Annelies Verbeke

Assumptions

Translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Annelies Verbeke, 2012

English translation copyright © Liz Waters, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Mark Hooper/Getty Images

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Veronderstellingen in the Netherlands in 2012 by De Geus bv, po Box 1878, 4801 bw Breda

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-030-1

The translation of this book was funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (www.flemishliterature.be)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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On Guard Here

Father,

That I’m writing to you says enough. I’m not doing too well, Father. You know that. Perhaps you predicted it. You may even see it as a test. I realize there’s no point in writing these words; you read my thoughts as soon as I have them. There’s no address to which I can send this letter in its tangible form and I’d be ill-advised to save it in a computer memory regardless. So see this as a prayer. I’m clutching at it as a last possible source of consolation, however much effort it takes me to hit the right keys and however fearful I am that one of my guardians will catch me at it.

Still, that anxiety is probably baseless. If they found me sitting at this monitor, typing, they’d no doubt immediately come up with some explanation that fits what they think they know. Stories. They’re good at those. The times when they caught me reading that’s exactly how it went. Not that they’ve caught me reading too often. It’s rare to find a good book in this house. He’s a complete idiot. I’m supposed to love them, Father, but he’s a jerk. He has his tender interludes, but they’re no compensation. She occasionally brings in something she ends up not reading. As on all other fronts, resolutions are as far as she gets. She recently decided to immerse herself in Rilke and left two of his collections knocking about in the lounge for a day. As I recall you’re no great fan of the poet, you don’t find him life-affirming enough I suppose, but as soon as they were out of the house I devoured his lines; as I said, I’m not doing too well. Loneliness, Father, is like the rain, and I can’t quote any more than that—I hadn’t memorized many lines before they yanked the collection out from under my nose. Tssk, they say. ‘Tssk,’ Father. And now Rilke is all on his own on the top bookshelf, where I can’t reach him.

This is solitary confinement. A prison. He never takes me out, it doesn’t even occur to him. As a rule she cares about nothing but herself—shockingly negative, she’s sure to come to a bad end. Yet she does sometimes take account of my needs. On occasions I even think she appreciates me and I too have my good moments, my little breathing spaces in this vale of tears, there at her side. If I lay my head in her lap she’ll stroke it absently, and even when I shove my nose between her buttocks in a regressive outburst she doesn’t get angry. Yes, Father. Regression. Between her buttocks. I can’t say it often enough: not doing too well.

There’s a question that haunts me, Father, a question that keeps me awake or makes me whine in my sleep. Before I ask it I want to remind you that I’ve never had any qualms about your decisions before. I really gave all I had to give during your previous initiative. I’m convinced you’ve not once had grounds to reproach me for a lack of team spirit or personal motivation. I never even complained about the post-traumatic stress disorder that first attempt left me with—for all your omniscience, it’s probably news to you.

I believed in what you were doing, what we were doing. But then I was a man, a human among human beings. And I understand why you wanted to take a different approach the second time, I really do, it’s a rationale I comprehend and endorse. Like you, I was disappointed by the result last time round and I can understand that you thought: all right then, let’s take a risk, let’s go for a surprise offensive. But why a dog, Father?

There’s no doubting the special bond between human and pet, but surely it’s not enough, surely it’s no recompense, no ticket to Salvation? What do you expect me to do? Perform miracles? Foster a world religion? Become the main character in the greatest best-seller of all time again? I barely get out!

And now that I’ve had the gall to ask for an explanation, here’s another question: if I must be a dog, why a schnauzer? I have infinite admiration for all the fauna you’ve created. Each creature is beautiful in its own highly individual way and it’s breathtaking to discover how they all slot together like pieces of the most ingenious puzzle. Yet it seems obvious to me that every living being, simply by existing, places limits on the practicability of expectations. That was your opinion too until recently, wasn’t it? Your plan? Otherwise it would soon all be over for the Almighty, right?

I find it so hard to believe that you still haven’t recognized the fact that the form in which you’ve sent me to earth is incompatible with what you wish to achieve, Father. As a schnauzer I really am subject to too many limitations. It’s hard for me to have to expound upon something so absurdly obvious. I’m short-sighted but not blind. During those rare walks I notice how the German Shepherds and Dobermans look at me. At best they think I’m a sweet little boy-dog. Why a schnauzer, Father? For all the hallucinogenic substances this planet has to offer and for all the insanity that prevails here, no living creature would feel the slightest urge to seek salvation at my hands. I have no hands, Father. This keyboard is already covered in scratches.

The mystery of your ways has cast me into the deepest gloom. Which isn’t exactly helping me to behave convincingly as a canine. I wonder how you would react if they put a biscuit on your nose and forced you to sit still. Shake a paw, Father? The days are long and monotonous, the food atrocious. When we’re outside and she lets me off the leash for a moment it’s not too bad; I pep up and my happiness makes me forget that I was determined to take the first opportunity.

