Saskia de Coster

We and Me

Translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Saskia de Coster, 2013

English translation copyright © Nancy Forest-Flier, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © plainpicture/Janklein

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

First published as Wij en ik in the Netherlands in 2011 by Prometheus, P.O. Box 1662, 1000 BR, Amsterdam

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

isbn 978-94-6238-062-2

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may

be made of the information contained herein.

The translation of this book is funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren - www.flemishliterature.be)

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‘To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face.’

– Virginia Woolf

We 1980

No one comes to the mountain unannounced. Friends always arrange their visits well beforehand. Always, without exception. It’s one of the many unwritten rules of the housing estate on the mountain. Unexpected visitors may very well find themselves staring at a locked door, as we say, forcing them to turn away, their goal unaccomplished. Too bad. The residents of the housing estate all lead busy lives. It is in their spacious villas amidst lakes of green grass, protected by trees and six-foot fences, that they are able to unwind. Normal visits are made by appointment. The appointments are written down weeks in advance in a large ledger with sewn signatures issued by a bank—the deluxe edition for good investors—made in the year 1980. Clandestine meetings are moved to highway motels, distant vacation resorts, or private clubs with passwords.

The very idea of casually dropping in at one of the villas in the richly wooded housing estate, just for fun, is out of the question. Friends would never do such a thing, because friends respect each other. There’s no reason for that kind of impertinence, say the housing estate residents. No such thing as a neighbourhood committee here, or a charter with guidelines. The men are busy senior executives who already spend too much time at meetings during the day to fill their free hours with more of the same. These are not common labourers who chair their local bridge club, or petty officials whose idea of a good time is to stand in front of a mirror and practise their monthly treasurer’s report for the local marching band. Nor do the women of the housing estate see the point of such committees. They have quite enough to discuss with their own families, and they prefer to spend their free time on themselves. Although there’s no formal consultation of any kind among the residents, they’re in complete agreement on most matters, remarkably enough. Tacit agreement.

The working people who come to the mountain know exactly when they are expected. Gardeners, cleaning women, and manicurists all have fixed hours. Even the procession of Sunday mendicants—black men from Zaire alternating with Jehovah’s Witnesses—abide by the resting community’s unshakeable schedules and only come on Sundays between the hours of eleven and twelve. The blacks begin their pitch with a broad smile and milk-white teeth, immediately followed by the friendly warning not to be frightened, and in one breath they sing the praises of their little hand-stencilled books containing ancient stories about the genesis of their African tribes, which they are peddling to finance their university education in theology at some unknown or non-existent university in the south of France. Whether it’s due to the people’s feelings of colonial guilt or to the black men’s babbling in a childish kind of French, quite a few books end up being sold. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, find themselves staring at a closed door before they’ve even reached the end of their opening sentence. In the year 1974, when the first villas in the housing estate were erected, a university professor accepted a copy of The Watchtower from a Jehovah’s Witness. It wasn’t long before he and his entire family were conscripted into the sect. Since then, not a single resident has been able to put up with even the opening spiel of a Jehovah’s Witness. The door is closed with a vague word of thanks and a resolute nod. No, the front doors here are certainly not flung open wide for every stranger who happens to turn up. What are front door peepholes for, after all?

So it comes as a total surprise to the residents when we make our way along the sunken road to the housing estate on a Tuesday afternoon in April 1980 without anyone on the mountain expecting visitors. We climb the mountain slowly. The road is so narrow here that two oncoming cars cannot pass each other. But there are no cars. Not at this hour of the day. At half past two on a Tuesday afternoon there’s no traffic from the housing estate to the real world, or vice versa.

There are only two roads leading to the estate. One of them sets out from the neighbouring backwater as a bumpy patchwork quilt of cobblestones and asphalt, patched countless times. At the end of this road the neighbourhood reveals itself, like the sea to a herd of water buffalo trotting across the Serengeti Plain: home, a final destination, a haven for quenching your thirst. The other way to get there is along the sunken road in the woods. The sunken road is an earthen trench that runs straight through the woods, a former riverbed in which an erratic asphalt road was laid. The road starts in the village and ends up in the paradise among the trees.

Potential buyers of the properties are enticed by the vastness of the lots and the fragrance of pine needles. Building permits are rather lavishly granted here. There’s room for large villas with swimming pools and tennis courts at the far end of each back garden. Even horse stables can count on a friendly wink from the mayor.

The families in the lower village still vividly remember how the count sold off the woods and grounds piecemeal to the occupiers up on the mountain. Their clans have been living in the village since time immemorial. Even before the village had an official name their ancestors were here. They were an industrious folk. They set up butcher shops, cafes, and liquor stores that they passed on to their children who in turn passed them on to their children, so the only things that had to be changed on the signs out front were the first names. The villagers speak a colourful local vernacular among themselves, with lush tones and heavy vowels that the people on the mountain can’t begin to fathom. There’s no direct communication between the two groups. Their only form of contact is gossip and backbiting.

If a professor from the housing estate should come down to buy something he accidentally overlooked on his shopping list for the big supermarket, the villagers close ranks. When he’s just within earshot they tell each other what for him is unintelligible slander, distilled from stories from the cleaning women and gardeners who work on the mountain off the books, fertilizing lawns and hanging bird houses on tree trunks at precarious heights. The mountain resident quickly purchases a loaf of salt-free, four-grain bread or a grilled chicken, jumps into his car, and returns to his family on the mountain as fast as he can.

Proceeding down the tongue of asphalt that rolls out of the sunken road, we turn onto the first street of the housing estate. All we see is one living soul, standing at the only bus stop in the entire housing estate, a pole with a minuscule timetable screwed onto it. A golden retriever lying in an impeccable front garden glances up for a moment. The smell of pine needles and horse manure hangs in the air. Somewhere in the belly of one of the villas a radio emits a news report on the death of the great master of film, Alfred Hitchcock.

On this calm Tuesday afternoon the housewives creep even more deeply into their cocoons of calm, drowsy boredom. At number 6 Nightingale Lane, Evi Vanende-Boelens, in an advanced state of pregnancy, leafs through an interior design magazine. Ulrike Vanoverpelt-Schmidt, who lives a couple of houses farther on, takes the ironing board from the storeroom and tackles the enormous pile of laundry generated each week by her husband and three children. The men still have hours of work ahead of them. The children have a little more than one hour at their school desks before the bell rings. Most of the residents started producing children a couple of years ago. The oldest children from the housing estate are now in their first year of school. Their mothers are waiting at home for a report of their day. Evi hopes to give birth soon so she can go back to filling her afternoons with visits to the boutiques.

All the residents of the housing estate are at about the same stage in their lives. They’re bringing a new generation into the world, in this paradise that they themselves discovered and developed. They live a respectable distance from each other because they respect each other’s privacy. No one can see into their neighbour’s bathroom, living room, or conservatory. Only the plentiful magpies see everything.

The dog follows us with his eyes but doesn’t bother to jump to his feet. He just lies there in front of his kennel, chained up, his head resting on his front paws. The fresh spring air is dry and every sound carries. It hasn’t rained in weeks. A pair of woodland birds break off their song. This is where we come to a halt.

We see the villa on the other side of the road, number 7 Nightingale Lane. There’s no avoiding it. The villa is a gigantic, rustic edifice in dark red brick with glazed, blue-black tiles on the weathertight roof and an enormous chimney. It must have taken a great deal of time and an impressive building plan to raise this construction successfully. The house attempts to exude an air of timelessness, there in the middle of a bright green lawn full of tree stumps, oak trees, and daffodils in full bloom. This picture is exactly what Stefaan had led us to expect.

We cross the lane and approach the villa. The hallways in the house must be streets in their own right, the rooms all ballrooms. We plant our finger on the round doorbell. Somewhere deep in the house, metal strikes a gong and we hear the loud reverberation.

It takes a long time. A very long time. This, too, we expected. We know this milieu; we’re aware of the time of day. In a neighbourhood like this one it’s not unusual for postmen or firemen making the rounds for their annual collection to think they’ve encountered an empty house. But they’re being watched from behind closed curtains and from indoor landings by kneeling cleaning women who are dusting the tubular limbs of the radiators, or by the lady of the house, clad in bathrobe and slippers, as she shuffles her way from the bathroom to the dressing room and looks down through the little window on the landing. The callers know it will be a long time before the locks of the fortified citadels are opened, one by one, and they stand face to face with a human being.

