Jan Vantoortelboom

His Name Is David

Translated from the Dutch by Vivien D. Glass

World Editions

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

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Jan Vantoortelboom, 2014

English translation copyright © Vivien D. Glass, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Mark Owen/Trevillion 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 Meester Mitraillette in the Netherlands in 2014 by
Atlas Contact, Amsterdam

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

isbn 978-94-6238-072-1

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)

Distribution Europe (except the Netherlands and Belgium): Turnaround Publisher Services, London

Distribution the Netherlands and Belgium: cb, Culemborg, the Netherlands

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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For my father and mother †

##

I leave this downtrodden life a young man: strong in body, clear in mind. It is not what I want, but I haven’t been asked. They’ve tied me to a post. A few metres behind me is a beech tree, massive on the verge of bloom. Looking through the frost-covered branches, I see blue sky, a trail of cloud slicing across it unhindered. The ground is cold. I feel a sense of timelessness I’ve never experienced before, as the morning dew slowly seeping into the fabric of my trousers grows tepid. By noon, I’ll be as cold as the earth, as the frost on the branches of the beech. As the air.

I lose control of my bladder, staining myself with the comforting warmth of my own body. I shall undoubtedly be forgiven the disgrace.

Spring is near. The days are lengthening already. Soon, the sun will mercilessly smother winter. Then man and beast will bow down expectantly, and new life bloom: butterflies emerging from cocoons, buds bursting into blossom. They will mate fluttering over my soldier’s grave, the butterflies.

The men in front of me are tossing crumbs to the squabbling magpies and jackdaws. In the field lies the carcass of a cow, one of its legs pointing stiffly at the sun. Then I see him. Galloping straight toward me, he jerks at the reins just metres away from the men. The stallion rears up, forelegs flailing in the air, spraying flecks of froth around. Clods of earth fly from its hooves. A soldier rushes up, grabs the reins and calms the horse with loving strokes over its muzzle. The officer dismounts, nods at his freezing men and turns to look at me. He is my executioner. I hope he’s a good man. A righteous human being. Not a monument to a murderous war. Looking up at him hurts my neck.

‘Is there anything you want to say, David? A last confession, perhaps? I can arrange it for you,’ he says.

He’s nice. He knows my name. Two frost-blue eyes in a weary face. I could say that I don’t believe in life after death, that I’ve never yearned for a god who is dead and buried, that my father taught me faith is a weakness of mankind, and that a confession, to me, would make as little sense as it would bring me salvation. I could also say that, though I honestly tried to make something of life, my mother’s forgiveness is the only thing I want from it now. Looking at him, I know my words would touch him. His hair looks like a wilted dandelion. He would make an effort to listen to me, to understand, and perhaps make a few meaningful remarks. Will his face be the last thing I see as the bullets cut through the tissue of my heart? I don’t know his name.

Or should I close my eyes when the rifles are shouldered and the black barrels aimed at me? Look to the inside? At my little brother, crawling through the garden on his knees; at my parents, standing in the small, sunlit kitchen together? Or at the class I used to teach, the boys of Year Six? Marcus in front. They would undoubtedly come to my rescue. Brandishing their wooden sabres and bows. Their hands, which must have grown even larger and coarser by now, unfastening the ropes around my wrists, cutting the strands with the pocket knives they aren’t allowed to carry.

I’d better not think about the two loves of my life.

A command rings out. The soldiers take up position behind a line. Standing closer now. I look at each of them in turn. They are strangers. I turn my face to the side, pitying the soldiers of my platoon who are forced to watch from a distance, and shake my head at the officer, who is still bent over to talk to me, asking if there is anything he can do. Then he suddenly falls silent. He has understood. He realises that at this stage, words would be nothing but a hindrance.

Am I afraid? They’re about to kill me, after all. Aiming at the white ribbon pinned to my uniform, on the spot behind which my heart is hammering away. So loud, I hear it thudding in my throat, in my temples. The heartbeat of the life they want to take from me.

I’m not afraid. I did my best.