What I’m going to write next is terrible, Father. You’re my darling daddy, I’ve always looked up to you, I want you to be proud of me. If I disappoint you, I disappoint myself; if I hurt you, I hurt myself. Your choice of a schnauzer is so ridiculous, though, that in my gloomiest moods I suspect you no longer care what becomes of humanity. That you think: I’ve done enough, let them get on with it. I could sympathize with that, in fact I’d even welcome a desire on your part to take things a little easier. What gets to me is my role in all this. If you’ve given up, then why send me here in such a stupid guise? Is this a joke, Father? An experiment? Or did you want to be rid of me?

The other possibility that occurs to me is—and on this point I suspect you’ll agree—even worse. There are times when I wonder whether you exist at all, whether you might just be a figment of my runaway imagination, a delusion that’s convinced me I’m a helpless saviour. Do I even exist myself, Father? Is this a lounge, are my owners real? Am I the hallucination of someone locked in a stinking white room, barking like a dog, confounding all diagnoses?

If you exist, you’ll punish me for what I’ve just written, but with all due respect and in the hope that you won’t interpret what I’m going to say next as a provocation: no matter how you make me pay for this, nothing could be very much worse than the frustrating dog’s life I have now. Don’t forget that I’ve got the horror that befell my previous manifestation to compare it with.

Make sure I quickly come to regret the tone these words convey. It’ll mean that I feel you in my heart again, that I know why I’m a schnauzer, that you are there watching over me and I’m on guard here. For you.

Until then I’ll go on waiting for a sign, an answer. I’ll look forward to the day when you call me to you and everything will be clear in the light of your love. But perhaps my despair will take the first opportunity to get the better of my hope.

Forgive me, Father, for I no longer know what to do.

Your Son

Henny Verhasselt’s Life’s Work

Henny Verhasselt hovered a fragile, brimful glass of Cava over the heavy tablecloth and tried not to look at Josephine.

‘It may sound strange now,’ he began, ‘but even as a child I wanted to specialize in supplying decorations to the catering industry.’

‘That’s nonsense, Verhasselt,’ said Josephine. ‘It would be great if your business was your childhood dream. Especially now that we’re celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary.’

Henny tried to suppress the fluttering of his right eye. He failed and sensed that his son had noticed the tic. He mustn’t worry the boy. Josephine was Martin’s wife, he needed to bear that in mind. Martin had said so himself—that he needed to bear that firmly in mind.

‘But I did,’ said Henny. ‘Laughing polystyrene portions of chips, bigger than I was. Plastic mussels. Even as a child I couldn’t get enough of them. I can show you photos.’ His fluttering eye sought his assistant Brigitta, his rock, responsible for transport, who disliked eating out but did it all the same, for him.

Brigitta put down her glass, leaned back a little and concurred. ‘That photo with the plastic sausages round your neck.’ Her right hand circled her own neck, then indicated how small Henny was in the photo and finally fell exhausted into her lap. ‘On the wall out there,’ she sighed before turning her attention to a vast inner Nothingness that seemed to afford her immense serenity. It wasn’t the first time she’d made Henny think of power tools. Safe electric power tools that automatically disconnect when a short circuit threatens.

‘It wasn’t a childhood dream,’ Josephine impressed upon her father-in-law with a kindly smile. ‘This is just life, Verhasselt. Chance. It’s important for you to realize that. Pure chance brought you here. To the top of a company selling catering decorations. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘No, of course there’s nothing wrong with it!’ He hadn’t quite shouted, but it was definitely too loud. His son looked stern. Josephine put on her most anxious mask. The glass in Henny’s hand had roughly the same diameter as her eye sockets.

She had seemed so different, Josephine, at the start. A clever lightweight possessed of a vision. With a coquettish tread she’d walked into his life to put an end to his son’s bachelor existence. She immediately mutated into a business partner, who with breezy insouciance got the company’s profit margin growing again. By launching substantial discounts at the right moments, she’d managed to create a hype around a 210-centimetre hotdog that squirted ketchup over its own head, and a waste bin in the form of a flute with scoops of brightly coloured ice cream. Henny saw them everywhere, even abroad. Yes, Josephine had a natural instinct for business. And he admired that.

So he told himself it was perhaps a little odd but certainly not a bad thing that his daughter-in-law addressed him by his surname. No one had done that since primary school. It felt impersonal, but he could no doubt safely assume that Josephine was just being chummy. The way her face creased when she spoke to him might have come across to a less positively inclined person as falling somewhere between impatience and pity. Fortunately Henny knew better.

The fact that she called the classification system he used for his book-keeping ‘the work of a psychotic neurotic’ and his absent-mindedness ‘an infantile expression of unprocessed grief’ was another thing Henny was able to live with. It made sense: she’d spent a long time studying these things, far longer than he had; she was more of an expert and she might even be right. Perhaps he was indeed a psychotic neurotic who expressed his unprocessed grief in an infantile way. The thought made him a little nervous.

Josephine treated his son rather fiercely, he felt, but Martin never seemed to detect anything humiliating in the categorical imperatives she deployed to spur him to action, or her frequently repeated remarks about balls, about Martin’s lack of them and, very often, about how you needed to have them and it was fortunate she, metaphorically, did. Since he kept forgetting what ‘metaphorical’ meant and no longer dared ask, every time she talked about those metaphorical balls Henny visualized her with a pair of metal testicles in an odd colour. He knew that every relationship is different, that you can never tell exactly what goes on between couples and that therefore you shouldn’t intrude with judgements or helpful advice. Perhaps his son liked the fact that she treated him that way, maybe it had to do with some unconventional kind of sex. It was not something a father ought to meddle with, even if it stung.