But now it’s been a very long time. We ring the doorbell once again. The sound is loud indeed. We’ve come all this way to congratulate Stefaan. The Vandersandens propagating themselves: that is a happy event that we, too, want to celebrate. Apparently we’re too late, or too early. After a third ring and a long wait, when there’s still no sign of life, we take a step back and search the front of the house for any movement behind one of the many windows. Nothing.

As unannounced visitors we now commit a double violation. We step away from the path to the front door and walk across the grass, past the windows. You see, there is someone home, isn’t there? Sitting in a dark red chesterfield armchair is a squat figure in a flowered robe. It’s unusual for someone in the housing estate to sit at the window in an armchair. The street is so far away that you can hardly see anything from the window. And gazing out at the street is the sort of thing old working-class women do. Those kinds of women don’t live on the mountain.

You would expect her to be startled by the loud tap on the glass, but the woman in the chair doesn’t stir. It’s difficult to tell whether her eyes are closed or just sunken into her fleshy, wrinkle-ridden face. Her short legs don’t reach the floor but hang in the air, motionless. Is the old woman unconscious, sitting there in the chair? Or is she dead? No, she cannot be dead. To get the old woman’s attention in some other way (she may be deaf), we wave at her.

The elderly woman does not wave back. Not even a nod of the head. It’s possible that her eyelids moved, like butterfly wings, but that may have been in response to a slight draught. The old woman is slouched in the chair at an angle. Just when we’re about to pronounce her dead, her bosom heaves up and down. A sigh escapes from the bellows of her sturdy body. The old woman’s heavy head falls forward and is hoisted back up. The head is all we need. Everything is under control. She is alive, her son is alive, and he has been given an heir. We’ll come back later.

Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier pushes herself out of the armchair. With great difficulty and loud groaning she slides to the edge of the chair until her orthopedically encased feet touch the floor. The heavy body rights itself. There stands Melanie at full length, far more pitiful than impressive. Stefaan’s mother is no taller than one of the rose bushes in the front garden under the bluestone window ledge that is luring the first rays of spring to shine on its buds. The rough-edged little woman is as prickly as the bush and just as incommunicative. She no longer finds it necessary to reach out to the world around her. Melanie only speaks when she is of a mind to.

Sometimes there are outbursts or brief phases in which she says a great deal. She can give her son a good tongue-lashing when the occasion calls for it, for which her aged body can still work up the energy. Otherwise there’s little that disturbs her enough to waste words on. She has a goodly number of obscenities at the ready, though. When she grabbed an open bag of frozen peas from the wrong end recently, strewing peas all over the kitchen floor, her uncouth words tore through the kitchen like a tornado. Down on her swollen knees, she picked up the peas from the marble floor one by one. After the last pea had been swept into the dust pan she disappeared into the cellar, only to re-emerge one hour later, thoroughly subdued, the angry words shaken out and released into the chill of the apple bin.

Her poor vision, bordering on blindness, doesn’t keep her from tootling around in her Fiat. Accelerating on the curves and driving down the middle of the road rather than on the right (just to be on the safe side), Melanie cuts her trail through Flanders. Police officers can chase her all they like, but she just keeps on driving—even stepping on the gas if necessary.

She’s known far and wide as a first-class grumbling curmudgeon. In all fairness, the gossips do report that there are mitigating circumstances to excuse her dreadful personality: the many tragedies she has endured. She never talks about the tragedies. She saves her peevishness for things no one can do anything about. If the sky is overcast, Melanie has the right to look so disagreeable and accusatory that an outsider will find himself apologizing spontaneously without having any idea why. If Melanie is deeply displeased by something (bird droppings on the window or margarine instead of real butter), she closes up like a clam and pretends to be as deaf as a post for a couple of hours.

And now the woman raises herself from the expensive chesterfield armchair belonging to her son Stefaan and his wife Mieke. Her eagle eye pans the relatively empty, oversized living room. Persian rugs cover the parquet floor, pieces of antique furniture try to out-age each other, and an original Permeke farmer’s wife, dressed in her Sunday best, gazes at the interior. What’s missing are little figurines for cosiness, a display case for gaudiness, calendars for memory, and a few crucifixes for piety. Her son and his wife prefer to spend lots of money on superannuated antiques, because they’re the kinds of overpriced furnishings that belong in a villa of this calibre. The beams over her head come from a demolished mill, the property of Mieke’s father of blessed memory. The house is bigger than the parish church, and it also has a gigantic cellar and a crawl space. Even the bedrooms are heated, and all the windows are double-glazed. As if a person actually needed all that.

Anyway, Melanie knows her place. The mother who scarcely speaks two words in succession is waiting in the lovely home of her still living son. He’s come a long way: made it to the mountain, with a wife of wealthy parentage at his side. Only now, at age forty, is he having his first child. God, it certainly did take them long enough.

In the meantime the sun has made its way to the other side of the house. Melanie has already been down to the cellar to calm herself and has now clambered back into her pricey but not particularly comfortable armchair. In the chill of the kitchen behind her, the thermostat kicks in. All this time Melanie has been doing what was asked of her: she is keeping watch. She is the house’s security guard.

Finally the taxi turns into the driveway. Her son Stefaan jumps out of the car, leans on the doorbell, lets himself in, tears into the living room, congratulates Melanie for her grandmotherhood, and even makes an attempt to plant a kiss on her cheek. She remains seated. She doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t even greet him. She doesn’t ask Stefaan how it went, or whether it’s a boy or a girl, or how Mieke is doing. Nor does she say a single thing about what or who rudely interrupted her sleep this afternoon. Melanie’s eyes wander through the living room, making their way toward her son. Then an index finger shoots out of her solid torso. She points ominously at Stefaan’s shoes on the living room rug. She has the right to blow the whistle on her son, regardless of the circumstances. It is her intention to keep raising her one living child for as long as she lives.

There are still a number of people in West Flanders who can tell the story of how Melanie brought her oldest son into the world at four o’clock in the morning. She had just enough time to wrap the little one in a sausage of linen and bind him to her bosom before relieving the lowing cows of their straining udders and spending the rest of the day working in the field. Stronger than a workhorse, that was Melanie.

During his first hours of life her oldest son filled his lungs with the moist stench of manure and the sour smell of barley gruel. Eighteen years later he turned his back on the farmer’s craft. Stefaan has worked his way up with an industriousness and drive he didn’t get from strangers. And now, at age forty, he’s a successful manager at a large pharmaceutical firm. He has both a degree in medicine and an MBA from Wharton Business School hanging on the wall of his spacious office. He owns a villa that’s still echoing with newness in the housing estate on the mountain.

Stefaan looks exhausted. His cheeks are ashen, yet he’s beaming. His dark eyes sparkle, his smile is so wide it almost tears at the corners. Stefaan has been awake for twenty-four hours. Not as in ‘not sleeping’, not in a slumber setting like his mother. He’s as hyperactive as a talking clock. One hour ago he stormed out of the maternity ward of the Sacred Heart Hospital in search of a passing taxi, calling out euphorically to the honking cars. He would never do such a thing in a normal, sober condition, but what has happened here is a wonder of the world guaranteed to make the world instantly forget all its turmoil, all the nuclear warheads and iron curtains.

‘Oh, my God,’ Stefaan shouts exultantly from the living room. He stumbles over his own words. ‘So extraordinary, so unbelievable.’ He keeps repeating it, ad nauseam. He wants the whole world to share in the towering happiness that’s taken hold of him. Delirious with joy: that’s what it’s called. A man hugging the sky and momentarily forgetting the dark shadow. From now on, happiness will be on his side. He had already collected the outward signs: wealth and advancing status. Now there’s this new dimension to add to them. ‘So extraordinary,’ he keeps repeating while shaking his head.

‘Every birth is extraordinary,’ his mother sighs. Her mouth has moved. Words have come out. Four words. She spoke at least four words, one after the other, and she isn’t talked out yet. She goes on: ‘Extraordinary in its own misery.’ His inaccessible mother thinks he can put up with anything. All these years he has been reacting appropriately to her callousness: properly and submissively, because it was she who gave birth to him.

Today Stefaan can hardly hear her. ‘A little daughter, Mama. A little girl.’ He takes off his loafers, puts them in the shoe cabinet in the utility room, and runs to the ironing room. No running in the house, Mieke would shout if she were here now. Behind the door of the ironing room are a couple of cardboard boxes. He had them ready months ago. He takes the boxes upstairs and goes into one of the seven bedrooms.

