VALKENSWAA​RD: THE FRAGRANCE OF CIGARS

Saturday evening in a friendly establishment with a glass of whiskey-water is very good.
Unlike the rest of the week, it is a quiet night there.
I like quiet Saturday nights - I lament the lack of female companionship, but as I am totally s.o.l. in that regard, that cannot be helped - but the absence of the rowdiness and drunken merriment that is usual elsewhere in the city is very pleasant.
The Occidental Cigar Bar is our kind of place.

All I really want out of an inn at eventide is the same calm comfort that many Dutch cafés used to have, before they forbade smoking indoors and started catering to alcoholic teenagers, druggies, and drunkards.
That, and the displays of rutting behaviour.
Not having rutted in a while, seeing such is sickening.
A café is a place to relax, smoke contemplatively, and read a bit.
Or take in the world-map on the far wall, showing all the places where 'our' ancestors raped, pillaged, and conquered.
We Dutch used to be the world's incendiarists, now we simply light a pipe in the evening, or have a Java cheroot with a cup of coffee.
The old-style Dutch café is a living room - a public place where you can be a bit more private.

Except, of course, because of Brussels, one now has to behave.
Europeanization enforces clean new living.
No more smoking! And sit up straight!
Be social to the drunken puritans!

[Informational interstice: Java cheroot - Besuki filler, zandblad binder, Sumatra wrapper. Besuki leaf comes from Eastern Java, and has a fine mild fragrance and flavour. It is often used in mixed filler (the main part of the cigar). Zandblad ('Sand Leaf') are the leaves close to the ground, pale and large. Their strength and size make them suitable to hold the guts of a hand-rolled cigar together. Sumatra produces lovely thin and silky leaves with narrow veins, soft and pliable, that form the perfect outter layer; aesthetically pleasing and possessed of a spicy-floral fragrance. A good cigar is a work of art.
Brands to look for: Glorie van Java, Hajenius, De Olifant, Oud Kampen - the last mentioned is probably the only all-handmade smoke left. But the previous three (machine formed, hand finished), are also exceptional products. And there are many others, in a variety of shapes and sizes. The old-fashioned Tuit Knak (short torpedo shape) is harder to make and will cost marginally more than a Halve Corona or a Senorita. ]


VALKENSWAARD, THEN

There was a pleasant café-billard before the end of town. Broad tables covered with rugs, as is common in the Netherlands, with comfortable chairs. In one section of the large tap-room was a pool table, hardly ever used by patrons - that was the generation before us, by the seventies billiards had faded a bit - but mostly there were empty tables around, each with a large glass ashtray that was far too big to casually pocket.
Dark browns, muted carpet purples, small reflected glints of glass.
Like many cafés in that day the owner also sold a selection of cigars: cheaper greenish torpedoes that smelled of clay for the old farmer, Senoritas for the fancy man, and very decent Half-Coronas for the patron with good taste.

One of whom was a elderly woman of spare frame, who smoked them at her table while reading the newspapers.

I spoke with her a few times when I was there, and after a while I knew more about her.

No, I didn't pry.

In an otherwise empty establishment it is polite to say 'goede avond mevrouw' when passing to one's own table with another cup of coffee, or to occasionally borrow a pack of matches. Eventually conversation may happen.
She owned one of the local shops, which she and her husband had bought a few years after being thrown out of Indonesia. Like a fair number of people locally she was in a permanent state of exile, but unlike most such she was not a Northerner temporarily carpetbagging in the South, nor an actual Indo desperately trying to forget the emerald lands forever lost.
She had been born in Eindhoven, and had family in Valkenswaard - that was why she and her husband had returned after Soekarno's revolution.

They had met shortly after the war during the bersiap ("be on guard") period. She had been a nurse sent out in 1945, he was an engineer who survived the Japanese railway project in Pakan Baroe and escaped into the jungle a few months before end of the war.
She had known his uncle and aunt who lived in Eindhoven in the thirties, that was one of the things they had in common.
Both of them had lost relatives during the war, in Holland and in the Indies.
It seemed natural for them to get married.