The nervous tic had manifested itself only after Josephine arranged for the magnolia to be felled.

He’d planted the tree in the middle of the five square metres of soil next to the entrance to his newly founded company, a young sapling that would grow along with the business. His wife had loved the magnolia. There came a day in April when they breathed the outdoor air together for the last time, when both his shadow and the shadow of the magnolia bowed fraternally over the bony body in the wheelchair. ‘In flower,’ she’d said with emotion, too much emotion, and he’d answered, gasping for breath, ‘There’s a lot those doctors can do, Annet.’

Martin had completed the job while his father and Brigitta were delivering an Elvis replica to a seaside bar. When he saw the freshly cut stump, an image flashed through Henny’s mind of his wife lying on the ground, alive but helpless, thrashing limbs amputated at knee and elbow. He stormed into his office and caught Martin hiding the murder weapon behind a stack of files. His son, the glove puppet, dropped the saw when his father pointed to it and looked round, startled, at his ventriloquist wife who carried on rattling the keyboard with acrylic nails.

‘That tree made too much mess,’ Josephine explained through Martin’s mouth, lips barely moving.

‘It’s time for you to let Annet go, Verhasselt,’ she had the audacity to add on her own behalf. As if she’d known Annet.

There was suddenly a great deal Henny wanted to say. ‘Gob’ and ‘cunt’ and ‘out’ thundered across the floor towards him and up his legs. Although he felt the words pounding relentlessly in his throat, he didn’t manage to articulate them. Only his eyelid excited itself. He stayed in his storeroom for a long time, between two Indians and a cowboy ordered by a client with a steakhouse called Wild West. He would deliver the threesome in person shortly. This was a normal day.

In the months that followed, Henny failed to rid himself of his rage. When he discovered Brigitta crying behind a fern in the showroom—Josephine had condescendingly ascribed to her both bulimia and a mild form of autism—he made a fresh attempt to outline his grievances.

He went over to stand in front of her desk and said: ‘There are things in life besides polystyrene, Josephine.’ He’d spent a lot of time thinking about that sentence.

‘Hmm?’

She keyed in a phone number and leafed attentively through a diary. He yanked the receiver out from between her shoulder and ear, unintentionally tugging one of her blonde locks in the process. She screamed.

‘Sorry,’ said Henny, and then: ‘There are feelings, too, Josephine. People have feelings.’

Now he could plainly see how cunning she was, how evil her intentions were.

‘Verhasselt,’ she said, the flat of one hand pressed to her temple as if to a gaping wound. ‘I think it’s high time we sought professional help for you. Don’t just stand there, Tin, take your father into the showroom and sort this out.’

‘Brigitta never cries …,’ Henny began. He trudged off silently behind his son. Martin was going bald, he noticed. His baby scalp had been exactly that shade of pink.

‘You need to remember that Josephine’s my wife, Dad.’ Martin’s voice echoed across the showroom with the force of conviction, but the word ‘Dad’ disappeared in a sob. He knelt down in the blast of sun falling through the skylight, behind the fern where Henny had earlier found Brigitta, head in hands.

‘What is it, son? What’s going on?’ It was far worse than he’d suspected, Henny realized. It all started with Josephine and led right back to her.

Martin shook his head and, moaning, allowed himself to be helped to his feet.

‘I’ll sack her,’ said Henny.

‘Then I can’t stay. She’d never accept it. You need us. The company needs us.’

It struck Henny that his son had already turned the idea over in his mind more than once.

‘Leave her!’ This time he had to be the one issuing commands.

‘She’ll destroy me, Dad!’

‘Or … we her.’

They looked at each other, Henny timidly, although with a fixed, wide-eyed stare, Martin incredulous. Until Henny laughed as if it had been a joke.

‘You always need to bear in mind that Josephine is my wife,’ Martin repeated, before stumbling away from his father and the fern.

Henny thought about that again later. While stacking crates of ostriches dressed as butlers, for instance. Each was a 190 centimetres tall and around fifty kilos in weight, and there was Josephine, walking heedlessly beneath them.

But. Well.

In the restaurant he looked pensively at Josephine, then at the glass in his hand. It was only when he lifted it higher into the air that it occurred to him what he wanted to toast.

‘I’ve decided to retire,’ he said. ‘This is the time to pass on responsibility to my son.’

He refrained from congratulations.

While draining his own, he heard three glasses being returned to the table.

The bubbles invigorated him. It was as if they were waking a new, bigger man, one who slowly stood up and, before anyone could put a name to him, made a dash for his freedom.

The Bearded Lady

Just as no one can combat the greying of the population by dying their hair, so Emmy Debeuckelaer could not keep her sorrow at bay by giving herself a good shave. At the age of about sixteen, when the beard started growing, she’d still been able to deny it a public outing. She shaved in the mornings before leaving for school, where she shut herself in the toilets with a pocket mirror and a Gillette in the afternoons. Contrary to her intentions, she was thereby ensuring that within a few months the excessive down would turn into tough, ever-present stubble. No matter how great Emmy’s abhorrence of the role, she became the Bearded Lady.