##

When the time is ripe, the fledgling chicks clamber to the edge of their nest and jump. Occasionally, one ends up floundering in a puddle, others are plucked out of the air by a bird of prey before having felt the power of their wings. The majority, however, flap away into the distance, their tiny bird hearts driven by a primeval power. Just like I did, on the day I closed my parents’ front door behind me and soared to Ghent railway station like a young seagull, taming the turbulent wind beneath my feathers. Despite the suitcase I lugged with me, my feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as I walked to the station, heart pounding in my chest. I had taken my leap and no one around me had the faintest idea: the man in the three-piece suit crossing my path with his walking stick stared straight ahead, the costermonger didn’t even notice me walk by. Not even the railway official who pushed my train tickets over the counter toward me with stubby fingers knew I was flying the coop that day, to a corner of the country I’d never been before; though he might have recognized the hope in my eyes, the restlessness in my limbs.

I pulled myself up by the metal pole, gripping my suitcase tightly, and looked for a window seat. My destination was Ypres. From there, I would take the tram to Elverdinge. It was early in the morning; I expected to arrive shortly after noon. I’d never heard of the village of Elverdinge until that particular morning about a week ago, when Father uttered the name at the table. I did know a little about Ypres, the city of cats. In the Middle Ages, cats were thrown from the roof of the Cloth Hall for good luck.

The smoke of a cigar curled upward. I watched the plume of smoke as it dragged itself over the back of the seat like a ghost, drifting toward me. That morning, my father explained to me that the name of Elverdinge was a male first name, derived from the names Athal and Fritho by a list of phonetic laws (which he also recited to me). He had read up on it, had even discussed it with a professor. I was drowsy and hungry. Besides, I’d become used to his reeling off long lists of the most trivial facts. Ever since my little brother’s untimely death, almost four years ago at the time, he had dedicated himself with even more tenacity than before to Professor Pekhart’s theory of the Quaternity. Knowledge, in the useless form of randomly amassed facts, had become his faith, had lifted his spirits again after a deep depression. Never needed a confessional, a holy water font or the Blessed Trinity, he said. Mother was frying eggs and a juicy slice of bacon. The smell drove the night air out of the kitchen. My father went on talking. I sat out his speech, and after a long pause that seemed to signal its end, tucked into the breakfast placed in front of me.

Afterward, he asked me how much I remembered of what he’d told me. Wiping my mouth on the dishcloth, I mumbled something about founding father Elverd and his followers. He was silent for a while, before reiterating the whole string of phonetic laws that had led to the place name Elverdinge, and closing with the remark that science and knowledge were based on repetition. It was one of the things Professor Pekhart had taught him. Then he rose, bent down to me and shook my hand across the table, congratulating me on my first job as a teacher in Elverdinge. I sat rooted to my chair. Had he gone mad overnight? Elverdinge? Mother wept, rubbing her expressionless eyes. She sat down beside me, on what used to be my brother Henri’s chair, and started buttering a slice of bread with shaking hands. I didn’t dare look at her for very long, out of fear of what I would read in her eyes. These days, my parents rarely sat on the sofa together the way they used to, a cup of coffee with a drop of milk on the table at their feet. When my father wasn’t working, he spent his time in the shed. I was in the way. I was the wedge driven deep into the log of their marriage. After Ratface’s death—how he used to laugh about the nickname I had given him—I went to university, even though I no longer wanted to. They made me. I did my best. The academic years flew by almost in a haze, as if time itself wanted to get away as quickly as possible from the day Ratface died.

‘I have been able to get the position for you,’ Father said. ‘It took some doing, but you are to be the teacher of Year Six at Elverdinge boys’ school.’ Mother stared at the slice of bread that was still lying on the board in front of her, open and glistening with butter.

‘Thank you,’ I murmured.

‘It is time,’ Father said.

He was putting on a brave face.

‘Time you stood on your own two feet.’

I nodded, surprised at the feeling of excitement and adventure bubbling up in me.

They gave me an envelope with money. To buy food and coals in the winter—expensive things, Father said. And a suit, as a schoolmaster should always look his best, Mother said. She had folded the slice into a sandwich.