He’s lived this moment over and over again in his dreams. He goes to the stereo, searches for the right cassette, and chooses the most suitable track by his big hero, Bob Dylan: ‘Forever Young’. He wants his daughter to stay young forever. But there’s a contradiction there: in order to stay young forever she would have to die. He opens his eyes wide but it’s too late; they fill with weary tears. It’s all too much for him after such a wakeful night.

In the nursery there’s a lovely antique cabinet for linens and clothes, as well as a child’s bed that cost three times his college tuition. A royal child from the Habsburg period slept in it. On the floor is a fanciful rug featuring a pattern of purple and red giraffes against a white background. And her desk is where he’ll fold the little boxes for the sugared almonds. Follow the instructions on the lid of the cardboard box to fold a compact little house out of rice paper. Stefaan’s fingers are definitely not slender piano fingers. They’re completely unsuitable for origami, a game played with rice paper that was adopted from the Land of the Rising Sun not so long ago. A Flemish farmer like his father would have blown his nose on rice paper like that.

Last night Mieke went over the instructions with him again, slowly and carefully. She wasn’t at all sure it was going to work, yet he soon succeeded in folding a little box with straight walls and a ribbon bow for a roof. His fingers tremble from the effort. He starts in on a second box, and then a third. Stefaan looks with astonishment at how his hands have turned into skilful dancers, daring to perform such perfectly choreographed origami.

He opens a drawer in the table and takes out the felt-tip pen. He and Mieke had had quite a squabble over the felt-tip pen just before her water broke. Mieke said she preferred professional printing to his chicken scratches, an unreasonable demand. Stefaan writes with silver-coloured ink on the outer walls of the boxes: Sarah, 28-04-1980. Sarah. The name they chose for her together, Jewish in origin, the name of a strong, high-spirited woman. It was their shared secret for seven months. They quickly agreed on a first name for a girl. But for a long time Mieke had doubts about the child itself: whether she should go ahead with it or not, whether she and the world really needed another child. These were doubts that Stefaan couldn’t relate to. Once they had made the decision it took years before Mieke finally became pregnant. Now their daughter is an indisputable fact. They have everything within reach to make sure their child, more than any other child in the world, has a golden future.

Sarah is offering her father a clean slate. In exchange, he is promising her his total commitment and a hefty bit of cash. Some people are all too eager to dismiss material possessions as something incidental, but Stefaan sees them as a sign of devotion. The most beautiful little pieces of furniture, the most exclusive little outfits, the most expensive diapers—he won’t take anything less. Of course he could have had the little boxes folded by someone else, but he wanted to do it himself, just as he refuses to hand his daughter over to the supervision of a nanny. His wife will stay home and take care of her. Everything has been arranged down to the last detail.

He is euphoric. As a doctor he knows the theory behind all this: your hormone curve is out of kilter, your temperature is fluctuating, you observe the world through tunnel vision. He allows himself just enough time to regain his equilibrium before going back to his mother. He looks out the window. There’s the lovely back garden, all ready for the child. Yesterday he disentangled the last pulpy winter leaves from the bushes. Stefaan glances over at the little boxes, which are lined up like houses along a railroad track. These boxes are the first trace of his daughter’s presence in this house. His daughter. He is her father and always will be, even when he’s no longer around. The simple logic of this moves him. He has finally been granted the title of father.

He has always told himself that he must not rest until he has reached that rarefied, precarious point: the top. It’s not everyone who makes up their mind one day to assume a leadership position, but such people do exist. These are people who don’t take orders from others but deal them out themselves. Arms crossed, shouting defiantly at the world: come on, I dare you.

Stefaan Vandersanden had everything it took to make it big, although he may have let himself be bossed around too much in his early youth. He was too quick to defer to rules and orders. If help was needed with the clean-up at school, he didn’t slip through the swinging doors and out onto the playground like everyone else but stood there waiting for instructions, often the only one to do so. A classmate who hadn’t finished his homework on time would get the answers from Stefaan, free for the asking. If some roughneck was fixing for a fight, Stefaan would just so happen to find himself nearby. It didn’t really help that he was skinny and clever, the usual combination for children who tend to get knocked around. When he was eighteen his father died, and he knew he had two choices: slide into grief or fight to survive. The clever, timid, country boy in wooden shoes from a West Flanders farming village became a respected top student at the great University of Leuven. Unlike his father, Stefaan was determined not to let himself be pushed to the edges of life. He sank his teeth in and held on tight.

Stefaan graduated summa cum laude as a doctor of medicine from the University of Leuven and let the professor who served as his dissertation advisor talk him into spending a year at Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania. Those two diplomas together would open any door, the professor said. Stefaan’s preference was to open all the doors himself, the doors to his own company. The day he returned to Flanders he ordered a package of printed business cards. His former sense of inferiority was transformed into one of limitless spunk. He had to start at zero, without a red cent in the bank. He had made some money working in a small print shop during his studies in America, which he had sent home—at least whatever he didn’t need himself to survive on campus. He went without meals and wore corduroy trousers in the summer, just to send money to his widowed mother. It was a twisted kind of pride all too familiar to migrants in a strange land. In the print shop he would reach his ink-black fingers into his pants pocket, groping for dimes to drop into the money box to send poor inner-city children to camp. On the day of his graduation Stefaan left this all behind. Now it was up to him. He was going to start his own business, and he needed every dime to invest in his own laboratory. He returned to Flanders, since that’s where it was going to happen.

It’s amazing how your goal comes right up to meet you as soon as you get it clearly in your sights. Stefaan was always bumping into ceos, people from the pharmaceutical sector, and investors. And at the least opportunity the twenty-eight-year-old Stefaan would fish one of his gold-edged business cards out of his wallet. He’d corner speculators who liked to play patron and treat them to lavish lunches. No sooner had the aperitif been served than he would make his pitch, without the slightest embarrassment. He knew the rules from the marketing boys at Vlerick Management School, who were beginning to make a name for themselves in Flanders. Their advice was to start out with some serious bullshitting about wines, Napa Valley, and golf courses. Stefaan broke these rules with relish, and with success. He saw no point in the unwritten law that you had to begin by discussing trivialities, when both parties knew perfectly well that the reason they had come here to Comme Chez Soi was to seal some cold-blooded deals. Business partners who didn’t share the same mentality would never become serious investors. The first three meetings at which he plunged right in with enthusiasm and fervour had taken an average of two and a half hours. Each time, he was able to scoop up more money than he had ever thought possible. He didn’t even have to hold a knife to their throats or get involved in any other sordid business.

Stefaan had a plan about the laboratory he was going to launch that was fairly megalomaniacal and rather vague. Dr. Paul Janssen of Janssen Pharmaceuticals had done it before him: immediately after graduating from medical school you start your own company, develop a new medicine, put it on the market, and promote it as widely as possible. Stefaan was well aware of his intellectual capacities. With his expertise he could build up a knowledge monopoly in Flanders and exploit it to his advantage. Many of the big industrial companies didn’t have enough in-house knowledge, or their specialists hadn’t been properly re-trained in years, and as a result there were gaps in their awareness of the latest developments. This was the hole in the market that Stefaan would take advantage of. With every meeting he had, he could feel the man in the suit opposite him growing more and more intrigued, bending forward, and whispering insistently about what they could do for each other—three different, impeccably dressed, pear-shaped men in their fifties with cuff links on their stiffly ironed dress shirts—until Stefaan almost had to shove them off his lap.

The success of the first three meetings led him to approach the fourth with the utmost confidence. Even if it didn’t result in any spectacular commitments, it really couldn’t fail. He hadn’t counted on the fourth investor being a son of a bitch, a man whose best friend was the ceo of a big pharmaceutical firm. The man let him wait more than half an hour. Pure intimidation, Stefaan knew, and he calmly buttered a second piece of bread. After another hour, and five ‘I’m-waiting-for-someones’ later, he settled his bill with the waiter and slunk away. The investor’s friend hadn’t liked the sound of it—an unknown, overly ambitious little doctor, fresh out of Wharton, wanting to set up an independent laboratory.

The next day the pharmaceutical company’s lawyer contacted Stefaan and demanded that he put an end to this lab business immediately, before he had even gotten started. The lawyer threatened to wipe out his entire future by instituting legal proceedings from which he would never recover financially. Within the space of five hours, one investor after another let him know that they were withdrawing their sponsorship. Furious and determined never again to let himself be bullied, Stefaan went to the headquarters of the dictatorial pharmaceutical firm. He was given an interview with the big boss, astonished him with his diplomas and knowledge, and left the building with a top-salary position.

