On Friday, 2 May 1980, five days after the birth, Mieke, Stefaan, and Sarah drive up the sunken road to the housing estate on the mountain. They turn into Nightingale Lane. Springtime is raging more furiously here than at the mountain’s foot. The avenues are lined with cherry trees in full bloom. Birds hop from branch to branch. A squirrel clings vertically to an oak tree on the property next to the Vandersandens.
In time, Stefaan is going to buy the lot next to theirs so that later on, when their daughter is living in their villa, she’ll have an extra big garden. She’ll play in the woods, too. Beneath years and years of fallen leaves the forgotten clothing and tents of Napoleon’s troops lie rotting. They passed through these woods and camped here for a time. At least that’s the story the real estate agent tells each of the buyers, and now they’re telling it to their own children. They live on the territory of the smallest punk ever to conquer vast parts of the world.
No sooner does the car bearing the new family ride up the driveway than the dog belonging to the neighbours across the street starts barking. He comes charging out of the villa’s open back door. The child in Mieke’s arms wakes up with alarm, startled by the fierce noise. Only a few days later the dog will have a new baby to greet in his own villa, for exactly five days after Sarah’s birth Emily is born, the daughter of neighbours Evi and Marc Vanende-Boelens, she a former model and former nurse, he a leading surgeon.
More insecure than ever about her own tried and tested beauty, Mieke sits in the passenger’s seat. Her ice-cold eyes shoot over the unmown lawn and spot a molehill belonging to the same doomed mole. As soon as Stefaan opens the car door for her, the sunlight begins caressing her blonde-brown hair. With her new acquisition clamped firmly in her arms, Mieke steps out of the car. She begins walking, still rather pale—paler than the baby pressed against her body. It takes a while to get used to the overwhelming open space, but as soon as she sees her mighty round boxwood beside the front door, Mieke knows she is home.
‘I could have sworn it was going to be a boy,’ she says to Stefaan with a trembling voice. The fact that she has just imparted life to Sarah gives her beauty extra radiance and makes her irresistible despite her loose-fitting dress, although Stefaan doesn’t dare lay a finger on her out of pure respect. Mieke plants tender kisses on the tiny girl and places her in Stefaan’s open arms. ‘Even so, I’m deliriously happy with her.’
Her silken cheeks puffed out in the fresh air, her bright little eyes squeezed shut because the sky is pouring down too much light for a newborn, little Sarah kicks against her fluffy sleeping bag. Beaming, Stefaan carries his daughter across the threshold.
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GRANNY 1990
‘Hello, Lord, good morning. It’s been a long time, but I’m back. Let me begin by congratulating you on your amazing victory in East Germany. I heard on the radio that the Christians there had a huge win in the elections.
‘Thank you for this day. I just drank my coffee, so things ought to go well here.
‘It seems like I only come to you when I want to ask for something, or when I have problems, or when I want something else done. I realize that. But just look at me sitting here, eighty-four years old. It’s already so hard just keeping my eyes open every day that I never get around to the rest. I really believe in you, Lord, even though you don’t hear much from me. I want to be clear about that. The fact that I’m here talking to you right now is proof enough.
‘I have something to ask you. Something serious this time. I know I’ve often bothered you with trifles. Far too often, looking back on it. That time when I was fourteen and I had a home economics exam, for instance, it wasn’t proper for me to ask for your help. You would have been quite right not to help me. And I didn’t even need your help anyway. Such a simple exam. I had the best grade in the whole class. The best of forty-one girls. I can still remember how nervous I was the day before the exam. As soon as I saw the questions I knew: piece of cake. I also knew that I would never be allowed to go any further in school, that’s how smart I was. I’m not stupid, you know. How else could I have had such smart children? Thank you for that, God.
‘I’m boring you with trifles. I don’t want to rob you of your precious time. You’re too busy to listen to a lot of hot air. Imagine if everyone came to you with every little trifle they had. No, that’s impossible, you can’t work that way. I’ll get right to the point, God.’
Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier believes that God can explain everything and that he kneads her fate in the palm of his big, superhuman hand just like a meatball. He has the last word, although he tends to keep his mouth shut. For years he was silent about the deaths of her son Alain, who died too young, and her beloved husband André. Melanie is no hypocrite. She’s more a desperate believer, with great pain locked up behind the leaden door of her heart.
It’s a grey Wednesday morning in 1990, only a few months after the Berlin Wall came down five hundred miles farther to the east, a few weeks after Gloria Estefan was released from the hospital across the ocean after her accident, and a couple of days after the enormous Hubble telescope found its place in the universe in order to look down on earth, and Melanie is sitting on the toilet in the smallest room in the house. Melanie is a Flemish woman who always flies the lion standard on holidays, a woman who makes deals with God like a Mafioso with the judge of the most supreme court, a sturdy woman who trudges through the wilderness in her head and sees in it a damp, black-and-white Congolese rain forest.
‘Almighty God, now you really have to help me. It’s an emergency. And between you and me, you haven’t been all that helpful so far. If you help me this time I’ll forget all that. I mean it.
‘I’ll forget how you turned your back on my dear little Alain. I remember his birth as if it were yesterday. People didn’t know anything back then. I didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant, not the first time and not the second time, either. Chubby as I am, chubby a second time. I’ve always been a good eater. Everyone said to me: Melanie, we don’t understand where you put it all. And I was so proud. I just helped myself to another hunk of bread. After that it turned out I was pregnant. I was going to bring another little one into the world, a brother or sister for Stefaan. During that labour I thought I’d die. I lay there for twenty-five hours praying my heart out. You may still remember that, God. It was such a beautiful spring day, although you may not remember it because of all the births in the world happening one after the other.
‘When Alain was born I saw right away that he was a special little man. Those rubbery little hands and feet, just like jellybeans. I was crazy about that little guy. After he was born it took forever for my milk to come in, literally. I had lost blood, towels full of blood. Fortunately I had built up some reserves, but because of the blood loss I didn’t have enough milk. I just kept yammering the livelong day: I’m going to die, my baby is going to die. I don’t know what came over me, but I just felt like it was going to end badly. Except I didn’t know it would take ten years. When Stefaan was born I was just plain happy, and you see, he’s still alive.
‘Everything was fine for a long time. Too fine. André and I couldn’t believe how happy we were with those two boys. They were like two peas in a pod, those two. They did everything together, while most mothers with two sons have to make sure they don’t knock each others’ heads off. Not them. Big brother and little brother, and no one could come between them. Stefaan was the clever little boss, maybe too smart for this world. He’d let people push him around, and I’d have to say: Stefaan, stand up for yourself. Alain was another story. He was the charming klutz who could never sit still. He was always on the lookout for danger. If he passed