‘Never mind, I don’t need to see it.’ Melanie hoists herself out of the armchair and propels herself to the cellar. She walks like a drunken goose. Since her second episode of thrombosis she’s had trouble walking upright. In the cellar there are pots, pans, and a whole supply of canned goods. There are also ten-kilo bags of keeping apples that a farmer sells in the housing estate from his old-fashioned pull cart. It’s always pleasantly chilly in the cellar, winter and summer.
A cauldron of soup is cooking on the kitchen stove, waiting for the return of the house’s inhabitants. It must be said that Stefaan’s mother knows something about cooking, at least about everyday cuisine: meatballs in tomato sauce, rabbit with prunes, and pudding with ginger biscuits. He tastes a spoonful so he can compliment his mother when she comes back up from her air-raid shelter. The soup is more or less tasteless. The lack of taste betrays the nervousness she feels about the birth of her first grandchild. He won’t say anything about the soup because then he’d have to be honest. That’s the way he is: he can’t lie, but he can keep his mouth shut.
Mieke can keep her mouth shut, too. When after two months she realized she was pregnant, she didn’t share her big secret with Stefaan right away, even though she knew how much he was hoping for a pregnancy. That was something he never quite understood. It offended him somewhat, but as a doctor he knew that when a woman gets pregnant she isn’t always herself. The hormones take over. Mieke told him later that she knew exactly when her mind, and not just her swelling breasts, whispered to her that she was pregnant. When she heard the report on the radio about those two East German families who had fled to the West in a homemade hot-air balloon, she wondered whether she had the right to force a child into the world. Before you knew it the dictatorship of the Iron Curtain would spread all the way to the North Sea, and where would they fly then, with a baby, without a hot-air balloon?
For Stefaan there had never been the slightest doubt. It’s their job to make sure the child is properly equipped to cope with life’s challenges. He needs them to have a child so he can be complete. He can still hear his own overly zealous arguments. Of course we’re going to be happy. You’re going to feel like a total woman. Our marriage will blossom. Yet Mieke still wasn’t sure. She didn’t actually utter the a-word, but he felt her thinking it. Then one day he got angry, very angry, and began talking about infanticide. It hadn’t really mattered whether he lost control or not when she said there was more to it than that, that his desire for a child was all out of proportion. ‘People without children are depressing people,’ he said, cleverly quoting her father. He knew that was her weak point. Her father had made his opinions all too clear when they were first married. A few years later the man died of a heart attack. For her mother his death was devastating, and she died soon afterward from the aftershock. ‘I know, people without children are depressing people,’ she had moaned. ‘There’s no way back.’ She was referring to the crushing responsibility. In a moment of weakness you could get bogged down just thinking about it. Then you’d go crazy and you’d never get around to having a baby.
They got through it together. It took patience and persuasiveness, but she got used to the idea. One month later he started catching her singing little tunes to her unborn child. Her swelling body did have its discomforts, from heartburn and infuriating itchy nipples to swollen ankles, and the enormous embarrassment. She was terrified of losing her slender figure and turning into a blob. She was ashamed of what she called her whale of a body, although the rounded forms made her more of a woman than she had ever been before. She stopped going outside. For the first time she cancelled the six-month check-up visits to the tenants of her properties.
Luckily they have a villa with a large garden. The garden is surrounded by tall rhododendrons. Mieke was able to keep herself well-hidden in the villa during the final weeks. Villas are ideal places for hiding your shame. A house is a body around your body. Would the little one in Mieke’s belly be ashamed, too? It was a pointless question, since the little one was still hidden away. Shame presupposes the presence of other people, and she wasn’t expecting twins.
During the last week Stefaan’s mother came to help out, her face as long as a fiddle. Mieke responded by complaining that she was a prisoner in her own home. The two women avoided each other as much as possible. Mieke thinks that Stefaan’s mother is jealous of her own son. When the tension became too great between Mieke and her mother-in-law, Melanie disappeared into the cellar and Mieke took refuge in the bedroom behind closed shutters, with a compress on her forehead and her swollen ankles resting on the footboard of the bed. In both the cellar and the bedroom it was fresh and safe.
‘Voilà!’ Calmed and even in relatively good humour, Stefaan’s mother resurfaces from under the ground while Stefaan has gone back to fiddling with the SCART cables. She’s tidied up her favourite spot again, the storage cellar. It needed it, she insists.
‘It’s got to be clean for when mother and baby come home. The baby may not see much yet, but even a moron can see spiderwebs. You have to keep your house clean, no matter what. Taking a little pride in your housekeeping, that’s the basis of all happiness. But a man wouldn’t understand that. Yes, indeed, clean in every nook and cranny, especially there.’ Melanie takes her handbag from the back of the chair and clamps it under her arm.
‘Berta has to be fed,’ she says. Berta is her aged dwarf goat. Melanie waddles to the garage under her own steam, reaching out to the cabinets and walls for support. She leaves her beige raincoat hanging in the closet. Without a word of goodbye to her son she closes the door to the garage behind her. Stefaan doesn’t know where Melanie got the sudden burst of energy, but he’s impressed by the force with which the garage door swings open and the speed with which Melanie drives out in the grey Fiat. He goes out to the garage, which is full of exhaust fumes, to close the door behind her.
Three hours later Melanie is back, honking at the garage door. Stefaan has just returned from the city, where he has bought a necklace for Mieke from Cartier’s. Melanie has had time to think. She is offended by the fact that she hasn’t been able to see her first grandchild yet because the totally unreliable video player won’t cooperate. ‘Didn’t you take a picture?’ She plops down in her trusty armchair. When Stefaan shows her a Polaroid, her first remark is, ‘Good gracious, that child is as cross-eyed as an otter. That’s going to give you plenty to laugh about, I can see that right now. Just start her off with her knife on the left and her fork on the right.’ She holds the photo an inch from her left eye. ‘Say, are there six toes on that foot? No? Or am I mistaken? Oh, dear! What a knob of a big toe that child has been blessed with. And that forehead—don’t even get me started. I don’t dare look at it for fear it’ll swell even more. Make sure her clothes are cut wide at the neck. And don’t feed her carrots, she’s already as yellow as a banana. Well, you can’t call her pretty, can you, such a tiny baby. Don’t look so disagreeable, tiny babies are never pretty, that’s all I’m saying.’ There’s no stopping her. She maps out the entire naked little body based on defects and curses and deformities. It’s done in many countries: a newborn child is made completely ridiculous before being released into the confusing, demanding world. The well-meaning family does it to divert the attention of the Evil Eye from the child itself.
‘And you,’ she snaps at her son. ‘What are you doing, standing there with your nose hanging out? And with a bouncing baby girl, the most beautiful child in the world. I already know what the future holds for Saaaraaah (she pronounces the name like a yawn). Didn’t think I would, did you? My own flesh-and-blood granddaughter. But son, that child is bound to be a walking disaster, I can see it all now.’
‘A what?’ Stefaan is shocked. Even though his mother’s frankly absurd, ice-cold reception has prepared him for the worst, even though he knows he shouldn’t expect anything consoling from her, this unvarnished, cruel curse is something he hadn’t seen coming.
‘What do you mean?’ Stefaan asks. His voice is hoarse with fatigue and exasperation.
An index finger flies like a pigeon from her heavy bosom and soars prophetically into the air. She, the oracle, clamps her thin lips together. Her hands land resolutely in her lap. Not another word more.
Stefaan says nothing.