His first years back in Belgium were marked by hard work and assisting his mother every now and then. Melanie wanted to sell the farm and use the proceeds to build a bungalow. After all those years she could no longer bear to look at the high wooden crossbeam from which a rope, along with her husband, had once hung. Stefaan went to the handsome office of the notary on Steen Street in Bruges to attend the public sale of his parents’ house. He was wearing a tight-fitting black jacket that dated back to his father’s funeral. He pushed the notary’s door open, listened to his own footsteps echo in the oak-panelled hallway, and crossed over to a room whose door was ajar. With a boundless lack of interest, and after a full five minutes, the woman who was pounding away on her typewriter finally deigned to look up at him, regarding him with total contempt as if he were something the cat had dragged in. He smiled at her, unable to think of a more suitable response. His jacket creaked as he handed his dossier to Mieke De Kinder. As he recalls she was wearing some kind of dark, severe outfit, but that’s not what Mieke remembers. That bit about the look of contempt may have been true because whenever she concentrates, the corners of her mouth always droop automatically. Without a word having been spoken she knew that this was just another man who took her for the notary’s secretary. And that may have been why she unconsciously looked at him as if she were about to give him a good thrashing.

After their first brief conversation she came to have a different view of him, as Mieke would tell him once they had been properly married. She no longer saw a piece of filth in a tight, ill-fitting jacket but a shrewd, sharp-eyed man, a serious sort, with a nice, jet black crew cut (no unwashed hippie hair for him) and an honest smile. A good-natured, mysterious man enveloped in an air of melancholy that could just as easily pass for general astuteness. The type that doesn’t know his own appeal. It would be exaggerating to say it was love at first sight. Something far more exciting happened to her in the beautiful, oak-panelled, eighteenth-century office of the notary than an ephemeral fluttering of infatuation. It was her husband who presented himself to her on the platter of a banal public sale, although there was a great deal of work to be done on this man. That didn’t deter her in the least. She saw it as a project to throw herself into, with all the drive and precision she possessed. She saw the rough basic structure of a man she could knead into the image and likeness of her ideal mate.

A great deal had to happen before the two got closer together, but in any case it was all thanks to the relatively lucrative sale of the farm where he had spent eighteen years of his life that Stefaan and Mieke were able to look each other in the eyes for the first time. She had brought her best friend Elvira along on their first date, but by the second Mieke said with a husky voice that she had no need of a chaperone. Every time he thought she had mustered enough civility to tell him he needn’t try anymore, every time he was sure that the next coffee date would be their last, she would nod passionately and suggest something about a concert or an exhibition.

Mieke admired Stefaan because he was so atypical, so modest and dogged at the same time, so authentic and so unmanly, so full of self-confidence and so elusive. She said so quite openly. He let these dubious compliments pass over him and smiled. And even though he learned through the grapevine that she came from a fabulously rich family that he was no match for, he set his heart on her. There was a time and a place for everything, and this was the time to clear a path for the love of his life. So when her family actually welcomed him with open arms, nothing stood in the way of their marriage. Now, more than ten years later, they’re the proud parents of Sarah, just when Stefaan had almost given up hope of ever having a child.

Stefaan works a sugared almond out of the box and places it on his tongue. The sugar melts. He gets down on his hands and knees, making himself small enough to fit under the table. As a little boy he loved to hide under the kitchen table at home. It’s one of his first memories: being under the sturdy table, his mother above him, changing his little brother’s cotton diaper. He looks at his mother’s weather-beaten face and listens to his brother’s cries until they’re smothered on his mother’s breast. Stefaan lies down on his stomach, just at his daughter’s height. This is how Sarah will crawl through the house. She’ll press her peach-soft cheek against the objects in the house to learn about the limits of things and of space, and to familiarize herself with her home.

Downstairs the phone rings. Who knows, maybe Mieke has awakened from her comatose sleep. In his attempt to stand up quickly Stefaan bangs the back of his head against the underside of the table. He laughs at his own clumsiness. He doesn’t even feel the pain. Out in the hall, when he picks up the telephone receiver and the insolent ringing stops, he hears a bass voice. The voice sounds familiar but he can’t immediately place it. Maybe it’s the fatigue, or because the man comes from another world where there are no newborn babies. It isn’t until the end of the congratulations that he recognizes the voice of Fernand Berkvens. He and Berkvens studied at Leuven together. Stefaan graduated with honours while Berkvens had to be happy with a simple satisfactory. Now he and Berkvens are colleagues. Berkvens lives in the village, Stefaan in the housing estate on the mountain.

Both of them applied for the same position as director of research & development. Berkvens’s wife says it’s a beautiful baby, Stefaan hears. She’s a nurse in the maternity ward at the Sacred Heart Hospital. Don’t nurses have a code of professional confidentiality? Stefaan himself wanted to be the one to announce the good news at work.

‘A girl! This calls for a drink,’ says Berkvens.

‘What shall we drink?’ asks Stefaan. He hears the remoteness in his voice. For Stefaan, the line between work and private life is of crucial importance. He guards it closely.

His mother has raised herself from the armchair and is now standing next to him. She takes a dust cloth from her apron and rubs it over the bakelite telephone with its ivory dial, an heirloom from Mieke’s parents.

‘What shall we drink? A beer at the pub, of course, to celebrate the birth!’ says Berkvens, his colleague.

‘A beer,’ Stefaan repeats.

Berkvens knows that Stefaan doesn’t drink beer. Never did, even before he came to understand that beer is for plebeians. The feeble bubbles and bitter taste are lost on him. After working long hours at his part-time job in the print shop while studying in America, his beverage of choice consisted of several glasses of a bright yellow soft drink.

‘I don’t know,’ says Stefaan. ‘I don’t know if I have time for drinking.’

His mother is still flitting around behind him. She has strong principles, always has. She won’t allow a single drop of alcohol to be drunk in her presence, for instance, no matter what the occasion. Single-handedly she has become Flanders’s biggest temperance brigade. She’s merciless in her condemnation of the respectable Fleming who joyfully returns to his wife and kiddies with ten glasses of beer in his belly: all the worse for him. According to her theory, alcohol is not only stupefying but it’s also very bad for the liver. ‘One glass? For the liver that’s no different than trying to bolt down a kilo of chocolate. Anyone who doesn’t believe me can ask Dr. Verastenhoven.’ ‘But he’s dead, isn’t he?’ ‘Exactly. The drink, you know.’

The last time his mother drank in public in the open air was at a small dinner party she organized following the commemorative mass held for her husband André. She had ordered and paid for dinner for thirty-eight: for the pastor, his nuns, her stone-deaf girlfriends from the retirement society, and her family. At that particular memorial she consumed everything that was left in the aperitif glasses, the wine glasses, the beer glasses, and the hard liquor glasses. At first her customary silence went unnoticed. Her guests never suspected a thing until she dropped the stuffed pear garnish from her serving of quail down her décolleté and, after spooning out the last of the advocaat, proceeded to throw up in the bushes next to the restaurant chickens.

‘It must have been the potatoes,’ she explained, gasping for air. ‘Probably a green one. I’m terribly sensitive to green potatoes.’ The establishment was being run by a gang of profiteers who let their filthy, Pamper-clad children run through the restaurant, which also may have had something to do with it, she said.

When Stefaan cautiously suggested it may have been the drink, she denied it up and down, only to toss in five minutes later as part of her sobering-up tirade: ‘Marie Brizard, anise liqueur—come on, who drinks that stuff anymore? Maybe the occasional cleaning woman who gets hooked on abandoned bottles when nobody’s looking. But otherwise?’

Stefaan sees his mother pulling faces, fishing to find out who’s on the other end of the line. He’s eager to end the phone call with Berkvens and says, ‘Another time.’

‘Another time then,’ responds Berkvens. ‘We’ll go out another time. I won’t forget, now.’

Stefaan hangs up. Fortunately he doesn’t like to go drinking. He has neither the time nor the inclination. He’s never shown his face in either of the two village pubs. He also finds it completely unbecoming to hang around in a drinking establishment when you’ve just been given the most beautiful daughter in the history of humanity.

‘How are you, Mother? It wasn’t too tiring for you, was it?’ He redirects his attention for the moment to his discontented mother.

His mother mutters something. She always seems angry at him. She is very creative in her reproaches, but they all arise from one underground reservoir of guilt and sorrow.