‘You are expected at the school next week. So you can get to know the place. The pupils won’t be there of course, it’s still the summer holidays. But you’ll meet the Mother Superior, and get to see the timetable, books and so on. You can move into the house I rented for you. Everything has been arranged,’ Father said.

I thanked him. They were holding hands. I had not seen them this close together for a long time. My father’s side whiskers looked like tufts of wool torn from a sheep. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat.

The closer we got to the village of Elverdinge—the tram had just passed the stop in Brielen, the village before Elverdinge—the edgier I felt. Wheat country. Meadows with islets of daisies and buttercups. Fields of maize. Everything slowly drifted past me. Occasionally, some boys would leap on the footboard to chug along for a bit before being chased off by the ticket collector. My belly rumbled with a mixture of excitement and fear. It was one of those summer days on which the sky was blue from morning till night. A cheerfully bright pale blue at first. And later, after sunset, a deep and melancholy indigo. I could make out the grey outline of a hill on the horizon. I had never been this far to the west of the country. The tram passed the first houses, and I could hear the driver’s call over the click-clacking of the rails and the whistling steam. The ticket collector sprang to his feet, shouted ‘Elverdinge station’ and disappeared into the next carriage, shouting the same thing again.

We came to a halt opposite the Belle Vue pub. A red flag flapped above the door. Without a glance at their passengers, the stoker, engine driver and ticket collector hurried inside. I put my hand on my suitcase, which I had placed in the aisle beside my seat. Only after the last passenger had walked past—a woman carrying bags that were bursting at the seams—did I leave the carriage. I walked toward the church tower and stopped in front of a large town house. Two square herb gardens bordered by boxwood hedges flanked the path to the front door, accentuating the building’s symmetry. The door swung open, and seeing a man in a black cassock and a wooden cross on a string around his neck stroll out, I realized it was the presbytery. I wanted to go on, but the priest motioned me to wait. He hastened toward me, leaving the door ajar.

‘Mr Verbocht?’

My surprise must have been written all over my face, as he went on to explain to me in detail how he had reached that conclusion. He also knew about my appointments both at the boys’ school and with Mr Vantomme, the landlord of the house I would live in during the coming school year. To my annoyance, he’d even made inquiries about my appearance.

‘So you see, I recognized you the moment I saw you walk past,’ he said. ‘I would like offer you a cup of coffee, but I’m about to conduct a funeral and need to make some preparations.’ He said it with the same seriousness he had put into his earlier explanation. ‘I’ll pay a visit when you are properly settled in.’

‘All right, Father,’ I said.

He shook my hand and went back inside. I heard the bolt slide across. I hadn’t gone ten metres when I heard footsteps and he was standing behind me again.

‘I forgot to tell you, the boys’ school and your house are that way,’ he said, pointing his arm to the other side of the crossing where I had got off the tram.

‘You’ve been given the addresses, I hope?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I have. Thank you, Father,’ I said. I made no move to follow his instructions. He gave me a doubtful look, twiddled his thumbs for a while and eventually turned to go, glancing over his shoulder one last time before disappearing between the two angular herb gardens. I decided to continue my walk. I had not been given an exact time I should be at the school. One thing he didn’t know, at least. Further on, I came to a surprisingly plain square paved with rounded cobbles. From the corner of my eye, I saw the door of the pub on the corner opening. An old man was placed firmly on a stool in the fresh air. Bending over, he spewed a thick stream of vomit on the ground between his shoes. The man who had pressed him down on the chair, and who now seemed to be watching over him, was short but broad-shouldered. He noticed me. I said hello. The bell of the bakery door tinkled and two boys came out, digging their fingers into the white, round sides of the loaves they carried. They shot me a guilty look, stuck out their tongues and ran away. I turned round and started walking in the direction of the boys’ school.

