Stefaan looks exhausted. His cheeks are ashen, yet he’s beaming. His dark eyes sparkle, his smile is so wide it almost tears at the corners. Stefaan has been awake for twenty-four hours. Not as in ‘not sleeping’, not in a slumber setting like his mother. He’s as hyperactive as a talking clock. One hour ago he stormed out of the maternity ward of the Sacred Heart Hospital in search of a passing taxi, calling out euphorically to the honking cars. He would never do such a thing in a normal, sober condition, but what has happened here is a wonder of the world guaranteed to make the world instantly forget all its turmoil, all the nuclear warheads and iron curtains.
‘Oh, my God,’ Stefaan shouts exultantly from the living room. He stumbles over his own words. ‘So extraordinary, so unbelievable.’ He keeps repeating it, ad nauseam. He wants the whole world to share in the towering happiness that’s taken hold of him. Delirious with joy: that’s what it’s called. A man hugging the sky and momentarily forgetting the dark shadow. From now on, happiness will be on his side. He had already collected the outward signs: wealth and advancing status. Now there’s this new dimension to add to them. ‘So extraordinary,’ he keeps repeating while shaking his head.
‘Every birth is extraordinary,’ his mother sighs. Her mouth has moved. Words have come out. Four words. She spoke at least four words, one after the other, and she isn’t talked out yet. She goes on: ‘Extraordinary in its own misery.’ His inaccessible mother thinks he can put up with anything. All these years he has been reacting appropriately to her callousness: properly and submissively, because it was she who gave birth to him.
Today Stefaan can hardly hear her. ‘A little daughter, Mama. A little girl.’ He takes off his loafers, puts them in the shoe cabinet in the utility room, and runs to the ironing room. No running in the house, Mieke would shout if she were here now. Behind the door of the ironing room are a couple of cardboard boxes. He had them ready months ago. He takes the boxes upstairs and goes into one of the seven bedrooms.
He’s lived this moment over and over again in his dreams. He goes to the stereo, searches for the right cassette, and chooses the most suitable track by his big hero, Bob Dylan: ‘Forever Young’. He wants his daughter to stay young forever. But there’s a contradiction there: in order to stay young forever she would have to die. He opens his eyes wide but it’s too late; they fill with weary tears. It’s all too much for him after such a wakeful night.
In the nursery there’s a lovely antique cabinet for linens and clothes, as well as a child’s bed that cost three times his college tuition. A royal child from the Habsburg period slept in it. On the floor is a fanciful rug featuring a pattern of purple and red giraffes against a white background. And her desk is where he’ll fold the little boxes for the sugared almonds. Follow the instructions on the lid of the cardboard box to fold a compact little house out of rice paper. Stefaan’s fingers are definitely not slender piano fingers. They’re completely unsuitable for origami, a game played with rice paper that was adopted from the Land of the Rising Sun not so long ago. A Flemish farmer like his father would have blown his nose on rice paper like that.
Last night Mieke went over the instructions with him again, slowly and carefully. She wasn’t at all sure it was going to work, yet he soon succeeded in folding a little box with straight walls and a ribbon bow for a roof. His fingers tremble from the effort. He starts in on a second box, and then a third. Stefaan looks with astonishment at how his hands have turned into skilful dancers, daring to perform such perfectly choreographed origami.
He opens a drawer in the table and takes out the felt-tip pen. He and Mieke had had quite a squabble over the felt-tip pen just before her water broke. Mieke said she preferred professional printing to his chicken scratches, an unreasonable demand. Stefaan writes with silver-coloured ink on the outer walls of the boxes: Sarah, 28-04-1980. Sarah. The name they chose for her together, Jewish in origin, the name of a strong, high-spirited woman. It was their shared secret for seven months. They quickly agreed on a first name for a girl. But for a long time Mieke had doubts about the child itself: whether she should go ahead with it or not, whether she and the world really needed another child. These were doubts that Stefaan couldn’t relate to. Once they had made the decision it took years before Mieke finally became pregnant. Now their daughter is an indisputable fact. They have everything within reach to make sure their child, more than any other child in the world, has a golden future.
Sarah is offering her father a clean slate. In exchange, he is promising her his total commitment and a hefty bit of cash. Some people are all too eager to dismiss material possessions as something incidental, but Stefaan sees them as a sign of devotion. The most beautiful little pieces of furniture, the most exclusive little outfits, the most expensive diapers—he won’t take anything less. Of course he could have had the little boxes folded by someone else, but he wanted to do it himself, just as he refuses to hand his daughter over to the supervision of a nanny. His wife will stay home and take care of her. Everything has been arranged down to the last detail.
He is euphoric. As a doctor he knows the theory behind all this: your hormone curve is out of kilter, your temperature is fluctuating, you observe the world through tunnel vision. He allows himself just enough time to regain his equilibrium before going back to his mother. He looks out the window. There’s the lovely back garden, all ready for the child. Yesterday he disentangled the last pulpy winter leaves from the bushes. Stefaan glances over at the little boxes, which are lined up like houses along a railroad track. These boxes are the first trace of his daughter’s presence in this house. His daughter. He is her father and always will be, even when he’s no longer around. The simple logic of this moves him. He has finally been granted the title of father.
He has always told himself that he must not rest until he has reached that rarefied, precarious point: the top. It’s not everyone who makes up their mind one day to assume a leadership position, but such people do exist. These are people who don’t take orders from others but deal them out themselves. Arms crossed, shouting defiantly at the world: come on, I dare you.
Stefaan Vandersanden had everything it took to make it big, although he may have let himself be bossed around too much in his early youth. He was too quick to defer to rules and orders. If help was needed with the clean-up at school, he didn’t slip through the swinging doors and out onto the playground like everyone else but stood there waiting for instructions, often the only one to do so. A classmate who hadn’t finished his homework on time would get the answers from Stefaan, free for the asking. If some roughneck was fixing for a fight, Stefaan would just so happen to find himself nearby. It didn’t really help that he was skinny and clever, the usual combination for children who tend to get knocked around. When he was eighteen his father died, and he knew he had two choices: slide into grief or fight to survive. The clever, timid, country boy in wooden shoes from a West Flanders farming village became a respected top student at the great University of Leuven. Unlike his father, Stefaan was determined not to let himself be pushed to the edges of life. He sank his teeth in and held on tight.
Stefaan graduated summa cum laude as a doctor of medicine from the University of Leuven and let the professor who served as his dissertation advisor talk him into spending a year at Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania. Those two diplomas together would open any door, the professor said. Stefaan’s preference was to open all the doors himself, the doors to his own company. The day he returned to Flanders he ordered a package of printed business cards. His former sense of inferiority was transformed into one of limitless spunk. He had to start at zero, without a red cent in the bank. He had made some money working in a small print shop during his studies in America, which he had sent home—at least whatever he didn’t need himself to survive on campus. He went without meals and wore corduroy trousers in the summer, just to send money to his widowed mother. It was a twisted kind of pride all too familiar to migrants in a strange land. In the print shop he would reach his ink-black fingers into his pants pocket, groping for dimes to drop into the money box to send poor inner-city children to camp. On the day of his graduation Stefaan left this all