What didn't seem so natural after their wedding was having children. Really, what had pulled them together was the places they shared and the people they used to know. They were mature individuals who found renewed stability with each other, they weren't hormonally stressed young lovers. And it was precisely because stability was lacking in Java during the last few years of the Dutch empire that children at the beginning had been out of the question. What kind of environment would they give a child, when the end of four hundred years in the East was in sight?
Was it responsible to bring someone into a world that had yet to recover from chaos?

When they settled in Noord Brabant, she ended up taking care of her sister's son Jan - her sister had died in prison in 1944, leaving a widower made unstable because of the war, and an infant - and by the time Jan was of college age, she and her own husband, while still close, no longer shared a bed. Jan was an adult now. An engineer working for the state. He had a promising career ahead of him, and would probably marry soon and have kids. She was looking forward to having the tiny ones stay with her during the summer, and visit regularly the rest of the year. Her husband could tell them tales of the Indies, and both of them would make sure the kids grew up knowing about all the people who had gone before, whose tales must be told, because their deaths had robbed them of their own voice.

She smoked cigars partly because of memory.
There had been several cigar factories in Valkenswaard before the war. Everyone in the town was, in some way, connected to tobacco.
The filler leaf came primarily from Eastern Java. The binder was often grown in Europe or South America. The best wrappers came from Sumatra, not too very far from where the Japanese during the war tried to build a railway through the jungle with slave labour.
Every few months buyers for the factories travelled to Rotterdam, and later to Hamburg, to inspect bales of new leaf, test samples, place orders. They would arrange transport back to Valkenswaard, guarding the precious cargo which was the life blood of so many people in the town, and the tobacco would be carefully warehoused. After fermentation, the central vein was stripped from the leaf by workers who lacked other skills, more experienced hands would roll the bigger cigars, young women made the thin little cigarillos that were barely thicker than cigarettes.
The town grew during the twenties and thirties, nice houses were built for successful merchants, and a few people got an education - learning was a little bit more affordable because of the money that cigars made.

The war was, of course, a disaster.

She had been in the North at nursing school when war broke out. For five years she did not see the South again. Finally, in 1945 after liberation, still rail thin from the hunger winter (the Germans had robbed all the food in the North for their own people), she went back for several months. But so much had been destroyed, or had simply worn down and not been repaired or restored, that she felt out of place. She was cognizant of her uselessness to relatives who had to share their own almost non-existent resources with a skeleton, and she was a stranger to people who had been there all the time and were still trying to digest what they had seen and what they themselves had experienced.
When the chance came, she took it. A re-opened hospital in the Indies was desperate for nurses, as many of their previous staff had died in the prisoner of war camps.
She signed up, shipped out. Learned a few phrases of Malay on the boat, as well as words like Tjimahi, Soekoen, Keloet, Lawiesegalagala, Pangkalan..... all of which have a peculiar resonance for those that lived.

Java when she first arrived was intense and brilliant, a place so different from the cold grey northern world. Viridian, gold, and crimson.

She met the engineer at a social event in the city where she worked. Many Dutch people still lived in or near the former P.O.W. camps, because going back into the countryside was dangerous. The Javanese were determined to be rid of the colonizers and tales of rape and murder in the outlying areas were common. In some towns and villages, the pemoeda (armed nationalist youth wing) had practiced unspeakable cruelties on those whom they considered collaborators, and destroyed all traces of the Netherlanders, including schools, churches, clinics, public facilities, even train stations.
In addition to the mental barriers that people had pulled up around themselves in order to survive the Japanese occupation, walls were growing between ethnic groups, and between those whose war years were not at all the same. Javans, Chinese, Ambonese, Holland-Dutch, and Indo-Dutch - they all seemed at times to be from different planets, and did not get along smoothly.
The engineer was different. Thin and gaunt, yes. But despite everything he had a sunny personality. He had survived, the Japs and Germans had been defeated, and no matter what happened, things could only get better.
Surely life would be good!

