The Two Witch Doctors

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Manfred Wolf

My mother was not without vanity, and when people started saying that she resembled Eva Peron, she was pleased. For several years in the late forties, she continued combing her hair back severely on both sides, the way the distant Argentinian beauty did. Eva Peron's doings were widely reported on our Caribbean island, and my mother frequently mentioned her. In our household it was understood that while Juan Peron might be a fascist, his wife tried to soften his ways and do all she could to help the poor. My mother pinned her picture up in the little hall near the kitchen next to that of Marlene Dietrich, with whom she also identified. Once in a while she even sang a line from the song Marlene had immortalized in The Blue Angel, which my mother had seen in Germany in 19S0. "From head to toe, I'm primed for love. Everything else means nothing."

My mother was both fun-loving and melancholy. Sometimes she sat for hours in the living room, listening again and again to her favorite record, Fritz Kreisler's "Viennese Caprice," the tremulous, pulsating violin seeming to bring a glow to her face and make her want to say something. "That music has the romance of Europe. Things happen there and only there." She listened in great silence to Edith Piaf and other Parisian singers. Then with relief, she shook herself loose and sighed, "I really have to drive into town and help your father." Occasionally she looked downright unhappy and complained that my father was inconsiderate or even selfish. They rarely quarreled, but when they did it was about his inconsiderateness.

In the aftermath of the war my mother always said the most important thing was that we saved ourselves--"Personal things can always wait." She repeated this many times, "For me, the personal is secondary. It was different when I was a young girl." Another time she said, "When I turned thirty in 1941 in Holland, we were in a state of panic, wondering what to do, what we could still do. Now that I'm thirty-eight, I'm calmer. But of course I will never be at peace."

Seeing friends always cheered her. Mother had a great talent for friendship. After we arrived in Curacao in 1943, she and Louisa Arends were close. Louisa was a heavy, cheerful Dutch Jewish woman of twenty-eight, who managed a stationery store called Liberty, and so my grandmother called her "The Liberta," a name that others in this nickname culture started using for her. Because Louisa was single, my father declared that she was a bit odd: "When a woman at a certain age doesn't have a man, she becomes strange." My mother did not contradict him. She also was good friends with Flora Kamelink, but Mrs. Kamelink was "really" Dutch--that is, not Jewish--and her husband was a high colonial official on the island, both restraining influences. Unlike my father, who was always remote, my mother had an intimate manner; she asked direct questions and looked people in the eye. And she seemed to hear what people said, which made them want to confide in her. Mr. Dimanche, a friend in our refugee circle, called often to speak to her, sometimes about his unhappy marriage. When we were on vacation, frequently without my father who had to manage the business, my mother was sought out by men who were business connections or simply tourists. They liked her youthful animation and direct manner.

One of my mother's best friends was Madame Escoli, whose first name I never knew and whom my mother always addressed as Madame. "Se tutoyer, c'est folie," said Madame, firmly signaling her preference for the polite forms of speech. Not that Madame Escoli was formal: on the contrary, a lot of rapid-fire French interrupted by bursts of laughter, and then sudden conspiratorial mumblings, especially when they were talking about Maurice, her husband, a bald, dour, brooding presence, much older than Madame. They were Sephardic Jews from Turkey, who had come to the island ten years before we did, in a quest to make their fortune, and now ran a luggage and handbag store in one of the more cramped streets of downtown Willemstad. Maurice was sixty, Madame not yet forty. "My husband," she said in her quick French, "he is from Ankara; I'm from Istanbul," as if that explained the huge temperamental difference between them. "In Ankara people are gloomy. But Istanbul, they enjoy life there and it is beautiful. Ah, Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium," she rhapsodized. "Where has the Ottoman Empire gone? Like everything else: disappeared with the wind." And then, switching from French to Spanish, she spoke the title of the movie she had just told my mother about, "Lo Que El Viento Se Llevo," "Gone with the Wind."

"Why did she never learn Dutch?" grumbled my father.

"Well, Max, both she and Maurice actually mastered Papiamento, which is more than we can say."

"OK, but we haven't been here a dozen years."

My father didn't mind Madame Escoli, but he felt that she was not "solid," one of his favorite terms. She spent too much time driving around in her two-door, cream-colored Chevrolet, visiting people, gossiping. But my mother and Madame got along just fine and rarely discussed the war or the war's end or anything of great weight. My mother was happy to laugh with Madame about the foibles of mankind and especially the odd ways of the island, which Madame knew well. Certainly my mother got enough heaviness from my father.