Other than that she had an extremely attractive body, which led some of her classmates to put a sexual proposal to her. The scene they had in mind would be played by six actors and a young woman wearing a mask. Emmy declined the offer and was considered ungrateful. Harassment followed, certainly, but more often she was avoided. They did look, boys and girls, women and men, they looked all the time, some biting their lower lip, others horrified, and all with the curiosity with which people witness natural disasters, just before running to safer ground. Deeply hidden in all those eyes was something else, too, something that was ignored because no one could say quite what it was.

Emmy was not the sort of woman who could easily put facial hair out of mind. Before the beard she’d looked forward with confidence to the moment when she would take over her mother’s sunbed emporium and develop it into a fully-fledged beauty parlour. Her mother consulted doctors, who prescribed Emmy pills and injections that didn’t help. In the end mother and daughter decided, hugging each other in their affliction, that a beard would not be good publicity for the business, and that Emmy’s start, like the new investments, would have to wait for the medical life-raft that was no doubt already being inflated in some laboratory or other and would float their way in the future.

Whole newspaper supplements are printed to convince you that your furniture tells you who you are, that you are what you eat. Lies, all of it, Emmy Debeuckelaer knew. She was her beard.

Although she continued to place her hopes in science, she found it increasingly hard to deny the existence of God. Not so much because she believed that a noble divinity lay behind every ray of sunshine, but rather because she found the idea of punishment more plausible than sheer bad luck. Her beard was a punishment. But for what? She couldn’t recall any great personal crimes that would justify such inexorable retribution. She therefore persuaded herself of a previous life full of wild atrocities. A psychic confirmed that suspicion. The clairvoyant discovered that Emmy had been a warrior in the Hundred Years’ War, first on the side of the House of Valois, later as a mercenary by the name of Richard the Slayer, deployable on all fronts, ever intent on the satisfaction of his perverse and extremely bloodthirsty destructive urges. Emmy had thought it was something like that.

The discovery of her previous existence at first mainly changed the nature of Emmy’s dreams. She’d previously experienced in them a repeat of the humiliations of the day, or had become in sleep her ideal self. Smooth-cheeked, regal hairstyle in the wind, at the head of a Japanese-style beauty salon—the most successful in Europe—she was surrounded by admirers saying she smelled nice, praising the softness of her moonlit skin. In her new dreams her broad fingers clasped an axe. Her muscular arms, all blood, earth, and sweat, lifted the thing above her head time and again and brought it down with full force, right the way through a fourteenth-century village.

At the start Emmy would never have admitted it to herself, but waking from this kind of dream was just as disappointing as from the one about smooth cheeks.

That she had taken on a different guise and was living in a different time from Richard the Slayer did not absolve her of responsibility. She alone could make amends for the centuries-old guilt and get a beardless life in return.

Good things come to good people, thought Emmy. She retrained as a nurse and was able to start even before graduating. The care sector was understaffed, overburdened, and underpaid; a nurse with a beard was, as a consequence, no problem. At least, that was the theory. One little old man had an anxiety attack every time she walked into his room on night duty and two other patients brazenly asked her whether she was undergoing gender reassignment. There were people with empathy and people with advice. The ones who annoyed Emmy most of all, however, were self-declared fellow-sufferers.

The patient in room 432, for example. Emmy couldn’t remember her name, probably because after each encounter her brain purged itself as thoroughly as it could of all trace of the woman. Her tragedy was that she’d come no closer to modelling work than a vegetable-slicing portrait on the side of a kitchen shop’s delivery van. She’d made reference to it in every conversation before realizing it wasn’t enough and never would be, that there wasn’t even any such thing as enough.

While the woman griped, Emmy looked with a smile at the clouds, which disappeared more rapidly than normal behind the window frame, as if they felt trapped, vicariously embarrassed by the sight of her beard. The frustrated model considered her a good listener.

Her obese colleague Caroline was likewise drawn to Emmy time and again by an assumed kinship. At least once a week she enumerated all the forms of discrimination that had befallen her, all the ways fat people were disadvantaged by society. The Bearded Lady again showed herself to be a benign listener, who never strayed into making comparisons, never said that fat people should simply eat less whereas for unwanted facial hair there was no remedy. She mentally christened Caroline ‘Calorine’.

In her dreams Emmy was less accommodating. As Richard the Slayer she kicked in doors to houses where Calorine, the failed model, the little old man who was afraid of her and all the tip-givers, sympathizers and tormentors that had presented themselves in Emmy’s life were hiding beneath rotten floorboards. They wore fourteenth-century clothes and held their breath. Richard the Slayer would walk through the room with a heavy tread, smash some furniture and curse threateningly to himself, as if incensed by the empty house. After stamping resoundingly to the front door, he would open and shut it without going out. As soon as the first sigh of relief rose from the floor, Richard stormed at it with his axe. A massacre later, Emmy would wake feeling relaxed.

