Sitting in a cosy circle around some garden tables were no fewer than fifteen people, the residents and guests of the guesthouse at Bloemenhof estate. Except for Fiona, they were all acquaintances. Because of this, and because of that strange kind of surge of electricity she had experienced from or towards the one man who seemed to be called Alexander, she had trouble relaxing. She could see that everyone was talking to someone, but she herself did not know where to start. She was glad she was sitting next to Bianca, because she had become a bit of a familiar face to her and she felt quite safe with her. On the other side next to her was an empty chair.

In the corner of her eye, she saw that Rosalie suddenly jumped up and came over to her. She went to stand next to Fiona and wrapped her arms around her neck.

Rosalie whispered, "I almost have to cry."

Fiona, surprised and amazed, put her arms around the girl's waist and whispered back, "Then why? Are you sad?"

"Yes, I see you so alone, and I feel your sadness. Not really sadness, it's a bit all together, sadness, anger and being scared. Something like that, I don't know what it's called."

"A kind of frustration?" asked Fiona.

"Yes, something like that. I feel that something is there, that you are scared, don't quite know what to do, and that in turn makes you angry and sad."

Fiona was deeply touched by this, it was so perfectly articulated... She hid her face in Rosalie's hair and whispered, "How do you know all this anyway?"

"I feel it, and sometimes I suddenly think words, and sometimes I say them right away, like when you were standing there with Bianca with those chairs, and now I thought about it first, because I found it hard to say."

Rosalie was silent for a moment, before she continued speaking with strong certainty: "I'll say it again, you can open your heart, because it's good. I don't know what it's about, but this is what I hear again."

"Thank you, Rosalie, thank you. I've already written it in my mobile, because I don't want to forget. And maybe I know what it's about, but I'm not sure yet."

"Doesn't matter ya, it will come naturally." Rosalie gave her a kiss on the cheek. "I'm going to Gloria again. Look, she's watching us."

"What would she be thinking? Would she wonder what you said to me?"

Rosalie shrugged. "She just might, I don't know. Oh, she's coming crawling over here! Come on, Gloria!"

Rosalie extended her arms to her, but Gloria headed straight for Fiona, pulling herself up by her legs so that she was on her knees in front of her. Fiona, who really had no experience at all with small children, knew no other way to do than to grab her under her armpits and take her on her lap.

"What do you want to tell me, Gloria?"

Gloria looked at her for a moment, and snuggled against her, gently pressing her head under Fiona's chin.

This simple gesture moved Fiona. She stroked her hair and tucked her nose into it. "What a sweetheart you are..."

Unconsciously, Fiona started rocking back and forth a little to the left and right.

"That's what Gloria likes, a little rocking like that," Rosalie explained, "Huib made a baby swing for her, it's behind their house. Gloria likes that so much! She doesn't like swinging very high, but just kind of, like you are doing now, rocking back and forth a bit."

"How nice... can you see if she's asleep?"

"No way, she's not asleep, she's awake, she's watching..."

Because Rosalie hesitated for a moment, Fiona looked in the direction Rosalie was looking, and looked right into Alexander's eyes.

"She's looking at Alex, I think," Rosalie said. "She's staring at him."

As Fiona looked at Alex for a moment, it confused her and she looked at Ellen. She saw that Ellen was engaged in a conversation, but kept looking back and forth from Alex to her.

'Bloody hell,' Fiona thought, 'what am I supposed to do with this?'

Before she had a chance to think of a solution, Lisa stood up. She asked for the floor in a clear voice and said, "Dear people, I just want to say that I think it's fantastic that we can be here together. It has been over a year since most of you witnessed the trials. I think only Fiona was not there, right?"

"Right, I wasn't there, I didn't know about it then, but I did read about it in the newspapers. Quite a lot was written about it," Fiona told me.