He seemed so very alive, and very attractive precisely because he was alive. They knew the same colloquialisms, the same dialect phrases, the same places in the gently undulating Southern landscape of sandy stretches, forests, and peat bogs.
They even know the same songs and dance moves. There had been no dancing for so long!

A year and a half after they married, the Dutch left Java forever. When the transports docked in Singapore, passengers weren't allowed on shore because the local politicians sided with the Indonesian Nationalists and were determined to be as inhospitable as possible.
When they arrived in Holland, there was no place in the big cities for most of them, and the refugees dispersed. Many ended up in North Brabant. Eindhoven, and surrounding towns like Valkenswaard, seemed to have more space and more prospects.
The multitude of cigar factories that existed before the war had been severely reduced - among those that remained were Hofnar and Willem II in Valkenswaard, Karel 1 in Eindhoven, a few more in various other settlements of the Kempen region. But they were finally flourishing again, and other industries were starting to grow.

She took in her sister's kid, and raised him in the small living quarters over a store that she and her man had found. Several years later they bought the store. It wasn't until they moved the business to a larger space that they finally had enough room for all three of them.
But by that time she and the engineer were just friends. He was still sunny, still reassuring, and comforting to be around. But they had met as mature adults after years of great hardship, at a time when they had already become fully formed individuals. After a period of play-acting at married life, they had percolated back into being independent by themselves.
Not solitary, mind you, but not quite able to function as a couple.
When the boy Jan moved out, her husband moved into Jan's room.
No fuss, no scene, no bitter argument. It just seemed right.

Among other things they sold cigars in the store. She worked during the day when her husband was at his job for Philips in Eindhoven, then when he had come home he would have dinner, and she would go to her evening job at the recovery facility among the pensioners. But during the day she puttered about, stocked the shelves, dealt with customers, kept track of what products people wanted.
The cigars had always fascinated her. Tobacco has such romantic names....... words that recall a warmer place, with more interesting scenery, smaragdine rice paddies, dormant volcanoes covered in forest green, the heat beating down and making the air vibrate, docks interspersing the dense dark line of palms along the shore, little black bugs that were everywhere during the rainy season when all was mildewed. Colours, fragrances, warmth.
Cigars connected Valkenswaard to a place that was not Valkenswaard. Different.
They had been young then. They weren't old now, but they were no longer young.

She hadn't worked at the recovery facility for several years by then. And her husband had retired.
They still ran the store, but in the evening she would go to the café for a few hours, to have a cup of coffee or a glass of sherry, smoke a cigar, and hear about the rest of the world through the eyes of the local newspapers.
Like many mature adults, she needed time alone. Her time.
One could escape for a while, dream a bit.
Have some coffee, and smoke a cigar.
A halve corona, or a bolknak.

As the first whisp of smoke rises, the long long piers of Tandjong Priok come into view.
The air trembles in the blazing heat rising up from the cement.
Briefly, autumn rain turns into summer.
Gilded evenings, silken leaves.


AND NOW

When I went back to Valkenswaard in 1999, the cigar factories were long gone. Nobody makes the product that once gave life to the town anymore, and far fewer people even smoke them. The place now smells of beer and car exhausts, not of country side and leaves.
Shopkeepers no longer live over their stores. Café-Billards have disappeared. Old buildings have been torn down and replaced.
The streets still follow the same plan.
For those who stayed, change has undoubtedly been both gradual and desirable.
But for someone now permanently in exile, the difference is drastic.
Many of the people I used to know are gone.
That is to be expected, we all get older.

At the Occidental on Pine Street, surrounded by the incense of other people's cigars, I can view the world through sepia-tinted spectacles if I desire.
Or happily wonder what rosy marvels will yet come.
All is briefly timeless in the smoke.
I can escape for a while.
And dream a bit.
My time.



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