All the same, when she then looked at herself in the bathroom mirror—the thing was indistinguishable from the rest of the bathroom fittings—she immediately lost heart. She was a woman with a light-blue silk dressing gown and a full beard that seemed to be growing more and more rapidly.

Since her good deeds as a nurse clearly weren’t sufficient to atone for the guilt of her previous life, Emmy decided to take a voluntary job at a shelter for the homeless on her nights off. Now and then there were fights, but usually it was quiet. A schizophrenic woman kept phoning her up with a knitting needle she’d pushed through one of her dreadlocks. Somewhat shocked by the size of the holes in the social safety net, Emmy pressed the three middle fingers of her right hand to her cheek so that thumb and little finger formed the ends of a receiver.

‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered to her finger. ‘I’m here to show you that it could be worse.’ She initially felt ashamed of saying such a thing, but when the woman, after a slight delay, burst into assenting howls of laughter, Emmy suspected she’d spoken the truth. She would happily change places with the bag lady. Better hopeless than bearded.

She wondered whether she in turn could find comfort from individuals who had suffered even worse punishments. She went in search of pictures of people put on show in those long-abolished travelling circuses, or in cabinets of curiosities. Hiki, the scaly man from Nebraska. Stella Blanchea, the woman with a tail. Betty Williams, who had the misshapen limbs of a twin sister growing out of her side. The Sanders family, with their leopard skin. Even hairiness could be worse, as proven by Krao, the ‘Missing Link Girl’ from Laos, whose entire body was shrouded in a coat of fur. ‘One of us, one of us,’ the photos chanted. Emmy belonged with them, just as a person belongs with his or her family, inextricably bound to them without having chosen to be. Emmy didn’t believe that their success and the money they made from their handicaps had made them happy. In fact she became all the more convinced that the world she belonged to was peopled by a sad troupe, a vanload of weeping clowns, however broad might be the smile into which the armless among them inserted a cigarette with their toes.

Did love bring Emmy consolation? Hardly.

At the hospital Bart, a urologist, courted her. He stayed the night ten times or so and came out with wise generalities about mankind such as: ‘We humans are certainly the only creatures afraid of death, yet compared to us, animals are free of an even greater fear. The fear that governs us from our first breath to our last sigh is above all the fear of sorrow. An entire lifetime spent worrying about missing out on happiness—and then you die.’

The fact that as he spoke these words a breadcrumb clung to his forehead so endeared Emmy to him that she briefly abandoned her reticence.

He never said anything about her beard and Emmy had to accept that. But after a few weeks she started to get the uneasy feeling that his ignoring the beard seemed to insinuate that she too had largely escaped Bart’s attention.

One day, while shaving, she snapped at him that he needn’t act as if it didn’t exist.

‘As if what doesn’t exist?’ Bart asked impatiently. He wanted to leave for a party.

‘Stop play-acting. You’re making us both ridiculous.’

He stared at her in exaggerated bewilderment.

‘Your girlfriend is shaving her beard. Don’t you find that strange?’

Bart shrugged. If he said now that he didn’t see her beard she’d be furious with him.

‘I don’t see that beard,’ he said.

After she’d been furious with him, and he’d asked himself in a very loud voice what he’d been supposed to say, repeated that he loved her and to her dismay even resorted to pleading, they decided to give the party a miss, rapidly downed a bottle of Cointreau between them and ended up between the sheets. There she asked him whether she could scratch him really hard, since he struck her as someone she wanted to have under her fingernails and she also asked, sounding far more fragile now, far deeper into the night: ‘If at the end of your life you’ve been hurt more than you’ve hurt others, does that make you a loser?’ As an answer he hugged her until the next afternoon.

It seemed a harmonious time between Emmy and Bart, but you never know what other people are thinking. Even if they say something exactly the way you once put it, it’s hard to believe they mean the same thing.

Rather unexpectedly he said he had trouble dealing with the mistrustful way she approached other people, her misanthropy. She described that allegation as deadly, saying her reticence towards others was less now than it had ever been. More arguments followed about her beard, how he dealt with it, how she dealt with it, quarrels that were no longer settled in each other’s arms. What Emmy and Bart shared was ultimately no more than the umpteenth love that came down to having to convince the other person that they were the one more beset by madness, the one less in tune with reality. In the end Bart fled to a beardless hepatologist called Patsy.

Emmy remained alone and firmly resolved to look at love from a distance in future. For women that was generally more difficult, she realized, biologically speaking but even more on a semantic level: a man is restless, a woman hysterical. At work she frequently stopped to examine the intriguing portrait of a bald man mounted on the wall in the corridor next to the secretarial offices. Ignaz Semmelweis was his name, according to the caption. Emmy never looked up who he was—she assumed he had something to do with founding the hospital—but because of the portrait she often thought about baldness in men. How baldness is worse in women. How for a man it’s no catastrophe if he lacks a beard.

Yet she’d looked into the eyes of enough flawed men to know that despair and impotence were sexless, just like short-sightedness and malice, and Emmy did not wish to become involved with gender-bound misanthropy. The more couples she observed, the more relieved she felt at being spared their exhausting fulfilments in life. You could see it in their faces. Everyone had insulted everyone else again. At home silences or tears would fall, and there were rifts, with an eye to something better, until there was no avoiding the realization that it only ever seems that way.