"Good, then I don't have to explain that," Lisa laughed. "In the time since then, a lot has happened. For a start, The Shelter was built and furnished. It is a safe haven for women who have been sexually abused in any way. Last year in the last few months, Gloria and William were born, and Bianca came to live and work at the shelter, and she brought her little son Julian. Where is that little guy? Ah, over there with Anton. A little further on, a discovery centre has been set up, where children from their inner selves discover themselves and what they want to learn. And in between, a digital gallery has been set up, and it's growing like crazy, really great! That, in a nutshell, is what has happened here. For me personally, I am just giving the example now, in the hope that you also want to share something about your past year, for me personally it has been a year of a lot of emotional healing. Unbelievable, what a process that is, super intense sometimes, sometimes mild, but in any case always good. I'm starting to get a better sense of who I really am and what I want. And about what we love to do most, you can tell Sjaak."

Sjaak looked at her with a mischievous face: "What we love to do most? How do you want me to tell you, in shorthand or at length about every caress?"

Lisa looked at him in bewilderment for a moment. "Caress?.... Oh you! I mean our music naturally!"

He moved his eyebrows up and down for a moment: "Okay, all right, although I think that caressing is pretty natural too... OK, so Lisa means our music!" He waited until the laughter calmed down a bit. "We discovered last year before the court cases that we love making music together. Lisa on violin or cello, myself on the piano. What we do cannot be explained in any other way than: playing what comes into our minds, what flows from the inside. Don't ask me how it works, it can't be explained. We started by recording what we play, and sometimes there's such a nice piece of music to go with it, we take that apart, and then we put pictures with it, nature pictures by ourselves and by people who have also stayed here sometimes. So we make a kind of clip. You can find them on the gallery's site, and also on YouTube. Furthermore, I am still working in the garden, and recently helped a young discoverer plant a vegetable garden at the discovery centre. That was cool, wasn't it Rosalie?"

Rosalie beamed: "That was great, Sjaak, you made Jan so happy! Every morning he runs to his vegetable garden first to see if he already sees some greenery. The cress is already coming up a tiny bit, so nice! I think we can eat those on bread next week, delicious with cheese!"

"Now that you are speaking, Rosalie, would you like to tell us something about yourself, about the last year?"

"I moved, I live near here now, because this is where I am at home, with Gloria. I was there when she was born, that was so beautiful! And now I visit her every day, otherwise I miss her for too long. And I like not having to go to school here, I learnt to read and write and do maths at home and I go to the discovery centre almost every day now. And I really like writing stories, stories about animals. And that's enough, who wants to?"

Alexander raised his hand. "I do want to recount. I remember how much fun it was to help at The Shelter, laying the floor, wallpapering, decorating, all that kind of stuff. It was quite hard work sometimes, but it was cosy and we looked forward to having women living there soon, a quiet and safe place. Other than that, I'm mostly busy with my work, I'm an auctioneer. That's running and standing still, sometimes very busy, sometimes twiddling my thumbs. That's about it, not much else in the past year."

"In which you momentarily forget something, which is that we are still married, dear," Ellen complemented. "And we try to make something of that, right?"

Alexander ran red: "Sorry Ellen, that was really clumsy of me, not to mention you... We have a good time together, Ellen and I, but it is sometimes quite difficult to really make time for each other because of our totally alternating working hours. Again, we have a good time together, but it's not always easy either."

He nodded at Ellen, as if to ask if she wanted to move on.

"I think Alex described it pretty well as it is. I wouldn't know what to add for the moment. I myself work as a lawyer, nowadays only in collaboration with Johan, together for the justice of abused women. I recently went through an intense piece of process. That had to do with why I was doing this work actually. I found out that it had nothing to do with my own abuse, because there hasn't been any, but with the fact that I was silenced. My desires, my will, my opinions were never allowed to exist. And somewhere in that is a link to those abused women, funny, I suddenly see that now. These women have been gagged by their abusers, and as their advocate I get to be their mouth, articulate what is going on inside them and defend them.