##

The Mother Superior placed the list of names on her desk. Each name was marked with a stern black dot. She read them out loud, rhythmically tapping her index finger. I listened, more to the way she read than her actual words. When she stopped and looked at me, I was afraid she would ask me to repeat the names. For some reason, one name had registered: Marcus Verschoppen. I don’t remember what made it stand out from the others, as she went on to tell me some trivialities about each of the eight boys’ backgrounds. She hoped I would remember the facts, though her tone of voice, punctuated by her ticking nail, did not seem to express much confidence. She nevertheless considered it her duty to provide a new teacher with all the relevant information. Could it have been her slight hesitation when reading the name, as if silently saying more than she put into words, making the rhythm of her ticking finger falter? She ended by saying I was in luck, I’d be able to see the boys, if I wanted to, because at this very moment they were being taught—she hastily thumbed through a little red book lying on the desk before continuing—Catechism in classroom four. Experience had shown that the boys found learning the texts by heart difficult, so they started them early, in August. I suddenly wondered how on earth my father had managed to get me a job as a teacher in a Catholic school. I wasn’t christened, hadn’t attended church as a child, had not received my first Communion and had never been instructed in religious subjects. The finger had stopped tapping and was frozen in mid-air like a hook.

‘The classroom is at the end of the corridor,’ she said. The hook straightened out as she pointed in its direction. ‘Incidentally, it will also be your classroom.’

So there I was, on a Friday afternoon under a sunny cotton-wool sky, peeking in through the window of my classroom. And there they were. Caught in a shaft of light slanting down from the tall window. My class. The boy in the first row was sitting on his own. He was wearing a smart white shirt. His hair was combed to the side, parted on the right. I would have bet my last cent on his name being Marcus Verschoppen. I recognized the twins, too: scrawny, ginger-haired boys. I looked at the sombre walls, the portraits of the Belgian Kings, the cupboard with its halo of grime, and high above the blackboard, directly over the portrait of King Leopold II, Jesus Christ.

In my mind, I started decorating the almost maliciously bare classroom with wall charts, drawings by the boys and poems. I imagined the children’s voices and the music that would bring it back to life. I would even put these abandoned windowsills to use. I jumped when a hard object hit the window with a bang, cracking the pane. It was then they spotted me—a new face, caught peering in through the window. They stared at me for several seconds, united in uncertainty, until the lips of the boy in the second row moved. Then came the laughter, collective, a bomb of voices exploding into the outdoors through the gap underneath the door. I turned and walked away.

##

‘David?’

‘David?’

Opening my eyes, I saw my little brother’s head as a dark patch in the semi-darkness of the room. He was sitting upright, his knees pulled up. A block of moonlight tumbled in through the skylight, from nowhere.

‘What is it?’

‘Why don’t bears have long tails?’ he asked.

I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’

‘No! Now!’

He used to do that to my parents, too. Every time they went to bed, he would be sitting cross-legged in his cot, wide awake. My mother said it was the fault of the noisy steps, that the creaking woke him. He didn’t make a sound, until my parents had changed into their nightclothes and climbed into bed, and the house had gone eerily quiet—then he started. Question after question. I was sometimes jolted from my sleep too, in my room on the other side of the landing. Not by his reedy voice, or Mother’s answers. But by Father. By the sound of his spanking my brother’s bottom to get him to stop. Or his thundering string of curses just before the spanks. Then came the crying, which only stopped when Mother got out of bed and cradled him in her arms. They argued about it. Mother wanted to keep my brother in their room a little longer, while Father, who had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work, wanted to throw him out, cot and all.

His questions were usually about animals. That was my doing. During the day, I dragged him through the garden where we lifted the patio flagstones and watched the earthworms, ants and woodlice panic as the roof of their world disappeared. Some frantically tried to crawl away, others scrambled through exposed tunnels, creeping and writhing over each other. We bored into holes and crevices with sticks, digging out eggs and larvae. Then we would stroll down the gravel path to the kitchen garden without giving the garden shed, its windows covered in fairy-tale cobwebs, a second glance. To the hedge. That was the boundary. Pointing through the hornbeam hedge to the woods, I told him that large, wild animals lived there: foxes, deer, badgers. Even wild boars with curved tusks. Bears and wolves, too, I whispered with wide-open eyes. At that point, he’d turn round and run inside. In the evening, the questions rose like bubbles in the descending silence of the night.