‘Did you see or hear anyone?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Now that you have a daughter you’re going to behave yourself and be happy, is that right?’

Stefaan ignores the caustic remarks that he has come to expect from his mother. ‘I’m going to the hospital. I’m taking some sugared almonds, a nightgown, and a couple of towels,’ he says. ‘But I’m bringing a present back for you. That should make you happy.’

The hours slip past. With a creak in her heavy joints Melanie stands up. She goes to the kitchen and spreads butter on half a slice of gingerbread. She gives herself permission to eat in the armchair, a small indulgence that she hopes will not leave too many crumbs. At some indeterminate point later on, Melanie wakes up with a start that reverberates through all her chins. Stefaan doesn’t seem to have been gone for long, although sleeping has caused her to lose track of time. Her mouth feels as sticky as a honeycomb. According to her doctor she doesn’t drink enough water. That was eight years ago. Now the doctor himself has died. Her son comes into the room with a carrying case. He zips the case open and takes a video camera out of the padded interior. Melanie’s heart skips a beat. Is this the present? It’s an ungainly metal hulk with one big, round eye.

‘Wouldn’t you like to see her?’ Stefaan asks.

He carries the camera in his arms like a child. The camera is frightfully expensive, which is exactly why Stefaan bought it. Stefaan wants to spend money on his daughter. He’s just itching to replay the scene that he observed with his own eyes through the lens of the camera. Now he wants to see it with his mother. He can also send the images from the camera to the television via a cable, an extra option he has paid a pretty penny for.

‘You’re not going to tell me ... ’ she says. She shifts the fulcrum of her body and raises her right buttock. A loud salvo is heard. Because of her deafness she cannot hear the sound of her own farts. Both her hands grasp the arms of the chair as if her body were about to fly upward, but it abandons the effort under so much weight. She struggles for breath, all the way down to the deepest tunnels of her massive body. The hand that had just been flapping freely lands on her prow, the other points to the unwieldy apparatus that Stefaan is cradling in his arms. Another of her verbal assaults is brewing. ‘ ... you’re not going to tell me ... that the birth is recorded on that thing?’ She nearly faints.

‘That’s right,’ Stefaan confirms enthusiastically. He crouches next to the television console and tries to connect the camera to the tv via the cable.

‘What will they think of next?’ Melanie spits out, along with another handful of words. Her unusual loquacity has to do with an attack on the present age. ‘No matter where you turn today, everything is out there for all to see. My goodness, a little baby can’t help it if he comes into the world in his birthday suit, but I don’t have to see your wife in all her glory, thank you very much. It’s become a regular scourge these days—there’s an ad for a new gas stove and bang, they have to put a naked lady in it. That’ll warm things up all right. Who wouldn’t be cold walking around in their altogether? Or yesterday in the theatre section of the newspaper. Yes, they have the nerve to call it theatre, getting undressed down to their last stitch with everyone looking on. To say nothing of that modern art nowadays! It’s all an excuse to show off a lot of filth. That guy with his whore and her bare breasts, the two of them in a sculpture. And we’re supposed to think it’s beautiful? Coarse, cheap, vulgar, too dreadful for words, that’s what I say. You can go ahead and call me old fashioned but it’s the unvarnished truth.’ Then she falls silent and her words hang in the air. Until a new fart resounds through the room to conclude her powerful tirade. Stefaan is still down on his hands and knees. He’s trying to make sense of the doodles formed by the wires on the living room floor.

‘Never mind, I don’t need to see it.’ Melanie hoists herself out of the armchair and propels herself to the cellar. She walks like a drunken goose. Since her second episode of thrombosis she’s had trouble walking upright. In the cellar there are pots, pans, and a whole supply of canned goods. There are also ten-kilo bags of keeping apples that a farmer sells in the housing estate from his old-fashioned pull cart. It’s always pleasantly chilly in the cellar, winter and summer.

A cauldron of soup is cooking on the kitchen stove, waiting for the return of the house’s inhabitants. It must be said that Stefaan’s mother knows something about cooking, at least about everyday cuisine: meatballs in tomato sauce, rabbit with prunes, and pudding with ginger biscuits. He tastes a spoonful so he can compliment his mother when she comes back up from her air-raid shelter. The soup is more or less tasteless. The lack of taste betrays the nervousness she feels about the birth of her first grandchild. He won’t say anything about the soup because then he’d have to be honest. That’s the way he is: he can’t lie, but he can keep his mouth shut.

Mieke can keep her mouth shut, too. When after two months she realized she was pregnant, she didn’t share her big secret with Stefaan right away, even though she knew how much he was hoping for a pregnancy. That was something he never quite understood. It offended him somewhat, but as a doctor he knew that when a woman gets pregnant she isn’t always herself. The hormones take over. Mieke told him later that she knew exactly when her mind, and not just her swelling breasts, whispered to her that she was pregnant. When she heard the report on the radio about those two East German families who had fled to the West in a homemade hot-air balloon, she wondered whether she had the right to force a child into the world. Before you knew it the dictatorship of the Iron Curtain would spread all the way to the North Sea, and where would they fly then, with a baby, without a hot-air balloon?

For Stefaan there had never been the slightest doubt. It’s their job to make sure the child is properly equipped to cope with life’s challenges. He needs them to have a child so he can be complete. He can still hear his own overly zealous arguments. Of course we’re going to be happy. You’re going to feel like a total woman. Our marriage will blossom. Yet Mieke still wasn’t sure. She didn’t actually utter the a-word, but he felt her thinking it. Then one day he got angry, very angry, and began talking about infanticide. It hadn’t really mattered whether he lost control or not when she said there was more to it than that, that his desire for a child was all out of proportion. ‘People without children are depressing people,’ he said, cleverly quoting her father. He knew that was her weak point. Her father had made his opinions all too clear when they were first married. A few years later the man died of a heart attack. For her mother his death was devastating, and she died soon afterward from the aftershock. ‘I know, people without children are depressing people,’ she had moaned. ‘There’s no way back.’ She was referring to the crushing responsibility. In a moment of weakness you could get bogged down just thinking about it. Then you’d go crazy and you’d never get around to having a baby.

They got through it together. It took patience and persuasiveness, but she got used to the idea. One month later he started catching her singing little tunes to her unborn child. Her swelling body did have its discomforts, from heartburn and infuriating itchy nipples to swollen ankles, and the enormous embarrassment. She was terrified of losing her slender figure and turning into a blob. She was ashamed of what she called her whale of a body, although the rounded forms made her more of a woman than she had ever been before. She stopped going outside. For the first time she cancelled the six-month check-up visits to the tenants of her properties.

Luckily they have a villa with a large garden. The garden is surrounded by tall rhododendrons. Mieke was able to keep herself well-hidden in the villa during the final weeks. Villas are ideal places for hiding your shame. A house is a body around your body. Would the little one in Mieke’s belly be ashamed, too? It was a pointless question, since the little one was still hidden away. Shame presupposes the presence of other people, and she wasn’t expecting twins.

During the last week Stefaan’s mother came to help out, her face as long as a fiddle. Mieke responded by complaining that she was a prisoner in her own home. The two women avoided each other as much as possible. Mieke thinks that Stefaan’s mother is jealous of her own son. When the tension became too great between Mieke and her mother-in-law, Melanie disappeared into the cellar and Mieke took refuge in the bedroom behind closed shutters, with a compress on her forehead and her swollen ankles resting on the footboard of the bed. In both the cellar and the bedroom it was fresh and safe.

‘Voilà!’ Calmed and even in relatively good humour, Stefaan’s mother resurfaces from under the ground while Stefaan has gone back to fiddling with the scart cables. She’s tidied up her favourite spot again, the storage cellar. It needed it, she insists.

‘It’s got to be clean for when mother and baby come home. The baby may not see much yet, but even a moron can see spiderwebs. You have to keep your house clean, no matter what. Taking a little pride in your housekeeping, that’s the basis of all happiness. But a man wouldn’t understand that. Yes, indeed, clean in every nook and cranny, especially there.’ Melanie takes her handbag from the back of the chair and clamps it under her arm.

‘Berta has to be fed,’ she says. Berta is her aged dwarf goat. Melanie waddles to the garage under her own steam, reaching out to the cabinets and walls for support. She leaves her beige raincoat hanging in the closet. Without a word of goodbye to her son she closes the door to the garage behind her. Stefaan doesn’t know where Melanie got the sudden burst of energy, but he’s impressed by the force with which the garage door swings open and the speed with which Melanie drives out in the grey Fiat. He goes out to the garage, which is full of exhaust fumes, to close the door behind her.

