Mallard

The journey home

Original photograph by J. V. Verde, design by Wietske Merison

My slippers flutter against the concrete like broken wings. I highly doubt these sidewalks were actually made for walking. I’ve never seen anyone else use them. But every now and then, my legs grow restless, and I just need to walk. I’m sure it’s a cultural thing. So here I am, walking past the ‘drive-thru’ of Raising Cane’s, then Arby’s, then Taco Bell, then Moo Moo Car Wash in a constant waltz between sidewalk and road, sidewalk and road. A car honks at me, disrupting my dance. In my hometown, a honking car usually meant someone I knew was passing by and greeting me. Still, intuitively, I put on my friendliest smile as I turn to see who the driver is. I don’t know him, of course I don’t, and he doesn’t look happy to see me walking here on the road. Here, honking, rather than a sign of belonging, has become a sign of its opposite: a reminder that I am, quite literally, where I do not belong.

My slippers flutter against the concrete like broken wings. It’s a beautifully slow and repetitive rhythm in a fast world of constant change. I’ve moved house six times in the last two years, all by myself. I started out with two suitcases and a ticket to the United States. I was deeply grateful for the opportunity to start my PhD with one of my academic heroes on a subject I am very passionate about. I was also exhausted from a rather challenging and heartbreaking year. I embraced the change with bruised yet open arms as I kissed my friends and family goodbye to move to lands that I had never even met before. Why is it someone is willing to leave behind everything they know in exchange for the unknown? For me, it was hope.

The fluttering of my slippers against the American concrete does not sound so very different from their fluttering against the cobblestones in my hometown. But it feels different. You’d think the cobblestones make you feel a bit unstable, but I rather think its the concrete that throws you off. It’s too perfect, too polished. The cobblestones are reassuring in their imperfection, there’s a beauty to their messiness and a predictability to the constant imbalance they create. I have tripped many times over the cobblestones at home, and have many a scar to prove it. But when I fell on the American concrete as I ran to catch my bus, I broke my ribs. I couldn’t blame it on the cobblestones. I could only blame it on myself. I remember the rhythmic tapping of my slippers against the concrete as I ran for my bus and then the soulless shush of my coat as I slid over the sidewalk like sandpaper. My neighbors walked on and did not seem to care much for another harmed or limping body on their streets. But the bus driver, she waited for me. I remember that. It brought tears to my eyes. The shushing of my coat against the concrete and the silence of my neighbors had felt cold, but her silence was warm and caring, like my parents, who would always greet my tears compassionately with a loving yet silent smile. Whenever tears would fill my eyes, they would make sure to give me just the right amount of attention to feel seen, but not too much, so my emotions could calmly water down rather than boil up further. The bus driver waited for me to make it to the bus. In silence, she smiled at me, and I felt loved.

I was chasing love when I fell. I was chasing a sense of belonging. I was chasing a place to grow some roots. But roots don’t grow through concrete. You can try as much as you want, and try I did, but home is not a door you knock on. Home is a door that’s wide open. Home doesn’t leave you feeling confused or out of place. Home is a door that at least two neighbors have a spare key to, so you are never locked out. Home is a door you never leave, even when you do.

You don’t look for a place to grow some roots. That’s not how it works. You have grown, thus you must have roots. You may deny them, you may run away from them, but they are no less there. The roots come first - they are the source of your growth. It took a village to raise me, and that village is still there.

I was born on a mountain. Or, well, a Dutch mountain, which is hardly even worthy of the title of ‘hill’. But when my grandmother climbed that hill with me on the back of her bicycle, it most definitely was a mountain. De Grebbeberg, in Rhenen, the Netherlands, was formed by a glacier about 150,000 years ago. It is the southeastern tip of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug (Utrecht Hill Ridge), a beautiful ridge of low sandhills that embellishes the heart of the Netherlands. When the German army invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, they expected to conquer de Grebbeberg in one day. But Dutch soldiers offered much stronger resistance than expected. 425 Dutch men and boys lost their lives on my mountain that May of 1940. 259 German men and boys never returned home. Rhenen, my place of birth, was bombed and shot to rubble. The Dutch army fought off the German invaders during four intense days of fighting, until the Germans bombed Rotterdam, the second largest city in the Netherlands - the city of my grandmother. My grandmother survived, but my country did not. The Dutch army surrendered on the 14th of May, and the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany.

My grandmother lived out most of the war in Rotterdam, where my great-grandfather worked and lived as a gardener on the estate of Iepenhof. Food was increasingly scarce as the war progressed, but for some reason, my great-grandmother cooked far too much food every night. My grandmother was only a child. Little did she or her eleven siblings know that my great-grandmother cooked so much food every night to bring it to ‘the big house’ to feed the Jewish people who were in hiding there. It was better that she didn’t know. During the fifth winter under German occupation, food was scarcer than ever before. There was not enough to feed all the children, and thus my grandmother, like so many other poor city children, was sent to live on a Friesian farm where she could work and be fed. I never really realized how homesick she must have been. It was war, she was only a child, and she was what must have seemed like half a world apart from her family, and even further away from any sense of home. I still cannot fully understand that now, but I think I have come closer.

