The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 20

THE GUARDIAN Friday August 14 1992 20 EUROPELIVING AWM'Bfl DM YKI PEOPLE By DOMINIQUE JACKSON ABBA DABBA DO The mafia was something they read about in newspapers, until Dutch chrysanthemum growers Nic and Laura Bot moved their family to sunny Calabria and met the mob. They learned the hard way to pay up and keep quiet, but after 18 years they broke the silence to Ben Haveman WHILE just about any pop their premises were slashed. Then the telephone rang at night, threatening to kidnap the children and blow up the greenhouses. Windows were smashed, flowers cut down. In February 1976, two masked men appeared at the door with a gun.

Nic was shot in the chest, straight through his hand. Half the village was in the house by the time the mafia figures are welcomed back like returning heroes, and anyone refusing to join in is a marked man. Last year they shot a friend of my daughter," says Nic, almost nonchalantly. "He was a bit slow paying up." Many businesses in the area closed. The motorway ends in the middle of nowhere, a clear indication of the mafia's stranglehold.

Nic's business ran into difficulties. The day labourers were the types with gold crucifix and open shirt, who preferred to drive up and down the main street in their Alfa-Romeos, according to Nic. "Doesn't every Calabrian father dream of being able to say proudly 'my son is no fool, he doesn't have to Nic saw his work undermined and destroyed. In the end he quit and is back in North Holland, growing bulbs, but the experience united the family. They will go back, for a holiday.

Calabria is a beautiful part of world. Nic will also continue as a consultant to the business, but he has put his shares up for sale. He shows me his scar. Ben-veniito to his successor in Bova Marina. Ciao, Italia.

shot a man dead in order to have an affair with his wife. But afraid of the mafia? Never. "They will only cause trouble if you do not come to an arrangement with them." One dubious business contact, who had a grand villa and five bathrooms, offered Nic a large "advance" when Nic and Laura's eldest daughter got married in Holland. Sweating, Nic changed it at various banks. Laura became a grandma.

A mafioso who did not yet have a blonde in his collection of mistresses became infatuated with her. He would phone incessantly from his prison cell in Messina. Being the sort who usually took what he wanted, everyone was terrified of him. "The man was killed later, in the market square. His brains were everywhere," says Nic.

Things are changing. The local godfather type who always found a mutually acceptable arrangement has been pushed aside by a younger generation with no time for com-, promise or compassion. "A mafia boss who orders his son killed because he refuses to follow in his father's footsteps is capable of anything. Released stirred; he decided to come to an arrangement with the mafia. He agreed to pay the equivalent of 200 every month to a guarda, a protector.

The protector turned out to be Vittorio. When the magistrates tried to investigate the shooting, the Bots kept quiet about the threats and the money. During the hearing Laura looked straight at Vittorio, a subpoenaed witness. She did not betray him, but murmured: "Well, Italians all look so alike." So the Dutch newcomers adapted to the local culture, which is defined as omerta, the code of silence. "Otherwise," say the Bots, "we would all be dead by now." Sometimes Nic would be approached by villagers asking if he hadn't paid that month.

"I knew they all benefited. Apparently they hadn't received their money yet." Nic tells how one of the leading villagers, "light suit, big once approached him, saying he had a plumber looking for work. "I told him I already had a plumber. A couple of weeks later the door to one of the sheds was riddled with bullets." The gun was the same as that used by someone who had pesticides something in flower exports, perhaps. Nic went to Italy as a works manager, to try.

A few years later he set up as a chrysanthemum grower in a village called Bova Marina, in Calabria, in the toe of Italy, where the mild winters are ideal for chrysanthemums and Mount Etna glows red on the horizon. The nursery covered 10 acres. They invested and made plans to expand from six employees to 45. But in September 1974, after the family had resettled and burned all its bridges with the past, an unsigned note appeared under the windscreen wiper. It demanded 100 million lire to be deposited under a nearby tree.

Until then the Bots had only encountered the Cosa Nostra in the papers, in reports of bodies buried in the foundations of buildings in Sicily. Uncertain what to do, they showed the note to their longest serving employee, Vittorio. "I'll fix it, boss," grinned Vittorio. "I know which way the wind blows." But Laura went to the carabinieri anyway. She would have been wiser not to.

First, all the tyres on AA the homes of their tfkpoorest girlfriends, the children sometimes ate grass. In school they never wore new clothes, so as not to stand out. The word mafia never passed anyone's lips. "Careful, mother," Petra admonishes her mother even now, "no as if the tentacles of the Cosa Nostra could still threaten this family in the Netherlands. Nic Bot, a 58-year-old chrysanthemum grower, has just returned from Italy, his second homeland.

Finite. Basta. Finished. He never thought he would sell his business. For 18 years he paid protection money, but eventually the customs of Calabria forced him out His family had left seven years earlier.

