‘Will you please not smoke in the house?’ says Mieke.
Stefaan is behind her, nodding.
Jempy storms up the stairs and starts making a terrific racket, but Mieke flatly refuses to rise to the bait and climb the stairs to see what Uncle Jempy is up to. After half an hour he’s standing at the top of the stairs with a blue Samsonite suitcase in his hands.
‘Well, that’s nice of you. That’s my suitcase,’ says Mieke.
‘It’s the least you can give to your very own brother. You won’t have any more trouble from me. And you’re really going to miss me, that’s for sure.’
‘Give me that suitcase.’ Mieke blocks the way to the back door.
That’s the last straw.
‘No, I’m not giving the suitcase back.’
‘What’s in it anyway?’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
She jerks the suitcase out of his hands. The suitcase flies through the air and crashes to the floor. The latches give way. The lid of the suitcase falls open. It’s completely empty. There’s absolutely nothing in it. Uncle Jempy leaves with the empty suitcase, aching with humiliation and as poor as a church mouse. He turns around one more time, throws his powerful arms around Sarah and says, ‘You’re going to go far, kiddo. Just like your uncle.’ He plants a kiss on her forehead, looks his sister over one more time from head to foot, and strolls out through the back door .
‘We did that well,’ says Stefaan as they watch him leave. ‘We won’t be seeing him anytime soon.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ says Mieke with a hint of sadness, ‘but our family comes first.’ She repeats this a few more times during the evening, as if she doesn’t fully believe it herself.
Traces of Jempy’s presence persist long after his departure. A registered letter arrives at number 7 Nightingale Lane sentencing Jean-Pierre De Kinder in absentia for fraud. The number of love letters for Jempy that continues to pour in is impressive.
‘Go get the letters,’ Mieke tells Sarah, and together they light a fire in the fireplace for the first time this season. The Vandersanden-De Kinder family warm their hands on spelling mistakes, exploding golden hearts, and foolish sentences about painless, eternal love.
-
WE 1991
Stefaan is away on business visiting a daughter pharmaceutical company in China. He left three days ago. Sarah watched her parents as they stood intertwined at the front door and heard the disgusting smack of their kisses.
Mieke and Sarah are managing just fine. When Sarah unsuspectingly hops down the garden path to the rhythm of the lively orchestra she conducts in her head, intent on feeding the cheese rinds and old sandwiches from her lunchbox to her feathered, two-footed friends, she pays little attention to the blooming flowers and insects all around her. But she does notice the humming engine of a blue striped station wagon coming up the driveway—on a Sunday, of all days, the only day of the week when everyone in the housing estate is at home. The station wagon parks there in full sight. Mieke is at the front door in a flash.
She throws up her hands in innocence. ‘No idea where Jean-Pierre De Kinder is,’ she tells the officers truthfully. She has learned not to lie or distort the truth to men in uniform. If they suspect she’s lying, they’ll take off their caps during the interminable silence that follows and look straight through her with their myopic little eyes, a trick meant to humiliate her so thoroughly that the truth can be extracted without effort. If she comes right out and tells the unvarnished truth of her own accord, the station wagon will disappear from the driveway more quickly, and the neighbours—those sluggards on the corner, for instance, who lie around in bed until noon—are less likely to have seen it.
‘No idea where Jean-Pierre has gone. He said he had business in South Africa. I haven’t heard anything from him in months.’
‘Neither have we,’ says the officer. ‘We’ve come for something else. Is your husband at home, perhaps?’
‘No, he’s on a business trip in China.’
‘Do you know a Mrs. Melanie Plottier?’
‘That’s my mother-in-law,’ says Mieke.
‘It is our duty to inform you,’ says the officer, eyes downcast, voice lowered, ‘that Mrs. Melanie Plottier passed away this morning. She had a frontal collision with a tree. Her seat belt was not fastened and unfortunately her head impacted the steering wheel. All efforts to save her came too late.’
‘That can’t be true, sir. Granny is deaf and blind.’ Mieke is begging them to see that she’s right, although she herself saw Granny’s Fiat crawling up the driveway like a zigzagging snail only a couple of weeks ago. ‘Deaf and blind, I tell you.’
‘Indeed it can,’ the officer insists. ‘We’ve seen worse than that.’
‘How is it possible that someone who can’t see a blessed thing and is as deaf as a post is let loose in traffic? It’s simply scandalous that such people are allowed on the public roads. These kinds of things should be heavily fined. For years I’ve been pushing for the mandatory renewal of drivers’ licences every other year, with a test, for everyone, young and old,’ Mieke says belligerently. She seems to believe that by making this speech she can save Granny’s life.
As long as she keeps talking and insisting on a reasonable explanation, she can hold reality at bay. The fact that Granny is dead isn’t the worst of it. It had to happen sometime. But what Mieke dreads like the plague are the practical implications. All her plans for the coming weeks are thrown into disarray. Not that, anything but that.
‘Oh, by the way, ma’am,’ says the officer. ‘We’re supposed to ask you why you sent your mother-in-law out into traffic in her vulnerable condition. But given the dramatic outcome we’ve decided not to pursue that any further.’
‘Is that part of your job description now?’ Mieke asks. ‘To come and blame people for tragic automobile accidents?’
As soon as the bumbling police have left and Mieke is back behind the closed door, the reality of their message hits her. Granny has never had a word to say to her, never even deigned to look at her. Mieke was too chic, too upper crust, too nervous, too this and too that. She in turn found her mother-in-law a singularly insufferable female. They had tacitly agreed to keep out of each other’s way or, at the very most, to limply shake each other’s hands in caustic silence if it couldn’t be avoided. Nothing can break that silence now. But Mieke is the one who’s been saddled with Granny’s death. What’s this going to involve? To begin with, Mieke will have to notify Stefaan, make a lot of phone calls, dress the child in black, throw together a wardrobe for herself, help her husband, arrange for the funeral, and comb all the rugs. Granny is the last elder to go. Mieke has drawn up a checklist from previous funerals. But even though all funerals look alike, every funeral is different.
Stefaan returns immediately from China, blaming himself the whole time for letting Granny drive the car. As soon as he arrives home, calm and collected, Mieke tells him what one of the police officers had just reported to her on the phone. Melanie had had a heart attack first, which is what caused her to drive into the tree. It was a painless death, if that’s any consolation. Utterly silent, Stefaan swallows his words and his tears.
After a day of desolation and phone calls from distant family members, Stefaan wants to have a talk with Sarah. He says this with his back to Sarah while blowing his nose ferociously into a kitchen towel. Mieke sees this and shudders. She feels like pushing his tear-streaked face into the towel like a naughty kitten, but the choking that would produce is palpable enough. The entire weight of all the family tragedies that Granny managed to endure with her peasant strength has now been shifted to Stefaan’s shoulders. The weight gets heavier with every death.
‘That’s what heaven is,