Three hours later Melanie is back, honking at the garage door. Stefaan has just returned from the city, where he has bought a necklace for Mieke from Cartier’s. Melanie has had time to think. She is offended by the fact that she hasn’t been able to see her first grandchild yet because the totally unreliable video player won’t cooperate. ‘Didn’t you take a picture?’ She plops down in her trusty armchair. When Stefaan shows her a Polaroid, her first remark is, ‘Good gracious, that child is as cross-eyed as an otter. That’s going to give you plenty to laugh about, I can see that right now. Just start her off with her knife on the left and her fork on the right.’ She holds the photo an inch from her left eye. ‘Say, are there six toes on that foot? No? Or am I mistaken? Oh, dear! What a knob of a big toe that child has been blessed with. And that forehead—don’t even get me started. I don’t dare look at it for fear it’ll swell even more. Make sure her clothes are cut wide at the neck. And don’t feed her carrots, she’s already as yellow as a banana. Well, you can’t call her pretty, can you, such a tiny baby. Don’t look so disagreeable, tiny babies are never pretty, that’s all I’m saying.’ There’s no stopping her. She maps out the entire naked little body based on defects and curses and deformities. It’s done in many countries: a newborn child is made completely ridiculous before being released into the confusing, demanding world. The well-meaning family does it to divert the attention of the Evil Eye from the child itself.

‘And you,’ she snaps at her son. ‘What are you doing, standing there with your nose hanging out? And with a bouncing baby girl, the most beautiful child in the world. I already know what the future holds for Saaaraaah (she pronounces the name like a yawn). Didn’t think I would, did you? My own flesh-and-blood granddaughter. But son, that child is bound to be a walking disaster, I can see it all now.’

‘A what?’ Stefaan is shocked. Even though his mother’s frankly absurd, ice-cold reception has prepared him for the worst, even though he knows he shouldn’t expect anything consoling from her, this unvarnished, cruel curse is something he hadn’t seen coming.

‘What do you mean?’ Stefaan asks. His voice is hoarse with fatigue and exasperation.

An index finger flies like a pigeon from her heavy bosom and soars prophetically into the air. She, the oracle, clamps her thin lips together. Her hands land resolutely in her lap. Not another word more.

Stefaan says nothing. He himself knows what his little girl is going to be—a top manager or a top consultant, something at the top at any rate—even though at this point her legs are as crooked as a couple of old pear tree trunks. She may be the eighth wonder of the world but he’s not going to tell anyone. Anyone. Even in a stable marriage like his, as well-negotiated as a perpetuity agreement, there are premonitions that are best left unsaid, if only in order to deflate them. They’re too fragile to be sent into the world as words. In addition, Stefaan doesn’t want to exert any unnecessary pressure on people whose company he enjoys. He knows perfectly well how weighty expectations can be. Against his better judgement he begins regarding this little girl as the coat rack from which he will hang the rest of his life, starting now.

On Friday, 2 May 1980, five days after the birth, Mieke, Stefaan, and Sarah drive up the sunken road to the housing estate on the mountain. They turn into Nightingale Lane. Springtime is raging more furiously here than at the mountain’s foot. The avenues are lined with cherry trees in full bloom. Birds hop from branch to branch. A squirrel clings vertically to an oak tree on the property next to the Vandersandens.

In time, Stefaan is going to buy the lot next to theirs so that later on, when their daughter is living in their villa, she’ll have an extra big garden. She’ll play in the woods, too. Beneath years and years of fallen leaves the forgotten clothing and tents of Napoleon’s troops lie rotting. They passed through these woods and camped here for a time. At least that’s the story the real estate agent tells each of the buyers, and now they’re telling it to their own children. They live on the territory of the smallest punk ever to conquer vast parts of the world.

No sooner does the car bearing the new family ride up the driveway than the dog belonging to the neighbours across the street starts barking. He comes charging out of the villa’s open back door. The child in Mieke’s arms wakes up with alarm, startled by the fierce noise. Only a few days later the dog will have a new baby to greet in his own villa, for exactly five days after Sarah’s birth Emily is born, the daughter of neighbours Evi and Marc Vanende-Boelens, she a former model and former nurse, he a leading surgeon.

More insecure than ever about her own tried and tested beauty, Mieke sits in the passenger’s seat. Her ice-cold eyes shoot over the unmown lawn and spot a molehill belonging to the same doomed mole. As soon as Stefaan opens the car door for her, the sunlight begins caressing her blonde-brown hair. With her new acquisition clamped firmly in her arms, Mieke steps out of the car. She begins walking, still rather pale—paler than the baby pressed against her body. It takes a while to get used to the overwhelming open space, but as soon as she sees her mighty round boxwood beside the front door, Mieke knows she is home.

‘I could have sworn it was going to be a boy,’ she says to Stefaan with a trembling voice. The fact that she has just imparted life to Sarah gives her beauty extra radiance and makes her irresistible despite her loose-fitting dress, although Stefaan doesn’t dare lay a finger on her out of pure respect. Mieke plants tender kisses on the tiny girl and places her in Stefaan’s open arms. ‘Even so, I’m deliriously happy with her.’

Her silken cheeks puffed out in the fresh air, her bright little eyes squeezed shut because the sky is pouring down too much light for a newborn, little Sarah kicks against her fluffy sleeping bag. Beaming, Stefaan carries his daughter across the threshold.

Granny 1990

‘Hello, Lord, good morning. It’s been a long time, but I’m back. Let me begin by congratulating you on your amazing victory in East Germany. I heard on the radio that the Christians there had a huge win in the elections.

‘Thank you for this day. I just drank my coffee, so things ought to go well here.

‘It seems like I only come to you when I want to ask for something, or when I have problems, or when I want something else done. I realize that. But just look at me sitting here, eighty-four years old. It’s already so hard just keeping my eyes open every day that I never get around to the rest. I really believe in you, Lord, even though you don’t hear much from me. I want to be clear about that. The fact that I’m here talking to you right now is proof enough.

‘I have something to ask you. Something serious this time. I know I’ve often bothered you with trifles. Far too often, looking back on it. That time when I was fourteen and I had a home economics exam, for instance, it wasn’t proper for me to ask for your help. You would have been quite right not to help me. And I didn’t even need your help anyway. Such a simple exam. I had the best grade in the whole class. The best of forty-one girls. I can still remember how nervous I was the day before the exam. As soon as I saw the questions I knew: piece of cake. I also knew that I would never be allowed to go any further in school, that’s how smart I was. I’m not stupid, you know. How else could I have had such smart children? Thank you for that, God.

‘I’m boring you with trifles. I don’t want to rob you of your precious time. You’re too busy to listen to a lot of hot air. Imagine if everyone came to you with every little trifle they had. No, that’s impossible, you can’t work that way. I’ll get right to the point, God.’

Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier believes that God can explain everything and that he kneads her fate in the palm of his big, superhuman hand just like a meatball. He has the last word, although he tends to keep his mouth shut. For years he was silent about the deaths of her son Alain, who died too young, and her beloved husband André. Melanie is no hypocrite. She’s more a desperate believer, with great pain locked up behind the leaden door of her heart.

It’s a grey Wednesday morning in 1990, only a few months after the Berlin Wall came down five hundred miles farther to the east, a few weeks after Gloria Estefan was released from the hospital across the ocean after her accident, and a couple of days after the enormous Hubble telescope found its place in the universe in order to look down on earth, and Melanie is sitting on the toilet in the smallest room in the house. Melanie is a Flemish woman who always flies the lion standard on holidays, a woman who makes deals with God like a Mafioso with the judge of the most supreme court, a sturdy woman who trudges through the wilderness in her head and sees in it a damp, black-and-white Congolese rain forest.

‘Almighty God, now you really have to help me. It’s an emergency. And between you and me, you haven’t been all that helpful so far. If you help me this time I’ll forget all that. I mean it.

‘I’ll forget how you turned your back on my dear little Alain. I remember his birth as if it were yesterday. People didn’t know anything back then. I didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant, not the first time and not the second time, either. Chubby as I am, chubby a second time. I’ve always been a good eater. Everyone said to me: Melanie, we don’t understand where you put it all. And I was so proud. I just helped myself to another hunk of bread. After that it turned out I was pregnant. I was going to bring another little one into the world, a brother or sister for Stefaan. During that labour I thought I’d die. I lay there for twenty-five hours praying my heart out. You may still remember that, God. It was such a beautiful spring day, although you may not remember it because of all the births in the world happening one after the other.