‘Mum? Mum?’

‘Shush. Keep it down. Dad needs his sleep,’ Mother whispered.

‘How many wolves live in the woods?’

‘Wolves? Silly boy. There aren’t any wolves here.’

‘But David says there are.’

I always giggled when I heard that.

‘David is pulling your leg,’ Mother said. ‘I’ll box his ears tomorrow.’

She never did.

‘And bears?’

‘No bears, either.’

‘Mum?’

‘Go to sleep now, or Dad will get angry.’

The morning I woke up to the sound of axe blows and cracking wood, I knew at once what was going on. Looking out of my dormer window, I could see Father chopping up the cot. The image shocked me—the violent blows of the axe, the same one he used to chop the chickens’ heads off.

‘Four’s the perfect number,’ my father told me when I had run downstairs to join him. ‘There won’t be any more.’

He was dragging the chopping block into the garden, to hack the planks into even smaller pieces. His axe came very close to his thumb. At every chop, I was afraid he would lop off his thumb, black-rimmed nail and all. From then on, my little brother and I shared my bed. I was ten at the time, he was four.

He dug his elbow into my side.

‘Why doesn’t the bear have a long tail?’

I didn’t have the faintest idea, but remembered a story from one of the books Mother used to teach us to read.

‘A very long time ago, his tail froze off,’ I said.

‘No it didn’t!’

‘Shhh! Be quiet.’

He was silent for a while, watching the door closely.

‘So how did it happen?’ he asked, once he was satisfied there were no footsteps coming up the stairs and the door stayed shut. Slowly pulling up my knees and clearing my throat with a deep, guttural sound, I tried to remember the rest of the story.

‘The monster awakens from hibernation and rises up from the ice valley,’ I improvized. Giggling, he tried with all his strength to push down my knees. He had never succeeded before. It gave me time to think, to frame my answer to his question in my mind. The wooden bedframe creaked. He was leaning his full weight against my legs. Slowly, I let them slide down.

‘Now tell me!’ he whined.

‘Well, it happened one very cold winter. So cold, the ice on the ponds was thirty centimetres thick,’ I said. I took hold of his hands and held them apart at approximately the right distance.

‘This thick?’ he asked incredulously.

I nodded, looking at the two round spots in his face where his eyes were. Silver moonlight surrounded his head. I went on.

‘Once upon a time, there were a fox and a bear. The bear was very skinny, and the cruel, sly fox, who wanted to play a joke on him, said he would show him a place to find food. The bear knew the fox and his pranks, but was far too hungry to be suspicious. The fox told him to make a hole in the ice, and with his last strength, the bear managed to do it. Then the fox told him to sit on the hole dangling his tail in the water and wait for a fish to bite; he had tried it himself and it had worked like a charm.’

Out loud, the story sounded ridiculous. I knew he didn’t believe me, but he hung on my words all the same.

‘Then, the hunters came.’

I shouldered an imaginary rifle and closed one eye to take aim, which he couldn’t see in the dark.

‘And then? And then?’

He pulled down my arm, bending my thumb so far the joint cracked.

‘The fox escaped, of course. The bear wanted to, but his tail was frozen in the ice. He was stuck fast. He twisted and turned his bum, while the voices of the approaching hunters came ever closer. Panicking, he pushed and pulled, harder and harder ... until his tail snapped off.’

My brother pondered for a while, then laughed in my face.

‘What a load of rubbish,’ he said, his voice more breath than sound.

‘It is, actually,’ I admitted. ‘But it could have happened that way. Don’t you think?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It would have hurt the bear, when his tail started freezing. Animals don’t like being hurt, either.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, glad he had thought of that himself.

‘Sleep tight, Ratface.’

I called my brother Ratface, a name I gave him when he was less than a year old. Not because his hair was short and spiky; on the contrary—it was white and fine, and there was so much of it that people sometimes mistook it for a white cap when Mother took him to the bakery or the butcher’s shop in the village. She laughed about it.