That process only lasted an hour or so at the deepest point, but I roared and cried so terribly then, that I had a huge pain in my throat and heart region. I then discovered something special, namely that if I consciously put my hand on that sore spot, the pain diminished and eventually even disappeared completely. I have applied this to clients ever since. Those women who come to us for a trial are tense, almost always have a headache. Since my own experience, I ask them about it, they admit they have a headache or pain in their back, I ask if I can put my hand on it, and if I am allowed to do that, actually always, that pain disappears. And besides, according to Johan, I have only become more fiery as a defender. And I'm happy about that!"

She looked around the circle, at which Simon spoke up. "During the trials, I was only just living with Annerieke. Between us it is fantastic, I have got the best woman on the planet, sorry men, that honour just falls to me, I can't help it either, it's just a fact. Furthermore, I still work in construction and enjoy my family here. Annerieke, do you want to continue?"

"Continue with you? I dare not say no now that you have crowned me the best woman on the globe!" She grinned at him and gave him a kiss. "I really feel that way too, like the best wife to Simon. Our relationship is so fine, so deep, and we also go through pieces of process very deeply at times. As I think you all know, I was first married to Erik, Huib's father, and I went through a deep process after he crashed, but now in this relationship with Simon, sometimes bits still come up. Something as silly as the question of whether I'm allowed to be indefinitely happy with Simon, whether that's not a betrayal to Erik. Those are tricky things, but they usually come up in bits, so it's not a deep dive all at once. And it's nice that Simon then stands behind me, lets me go through it and when I've had the worst of it, comforts me, hugs me, so that I relax completely again. For work, I am still the cook, baker and hostess of the guesthouse, and I still love that work. And those youngsters on our property, that's great too. We understood from Huib that a lot more are going to come, a whole herd, right? It seems great!"

"Okay, enough Annerieke! Shall we take over, Margreet?"

Whispering, he asked her something, to which she nodded.

"Well, following on from Annerieke’s story, we are happy to tell you that we are keeping our promise and that our second child is on the way! That none of you knew that already... is because we ourselves have only known for an hour. Margreet told me when Sjaak and I returned from the supermarket..."

"You too? Hahahaha," Lisa was laughing all over. Sjaak just came home, and I jumped around his neck to whisper to him that we're having another baby!"

Annerieke jumped up and cheered, "Yeahhhhhhhhhhh!"

Lisa continued, "Do you guys have an idea yet whether it's going to be a boy or a girl?"

Margreet nodded: "Another girl, but totally different from Gloria, more of a sturdy type, sturdy and also creative! What about you guys?"

" We'll have a girl too!" laughed Lisa. "Soon we will have two more girls on the Bloemenhof estate!"

Huib and Margreet continued telling together, about their work, the gallery and about Gloria. Huib explained that he felt an urge inside to also work more creatively with wood, purely creative, without the idea of a piece of furniture or some other practical piece behind it. "I just don't know how yet, I don't see it in front of me yet," he said.

"Will come," Anton promised.

"I'm finished, you go right ahead Anton!" encouraged Huib.

"OK, I had to think hard for a moment, what happened in the past year... To start with, a major change in the way I approach employees within my company. As Rosalie told me, I am now a good father. Well Joke and I don't have children, but I experience that I have become a father to my staff, the people who mostly work with me every day. I shape that into a change from what are known as performance reviews. The word says it all, how do you perform? That only says something about how you do your job, but nothing about who you are, how you are in life, how you are doing and what you like or find difficult. I can't say other than that I love doing it this way, and noticing that the atmosphere has changed, become convivial like it used to be, in the beginning, when I started the business with a friend. That's my work, and my home is Joke. Not that I claim her there, rather not, that would not be good for her and therefore not good for me, but she... she is my everything... I give you the baton, dear!"

Joke smiled blushing and pretended to take a baton from him. "I enjoy spending hours every day writing my books. I'm working on the fourth one now, but I still haven't dared to publish them. I doubt I think they are good enough for that. And yet I still enjoy it, describing stories about all kinds of people. And I have a fantastic safe haven with Anton, the man who loves me more than I can imagine..." She looked lovingly at Anton, who gently squeezed her hand and winked at her.