Emmy Debeuckelaer raced through her life, past adults with dirty nappies, vagrants with psychoses, couples with problems, strangers with stares and recurring extras who liked her but didn’t know her. Sometimes she would turn abruptly to people and ask what they were looking at. One time a woman answered: ‘I was looking at your dress, it’s lovely,’ and it cost Emmy quite some effort not to believe her. And every night again: the axe, the screams, the perforated intestines, the taste of human flesh, the relief.

God took all the time in the world to put her patience to the test. She was approaching forty, Emmy was. Her beard was already showing its first grey hairs. The guilt had still not been atoned.

There were days when she doubted whether one lifetime would be enough to set right all Richard’s wrongdoing, especially since she enjoyed it so much in her sleep. There were days when the beard seemed more like bad luck after all, days when she no longer believed in recompense, even though she had nothing else to go on, days too when she believed that all goodness begins and ends with yourself, which needn’t necessarily be a problem. There were ominous days when she thought: from now on everything is full of flies.

Emmy started to see people who wronged her as ever-shrinking sculptures on the palm of her hand. When she closed and opened it again, they were gone. She learned how to look at people, saw that they could continually and permanently damage themselves by their efforts to change course. She’d finally worked out how to describe what was hidden inside them when they looked at her forested chin; they saw their own scars, concealed in the darkest passageways of their soul, the ghosts of their childhood, the traumas woven into their DNA for generations.

There was a morning when Emmy woke from a dream in which Richard had been lying on his back in the grass staring at the clouds and the migrating birds flying past them. She had no idea what his fourteenth-century brain thought about that, perhaps Richard didn’t think anything at all, but it was clear he’d been behaving the same way all night, briefly no longer a slayer. It made her feel as if she’d lost something essential and immediately forgotten what. It felt good.

There are people who laugh till they cry. With Emmy Debeuckelaer it was the other way round. In the deepest pit of her sorrow she suddenly felt immensely happy. What a morning! It was a morning on which she was the only glittering grain in the awe-inspiring mountain of variation that nature had managed to bring forth, not a type that would set the tone for future generations but a sublime one-off. A gift is also an abnormality, went the cry of jubilation in Emmy’s chest, and she even turned it around: an abnormality is also a gift. She felt a true and sovereign aristocrat, that morning, and for a handful of mornings after, scattered untidily across a life that advanced just as quickly as anyone else’s. As for the beard, that remained.

Rigor Mortis

They’d laughed about him while driving to his house. It wasn’t the first time he’d told her a bit about Daniel, and as on previous occasions it won him her gleeful attention. Especially when he imitated Daniel’s plaintive way of talking. In the car she stroked his neck with two fingers and pieced the anecdotes together into the man she was about to meet for the first time, the young guy Bart had got to know when he was still a trainee at the hospital, the patient who wanted his hypochondria to be taken seriously, who had actually shouted: ‘I’m a hypochondriac, remember?!’ That bozo who wanted to be an actor but never got beyond playing corpses. Him.

‘Is he the one with shingles, too?’

Bart couldn’t remember any story about shingles, not even imaginary shingles, not even a made-up story.

‘I don’t think so, no.’

Clearly there must be someone else in her past who told anecdotes about strange friends. Bart felt a stab of jealousy and didn’t mind that at all. It meant something, to feel jealous. It’d been a while.

‘And why does a doctor become friends with a hypochondriac?’

‘Shared interests?’

She grinned for a second or two, then asked, genuinely curious: ‘No, really. Why are we going to see him? He sounds terrible, in real life.’

‘He’s a source of good stories,’ said Bart. ‘It’s his housewarming.’

And Daniel wasn’t terrible in real life. Or not terrible, full stop. He hoped Patsy would realize that. He felt certain she would.

The front door was open a crack, so they went in. They stopped in the dark hallway for a chance to absorb the scene in the living room without being noticed.

‘It looks like a nativity stall,’ Bart muttered.

Daniel was sitting in a chair with a stout woman at his side whom Bart recognized as his older, manic-depressive sister. The empty beer crate between them was playing the part of the crib. Next to them stood three lanky friends with their hands in their pockets. If they’d brought any myrrh, they must have smoked it already.

‘Or just a stall,’ Patsy whispered. ‘It’s not too late to go back.’

In one corner of the cupboard-crammed room a poorly tuned radio was playing. Daniel drowned it out.

‘Yes, it might seem nice, a house with a garden, but I’m horribly allergic to the poplar. Severely irritated sinuses. Can’t sleep for the pain. Constant. Stinging. No, “cutting”. A cutting pain, that’s what it is. I think I’ll be left with permanent damage.’

‘Oh, come on, isn’t that laying it on a bit thick?’ Bart stepped out of the shadow into the living room.

‘Bart!’

There. That was one reason. The way Daniel sprang to his feet and, just before remembering his ailments again, stretched out his arms towards Bart, quickly, like a child greeting a favourite uncle. Patsy must have missed it. She was inspecting the ceiling and the dusty floor across which she was only now shuffling into the room.

‘This is Patsy, Daniel. Daniel, Patsy.’

They shook hands.

