Stop! We can’t just shrug this off. All the colour drains from the room. No one dares take a breath. We’d step in and do something if we could. Stefaan, just let it pass. It happened in another lifetime.
‘What do you mean?’ Stefaan pants. ‘What do you mean? I’m not going to be drawn into this. No, not me.’
‘You’re right. It’s my fault,’ says Mieke, who has shocked herself with her cruel swipe.
‘That’s not what I’m saying. You’re also just the product of your upbringing.’
‘Yes, thanks a lot,’ she says, cloyingly sweet. ‘At least I had an upbringing, not obedience training like animals on a farm.’
Stefaan snorts like a mare who’s just run a race.
‘You come home and stick your feet under the table and you don’t have five words for me.’ Mieke rolls out the heavy artillery.
There’s a lather of rage on Stefaan’s lips. His voice cracking, he shouts, ‘I work myself to the bone and it’s still not good enough.’
‘How hard is it to be friendly to your wife every once in a while, someone who toils away all day long? Sometimes it feels like I’m living with your mother.’
Sarah watches as her parents take turns placing stones on the scale of love, a scale that isn’t made for such weight and soon gives way, leaving two people facing each other, trembling with rage, overwhelmed by the debris of all those complaints, their hearts headed for some unknown depth, quivering, swirling, each one determined for the very last time not to be taken in by this comedy, which has been going on for more than ten years and which no one with an ounce of sense in his head can call a good marriage.
‘It’s all my fault, all of it,’ Mieke cries. ‘I should be dead! Where’s a gun?’
‘Calm down!’
‘Just kill me, that’s all I ask. Do me a favour and kill me.’
‘There’s no talking to you.’
‘But I am talking, right? I’ve even come up with a solution.’
It’s either the hunger or the commotion, but Sarah suddenly feels faint. She drops down against the wall. She can’t get any air. Now she knows for sure: her parents are going to get divorced because they hate each other.
Together they begin howling at the moon, at the stars, at each other’s darkest, most hateful, most unbearable shadows and delusions. Stefaan can no longer control himself, and with all the outraged fury and strength he has in him he kicks at the door to the utility room, the only door that isn’t made of oak. The door answers with a crunch. He’s left hanging in the splintery hole. He begins hopping around on one foot, the other having been swallowed up by the gaping mouth in the door. He isn’t able to wrench himself loose.
‘Now that’s a solution,’ Mieke cries.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Stefaan says, instantly pale and serene. Blood is starting to flow where his ankle has disappeared into the door.
‘Oh dear oh dear, you’re bleeding,’ cries Mieke. She hurries to the kitchen and comes back with a bucket and a sponge. She wipes the blood from his leg and begins to scrub the surrounding floor. Blood, stubborn stuff.
As in the most idiotic slapstick comedy, the front doorbell suddenly rings. Mieke, torn between two places where her presence is required, decides to complete her tasks one after the other.
‘Stefaan, everything is going to be fine,’ she keeps repeating as she squeezes the sponge into the red water.
Stefaan can’t think of anything better to do than smile his eternal smile and say, deathly pale, ‘I’m going to deal with this. Everything is under control. You go get the door.’ He tries to pull his foot out with a single tug but the door refuses to release its prey from its mouth of splinters.
‘Sarah, help me out here!’ Stefaan calls out. ‘Go get a saw and hammer out of the garage.’
More exemplary than ever, Sarah deals with this moment of crisis by playing the role of obedient child. She goes out to Stefaan’s gigantic do-it-yourself arsenal and picks out a hammer and a small jigsaw.
‘If that’s Ulrike again with more of her penny-pinching, I’ll get rid of her fast enough,’ Mieke grumbles. Her neighbour Ulrike is extremely well off. Her husband is a professor of economics and sits on dozens of boards of directors, yet Ulrike loves a bargain. For months now she’s been trying to convince Mieke to have a sauna installed so both of them can get a twenty percent discount. But it isn’t Ulrike. Marc from across the street, not exactly the shy type, slips right past Mieke and walks into the dining room uninvited.
‘Marc! What a surprise!’ Mieke runs after him.
‘Hi, Mieke. I have a question for Stefaan. My regular golf partner just cancelled, and … ’
‘I’d go get him but he’s in the shower,’ Mieke says. ‘Sorry, Marc.’
Marc shoots a glance into the kitchen and sees Stefaan struggling at the door.
‘Excuse me, Mieke,’ and he deftly pushes her aside. ‘I’m going to give Stefaan a hand.’
Like a genuine action hero, he forces his way into the kitchen. ‘This looks like child’s play compared with what I do in the operating room every day.’
‘Leave it, Marc,’ Stefaan mumbles, but Marc has already grabbed the jigsaw and is skilfully carving his way through the wood until he reaches Stefaan’s leg. In no time at all Stefaan is standing with both feet on the floor. Marc looks at his work with satisfaction. After a slap on the back for Stefaan and a wink for Sarah he sails back to the front door.
‘Stefaan is in the shower,’ he says to Mieke, who has gone purple in the face. Marc now has a cluster bomb of gossip on hand that he can set off all over the neighbourhood. The hole in the door is repaired the next day, but too sloppily to ever meet with Mieke’s approval, as if a visible sign were needed of the struggle between two people who will do anything to really see each other. No one in the neighbourhood seems to have heard about the hole in the door.
It’s a peculiar coincidence, but on the few rare occasions that Sarah goes with her father to see Granny it’s invariably raining. Today, too, the roads seem slippery. Rain in Belgium is like the great leader in a dictatorship: it pops up everywhere. Rain is the starting point of every banal exchange and it seeps into every conversation. You can’t do anything about the rain. You can tie a plastic bag over your head like the old ladies and walk around Easter-egg fashion, you can put on a bright yellow poncho that makes you lose control of your handle bars, but these aren’t real solutions. You can also put on a sour face, as Granny does so well. It doesn’t even have to rain for her to do that. Granny’s face is permanently set on bad weather, at least whenever Sarah sees her, and fortunately that’s no more than three times a year. Even Mieke has insisted that Sarah go to visit her today. The old woman is so eager to see her granddaughter again, her only granddaughter. This is her eleventh birthday, and according to Mieke she’s a big girl now and she can do nice things for other people every once in a while.
Granny is sitting all hunched up in the armchair with a thermos and a cup of cold coffee beside her. On her instructions Stefaan goes to the refrigerator to get a box of pastries and places it on one of the dozen little side tables that are spread out all over the bungalow. When he comes over to her, she squints up at him and asks, ‘Is that Sarah?’
‘No, Stefaan,’ Stefaan shouts. He gives Sarah a nudge, making her stand in front of her grandmother.
‘Stefaan?’
‘No, now it’s Sarah!’ Sarah screams.
‘Ah,