Bianca sat up for a moment and spoke up, "For those who don't already know, I'm Bianca and that sweet little guy over there is my son Julian. I worked in Anton's company and when he changed the way he had conversations, and also asked about me personally, I mentioned how difficult I found it that I would have to take Julian to a babysitter every day, almost every day to a different one. He then recommended me here and I have been living in the attic of Bloemenhof ever since. And I have it better here than anywhere else. The room is big, the work is fine, and the people... you know them, I don't need to explain, I just want to say that moving here was like coming home. I picked up my old hobby, sewing doll clothes, not standard clothes, but clothes as they originate inside me. I have all the space for that in that room. And I also got space for it on the digital gallery, super nice! And with Julian I am very happy, he is a beautiful little guy!"

Marieke continued, "I had an agency for security. I not only arranged security for Sjaak and Lisa, but also for several women at The Shelter. Some time ago, in May I believe, I went through a process as the question kept coming to me as to why I had chosen security, and through a nightmare, the feelings that had brought threat in the past came back in full force. I realised through the process, that I had chosen security from my own woundedness. On Johan's advice, I called in sick for a while, then sat at home, wondering what to do with all my time. I also discovered something from my childhood, tinkering with folding sheets. I started folding, fans, and made butterflies out of them for the baby's room. Just funny, fun to do. I later bought more types of paper, also slightly firmer paper and have been trying out more since then. And in about five weeks, we hope to become parents to the little girl who is still curled up here now." She put her hands on her belly and looked around the circle smiling.

Anton wanted to follow up on what she had told, but Huib was one step ahead of him: "Marieke, do you have pictures of what you made from those folding leaves?"

Marieke looked at him, nodded: "Yes, I did take photos of them, with my mobile."

"May I see them?" asked Huib.

"Yes..." Marieke briefly looked for them as Huib walked towards her. He looked, saw the picture of the nursery wall, full of paper butterflies.

"Can I go around with it for a moment, so the others can enjoy it with me?"

"Enjoy it? Yes, you may," Marieke shrugged. She didn't understand why he wanted to, it was just some paper, nice work, funny result... but nothing else, right?

She was hugely surprised by the enthusiastic exclamations. And most of all because Rosalie started crying. "All butterflies! So many butterflies for your baby! I want to write a story about it, about butterflies, can I have a picture of your butterflies for my story?"

"Of course you can! Then we'll just have to figure out how to arrange that later, will be fine. Tell you what, I'll send one to Huib, then he can print it out for you."

"No, don't print it out, Huib can send it to the printing shop, then they'll put your picture on the front!"

"Will your stories go to the printing shop? Will they be real books?"

Rosalie nodded: "Yes really, very nice!"

She walked back to Fiona, who was still rocking Gloria while listening to everyone.

Huib asked for a moment's attention: "Which of you are involved in the digital gallery? I mean: who has a page there?" A few hands went up. "Okay, what do you guys think about this?"

There were shouts from one to another:

"Art, that's art!"

"Join us too, Marieke!"

"Yes, you belong, this is beautiful!"

And Anton: "What did I promise you Marieke? This is going to touch people..."

"We'll talk more about it later Marieke, is there anything else you want to tell us?"

Marieke shook her head and passed the turn to Johan.

"I have the honour of soon becoming the father of this sweet girl, and I am still incredibly happy with Marieke. Our bond is so strong, as if we are one person. Outside the home, as you have already understood, I am a judge for abused women. Marianne may tell more about that later. Over the past year, a year of coming home to Marieke, a lot has happened, in and around court, but also at home. Parts of process for myself. Before Lisa's court cases, Marieke broke down the walls of my heart with her fervent love for me, but then, of course, everything is not immediately gone. Memories of my childhood have come back, and I have gone through them all the time, with Marieke beside me, often literally. I have discovered how good it is to do some reading in my free hours, just for relaxation rather than for work, or to do some work in the garden, messing around. Yes, those are my hobbies, the garden and reading. But my work as a judge is really the core of what my heart is about, what my heart is about doing. But Marieke is the core of where my heart goes when it comes to relationship, to being. And Marianne is a dear friend of both of us, and at my work my right hand, almost literally... You may continue Marianne!"

