1.
When my mum met her new boyfriend, who was just called Henk and who would later become my stepfather, God came into our lives, and he never left.
We were an irreligious couple of wild animals before she met Henk. We did everything that wasn’t allowed, especially my mum, because I was too young for that. My father had run off. I do still have some memories of him, he came from Wales, and Henk just came from Rotterdam, from Charlois.
The first evening he came to dinner at our house, Henk said: ‘Pray.’ I didn’t understand what he meant at first, and then my mum told me that Henk likes people to pray before eating. So, we did.
Henk had worked in construction, but his little finger had been shattered, a kitchen unit had fallen on it and what remained on his left hand could barely be called a finger anymore.
Henk said, ‘God had to drop a kitchen unit on my little finger to shake me awake. But it did wake me up.’
My mum nodded and then they went to her bedroom and from that day on Henk visited more often. One evening, he said to me, ‘You can call me Dad or Henk, as long as you’re pure in God’s eyes.’
That made an impression on me. I was nearly thirteen and Mum’s previous boyfriends had mostly tried to ignore me or had gone out of their way to make friends with me, and I found that even more annoying than being ignored, so I was glad that Henk just mentioned purity, because that’s actually something I like myself.
On a cold day in August 2019, Henk moved in with us with two suitcases and a plastic bag. His mother had been killed in a robbery – he said, ‘When Rotterdammers are good, they’re very good. When Rotterdammers are bad, they’re very bad,’ – and although I didn’t understand what the following had to do with that robbery, Henk claimed that God hated clothes. ‘He wants to see you as you are,’ he said. ‘Anyone who follows Jesus and doesn’t like to walk around naked is a fraud. You only have to look at the robes the Pope wears to know that the man is the devil.’
My mum said, ‘It’ll take us a while to get used to it, but let’s just do what Henk says.’
At work – Mum worked at a hair salon for ladies and gentlemen in Kralingen – she wore clothes, and I obviously did at school as well, but at home we were God’s own nudists.
Then Covid came along. Henk picked up an atlas. He drew a circle around the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and he said: ‘This is Sodom.’ Then he drew a circle around Italy, the Balkans and Greece and said: ‘That is Gomorrah.’
After that, he kneeled down and he said, ‘What that little finger was to me, Covid is to the rest of the world. A wake-up call.’ Tears streamed down Henk’s cheeks – that threw me a bit because I’d never seen him cry before – and he opened the door to the balcony of our little flat. Naked, he stood out there, pointed at Rotterdam and, still crying, he said, ‘God gave us free will and look what we do with it. Just look what we do with it.’
That night, Henk masturbated on our balcony. My mum and I sat inside, looking at him, and she said, ‘Son, this is admittedly a little different from my previous boyfriends, but do you really think we came into this world for candlelit dinners, racy underwear and a bit of polite yapping? For love, you have to go a long way.’
Then Henk came back inside, and he said, ‘I’ve poured my seed over Rotterdam, but I’m afraid it won’t do any good.’
2.
In autumn 2020, when Henk became convinced God would wipe Europe off the map, we moved to Arizona, to the settlement Hashem City, where a good friend of Henk’s, Wim, who had been a dock worker, served God in a village he had founded near the Mexican border. We got a religious visa for America and, according to Henk, we would be safe in Hashem City.
Hashem City was a small settlement in the desert, where Wim and about two hundred disciples, some forty of whom were children, were trying to escape the end times. Wim spoke English with a strong Rotterdam accent, and some people even said he spoke no English at all.
The children, and that included me, were the soldiers of God and we had been given the task of punishing heretics. Wim himself was a very mild-mannered person, but the people he had gathered around him could not stand heresy.
The heretics were handed over to the soldiers of God; only the children were real soldiers, only they were pure of spirit.
One afternoon, when we were all nearly dying from the heat, they brought a man from Canada to us. He had had a hard life, had worked for oil companies, had been divorced three times, was an alcoholic, and then he had heard Wim speaking on YouTube. At that moment, he knew – he had headed straight to Hashem City.
But as time passed, he began to have doubts. He started proclaiming, ‘Can a dock worker from Rotterdam really be the chosen one?’
So, they picked him up and brought him to us, the soldiers of God. They always said to us, ‘Caress the heretic. Drive his idolatry out of him with love.’ However, when they brought in the Canadian, naked, old and withered, and we, the soldiers of God, were unable to suppress our disgust, we knew: this man is beyond help.
What we did to that Canadian defies description and yet I know for certain that we made a decisive contribution to bringing the Kingdom of God closer that day. It was the most wonderful and the most exciting thing I had ever done – the omnipotence, the screams of the old heretic, the fellowship among the soldiers of God.
Mum is right. We’re not in this world for candlelit dinners, lace lingerie and boring prayers. We are in this world for something greater.