‘People who say that are talking through their hats,’ Father said when she told us.

I called him Ratface because for months, he only had two incisors in his lower gums, and my parents started to worry whether the other teeth would ever come through.

##

Mr Vantomme lived close to the school. I knocked at the door and waited. Then I peeked through the semi-transparent net curtain, but nothing moved. I knocked again. No sign of life. Only by shielding the sides of my face against the sun was I able to detect movement inside, which turned out to be a cat, lazily stretching itself on the back of an armchair. Then I spotted an envelope, folded four times and wedged into a gap in the window frame. I wrenched it free, flattened the paper and saw the name Mr Bucht – 91 scribbled on it. Inside the envelope was a key. I slipped it into my trouser pocket and walked in the direction of Boezinge, to the house on number 91.

The key didn’t fit. I fumbled at the lock, pushed my shoulder against the door while trying to turn the key, tugged at it when that didn’t work, forced the key deeper into the keyhole, tried turning again, but the door wouldn’t open. Maybe I could get in through the back door. The garden was a mass of weeds. The key didn’t fit there, either. At the back of the garden, I saw a wooden shack with a heart carved into the door. I went back to the front and decided to kill the time sitting on the doorstep. Involuntarily, my thoughts wandered. The boys I saw earlier that day. Ratface could have been one of them. I had become used to the moments my thoughts turned to him, to seeing flashes of his presence in everyday objects, in animals, in the movement of an arm or a leg. My bum was starting to hurt. I stood up to walk back to Mr Vantomme’s house. This time, he was at home. I introduced myself politely and shook his hand. He smacked his lips. When I told him the key didn’t fit, he gave me a bewildered look, turned on the heels of his threadbare slippers and mumbled something to a row of photographs as he shuffled past them down the hall. He could hardly walk. I thought I saw some kind of lump between his legs, but decided that had probably been a pocket of air caught in the fabric of his oversized trousers. A moment later, a similar key was stuffed into my hand. He assured me this was the right one and apologized for the misunderstanding, saying he was but an old man, burdened with a failing memory. He asked me whether I had brought my wife and children along, as life would be lonely without them. And did I want a cup of coffee, because his wife had been dead these ten years and now his bitch Penny had also died last week.

‘Cancer,’ he said pityingly. ‘Body covered in lumps. Same as my own late wife. Can such a disease be passed from humans to dogs? Through a flea or mosquito bite, perhaps?’

I said it didn’t seem likely to me, that it was kind of him to offer me a cup of coffee, but that my journey had tired me out and I would prefer to go home.

The lock turned with a click, and the door opened without a squeak or creak. A promising start. The plainness of the living room also appealed to me: a table and two chairs, an armchair in the corner next to the window, and next to the stove, which was a kind of potbelly stove, a larder cabinet.

‘Everything a man needs,’ I mused. The back door didn’t open quite as smoothly. There was the shack with the heart door again. I cleared a path through the thistles and nettles until I reached it. The door handle came loose in my hand and didn’t seem to fit the mouldered hole when I tried pushing it back in. Leaving the door ajar, I pulled down my trousers. The seat felt damp, and I realized a moment too late that I didn’t have anything to wipe myself with. Some kind of large leaf would do. I emptied my bowels, hoping there was no one around to hear the repulsive noise. Through the cracks in the wall I could see a magnificent pink-orange haze where the sun had set. Standing up reluctantly with wet buttocks, I pulled my underpants up to my knees and hobbled to the weeds, in search of my leaf. Amazingly, I found just the thing, a broad leaf on a thick stem—probably rhubarb. I tore it off, bent over and wiped my backside. A cat in heat was wailing somewhere.

I climbed the stairs to look for my bed. With a bit of luck, it would even be made, though I doubted it when I saw the state of the stairs. Every other step was cracked. A recipe for a broken leg. I wasn’t disappointed when I entered the bedroom: there was a bed, even if it looked more like a large trough. And a mattress, too, or rather a bag filled with old straw, but soft enough. No sheets. It would do for now. The nights weren’t very cold yet.