At least the grandchildren will be able to go to school without a police escort. "Nic was a gambler." says his wife, Laura. "Restless, like a gypsy. Both of us found it too predictable here in the Netherlands. Too claustrophobic." There had to be something more adventurous than a job in EASTERN PROMISE SETS IN THE WEST Was East Germany a paradise for women? Many West German women were prepared to believe it until the Berlin Wall came down.

Now, report Lars Trdgdrdh and Henrik Berggren the women of united Germany are falling out about their future group that doesn't take itself too seriously makes camp cover versions of Abba hits, Anni-Frid Lyngstad the ginger-haired Abba was in Stockholm this week to prepare a fundraising concert for Det Naturliga Steget (the natural step), an environmental group she founded. The concert tonight will be held in the courtyard of the Royal Palace in Stockholm and features everyone you have and haven't heard of on the Swedish music scene, including Roxette's Marie Fre-driksson and the opera singer Hakan Hagegard. "Our aim is to inform performers about protecting the environment so that they pass the message on to their fans," said Anni-Frid, who now has a reputation in Sweden for keeping worms under her sink to boost the composting. And it's not any old sink. These days, she's married to a Swiss prince and lives near Zurich.

As for the other Abbas, 20 years after the group started and 11 years since the last album, Bjorn Ul-vaeus and Benny Andersson are writing musicals and Ag-netba Faltskog is said to have become a recluse. Frida takes the Abba revival which will take off in earnest next month with PolyGram's four CD set of Abba's hits in her stride: "For me, Abba has never really gone away." BORIS Yeltsin is clearly in no hurry to shower medals and honours on worthy supporters. Since last August's failed coup, Russia has introduced only two replacements for the myriad decorations which weighed so heavily upon the chests of Politburo apparatchiks. But his opponents have other plans. The former democrat Alexander Nevzorov, now a rabid nationalist presenter of 600 Seconds, the controversial St Petersburg television current affairs show, has invented his own medal (engraved For Truth and Courage) for journalists who have risked their lives in pursuit of a story.

Nevzorov designed it and heads the commission which will award it. Nobody has yet been nominated, but Nevzorov is clear that hacks on the pro-democracy papers are out of the running: "It would be like giving medals to people who collaborated with the krauts in the war." IF YOU go down to the woods today Only a handful of brown bears survive in France, but it has taken just one to trigger an almighty row between the state and villagers in the Pyrenees. The beast has been run ning riot through the area, munching lambs. So far, the men from the environment ministry have failed miserably either to frighten or capture the animal. Finally, the mayor of Bielle decided to take matters into his own hands.

Jean Bay-laucq ordered the construction of a huge cage baited with a ewe to the wrath of the National Office for Hunting which claims that he has neither the expertise nor the authority to trap the bear; moreover, he is depriving its officers of a job. Last year they shot a friend of my daughter's. He was a bit slow in paying doctor finally arrived. After a brief examination, he shook his head and said: "Signora, there is no hope." But amazingly, the bullet missed Nic's heart by a hair. Nic lost a lung, and after the operation to remove the bullet lodged in his back, his reaction was: "That's it, I've had enough." But the pioneer spirit wanted to exploit their economic and reproductive potential," explained one eastern feminist.

While women, even if they had small children, worked more than 40 hours a week and did most of the housework, their children spent about 10 hours a day in large nurseries in groups of 25. ESTERN German women find it hard to understand what they are sup; posed to have to learn from the DDR. "After 15 years of the Women's Movement I have no desire to repeat history," wrote one critic recently. However, there is another dimension in the very bitter conflict between eastern and western German feminists: the eastern women's emphasis on their role as mothers. The fact that they wanted to have children despite having a job and easy access to abortion proves that they let a patriarchal state lock them into traditional female roles, according to West German feminists.

Many East German feminists claim in their turn that then-West German counterparts are frustrated because policy there forces women to choose between children and career. "In the 1980s, I was invited to attend a university in the West," explains Ms Runge. "I got on well with the men. But the women were so aggressive, and later I understood why. All the male professors of my age had wives who had once been in mid-career, but had then married, become housewives and had children and were now feminists.

"They talked to me about linguistic skills and gender theories, about how disgusting men were and that women had to be independent. I didn't understand. I said: 'But you are dependent on your husbands, why don't you work?" for asthmatics" And Mahler's Fourth? "Tired and dry." Harb also found fault with the orchestra: "Technical inadequacies, imprecision, a disastrous oboe entrance." He admitted "one would overlook such blemishes if genuinely vital music were being made, but, surprisingly, Salonen seldom rose above the mere reproduction of IF Mahler suffered at the hands of Salonen, there is better news about the man they call the French Mahler, Erasure: number 3 in the European chart with its Abba-esque EP, and (below) the real Anni-Frid Lyngstad ACROSS THE BOARD BELGIAN politicians, still squabbling about carving up the country along linguistic lines, should take a tip from the makers of Monopoly, who have just managed to produce a politically correct Belgian version of the board game with an absolutely equal balance of Flemish and Francophone place and street names and a fair division of the more expensive addresses. RUSSIAN radio transmitters, once used to jam subversive broadcasts beamed in from the West, are being rented to former enemies of the Soviet state. Pioneering German station Deutsche Welle is leasing several Russian stations to broaden its broadcasts to Asia.