"So I also work in court. At the time of Lisa's court cases still often behind the reception desk, to welcome people, as well as a bit of secretarial work, administration. But because since her court cases something has been set in motion, which is so much bigger than we could have imagined, I have been appointed by the court as Johan's personal secretary. A correspondence has started with judges and lawyers from all over the world, as well as with victims and perpetrators and interested people. I have prepared several standard replies, but even then I have my hands full. It is sometimes tough, but wonderful work, as we see how the judicial world is slowly but surely changing. I regularly visit Johan and Marieke at home. Their friendship is really dear to me. So it feels natural that they asked me to come here with them this week, but when I think about it, I come to the conclusion that such a thing is not natural at all, but that I am just a lucky girl. Other than that, I like sitting outside in my garden, just resting a bit, especially giving my head a rest. I noticed a while ago that my hands were having trouble with that, with doing nothing. Marieke put balls of cotton in my hands and then I discovered macramé in a totally different way than I knew it from before. No patterns, no fixed knots, but following my heart. I find that much more fun to do than those standard things."

"Pictures?" asked Huib.

"Yes, I did take a few photos of the first piece of work, but it doesn't amount to that much..." Marianne objected.

"I disagree with you from the start. If you say you follow your heart in it, there's more to it!"

He took over her mobile, saw the picture of 'Out of Knots', her first piece of work that she had hung on her ceiling. He went around with it, and again many people were excited. This time it was Fiona who got emotional. Huib asked her if she wanted to tell him what happened.

"I want to try, but I don't really know it myself. I will straight away tell my story of the past year. Last year, even before those court cases of Lisa, I was here with Daniel. We had been married for ten years, but our marriage felt empty compared to the relationships we saw here. We decided to break up, move on separately. And that has been very good. I recently bought a piece of work made by Katja through the digital gallery, and on the day I went to pick it up, something seemed to have broken through. I knew I wanted to start working with clay. I did, and designed 'Centipede?' I have since made dozens of Centipedes, all slightly different. I sell them through the gallery, they are nothing special to look at, funny, but not special, I thought... but it turns out they touch people and that's why they want to buy them. Since my Centipede, I've been waiting for new impressions, but I bump into something, I don't get any further, I don't know what else I could make. It felt like a hill that I can't get over, that I can't even see over, but now that I see 'Out of the Knots' from Marianne, I know I'm in a knot somewhere. I want to leave it at that for now. I just really want Marieke and Marianne to put their work on the digital gallery, and if you ever want to sell 'Out of the Knots', you hereby have a buyer! Oh yes, apart from that, I work in a bookshop. I used to read a lot, before I started clay, but liking to read is a bit different from working in a bookshop. I would prefer to quit, but I don't have enough income at the moment. This is another reason why I hope to get out of the knot soon, so that I can start making more from clay. My hands are itching to start working on it! Sorry, I just happened to pop in. Maybe you weren't ready at all, Marianne?"

"Yep, I was ready. And I think everyone has been by now. I'm hungry!"

Marianne slapped her hand in front of her mouth, as if ashamed for just blurting it out. However, she found a lot of support, at which everyone stood up. Margreet came over to Fiona, took Gloria from her. "How wonderfully you looked after her, Gloria was obviously in her element with you on your lap! Thank you! I'm going to change and feed her for a while."

"Shall I bring you some food?"

"Huib would already do that for me, but I think it would be nice if you help him with it a bit," Margreet replied with a wink.

"All right, I'll help him out!" laughed Fiona.

To chapter 66. Anton helps Ellen on her way

Or to the Table of contents