I pictured myself lying there. My hands crossed on my belly. My feet side by side. Just like Ratface had lain at his wake. What if I died here in my sleep? Who would be the first to find me? Mr Vantomme? But he had a hard enough time walking, never mind climbing the stairs. He’d send over some handyman or other, in which case my body would be carried downstairs by a complete stranger. Perhaps he’d fall down through the cracks in the steps, corpse and all, giving me a posthumous skull fracture and brain haemorrhage. Blood leaking out of my ears. Soaking my hair. Just like Ratface’s. Scolding myself for my cowardly fretting, I turned to one side.

The caterwauling started again, closer this time. After yearning for silence for thirty torturous minutes, I got out of bed and tried to open the attic window. It was sealed shut. Besides, I didn’t have anything at hand I could have hurled at the creature, which I suspected was sitting in the roof gutter. Standing outside, in the light of a mottled moon, I couldn’t make it out anywhere. I climbed back into my trough, where I tossed and turned before finally going to sleep: the sea was rippling silver. I stared vacantly at the crestless waves. My feet stepped over the glistening silver and onto the sand, which gave way under the heels of my boots. Waves crashing against a distant rocky coast, my footprints walking away from the sea. Everything was silent. And I was alone. No squealing, naked women running up to me, breasts bobbing up and down to the rhythm of their steps. A bank of fog rolled down the beach. Suddenly, a little boy emerged from the fog, walking toward me with outstretched arms. Barefoot. His face a grey patch. Greyer than the fog. Gripped by fear, I walked backward, back into the water, my eyes glued to the grey face. When the seawater was at my lips I kept on walking, wanting to drown myself. I woke with a start in the falling dusk, gasping for breath. Several confused seconds later, I heard the cat whining again.

##

It was on one of my explorations of Elverdinge’s country lanes that I met him. After the heat of the days before, the gentle sunshine was a relief. He was standing at the junction where the straight drive met the winding Hospital Lane. In his right hand he was carrying a bag and a notebook. His left hand was in his trouser pocket. Beside him was an Alsatian, ears pricked. I didn’t notice them until I was quite close. They were standing as still as the pollard willows guarding the drive. I looked at him, intrigued by the bag and notebook. It was not a sight I would have expected to see that afternoon, on the last Saturday of the harvest month. I slowed down, saw that the dog had put back its ears and stopped wagging, its tail lying motionless beside it like a black snake. I stopped a couple of metres in front of them.

‘Good day, sir,’ the boy said.

He took his hand out of his pocket and signalled to the dog, who instantly stopped growling.

‘Good afternoon, Marcus,’ I said.

He jumped at the sound of his name coming from the mouth of a stranger; he didn’t recognize me.

‘Does he bite?’ I asked.

‘Buck won’t hurt you.’

I pointed at his bag and notebook.

‘Going insect hunting?’

‘Butterflies,’ he said.

‘You will set them free again, I hope?’

‘After I’ve drawn them.’

He tapped on the notebook with his index finger.

‘May I see your drawings? Only if you don’t mind,’ I added quickly when I saw his hesitation. But he carefully placed his bag on the ground and handed me the sketchbook. His fingers looked stubby, the fingertips plump. They didn’t match his lean body.

‘Very nice drawings,’ I said, impressed by the accuracy of the colours and details.

‘Thank you.’

He smiled, scrutinizing me curiously with eyes the colour of hazelnuts. In the distance behind his back, a cart pulled by two draught horses turned into the drive. The man on the box shouted something and a whip smacked down on the horses’ backs. Marcus had heard it too, and turned round. We stood to one side in the grass. I was still holding his sketchbook as we waited for the approaching cart, which left a cloud of dust and sand in its wake.

‘I have to go,’ the boy said in a worried tone of voice.