TROPICAL weather ensured a successful and less than sober start to this year's Prague beer festival, but within a week service was slowing down because hundreds of glasses had disappeared and customers complained they were being short-changed. More than half the Czech staff were promptly sacked by the event's German organisers, who now fear they will not be able to cover their costs. GERMANY'S leading Catholic theologian and critic of the church, Eugen Drewermann, has astounded his acolytes by getting involved in Swiss phone sex lines. But don't expect saucy sighs when you call his number 156 70 23. Instead, you'll get an earful of some calming classical music and a few choice lines of Drewer- mann's meditative texts.

Unfortunately, the service is only available to Swiss subscribers. sausage peperoncino hot pepper; literally: little big pepper). Come the dessert and Ste-fania gives in to temptation: "Via, forse unafettina snella snellina" (Oh all right then, just a little slice, just a sliver, the merest sliver). Her eye is caught by a beautiful child whose cherubic countenance brings out the mamma in her. She bends over the pram.

"Come sei hello, ma sei davvero piccolo, sei piccino, ma piccinino, un vero bambolotto!" (Aren't you beautiful, you're so small, you're so little, you're just tiny, a real little doll. Bambolotto literally: big child). She chucks his chin and smiles fondly, until her at tention is drawn to the businessman at the nearby table who keeps grinning at her sederino and waving. "Ma guarda lui. Un po'bruttino, no?" (Take a look at him.

Is he ugly or what? use the diminutive here and you damn with faint praise). With a look of scorn, Ste-fania turns to summon the waiter and asks for the bill. An expression of mild surprise crosses her face when she receives it. "Un po'caruc-do "(A little on the expensive side, for which read What a rip-off) she remarks, reaching for her handbag. It is not there.

Perhaps it's in the car, suggests Silvia, helpfully. Stefania leaves the table, returns 10 minutes later. "Ho cercato da tutte le parti! Ho but-tato giu'anche I'anima!" (I've looked for it everywhere! I've even searched my Silvia sighs, mutters "Madonna under her breath, and pays the bill. THE ART OF SMALLER TALK I She was a sociologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin, but resigned after admitting her contacts with the Stasi. She now manages a Jewish centre in east Berlin.

"Women were independent. A woman who went to work knew that she had enough money to be able to kick her man out. When I was 18, 1 got pregnant. I had the child. I got pregnant again and I had an abortion.

You didn't need to worry, the state took care of you. I worked three shifts and the kid was at day nurseries all week," she says. "Being a single mother was no problem, except maybe on a personal level in that you wanted to have a man. Today you can't get a job if you're on your own with two children, and if you have three you have no chance at all. "We had no idea it would be so hard; that's not the way it was shown on West German television," she adds.

"Now women are on the market and have to stick with then-men. You can't divorce. In the East, women always used to fall in love, have children, divorce, find a new man and so on. Now you can't move in and out as you please. If you take someone in, how on earth are you going to get rid of him again?" EMEMBERING the DDR as a women's paradise lost is attractive for all those who, like Ms Runge, have found it hard to stomach the self-importance the western Germans have displayed since reunification.

The problem is that the DDR's policy towards women was the work of the state, not of East German women there was no feminist movement to speak of. In the early 1980s, a number of measures were introduced to counter the falling birth rate. "The state was not interested in emancipating women but Esa-Pekka Salonen 'a waltz right rhythmic sense for such a challenge, and he tried to compensate with creative intervention that distorted the original beyond recognition. This was a waltz for asthmatics." Ouch. But it gets nastier.

Karl Harb of the Salzburger Nachrichten wasn't scandalised by the waltz. "Why shouldn't it sound a bit like Hollywood?" He praised Sa-lonen's courage and his ear for detail. But in the Berg "everything seemed dull, spelled out but not deeply felt and organically devel 4 IHGEIVS M11ETER. IN WHAT was once East Germany people are searching for something which has now gone not the corrupt political institutions or the everyday patterns of life associated with the old order but the status of women. In doing so they have stirred-up a curious debate with their sisters in the western part of unified Germany.