Like all other seasons, that winter, too, passed. My grandmother returned home. Rhenen was rebuilt from the rubble, as was Rotterdam. My mountain was German for 5 whole years. Then, in the spring of 1945, it became Dutch again. American soldiers liberated my mountain. As they fought the Germans, once again, Rhenen was shot to rubble. Once again, it was rebuilt. My grandmother grew from girlhood into womanhood, married my grandfather, and gave birth to five sons and one daughter, my mother. My mother moved to Rhenen with my father, and when she did, my grandmother followed. I was born in our family home in Rhenen. There, on my mountain, I learned to walk, talk, and ride a bike. Many times I fell. And many times, I got up again.

My slippers flutter against the concrete like broken wings. My thoughts fly home to the sound of their beat. When I was four years old, home moved house from Rhenen to Woerden, another small city in the province of Utrecht. In Woerden, I first went to school, worked my first jobs, and first fell in love. Many times I fell. And many times, I got up again. The Dutch word Woerden literally means ‘male Ducks’ - ‘Drakes’ or ‘male Mallards’ to be precise. Whenever I explained this to my friends from Amsterdam or Rotterdam, they’d jokingly call my town Duck City. I quite loved that name.

Mallards are not loved by many birders. They’re too common, just like Pigeons. Many birders don’t even bother to get their binoculars out when they see a group of Mallards swimming in their local pond. Instead, birders love to chase exotic birds. Rare birds. Birds that only migrate here for a short season, birds that do not want to be seen, or birds that find themselves in a habitat they do not belong in. Those are the birds we chase. But why?

“That’s just a Mallard,” we will say, as though the common Duck is hardly even worth noticing. But how beautiful is that vividly green head with its elegant white necklace, like a well-polished emerald? How beautiful do the male and female Mallards fit together? Their plumage is completely different, but they have the most stunning matching royal blue wing stripe. It’s the same radiant blue as the wings of the famous blue morpho butterfly. We travel through rainforests to find blue morphos. We pay entry tickets to zoos and butterfly houses to behold their grace. Jacques Majorelle traveled all the way from France to Morocco to find the most beautiful shade of blue, but he could have found the same color on the wings of his local French Ducks if he had actually been willing to see their beauty. If he had been able to see the beauty of the known like he saw the beauty of the unknown. If he had been able to see the beauty of the common.

I was eighteen when I left Duck City to go to a small international college in the south of the Netherlands. That’s when my tongue first parted with the language of my ancestors, and slowly got used to the shapes and sounds of English. I thought my English would get better when I moved to the United States, and I would gradually lose my Dutch accent altogether. At first, it worked. But over time, it seems my tongue got homesick. Every now and then, in the middle of a sentence, it will flutter back to the sounds of its homeland. A little ja will break through the endless rows of yeahs and yesses. And when it does, I smile. Ai smaijol, in a proud Dutch accent. Why would I want to hide my roots?

The fluttering has stopped. I have stopped walking. I have noticed a group of Mallards by the side of the road. They’re just chilling in the grass, not unlike the Mallards in my hometown chill. One quacks at me, not unlike the Mallards in my hometown quack. Mallard is a word that sounds funny to me, because ‘mallerd’ in my language means something like ‘you silly Goose’. I do feel quite silly. I feel quite silly for chasing dreams, chasing love, chasing belonging, when all along, all I needed to do to find it, was just cease the chase.

In his famous poem The Conference of the Birds, the 12th-century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar describes a Duck who loves his pond too much to set out on the journey to meet the King of Birds. It is a metaphor for those who become so comfortable in their worldly home that they become selfish, lazy and greedy. They forget to strive for their true and everlasting Home beyond the fleeting material realities of this world. Their pond becomes their prison.

I believe that those who patiently persevere through hardship in this life, including the hardship of homesickness, and remain steadfast in their struggle for goodness, will be embraced in the true peace of Home in the hereafter, if not in this life. Those who fall will rise again, as long as they keep getting up, just like Rhenen. For them, homesickness is a sign, a verse in the book of this creation, that reminds them of their longing for their true Home. Then, they will hear, “Peace be upon you for what you patiently endured. How excellent is the final Home” (Qur’an 13:24).

But I also believe the Divine to have a wonderful sense of humor. As such, I would not be surprised if that final Home ends up feeling not so very different from the first one. Perhaps only then we will be able to fully appreciate the heavenly beauty of the royal blue wing stripe of our local Mallards.

Taking my warning from Attar, I strive not to be the Duck who loves his pond too much to do anything but blindly bathe in the comfort of its loving embrace. But I will also not be the Duck who fails to see the beauty in the very pond that sustained him, shaped him, and is with him in every quack and flap of his wings. I will not be the Duck who fails to be fulfilled with gratitude for his pond and ends up exploiting it by failing to appreciate it and give back to it after years of dependence on its support and care. I will not be the Duck who only finds beauty in faraway seas or in distant hope and promises of greater nourishment and greater love, only to have its wings end up broken, fluttering against the concrete like slippers on an evening stroll.