He grabbed the book I held out to him. The cart slowed down but didn’t stop. With a jerk of his head, the man ordered Marcus to jump on behind. The dog went first with an effortless bound, but the boy ran after the cart stiffly, trying to place his bag and notebook on the jolting vehicle as it gathered speed before awkwardly scrambling onto it himself. The man didn’t look back once. When the whip cracked a second time and Marcus was safely installed in the back, he waved to me.

##

Ratface’s arrival was a major event. His scream woke me up, rang in my new life. I had never looked forward to anything so much—at six years old, I had already given up hope of ever having a little brother. Leaping out of bed, I opened the dormer window and savoured the morning air for a moment: a mixture of peppermint, verbena and lavender that rose up from Mother’s herb garden. As always, I scanned the primroses and buddleias for sleeping butterflies, wings pressed together, weighed down by dew drops. Then I ran to the door. My fingers already clutched the handle when the realisation dawned on me that I would have to wait for Father. The night before, sitting on the edge of my bed and temporarily adopting my mother’s habit of drawing a cross on my forehead with her thumb before I went to sleep, he had forbidden me to leave my room.

‘Tonight’s the night,’ he said. ‘Tonight, the baby will come.’

And only once everything was over and my little brother (for it was to be a boy, even though my father would have preferred a girl to balance out the family) was sleeping in his cot, he would fetch me. I looked at the toys Father and I had made for him together—a pull cart, a rocking horse and a castle—sawn and assembled from the planks he hoarded in the shed. Painted with a home-made mixture of birch leaves, beetroot, coffee and egg, prepared in glass jars by Mother. For the horse’s mane, I had searched the fences for wool, which I knew sometimes got caught on sharp protrusions; rubbing against them, the sheep would leave behind tufts of wool like small unravelled clouds. The horse was a white stallion, the mount of knights and princes. I watched the dust in the pillar of sunlight slanting into my room from the window and promised out loud —and for the thousandth time—to look after my brother, to teach him everything I knew, to take him out to play when the sun shone, play games with him at the kitchen table when it rained and protect him from whatever or whoever wanted to hurt him. When my father finally came upstairs, I could tell all was well. His eyes shone. He put out his hand and hugged me. My hand in his, we went downstairs side by side. I bumped my elbow on the banister, but ignored the pang of pain. This was a happy day.

One Saturday toward noon, wanting to help my mother who was preoccupied with my brother, I tried to lift a pot of potatoes from the stove with two thick oven mitts and scalded my arm. I had turned my face away from the hot steam escaping from under the lid and hadn’t noticed the pot was tilting. The lid slid off and a slosh of boiling water splashed over my arm. I dropped the pot, my scream cutting through my parents’ peaceful Saturday routine. A glass bowl toppled over and smashed to pieces on the floor. Mother wailed, Father quickly carried me outside and dipped my arm into the rainwater barrel, up to my shoulder joint. He was holding me like that when I fainted. I don’t know how much time had passed when I came round in the armchair, my mother carefully bandaging my skinned hand that was smeared with a tar-like herbal ointment. There was no supper that evening. When she was finished, my mother washed me, dressed me up and combed my hair, and I walked the long way to the doctor with Father, light-headed and with my pain-free hand in his.

The waiting room was empty, the ceiling high. The chairs creaked at the slightest movement. I counted the heartbeats of the throbbing pain in my hand. At two-hundred-and-fifty-seven, the door opened. I stood up and followed the doctor across a stream of blue tiles to the other side of the corridor. Father closed the door.

‘Let’s have a look at your arm,’ the doctor said to me, removing the bandages. He snorted when he saw the dark-grey ointment and inhaled its stench.

‘What is this?’ he asked Father.

‘A herbal ointment his mother made.’ The ointment was so thick and viscous the doctor wasn’t able to examine the burn. He turned to a cabinet and took out a tube of cream.

‘Apply this daily,’ he told Father in a stern voice. ‘For a week.’

He turned to face me.

‘What’s your name?’

‘David.’

‘Well, David. Come back next week,’ he said.

I nodded. He fixed me with his stare until I was so uncomfortable my cheeks started burning with embarrassment. He had large, brown eyes. Hairs curling at his temples.

Father settled the bill.