The French magazine L'Ex-press recently placed the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik in an exclusive group with Scandinavia, the USA and Canada in terms of women's status. In eastern Germany 90 per cent of all women of working age were in the labour market, state child care was almost universal and abortion was a right. Above all, the DDR was way ahead of West Germany, which is an under-developed country on feminist issues with its patriarchal welfare policy, limited abortion rights and low percentage of working women (about halt). The policy towards women disintegrated at the same time as the DDR did; unemployment has forced eastern German women to stay at home. Day nurseries are closing or have raised their prices dramatically, and the role of the man as breadwinner is being reinstated.

Recently, the magazine Der Spiegel even reported a huge rise in the number of eastern German women having themselves sterilised so as to be able to compete in the job market. But what the women mourn most is an ideal, a lost identity. Eastern German feminists believe they existed in a different psychological reality to the women of the the western half. They could make demands of their work, their husbands, lovers and children. Irene Runge is in her forties.

NOTED WDTH ALARM Desmond Christy NOT many people actually booed, but Esa-Pekka Sa-lonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were given a very rough reception by music critics after their debut at the Salzburg Festival. The critic from the Vienna Presse commented: "The bizarre idea of playing the Emperor Waltz as a prelude to the Berg Violin Concerto was obviously well intended, as a bow to the host country But what really did not work is the way Salonen wanted his musicians to play this music. The young maestro lacks the I Clean break Railway workers in Brandenburg, near Berlin are vanishing and women are finding it harder to compete Sara Montgomery and Jane Rogoyska find little things mean a lot in Italy THE SCENE is a restaurant in Tuscany, lunch is on the table. A woman drives up with a squeal of brakes in her Fiat Cinquino (the Cin-quecento, which means 500, affectionately known as the "little belloccia!" (literally: my big beautiful one; a term of rough endearment usually used between women) cries the elegant dame as she spies her friend Silvia, who has been waiting quite a while. "Come stai?" (How are you?) she enquires.

"Benino. tu?" comes the frosty reply (bene well, the diminutive benino to be spoken through rightly- pursed lips). Stefaiua is late Decause she's been shopping. Very boring, she says: "Cercavo una cosa, sat una di quelle co- sette, quelle coseltine. sai di che cosa par to (I was looKing for one of those things, you know, one of those thingum-mies.

those thingummyjigs, you know what I mean) and with a vague gesture or her hand she pops Into her mouth the smallest pezzettino of pizza and peperoncino (pezzo piece pezzetto small piece pezzettino tiny piece; pepe pepper peperone pepper in eastern Germany. Creches photograph: paul odriscou. Houses, streets and river-banks are to be preserved as you see them in the paintings. Clearly, we only need Prince Charles to put Britain on canvas and then bang a preservation order on it. I shall suggest this to the Minister of Fun when he's cheered up.

NOT showing at a cinema near you: Lenin once hero of countless epic films has now become a comic turn. A new film by V. Studenni-kov and M. Grigoriev called Strict Regime Comedy concerns a group of prisoners putting on a play to commemorate the centenary of the birth of the leader of the world's proletariat. The prisoners take the whole thing to heart and organise an uprising led, not surprisingly, by the character who plays Lenin.

The film ends with the prisoners breaking out of the Gulag on an armoured train. The directors were unsure how to end the film. Should the train just disappear into a tunnel or crash? In the end they decided that a closing shot of Lenin driving round in circles best reflected the current state of Russia. day, Boris Yeltsin is imposing strict controls on private art sales. This probably just means the bribes wiU have to be bigger.

BUT suppose you've already ripped off a couple of dozen icons and need somewhere safe to store them. What you need is the Dutch government's bomb-proof art bunker, built in 1942 when the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands made it a prime target for Allied bombers. The occupation government invested 7,000 cubic metres (almost 250,000 cubic feet) of scarce wartime concrete in the round structure about 30 metres (100-feet) in diameter. Now it is for sale. In the last three years of the war it held 3,000 paintings from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others.

THE little town of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris was made famous by van Gogh, Cezanne, Pissarro, Corot, Daubigny and Vlaminck. They tried to capture its charms on their canvases. Now the town has to capture the charm of the canvases. the mystically inclined Charles Tournemire (1870-1939). Like Mahler, he composed on a grand scale.

One of his organ works is longer than all of Bach's organ music put together. In recent times, his admirers have been busy championing his music and his seventh symphony has been premiered by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Liege at Tongeren, down the road from Maastricht. A modest work, by all accounts, lasting a mere 80 minutes and requiring 68 stringed instruments, 20 woodwind, two dozen brass, two harps, Celesta, a heavily armed percussion section and, of course, an organ. Alfred Beaujean, who reported on the premiere in the Frankfurter Allgemelne, says that by comparison with Messlaen, Tournemire's symphony comes across as a mighty improvisation. I expect we will hear more of the mystic organist.

IT is believed that 70 per cent of the 17th and 18th century icons and religious pictures of the Russian Orthodox church have been sold abroad. So, rather late in the.