain in earlier times reflected the wealth of a family. Amber could be found in sufficient quantities at the Hallig coasts, mostly along the driftline. Raisins, on the other hand, were expensive and difficult to come by.

The box forms the semicircular frame around the three or four horizontal struts. A vertical wooden strut, twenty to forty centimeters long, serves as a central column. To the right and left of it, figures made of salt dough are hung in the tree. There are animal motifs as well as motifs from seafaring and agriculture. On my Jul trees I hang a sailboat and a mill as well as a cow, a pig, a fish and a cock. Each symbol has a special meaning, of course. In general it is said that they stand for fertility, happiness and good wishes for the new year. The luck for me is that my parents relieve me of the work of decorating the Jul trees for the holiday apartments. During one of my visits to them in Husum, I bring the empty wooden racks with me and can pick them up again in time for the festive days, beautifully decorated.

Also with me in the ground floor Christmas mood has moved in. Beside the tree decorated in red, gold and with straw stars, of course with real beeswax candles, there are angels, Santa Clauses, reindeers and many other figures on the windowsills. I like this quiet time, which I can get the most out of on Hooge, because then there is really some peace and contemplation. Even if I spend a lot of time reading and answering the numerous mail that arrives not only as email, but also by post in the house at Landsende.

The letter lay in the midst of a great bundle of letters, parcels and colorful Christmas cards. I was impressed that so many people had thought of me. Opening and reading the mail was like a wonderful gift, because except for a few bills all of it made me smile and feel good. The large white envelope was still waiting to be opened. Two Christmas stickers decorated the envelope, a shiny angel and Santa Claus with a long white beard. My address was written in green ink, I couldn’t find a sender’s address. I just noticed the stamp wasn’t postmarked. Curiously I opened the envelope, took a stack of paper from it and on top a cover letter also written in green ink.

Hello, Frau Just. Our phone call in November made me very thoughtful, but also very sad.

My gaze went down to the last line, and I saw that the letter was not signed with a name, but only with initials. An anonymous letter. No signature, no return address. Yet I knew immediately who was hiding behind this abbreviation. I didn’t know the lady personally, I didn’t remember her name at that moment either, but only three telephone calls with her. I suspected she had to be between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies. She had called me for the first time in the spring and said that I was the right contact person for her, as she had not found fertile ground with other addressees for her concerns so far. She had learned that I would be committed to tourism on Hooge, so she now turned to me. It was on her mind that a bathing place in the west of the Hallig was no longer easily accessible for older bathers after structural changes and that the declining opening hours of the local restaurants would cause her concern. We talked for a while about the quality of the current tourist offer on Hooge, I agreed with her on one point or another and promised to pass on her suggestions to the appropriate body. I did so, which I informed her about in the second phone call, because she called me again in summer.

And then followed the third conversation in November, the telephone call, in which she told me of completely different worries. She described an incident that had happened in the Hallig grocery store during her last vacation at the end of September.

The lady was standing at the cash register, and in her immediate vicinity was a little girl. This girl was in her eyes “a very naughty brat". She was impudent, insulted her and stuck out her tongue. The lady on the phone told me in great detail that she had been more than horrified by this situation, because she had never experienced anything like it on Hooge before. To date, the children have never been so cheeky and naughty, and this development is now really damaging to tourism. Such disrespectful behaviour towards adults is insulting and outrageous. The caller could hardly be stopped, not even when I tried to show with some examples that there have always been cheeky children on Hooge. In earlier times it was not uncommon for children to throw raw eggs, often targeting guests or at least their children. I tried to reassure them with humour that this behaviour was not unusual for children. She vehemently contradicted that.

“For 25 years now, Ms Just, I have been travelling regularly to the Hallig with my friends, but I have never met such a cheeky child here before,” she said in a harsh tone. “You have to do something about this situation, and above all, as Hallig people, you have to stop this development, because that is only the beginning!”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, already suspecting which direction her complaint would go in now.