‘So this is her,’ said Daniel, his voice flat.

Patsy frowned mildly in Bart’s direction. If Daniel had put it another way, if he’d said he’d heard a lot about her, she would have coyly answered ‘likewise’ and given Bart a quite different look. Daniel’s handshake was less limp than she’d expected, as if he were eager to clinch an important deal.

‘Like something to drink?’

‘Yes, and give these people something too,’ said Bart. The sister and the young men nodded gratefully at him. While Daniel searched for a bottle, one of them helped Bart turn over two sofas that were leaning against the wall on their ends, surrounded by cupboards. When both were standing on the floor in the usual manner, the entire gathering immediately sat on them.

Bart winked at Patsy. She could see how happy he was.

‘Showtime!’ Daniel called out. His sister took the bottle and glasses from him, so he could hunt for the remote control.

‘Did you see me in City Patrol 2020?’

Patsy gave him a friendly shake of the head.

‘The police series?’

‘I haven’t seen it,’ said Patsy. ‘It’s not a series I know.’

He turned on the TV and searched through the list of missed programmes. When he’d found the right episode, he pressed fast forward. The guests attentively followed what was happening on the screen. A policewoman jerkily tapped a policeman on the shoulder. She had a sandwich for him. They both became agitated by it. Agitated robots.

‘Press a couple more times. It’ll go faster,’ said Bart. He giggled.

The policewoman drove furtively past a building. Through the bars of a school gate she looked at a child. She walked along a corridor, in the dark. A weapon on the floor. A man on the floor.

‘That was me,’ said Daniel. ‘Dammit.’

The remote control wasn’t working properly. Bart was laughing at full volume now. Daniel thought it was funny as well. A block of flats in the sun. The counter of a pastry shop. The tearful face of a woman. The counter of a pastry shop. A block of flats in the sun. A man on the floor. A weapon on the floor.

‘Stop!’ shouted Bart.

‘Here I am,’ Daniel said unassumingly.

He was shown in close-up for about two seconds. Daniel as a corpse, dried blood in his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth, pale-faced, a memory of some superhuman depravity in his bulging eyes. Then the policewoman spoke into her smartphone. ‘I have him,’ she said. ‘He got here before us. Come to the warehouse.’ And Daniel lay on the floor behind her like an out-of-focus prop. To round off the scene the camera zoomed in on him one more time.

‘Dan the man!’ shouted Bart.

‘Dead man Dan!’ shouted Daniel.

The three skeletal young men and the sister grinned along with them for a moment.

‘There’s something else,’ said Daniel. He stood up. ‘Would you mind taking a quick look? It’s a kind of skin rash. It started the day before yesterday. I think it’s shingles. Come with me to the kitchen, the light’s better in there.’

‘Shingles?’ said Bart. ‘Shingles after all. Patsy, did you hear that?’

A weak smile flashed across her face.

‘Does your brother often play the corpse?’ she asked the sister, after Bart and Daniel had closed the kitchen door behind them. ‘I mean, can you earn a living that way?’

The sister shrugged.

Patsy looked at the closed door and felt something she couldn’t immediately place, until she realized it was fear.

‘He’s been in several feature films,’ said one of the men. ‘He’s famous, really.’

Patsy nodded. Perhaps the young man had meant it purely informatively. Perhaps it wasn’t a rebuke.

‘What do you do?’ asked the one sitting next to him.

He hadn’t said: what are you doing here? There was probably no need for her to be on her guard.

‘I’m a doctor,’ said Patsy. ‘Like Bart. We’re doctors. Bart’s a urologist and I’m a liver specialist. We work at the same hospital. But in different departments, of course.’

It was as if she’d been talking for ages, in an inappropriately loud voice. As if she’d given secrets away. What were they up to in that kitchen?

The last dribble of wine stuck stubbornly to the bottom of the glass before finally rolling over the rim onto Patsy’s tongue.

Bart noticed she was glaring at him when he burst into the living room sniggering. First he pushed Daniel towards her, then he pulled up his shirt a little. His fingers made slight depressions in the pulpy flesh of Daniel’s belly, right next to his navel.

Patsy scratched herself at the same spot.

‘What do you reckon that is?’ asked Bart affectionately. ‘I’d say they were mosquito bites.’

‘It’s too dark in here,’ she said, before even looking.

‘They’re in a neat row,’ Daniel observed. ‘Pretty intense for a simple mosquito.’

Bart rolled his eyes. For Patsy’s benefit. Was she supposed to smile? What did he expect?

‘You want to watch the scene?’ Without waiting for an answer, Daniel pulled a DVD out of its case. It seemed he’d put it ready.

‘Is that the rigor mortis?’ How could Bart ask in such a neutral tone?

‘He’s really terrific in that,’ the sister whispered.

After fifteen minutes, Daniel found the right fragment of a costume drama, the kind that Bart called ‘garden viewing’. Daniel played a genteel coachman who was shot with an old-fashioned handgun. He stared open-mouthed at the expanding patch of blood amid the frills of his shirt and then sank sideways to the ground.

Patsy’s eyes moved back and forth between the screen and the breathless viewers.

Bart massaged her calf.

