Stefaan goes to the bathroom and washes his face with cold water. He peers into the mirror. ‘Do you realize that you and Sarah are the only remaining members of the Vandersanden family?’ we ask him in chorus. ‘The only ones. And it’s all your fault.’ We point an accusatory finger at him, at a couple of moments in Stefaan’s history that were better left unsaid, a list of crude blunders that he cannot undo. He takes down a rough towel that’s been dried outside on the line and rubs it long and hard all over his face, as if this can scrub away all his troubles.
On the morning of the funeral a limousine drives past the villa at number 7 Nightingale Lane. This was Granny’s wish. A bizarre detail. She has permitted herself this one frivolous act after a life filled with nondescript scenes that were remarkable only in their normality, edged with the black fringe of tragedy.
‘The notary is drunk,’ Stefaan has said over and over again. ‘This can’t have been my mother’s wish.’ But the limousine comes by anyway, just to be on the safe side, since that’s what it says in the last will and testament of Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier. In the same will she has also instructed that she be buried with her little son and her husband.
The family of three rides behind the hearse, where the coffin is bobbing around inside. A closed coffin, the undertaker has emphasized. He didn’t even let them choose. A limousine is a Hollywood invention, so Sarah grabs her chance to play movie star, just this once, for just a little while. She sits in the back seat, waving at the crowds on the way to the church like a leading lady about to pick up her Oscar. Sarah’s not what you would call glamorous in her black nun’s skirt, but even so she puts on her prettiest smile.
‘A limo and my mother. There’s no way that makes any sense. And cut it out, Sarah.’
The one everyone feels sorry for is Stefaan. He spent five long hours last night busily placing service booklets on the chairs of the church and penning a little poem, his last greeting to his sullen mother. At four in the morning he was still in the attic thumbing through photo albums. He also knows perfectly well that his mother wasn’t going to live forever and that she quite probably felt her own death approaching, but it’s the smell of death that makes his flesh crawl, that throws him back to a place he doesn’t want to be. It’s cold there, it’s bleak, and he hears the cracking of ice.
‘It’s the death of your little brother, too, isn’t it,’ says Mieke. ‘That’s coming back, too.’
‘No,’ says Stefaan curtly.
Before getting out of the limousine he takes another sedative at Mieke’s urging. She’s never seen her husband so shaken and devastated. It’s not as if it’s never happened before, though. Every now and then he has to stay home from work because his nerves are wound too tight. Just lying in bed, brooding and moaning, you’d never see a woman doing that. Mieke reads the brief text he’s written as a goodbye to his mother, going over it several times. She’s keeping in mind the possibility that she will have to read it aloud to the gathered mourners. Anticipation is her best friend in crisis situations. Half an hour later it’s quite clear that Stefaan isn’t fit to read anything aloud. The sedative is much too strong; not only does it dull his feelings but it also makes him experience the funeral through a heavy fog. He can barely stumble to the front of the church. Mieke takes him by the arm and leads him to his place, and with a gracious, not too cheerful smile she steps up to the lectern and reads out the corny bit of poetry.
The evening of the funeral they drive past the home of the deceased one more time to appraise the general condition of Granny’s residence. The house of Stefaan’s mother is not the home he grew up in but a new rudimentary structure full of dried flowers and air fresheners. Stefaan is planning to clear the house out as soon as possible and rent it.
‘Do we really have to look at it today?’ asks Mieke. ‘What’s the hurry? It’s not on fire, is it?’
‘Berta,’ Stefaan says. He wants to be strong, as he was after the death of his father. Not letting things slide, but dealing with them. It’s Stefaan’s strategy for combating grief: fighting back by taking his fate in hand, organizing a game of arm wrestling to see who’s the strongest, himself or his grief. Sarah is the first to discover that the stubborn dwarf goat has turned her shaggy back on her allocated bit of grass and sallied forth into the wide world. At her prodding, Mieke searches for a photo of Sarah and Granny with Berta the goat clamped between them. The plan is to cut Berta out, photocopy her picture, and distribute it throughout the neighbourhood under the heading ‘MISSING’.
The days that follow are mainly taken up with the requisite driving back and forth to the recycling centre. The glass container gets a bellyful, an entire cellar of freight. Most of it consists of empty bottles of an old-fashioned anise liqueur known as Marie Brizard, a liqueur that hits you over the head like a hammer, so stupefying that you sit in an armchair in silence from morning to night while the world passes you by and your goat comes to look at you through the window every now and then.
Mieke, who has spent days on end doing her very best to resist spewing venom all over Granny out of a sense of decency, and also out of a kind of protective reflex for her badly shaken, grieving husband, gradually returns to familiar territory.
‘All those little side tables,’ says Mieke, ‘with all those glass rings on them. Just like Gustave, the lush, who rented my house in Ghent for only a year, thank God. How could you not have seen them!’
Anyone who’s ever emptied out the house of someone who has died has bumped into little things with a long history. A hairpin stuck behind the frame of a photo of her deceased son, a whole supply of Fisherman’s Friend breath fresheners, useless bowls full of unused, brittle elastic bands, a comb with only three teeth, modern Adidas sport shoes with Velcro closures that the old lady loved to wear on her home trainer out on the porch. A life that you carry off, relocate, recycle. No one comes away unmoved.
All four of the parents of Mieke and Stefaan are dead. The roof above their heads has been blown away. They’re next, Mieke realizes. And who will they leave behind? Sarah. They waited a long time for Sarah. It never seemed to work. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. They kept it up to the point of weariness, but there are defects in nature, too. Mother Nature has her forests and her deserts. Mieke was more a rather arid place.
For a long time Mieke has wanted to keep a diary. Now there’s only one thing standing in the way and that’s Mieke’s sense of duty. As the product of an overly Catholic, old-fashioned upbringing, Mieke has to give herself permission to do something that has no immediate purpose. Writing down your thoughts in a large notebook doesn’t really do anybody any good. But Mieke excels in convoluted arguments: she finds secret ways to fool herself into thinking that not only should she write such a book but that it is even her duty to do so, for posterity. And that, fortunately, takes all the pleasure out of it. Once again she feels safely constricted in her corset of duties, and under this compulsion she begins keeping a close eye on her daughter, searching for funny remarks and spontaneous (or not so spontaneous) slips of the tongue to give her diary more colour. For an outsider, such an addiction to duty might seem agonizing, but once you’re addicted you discover what an exceedingly pleasant and engrossing way of life it is.
Yet sometimes she secretly hopes for a little peace and quiet. Stefaan or Elvira ought to insist that she put on the brakes once in a while because she does everything she can to keep active, to demand the most from herself, and occasionally to reach so deeply into her reserves that when she gets up in the morning she’s already dizzy from a whole night of brooding about what has to be done the following day.
Mieke begins her diary like a friendship book, the kind that young girls used to circulate among themselves. What word should she use to describe herself? Say someone asked her who she is. What if her name just wasn’t enough? What if someone were to say: okay, fine, Mieke Vandersanden-De Kinder, but