I knew from the beginning which girl she was talking about, her description made it easy to guess. Yes, this little girl was indeed a very bright and adventurous child who, at the age of six, was just about to discover the Hallig world and her own life. The girl had only lived on Hooge for two years at the time. On a Hallig, a spot of earth that this girl had reached after months of arduous travel with her parents and three other little siblings, shortly after they had to leave an area where so-called adults fought each other to the death. Without knowing why or where to go, this child lost her familiar home, big protecting family and much more. During a storm and the corresponding waves, this girl arrived on Hooge with a ship shortly before Christmas. With belongings distributed in a few plastic bags, with just five familiar people around him. Everything else was foreign to this child. I do not want to know what this girl and her three siblings had seen and experienced up to this point in time. Jasina. Afghanistan.

“By that, I mean there’s more to come. After Hooge,” she explained pointedly.

I felt myself tense. I took a deep breath. My up to then calm and soothing tone changed instantly. So is my mood. My patience was torn.

“Dear Madam,” I said, “I would like to tell you one thing: if you think that you have found someone in me to whom you can firstly complain about cheeky children and secondly unload your thoughts impregnated with xenophobia for whatever reason, then you have been mistaken. In addition, my personal recommendation is to look for another tourist destination if you should have a problem with both the one and the other topic. I understand that the current social changes are leading to difficulties especially in conurbations, and I entirely agree with you that by no means everything humanly possible has been done or is being done to find sustainable solutions. For all sides. But I will not accept that you should take a six-year-old child, whether cheeky or not, as an opportunity to name your political views in the same breath as the tourist community of Hallig Hooge and its inhabitants, and that the latter should take responsibility for putting this, as you call it, situation in order!”

Man, was I mad!

Accordingly, our telephone conversation ended very quickly. We had said goodbye to each other in a perfectly reasonable tone, but my pulse rate was anything but a reasonable rhythm.

For a few days this phone call kept me busy, but luckily I had forgotten. Until the day before Christmas Eve. Until that moment when I was holding the pile of paper from that lady in my hands. A handwritten lined A4 sheet, on which she expressed her disappointment about my attitude, and that with unmistakable words. I read that I was a do-gooder who would set standards I couldn’t take responsibility for, and a few lines later she made it clear that Hooge would lose twelve regulars and that my attitude would have harmed not only the Hallig but the nation. In order to underline this and probably still lead me on the “right path", she had attached newspaper material with content that prophesied in the most polemical way the demise of all German holiday paradises and, as a consequence, the Western high culture. I did not even spend a minute of my time on these reports after I realised what they were.

I had never experienced anything like it before. Anger and another feeling spread through me. I turned the envelope once more in my hand, and my gaze was once again caught by the unstamped stamp. How could that be? How did this letter, presumably from Lower Saxony or North Rhine-Westphalia, if I remembered it correctly, get into my house without a canceled stamp? For the first time since I lived on the Hallig, I had a more than queasy feeling, and for a short moment I didn’t feel safe in my house. Once again I missed my dog Chico at my side. And that wasn’t because of the stupid papers in my eyes that were inside the envelope, but because I thought for a moment that there had been someone in my hallway who I would have thrown out with my own hands in a high arch if I had met them personally.

Soon this feeling evaporated again and made room for anger and annoyance. What a cowardly way to send such crap anonymously! That actually already said everything about the character of the sender. I threw the letter together with the unspeakable newspaper cuttings into the trash without further ado and decided not to give the lady and her remarks any further thought. On the contrary. I thought of Jasina and enjoyed the certainty that she and her siblings had already experienced a Christmas on Hooge. With many benevolent people around them, with peace, music and candlelight and also with God’s blessing. Because these children spent Christmas in Hooges, a beautiful church open to all people. The way the church is supposed to be, especially at Christmas. And especially to children. And I wished with all my heart that these children would also be able to spend a Christmas in peace for the second time this year. And for me this is a Christmas story that comes from real life and can’t be any more Christmassy.

Addendum: In March 2018 I held a large white envelope in my hands for the second time, again without a sender’s address, but with stickers that immediately let me guess in which direction the content should lead me. At least this time the stamp was cancelled. I didn’t appreciate the enclosed newspaper clippings, but I had to admit that I read the anonymous writer’s letter with a certain curiosity. Already on the fourth line I had to laugh, because she had written in her first letter about twelve guests who would turn away and never travel to Hooge again. Now there were only eight. So she had either lied the first time, or four of her friends had decided otherwise. Or she was just an old dodgy woman who couldn’t quite remember what she had written three months ago. I could understand that well, because one could only forget her lines.