Column | All Souls’ Day – NRC

This week I was on holiday in Sicily, which I rather love, where, with my terrible Italian, it was quite a job to explain to an Italian friend that the National Cycling Championships in our country had been cancelled. Why? Because there was too much headwind. He looked at me pityingly and asked if I was doing well.

My Italian is indeed not the best, but not as rickety and incomprehensible as the Dutch of a certain Gijs Tuinman. He is number three on the BBB list in the upcoming elections. I later heard him talk on the radio in a debate about Israel organized by CIDI. It seemed as if this Gijs was not giving a well-prepared speech to group 4. In a kind of desperate nonsense. Next year I will hear him defend Infantino and the KNVB in a parliamentary debate because Saudi Arabia is a very good choice for a World Cup. All those good football players go there anyway. For the love of the sport. Poor Gijs. Caroline will have to work on that in the coming weeks. Maybe a nice job for Mona from Volendam, who has been counting her redundancy pay for a while on a rusty side track somewhere.

My Italian friend was sad. Because it was All Souls’ Day and he has lost quite a few loved ones in recent years. I didn’t ask if he had had a grief coach at the time. I was afraid of being laughed at. And I didn’t tell him that we have a star restaurant where the chef occasionally serves a crow. That wonderful cemetery bird. Only a nuisance crow. These may be shot. Common crows are protected. Maybe wolf will be on the menu there soon. But a greedy one that a grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood ate. Those bad wolves can die. Otherwise they are protected.

I didn’t dare tell my friend that the wolf is a hot item in all our party programs. More important than the refugees. The farmers want the wolf dead, while the city D66 members are of course against it. The wildest animal they have ever seen is a fat bike.

In the evening I walked with my friend to the magically lit cemetery. It was pleasant there because families each sat at their own family grave.

I cautiously wondered whether they also celebrate All Souls’ Day in Gaza. It won’t be so magically lit there. Simply because the power has been cut off. But it was probably busier there.

Why did that godforsaken war come into my head again? And why did I burst out laughing when I heard a psychiatrist on the radio say that people in our country are in therapy because they saw the war in Gaza on television and therefore feel like victims? Just like the sobbing passengers whose flight was canceled on Thursday due to the storm, who acted as if the world had ended. How do these types of people view the News? What will happen to these people if things ever really go wrong for us?

I asked my friend whether sympathy for Israel is also decreasing in Italy. He thought so. According to many right-wing Dutch people, this is due to the far too left-wing media. To which my friend smiled affably: “The Israelis are doing their best themselves!” He immediately asked me if I thought he was an anti-Semite. At that moment I shouted ‘yes’, which startled my friend. He is absolutely not an anti-Semite.

But I shouted ‘yes’ because Ajax scored. I explained to him that the great champion of the time played a cellar-breaker against Volendam on All Souls’ Day. Symbolic.

My friend said I really needed to work on my Italian. Ottavo is possible, but diciottesimo is impossible. It’s about Ajax.

I was silent and thought about all the things I hadn’t told him tonight. Simply because I couldn’t get it all explained in Italian. But you know what my problem is? I can’t do it in Dutch anymore either.

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