Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir

‘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.

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‘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.

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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?

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The two nymphets are rosy-cheeked, and go topless all year round. They don’t wear dresses, just a big sheet over one shoulder. Their hair hangs down in thick coils. They look a little sad, not yet smiling. I try to catch their eyes but never can. I watch them through the window of room 21, in the eaves of the hotel, where my sister and I sleep most of the time.

The nymphs reign like Greek statues on either side of the station forecourt. On the left is the source of the red light that gives the area’s nights their bright, intermittent glow: an enormous Coca-Cola sign. I love the elegant writing with its upstrokes and downstrokes, and the funny name that rings out like a greeting in an exotic language. The light is intense and streams right into the hotel. It also tints the noses and breasts of my nymphs, making them twinkle.

I sometimes stretch my hand dreamily out of the window, watching my arm flush and fade. I am a station nymph, an angel ready to depart, a little girl on a journey. About to fly out of the window like a bird. I watch my flesh become flooded with the soft light, turning my arm, opening my hand then shutting it again. I do a finger-puppet show under the Coca-Cola spotlights and the gaze of my nymphs.

It’s a funny kind of home town, Utrecht: a puritanical, grey, swarming business hub whose visitors are welcomed by two naked women and a huge red neon sign.

The door to my room opens, slowly. My mother pokes her head round it and is astonished to see me at the window in the middle of the night.

‘You’re not sleeping?’

‘No.’

‘And your sister?’

‘Marianne always sleeps well.’

‘The hotel is full. Wake your sister and take her to room 22, I’ve just let this one to a good customer.’

Room 22 is not a room but a cubbyhole, with a skylight in the ceiling and a single bed. When the hotel is full we spend the night there. I pick up Marianne’s hot, limp body, telling her that it’s me and there’s nothing to worry about. I carry her upstairs while my mother tidies the room quick as a flash, and calls downstairs to the customer in her late-night auctioneer’s voice.

The bed in 22 is narrow and cold. The customer in 21 will enjoy slipping into the warmth left by my sister, and fall asleep easily. Not me. I tack up the pictures of Donald Duck that I drag around with me in an effort to recreate a familiar universe.

The skylight is too high to see anything through it except a patch of black sky. I concentrate on this rectangle. What if my mother rented room 22? Where would we go then?

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I love my little sister. I’m glad she’s here, life isn’t as cold. My mother finds it amusing to tell how when I was two years old she found me trying to strangle baby Marianne. That story doesn’t make me laugh. I was jealous, it seems. Strangle Marianne? No, I would miss her. I prefer to pull her ear or pinch her chubby cheeks, not really hurting her, just reminding her firmly that I’m the eldest, the strongest, that we are here for each other.

We don’t hug in my family. Physical contact is reduced to a minimum. Touching would be letting the body express its tenderness, and what’s the point of that? Work, bustle and distance act as a substitute for everything.

‘Do you have to touch each other to make babies?’ I ask, curious.

My mother is embarrassed and tells me her cabbage-patch theory. Aunt Mary cracks up. How strange, I think to myself.

Tonight the hotel has lapsed into its night-time silence. I can’t sleep and I am listening out for the slightest sound, the potential movement of the china doorknob. I’m watching for my mother’s exhausted face, for it to come round the door and ask us to leave our room, whatever the time and the depth of my sister’s sleep, to go even higher, even further, into a space so small we can hardly fit, so small there could be no smaller space. We would be invisible, forgotten forever.

This childhood moving of rooms orchestrated by my mother, these nocturnal migrations to make way for strangers for the sake of a few extra florins, leave me with a deep conviction that sometimes eats into me beneath my calm façade: I’m in the way, too much, cheap, cut-price. I wander from room to room.

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‘Is Hans here?’ asks the customer.