Wallflower Dispatches

Amira is Dutch.

It is strange to think that in what she calls “her former life”, she probably was a “Marijke”, perhaps a “Trijntje” or even a “Wilhelmina”. I have a feeling we will never know.

Despite the fact that she looks 52, she has actually led a very long, eventful life and crammed into much into 78 years, her real age.

Born in the 1930s, she was interred by the Japanese in WW II and is a concentration camp survivor of the other sort. Her father died young and her mother – by Amira’s account – was an upper class Dutch lady with airs and graces and a matching cold heart. Sometimes parents and children are not cut from the same cloth.

Amira (or as she might have been then: Marijke) tried very hard to be a good upper class Dutch lady herself when she settled in Holland some time after the war. She married, had a daughter and mixed easily with the intellectuals at Amsterdam University where she worked.

Soon, she felt uneasy with the wealth in her life; the penthouse, the holidays, the semblance of a contended life that comes with these trappings like a free promotional gift.

She described one holiday in Morocco where she was staying with her husband. She called herself a prisoner of an exclusive holiday compound that fulfils all the fantasies of the Western traveller. One morning she escaped, as she puts it: “I had to see what it was like outside.” So she stepped across the border of iron gates, saw the poverty of the real life and never returned.

Shortly afterwards, this escape took on grander forms when she left her life, culture and husband to live in the Maghreb desert amongst the Arabs. Her daughter was grown up. It was easy to leave.

The Bedouins with whom she lived in the desert named her with the name she still bears. Amira was named for her courage, her uprightness and fearlessness, for the fact that she – a woman – dared to travel alone in this harsh environment. She became a Muslim – after her own fashion it appears. Amira left her Dutch persona behind, like an exquisite, but useless alligator skin.

She walked for years, lived in a village in Kurdistan and finally worked for a Jewish couple in Israel, looking after their plants, vegetables and flowers; highly effective Dutch green fingers in the land of milk and honey.

It appears that she has shied away from close human relationships that involve long-term commitment and intimate closeness. Instead, she returned to Europe with three dogs. The adoption process had been mutual.

It seems fitting that we met her thanks to her dogs who appeared from nowhere in a dusty car park after we had just gotten out of our vehicle. She saw us, talked to us as if we had known each other for years and uttered incisively in her direct Dutch manner: “I can see that you are honest and can’t lie.” Who could refuse this unusual friendship?

Today, here in France, Amira lives simply with her dogs, which she calls her children. She has daily chats with Allah and lives willingly on the poverty line. Back home in Holland there are means and possessions, but her real treasure is her freedom, her “children” and the fact that she is no longer attracted to the superfluous materialistic things in life. “I am rich, can’t you see,” she will say regularly. “HE looks after me. Look…” she will say pulling the short mane of her grey hair and jumping up. “HE has left me this and I don’t walk like an old woman.”

The large variety of injustices of this world (cruelty to animals, children, people, boring conversations, lack of interest in this world etc.) is always wonderfully summed up by one word: “Freselik!!!” (‘Awful’) which Amira spits out with great passion. Sometimes events take such a turn that it’s “Heel freselik.” We chat in English, German, French, and have learned many new Dutch words.

She looks to the future in terms of “another twenty years.” She has found a small patch of her private paradise. She is a genuine rare human create.