Five Brothers and a War

Piet in Luxembourg

During the same summer, Piet was taking his vacation on a bicycle trip to Luxembourg. Piet was still rather young to go to Luxembourg with one of his friends, so Maria had strong misgivings about it. She consented to allow the trip on one condition—that Piet would send a postcard every day with details about how they were doing. Just to help that idea along and ensure compliance, Leendert bought 21 postcards, one for every day they were gone, writing the Margrietstraat 20 address on each card. He then put Belgian stamps on them before placing them in Piet’s jacket pocket. The morning they set out, Piet, trying to sound responsible and quite mature, reassured Marie not to worry. “Just remember, we are very much aware what we leave behind. Don’t worry!” were his last words, while mounting his bike that by now looked like the trip was going to be far longer than three weeks. Marie, not realizing it yet, would be replaying that last goodbye wave numerous times during the following two weeks. Every day the mailman became the most important man in her otherwise routine life. Mail delivery was always very efficient. Letters mailed in Den Haag before nine o’clock in the morning were delivered in the afternoon. Outside the city, including from neighboring countries, mail was delivered the next day. The first day came and went without a postcard arriving. Day two also came and went. In fact, there was nothing for the entirety of the first two weeks, when finally, postcards arrived. While on the one hand, Leendert and Marie should have been relieved that they finally knew that Piet was still alive, they were beyond annoyed—they were furious. All 21 cards had arrived all at once, and making matters worse, not one had so much as a single word from Piet. The only thing written on them was the address Leendert had meticulously added himself. And of course, the final straw was that Piet sent all 21, but there were still seven days until the trip was over. Therefore, his parents could expect nothing from Piet for the last week, including his travels back home. While Leendert was a patient man, his fuse had been thoroughly blown. He decided to straighten out his second-born, so he first looked up Piet’s itinerary to see where he was. He then tried to place a long-distance call, but was stymied because the hostel where Piet was staying had no telephone. At each step, his fury was growing. He decided to send a telegram, which read, “EMERGENCY! CALL IMMEDIATELY!” Piet got the shock of his life when he got the telegram. Figuring that somebody had died, he raced down the road (the hostel was halfway up a mountain in Luxembourg) to find a telephone down in the village. Out of breath, he placed the call, and as soon as Leendert answered, he blurted, “What happened?” Leendert, incredulously repeated, “What happened? You want to know what happened? We received all your blank postcards just now, that’s what happened!” “Oh, is that all?”, replied Piet, quite relieved that everybody was still alive. The reply did not do anything to extinguish Leendert’s irritation. On the contrary, Piet had just put some highly combustible liquid on it.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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