12) Don’t search too hard, you might find more than you hoped for

12) Don’t search too hard, you might find more than you hoped for

Vacuum-cleaning I look under my desk. Two big, red cardboard boxes. A fraction of a second I don’t know what is inside or why they stand there. Then I remember they contain photos, hundreds of them. They too await ordering, to be  cataloged, a text to be added.

Warning! Don’t look into these boxes with old pictures. If you find them you find stacks of them. On some of these pictures of people whose identity is impossible to determine. Sending you head on to a new track of information gathering. Or you know who it is but you know next to nothing of this person.

Take the mother of my maternal grandmother, my great grandmother, Jeannet Hülliger. With her slightly slanted eyes, a brooch in the form of a miniature Javanese keris and her high cheekbones she shows all the indications of a mixed racial parentage. Grandma ‘Moes’ as she was called and off you go, surfing the Internet for information about great-grandma Moes.

Loathing and disgust fill my heart as I come to understand how much work there is to be done if I were to take my quest serious. Great-grandma Moes has a Swiss name, Hülliger and she marries someone who is also of Swiss origin, Alphons de Sturler. Was he a pure bred European? Or was he also of Eurasian extraction?

When I finish my project I must write a book about the do’s and don’ts of neatly storing and labelling the images of your life.

The pictures that I make after September 1999 - the month that Marike and I meet -  don’t pose a problem as Marike can select and arrange them. Mostly they show her, her being pregnant, her becoming more and more pregnant and finally our first born Mijntje. To a lesser extend the same happens be it less documented when Maike is due to arrive. I also make a short sequence of our baby-boy who was aborted due to an affliction called acephaly. His skull didn’t close and his brains dissolved.

More in the realm of fun-pictures are the ones we make in Madeira where we stay in what is for me by far the nicest hotel I have ever visited. It is an old building that stands on a hill. To reach the entrance you walk through a garden full of Angel Trumpets. From the dining room you have a captivating view of the capital Funchal.  Aside from the romantic surroundings the paint is fading, water-pipes are rusty and the sink smells. The owner tells us it is probably the last season she can exploit the hotel. She is too old to continue and nobody wants to take it over.  

The street leading to the hotel is so steep that we walk it back to back as Marike has become absurdly big. I push her upwards walking backwards. It is a way to get attention indeed.

Photographs are a seductive lot. I have a few empty photo-albums so I could start pasting them into the album. First sorting them out year by year, then from month to month. Afterwards I will start with the slides. Postponing is a appealing strategy.

My good friend Cees visits us and I tell him about my problem which slides to keep and which to destroy. Cees, Chantal and I have been in Flores 1984. He asks me: ‘Remember that time our bus was stuck because a bridge was broken?’ 

Accidentally I have seen a picture of a exuberantly painted bus on Flores and local guys dragging around logs. He continues: ‘We had befriended an Englishman and we have a discussion about the art of travelling looking at these guys trying to repair the bridge. Like even if they cannot fend the bridge and we will not be able to arrive at our intended destination, we still have enjoy travelling.’ I remember the broken bridge, but the Briton? No. These boxes also are full of forgotten memories.