‘When Alain was born I saw right away that he was a special little man. Those rubbery little hands and feet, just like jellybeans. I was crazy about that little guy. After he was born it took forever for my milk to come in, literally. I had lost blood, towels full of blood. Fortunately I had built up some reserves, but because of the blood loss I didn’t have enough milk. I just kept yammering the livelong day: I’m going to die, my baby is going to die. I don’t know what came over me, but I just felt like it was going to end badly. Except I didn’t know it would take ten years. When Stefaan was born I was just plain happy, and you see, he’s still alive.

‘Everything was fine for a long time. Too fine. André and I couldn’t believe how happy we were with those two boys. They were like two peas in a pod, those two. They did everything together, while most mothers with two sons have to make sure they don’t knock each others’ heads off. Not them. Big brother and little brother, and no one could come between them. Stefaan was the clever little boss, maybe too smart for this world. He’d let people push him around, and I’d have to say: Stefaan, stand up for yourself. Alain was another story. He was the charming klutz who could never sit still. He was always on the lookout for danger. If he passed a tree, he’d climb to the very top and then start screaming, or he’d only get halfway up because the branch broke off. If he saw a hedgehog, five minutes later he’d be pulling the spines out of his backside. If you let him help you in the kitchen, he’d cut all his fingers at once with the potato knife. There’s a big room for worries in a mother’s heart.

‘Alain was ten years old when he went to heaven to keep you company. We lived on the paved road at the time. It was called the paved road but there was very little traffic on it. Stands to reason, since there were almost no cars back then. There were the farmers’ horse carts and mail coaches, that’s about all. There was one person in the village who did have a car. Desmet, the brick manufacturer, with that cigar of his always sticking out of his bulldog mug. And on that horrible, hateful winter day, that car stopped in front of our yard and the door opened. To our utter astonishment Stefaan got out and put an end to our happiness with just a couple of words. Yes, God, I’m telling you the truth. Sometimes I wished I had never been born. Then I never would have lost my child. And the worst of it is: life just goes on. No sooner had Alain been laid in the ground than the neighbour lady came over with sugared almonds. And wouldn’t I like to come see her sister’s little one, to take my mind off my troubles? Wouldn’t that make you crazy, too?

‘After little Alain died I didn’t say a word for five years. It was not an easy time. Because people begin to think: she’s just not opening her mouth, the sourpuss. All she wants to do is sit around and mope. She likes it. But that’s not the way it works. I didn’t like it at all. I had to do it to keep from doing something worse, to keep from screaming. Sometimes I can sit so still that I think it never happened.

‘Don’t fret so, my sisters would say. You have to talk.

‘There’s the door, I’d tell them.

‘You just can’t explain something like that. There you are, literally empty-handed. You hand over the coffin, thank every Tom, Dick, and Harry for coming, and then the next day comes, and the next, and the next. And you say to yourself: Melanie, don’t let on how you feel. Just grin and bear it.

‘And yes, I cultivated a couple of bad habits to help me carry on. But does that bother anybody, I ask myself. No. And people are less bothered if I keep my mouth shut.

‘I hung up Alain’s photo. The focal point of our house, which everyone uncomfortably avoided. I burned my eyes on it every day. Even that doesn’t work anymore. All I see are the outlines of the frame. No, dear God, grief doesn’t wear out. Grief is not a carpet.

‘André had such a hard time. He couldn’t take it anymore. He was a proud man, my André. You can go ahead and say he was just a peasant, God, but on Sunday you could never tell. At least not when he was still in good shape. Six o’clock in the morning in his three-piece suit, walking through the fields to church in his bare feet, dress shoes in his hand to keep from wearing them out, and his watch in his vest pocket. One of those big, beautiful watches, that makes such an impression, you know.

‘His fingers might be blue from the cold, he might have tipped over the only glass of beer he’d had in weeks, his child might be dead, but I never heard André complain. I mean never. Look, God, I complain too much and I know it’s not getting me anywhere, but isn’t it possible to complain too little? Isn’t that a sin as well, not to do enough bad things? It was his downfall, because he locked it all away inside and it sank like lead until it pushed him down so low that all he could do was follow, into the ground, into the grave.

‘Dear Lord, you propose and you dispose and all I can do is resign myself.

‘Sometimes, dear God, I’m really afraid for Stefaan. I just can’t make him out. He can be so preoccupied and abrupt, even though everything’s going his way. With his good looks and his chic, upper-crust lady, with his little Saaaraaah and his enormous villa. Maybe he’s had too many lucky breaks, that can’t turn out well. Everyone has to have his helping of affliction. Everyone. Except for stars like Michael Jackson, such a cheerful black boy. Yes, well, those people aren’t real. It’s all plastic, all for show. Anyway I liked the sound of him better earlier on, with all his little brothers.

‘But I’m rambling, dear God. I want to talk to you about something else: tomorrow Sarah is going to be ten years old. That’s how old Alain was when he died. I know there’s some poisonous gift being passed down in this family. It’s our fate.

‘Now I want to ask you, merciful God: leave Sarah alone and take me. You know that I’m very grateful for the life I’ve had, at least for a little part of it. Spare Sarah and take me. That’s all. It’s about time I saw André and Alain again anyway. Look, God, I’m tired, I’m really tired. You aren’t planning on keeping me here much longer, right? You don’t have to answer me. Just say no or yes. They don’t need me here any longer. I can see it everywhere I look. In the faces of the people around me who say: how much longer is that bitch going to live? In the mirror that grins back at me with a twisted smile, and in the ridiculous calmness that has crept into my life. There are days that I hardly move at all, or hardly make it from my chair to the kitchen.

‘It’s not about me. It’s about my family. I don’t want them all to bleed to death. All those accidents, they have to stop. All those tragedies and all those deaths, I can’t take it anymore. If you have to have one more of us, dear God, then take me.

‘I just want to ask you in a friendly way to please keep my request in mind.

‘Thank you for your attention, dear God.

‘If I might add just one more thing: in the end it’s in your best interest as well. If fate visits us one more time, I swear, I won’t believe in you anymore.’

Mieke 1990

Today Mieke has bought white cabbage and vinegar. Sauerkraut has never been on the menu at 7 Nightingale Lane, but Stefaan kept insisting, so she’s going to make sauerkraut. Mieke has had to overcome her suspicion of the questionable cheap ingredients, vinegar and cabbage. Sauerkraut—the name itself says it all: a combination of something sour and something that can produce dangerous intestinal gas. A food item that in all probability was invented by some bored fool on an ice-cold afternoon in the unattended kitchen of a lunatic asylum. Making sauerkraut could easily take half a day, she has estimated, but she’s been charging ahead due to sheer nervousness. At half past two in the afternoon she’s well ahead of schedule. Preparing this peasant German specialty has not been enough to calm her nerves. There’s real work that will do that: getting down on her hands and knees, endlessly combing the little threads of the rug in the living room like a nervous house cat scratching a scratching post. It’s an aberration that Mieke allows herself when she has worries.

For a woman like Mieke, the world is not a round globe or a flat pancake but a maze with lots of entrances and just one exit that can only be found with the compass of a highly principled upbringing. She learned this during her childhood from her father, a strict man with impressive curling eyebrows that emphasized his wisdom, a prosperous notary of considerable prestige who specialized in corporate law, the proud head of a respectable family with a classic beauty of a daughter, a rebel of a son, and a well-behaved, sweet latecomer to whom they gave the name Mieke. To the great relief of her parents, now more than ten years deceased, Mieke has followed in their footsteps. She is an intelligent woman with class and style, an icon of the values that her parents instilled in her, a radiant beacon of normality in the sea of chaos of 1990.

Mieke’s parents were already quite old when they had her. First there was Lydia, the eldest daughter of Gerard and Camille De Kinder, then came Jempy, and finally it took another twelve years for Mieke to be brought into the world. Mieke’s sister and brother quickly escaped from their parents’ home. Her father the notary, however, was decidedly present throughout her entire childhood. His desk was in the front room of their house. Mieke spied on the many people who came to visit him. People not only came with legal questions but they also brought him their moral problems and dilemmas. The pastor himself felt aggrieved. Mieke had enormous admiration for her father, although her upbringing was a confusing, benumbing cocktail of totally contradictory ingredients. Her father was not only a notary who had a friendly word for everyone, but he was also a dictator who demanded that his children get up every day at six o’clock on the nose, that they keep themselves hidden whenever visitors came, and that they always address him with the same two words: yes, father. At arbitrary moments he was suddenly the loving papa whom they could go to with all their questions, and he surprised his children with extravagant toys. As a child of a father like that you don’t have a clock to tell you when such a moment of grace is about to arrive. Mieke developed her own rigid logic that she lowered over all contradictory signals like a bell jar.

