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