‘That doesn’t make sense!’ She’d restrained herself as long as she could.

The thin men and the sister stared at her, plainly insulted. But she was angrier. She pointed at Daniel, then at the screen.

‘Your character is shot and then immediately starts to go stiff. That’s not what happens! Rigor mortis doesn’t set in until two hours after you die, and six hours later the body goes limp again. I’m a doctor. My mother …’

They didn’t need to know that. First her mother’s eyelids, then from her cheeks to her neck, then the rest, in a wave. She needed to calm down. Bart stroked her knee. Daniel poured more wine into her glass. When she put it to her lips she felt a vague pain starting up in her stomach.

After the rigor mortis scene came three more clips in which Daniel breathed his last. In one he swerved a car into the path of an oncoming vehicle, in another he tried in vain to avoid a collision, and in the third his lifeless body was found on a beach.

After a mischievous ‘That’s all, folks’ and brief applause from the audience, Daniel turned off the television.

Patsy had clapped along with them, listlessly. A ball of lava seemed to have settled into her stomach. ‘I don’t feel well,’ she said to Bart. Had he heard her?

Daniel liked to talk about his hypochondria. He’d declined treatment because he had his own theories about its underlying causes.

‘I remember once getting a nasty burn as a child and being surprised that there was an ointment for it. The existence of both injury and treatment struck me as an error that didn’t fit in the ideal world I longed for. My hypochondria is a way of dealing with that. A reaction.’

Everyone nodded.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Patsy.

‘For a long time I struggled with a similar thought,’ said Bart. ‘Why do frogs exist? Okay, they eat insects. But why do insects exist? Why all the carry-on? Who knows, maybe that’s why I became a doctor.’

‘What?’ She’d never heard him say anything so obtuse.

Something was wrong with her breathing, with the air. If her stomach wasn’t hurting so much, she’d think she was dreaming. She tried to squash the fireball flat with her fists. It must have something to do with the wine. Poison. The wine must be poisoned. Daniel was trying to poison her. Perhaps she ought to empty the glass into her handbag so she could have the wine analysed in a laboratory, then she’d have proof. No. She put the half-empty glass on the floor and carefully pushed it away with her foot. When she looked up again, her eyes caught the sister’s, those grey eyes like narrow slits in a broad face. The light shining out of them was clear and cold.

Madness floated like a swarm of fireflies through the dimly lit living room, buzzed against the high ceilings of the musty house and circled around Patsy’s head. It was infectious. Tangible.

She stood up.

‘I don’t feel well.’

‘What did you say, my love?’

Bart walked up behind her.

‘Open it!’ Patsy shouted.

He fumbled in his trouser pockets for the car keys and opened the door from a distance. She settled herself behind the wheel, even though Bart had been driving.

‘Patsy, what’s wrong?’

She mustn’t say anything about poison. ‘I’ve got such a stomach ache. I want to go home.’

Disappointment crept over him, he still didn’t exactly know why.

‘Of course, my sweet. Just come and say goodbye to Daniel. Come on. So strange that you suddenly ran off.’

She tried to sound unmoved. ‘I’m strange?’

‘It’s not surprising if you don’t feel entirely comfortable, but try getting to know him better. Come back inside with me for a moment.’

‘My stomach really hurts! I think it’s the wine.’

‘Okay,’ said Bart. He didn’t believe her and was making no effort to hide it.

‘Who are those people, Bart? What are they to you? Do you want to help him? Daniel? Is that it? Aren’t your patients enough for you?’

‘That’s not it,’ said Bart. No, that wasn’t it.

‘What were you doing in the kitchen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is there something between the two of you?’

He shook his head, as if overcome by a sudden dreaminess. He wondered who this woman could be. This Patsy. Four months ago she’d stayed the night with him for the first time. At breakfast she drew a face on his egg and folded a paper hat for it. She was beautiful, sweet, sensible and funny. But that wasn’t all.

‘It really does hurt!’

He could see what she must have been like as a child, when she wanted something she couldn’t get, got something she didn’t want. The face on the egg had looked sad, almost conflicted. He could give her a hug, let her start the car. ‘Come with me for a moment,’ he said, his fist already on the door handle.

‘No! Stay here!’ Bart would never re-emerge. Daniel would never let him go. She’d be left waiting here while her hair turned grey and her nails grew in circles.

‘I’m going to get my coat. I’ll be right back.’

‘You weren’t wearing a coat!’ she shouted after him. The car door shut off her voice with a bang.

By the time Bart walked back into the living room, everyone had gathered around Daniel and his cello. That was another reason: the cello. The way he meekly bent his head as he played, the long glide of the bow, the stiff finger of a trembling hand pressing a string. The piece evoked a deep blue sea under a coral-coloured sky, the smell of food from small kitchens in whitewashed houses, children playing in the middle of a crowded square, surrounded by voices and evening, and all of it breathing a kind of regret.

‘I call it “The Apocalypso”,’ said Daniel after the silence and the applause.

‘It was beautiful.’ Bart swallowed. ‘Patsy ought to have heard that. She’s in the car, says she doesn’t feel well, wants to go home.’

‘Have some patience with her,’ said Daniel. ‘Give her a chance.’