In the living room Mieke sinks down onto her latest acquisition, a hand-knotted Persian rug that took more than three hundred thousand hours to make. She likes her house to be well-ordered and tidy. ‘Other people can do as they like in their shacks,’ she says, ‘but here everything has got to be clean.’ Just what her father used to say approvingly to his floor-mopping wife. The word ‘shack’ does not really apply to the home of Mieke and Stefaan on the mountain. By ‘clean’ Mieke means: not a single hair is allowed to hang from any of the chair legs, not a mote of dust is given the time to flutter down over the bergère armchair, the residents don’t have to keep making arbitrary decisions about where to leave their various things, and all the tassels on the rugs lie straight. The furnishing and maintenance of the villa is a huge job to which Mieke has devoted herself with love.

To keep her shrieking nerves under control she combs the threads of the rug. She combs away Sarah’s habit of shrugging her shoulders when Mieke explodes over the spots of India ink on the white kitchen table; she combs away the child’s pathological indifference because it drives her wild; she combs away the shrill chords that her daughter tries to coax out of her guitar as if she were, uh, Nana Mouskouri. The combing doesn’t fail to have a calming effect. She combs until all the threads are lying neatly side by side and she can breathe a sigh of relief and keep on combing because it does her so much good. Combing rugs helps her the way a glass of wine can help, or stroking a puppy, or covering a baby’s bottom with talcum powder. Yes, it’s a private thing.

Mieke started her curious hobby after Sarah was born. Determined to work off the mushy pudding belly of her pregnancy, ravenously hungry, she spent many hours on her hands and knees combing the rugs. She ruined her knobby knees with all that combing. The doctor mentioned something about housemaid’s knee.

All that rug combing made Mieke slimmer and less gloomy than she had been during the first days of her new life as a mother. No one spoke of postnatal depression back then, a condition that hadn’t yet been diagnosed in their circles in the year 1980. Indeed, the word ‘depression’ was a generic term for lazy people who liked to attract attention by being lackadaisical, nothing that couldn’t be cured by a cold washcloth in the morning, extra hard work during the day, and a good swift kick in the backside. And even if the illness had been known, the proud Mieke would never have allowed her affliction to be characterized by such a banal medical term. Postnatal depression or no, the birth of Sarah had shaped the rustic style of Mieke and Stefaan’s household interior in any case. A house without tassled rugs was not an option for Mieke. She bought heaps of expensive Persian rugs during the months after the birth and she combed herself silly. She may have gone a bit too far, in retrospect, yet combing was certainly better than lying around in bed, wretched and lazy, like a mussel in its shell.

While she’s combing, Mieke runs through all the vexatious possibilities of what can go wrong when a ten-year-old child goes on a one-mile walk. Two days ago Sarah had her birthday, and in addition to a crown and a cheesecake with ten candles Sarah was allowed to pick out a gift. Sarah resolutely chose to go on a journey on foot and without supervision to the village newspaper shop. Her daughter is inventive, that’s one thing you can say about her. And Mieke is a woman of her word: front door open, a coin in Sarah’s hand, and there she goes to the newspaper shop to buy herself a Libelle Rosita magazine. Mieke does not feel easy about this. It’s the very first time she’s let her daughter out on her own. She curses herself for allowing it. Sarah is far too docile, far too good. If anything were to happen to her, Mieke would never forgive herself. Of course there’s no way that Sarah would ever be taken hostage by Palestinians or hit by a car in the silent housing estate, or swept up by hookers from the village. No way. But even so, the most unexpected things are often the first to happen. Especially to a clumsy, innocent child like Sarah, who would give her money away to a moustachioed man in a white van in exchange for a lift.

In this new decade you can’t just send your only child out into the minefield of the world. How can she be so stupid, Mieke says to herself, knowing her daughter already made a failed attempt to run away from home at the age of five and tore her dungarees on the barbed wire around the chicken coop. These are the ideas Mieke is combing out of her head, but they don’t disappear entirely. It’s just like the neighbours. Even if they’re not walking past all the time, they’re always there and they can pop up unexpectedly at any moment. Her neighbour Evi is forever wiping her feet on the unwritten law that you don’t just show up at each other’s door whenever it strikes your fancy.

Evi Vanende-Boelens lives with her husband, the top surgeon Marc Vanende, in a hypermodern house with octagonal windows on an enormous plot of land. One year ago they had an English garden installed, complete with labyrinth, in exactly fifteen days. The garden clashes with the design of the eighties-style house, with its conversation pit, open kitchen, countless different levels, and indoor swimming pool. But the Vanende-Boelens family, liberal to the core, think nothing of making whimsical, ridiculously expensive changes every now and then that send shock waves through the Vandersanden-De Kinder family. Emily is the product of a jovial bon vivant of a father who has been known to hang over the operating table in a shaky state of near delirium but who never loses his concentration, and a devil-may-care mother with the looks of Jane Fonda who takes part in the latest Adidas jogging trends and, with her filthy puff-ball of a dog, fertilizes the front gardens of even the most dignified of the housing estate dwellers at eight o’clock every morning while merrily waving to the passing cars during the daily migration to the city, when any respectable housewife and mother knows she should stay indoors where she belongs. It’s one of the fundamental rules that applies to all the housewives in the villas on the mountain: you can sit on your lazy ass all day long, but in the morning between waking up and waving goodbye you’re expected to work yourself to death for your offspring. Morning is the only time you really have something to do without having to talk yourself into it. Breakfast has to be cleared away, the beds made, and the rooms aired, and for those who are so inclined it’s just a matter of grin and bear it before the first bottle is broken out or the first pack of cookies is torn open, for There Must Be Discipline. This does not apply to the Vanende-Boelens family. Marc is still sleeping it off in bed, Evi is chattering away and laughing, her ponytail bouncing back and forth, and daughter Emily is going about her business. She’s been able to prepare her own sandwiches since she was three and she’s never lost the knack.

‘Mieke, I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but do you happen to have any ice cubes?’ Eyelashes gleaming, Evi is fidgeting at the door and pulling on her short little dress as if she were trying to persuade gravity to lengthen it a bit.

‘Ice cubes?’ Mieke’s eye falls on the sticker she invitingly hung on the doorbell. rain or shine, always welcome, says the flippant little text balloon on an orange background. That has got to go. ‘Of course, Evi, just a minute.’

When Mieke comes back to the front door, Evi points down with her diamond-beringed finger to her neighbour’s legs.

‘Something happen to your knees?’ Mieke looks at the red spots on her knees and shrugs her shoulders.

‘I knew you’d have ice cubes, Mieke. I can always count on you. Oh, yes, I have a letter here. It was in our mailbox for a couple of days but I completely forgot. Sorry. Who is Jempy De Kinder?’

‘My brother. Thank you. And if you need more ice cubes, be sure to come by,’ Mieke says with blatant insincerity.

Looking out the bathroom window she watches the neighbour’s cat search for a comfortable place among her freesias. The words what cats hate rise to the top of her mental shopping list for the garden centre. The neighbours aren’t going to teach the cat, so someone else is going to have to set the limits.

Mieke steps into the shower. She never takes a bath. Baths are for lazy people who have too much time on their hands. The Romans took leisurely baths and even had bath houses. It’s no wonder their decadence was their downfall. In his letter Jempy writes that he’s coming to visit her soon. How long has it been since she’s seen her brother? How anybody can live like Jempy does is beyond her, but it’s out there in that great beyond that her love for her brother lies. He’s like a cat: you don’t know where he’s come from and whose flowers he’s going to destroy, but you can be pretty sure he’ll be back, in perfect health and beaming all over. Stefaan is more like a dog. She lovingly keeps him on a short leash. Every now and then he’s moody, sometimes even paranoid, and when he’s in his basket he licks his own wounds. He’s not always Mr. Cheerful, but she values his sincerity. On the other hand, the blindingly white smile of Marc across the street is a perfect example of play-acting. When you take out the garbage cans after sundown and you catch a glimpse of his professional doctor’s grin, it can scare the living daylights out of you. As if his fee had something to do with the width of his smile.