‘Alain was ten years old when he went to heaven to keep you company. We lived on the paved road at the time. It was called the paved road but there was very little traffic on it. Stands to reason, since there were almost no cars back then. There were the farmers’ horse carts and mail coaches, that’s about all. There was one person in the village who did have a car. Desmet, the brick manufacturer, with that cigar of his always sticking out of his bulldog mug. And on that horrible, hateful winter day, that car stopped in front of our yard and the door opened. To our utter astonishment Stefaan got out and put an end to our happiness with just a couple of words. Yes, God, I’m telling you the truth. Sometimes I wished I had never been born. Then I never would have lost my child. And the worst of it is: life just goes on. No sooner had Alain been laid in the ground than the neighbour lady came over with sugared almonds. And wouldn’t I like to come see her sister’s little one, to take my mind off my troubles? Wouldn’t that make you crazy, too?
‘After little Alain died I didn’t say a word for five years. It was not an easy time. Because people begin to think: she’s just not opening her mouth, the sourpuss. All she wants to do is sit around and mope. She likes it. But that’s not the way it works. I didn’t like it at all. I had to do it to keep from doing something worse, to keep from screaming. Sometimes I can sit so still that I think it never happened.
‘Don’t fret so, my sisters would say. You have to talk.
‘There’s the door, I’d tell them.
‘You just can’t explain something like that. There you are, literally empty-handed. You hand over the coffin, thank every Tom, Dick, and Harry for coming, and then the next day comes, and the next, and the next. And you say to yourself: Melanie, don’t let on how you feel. Just grin and bear it.
‘And yes, I cultivated a couple of bad habits to help me carry on. But does that bother anybody, I ask myself. No. And people are less bothered if I keep my mouth shut.
‘I hung up Alain’s photo. The focal point of our house, which everyone uncomfortably avoided. I burned my eyes on it every day. Even that doesn’t work anymore. All I see are the outlines of the frame. No, dear God, grief doesn’t wear out. Grief is not a carpet.
‘André had such a hard time. He couldn’t take it anymore. He was a proud man, my André. You can go ahead and say he was just a peasant, God, but on Sunday you could never tell. At least not when he was still in good shape. Six o’clock in the morning in his three-piece suit, walking through the fields to church in his bare feet, dress shoes in his hand to keep from wearing them out, and his watch in his vest pocket. One of those big, beautiful watches, that makes such an impression, you know.
‘His fingers might be blue from the cold, he might have tipped over the only glass of beer he’d had in weeks, his child might be dead, but I never heard André complain. I mean never. Look, God, I complain too much and I know it’s not getting me anywhere, but isn’t it possible to complain too little? Isn’t that a sin as well, not to do enough bad things? It was his downfall, because he locked it all away inside and it sank like lead until it pushed him down so low that all he could do was follow, into the ground, into the grave.
‘Dear Lord, you propose and you dispose and all I can do is resign myself.
‘Sometimes, dear God, I’m really afraid for Stefaan. I just can’t make him out. He can be so preoccupied and abrupt, even though everything’s going his way. With his good looks and his chic, upper-crust lady, with his little Saaaraaah and his enormous villa. Maybe he’s had too many lucky breaks, that can’t turn out well. Everyone has to have his helping of affliction. Everyone. Except for stars like Michael Jackson, such a cheerful black boy. Yes, well, those people aren’t real. It’s all plastic, all for show. Anyway I liked the sound of him better earlier on, with all his little brothers.
‘But I’m rambling, dear God. I want to talk to you about something else: tomorrow Sarah is going to be ten years old. That’s how old Alain was when he died. I know there’s some poisonous gift being passed down in this family. It’s our fate.
‘Now I want to ask you, merciful God: leave Sarah alone and take me. You know that I’m very grateful for the life I’ve had, at least for a little part of it. Spare Sarah and take me. That’s all. It’s about time I saw André and Alain again anyway. Look, God, I’m tired, I’m really tired. You aren’t planning on keeping me here much longer, right? You don’t have to answer me. Just say no or yes. They don’t need me here any longer. I can see it everywhere I look. In the faces of the people around me who say: how much longer is that bitch going to live? In the mirror that grins back at me with a twisted smile, and in the ridiculous calmness that has crept into my life. There are days that I hardly move at all, or hardly make it from my chair to the kitchen.
‘It’s not about me. It’s about my family. I don’t want them all to bleed to death. All those accidents, they have to stop. All those tragedies and all those deaths, I can’t take it anymore. If you have to have one more of us, dear God, then take me.
‘I just want to ask you in a friendly way to please keep my request in mind.
‘Thank you for your attention, dear God.
‘If I might add just one more thing: in the end it’s in your best interest as well. If fate visits us one more time, I swear, I won’t believe in you anymore.’
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MIEKE 1990
Today Mieke has bought white cabbage and vinegar. Sauerkraut has never been on the menu at 7 Nightingale Lane, but Stefaan kept insisting, so she’s going to make sauerkraut. Mieke has had to overcome her suspicion of the questionable cheap ingredients, vinegar and cabbage. Sauerkraut—the name itself says it all: a combination of something sour and something that can produce dangerous intestinal gas. A food item that in all probability was invented by some bored fool on an ice-cold afternoon in the unattended kitchen of a lunatic asylum. Making sauerkraut could easily take half a day, she has estimated, but she’s been charging ahead due to sheer nervousness. At half past two in the afternoon she’s well ahead of schedule. Preparing this peasant German specialty has not been enough to calm her nerves. There’s real work that will do that: getting down on her hands and knees, endlessly combing the little threads of the rug in the living room like a nervous house cat scratching a scratching post. It’s an aberration that Mieke allows herself when she has worries.
For a woman like Mieke, the world is not a round globe or a flat pancake but a maze with lots of entrances and just one exit that can only be found with the compass of a highly principled upbringing. She learned this during her childhood from her father, a strict man with impressive curling eyebrows that emphasized his wisdom, a prosperous notary of considerable prestige who specialized in corporate law, the proud head of a respectable family with a classic beauty of a daughter, a rebel of a son, and a well-behaved, sweet latecomer to whom they gave the name Mieke. To the great relief of her parents, now more than ten years deceased, Mieke has followed in their footsteps. She is an intelligent woman with class and style, an icon of the values that her parents instilled in her, a radiant beacon of normality in the sea of chaos of 1990.
Mieke’s parents were already quite old when they had her. First there was Lydia, the eldest daughter of Gerard and Camille De Kinder, then came Jempy, and finally it took another twelve years for Mieke to be brought into the world. Mieke’s sister and brother quickly escaped from their parents’ home. Her father the notary, however, was decidedly present throughout her entire childhood. His desk was in the front room of their house. Mieke spied on the many people who came to visit him. People not only came with legal questions but they also brought him their moral problems and dilemmas. The pastor himself felt aggrieved. Mieke had enormous admiration for her father, although her upbringing was a confusing, benumbing cocktail of totally contradictory ingredients. Her father was not only a notary who had a friendly word for everyone, but he was also a dictator who demanded that his children get up every day at six o’clock on the nose, that they keep themselves hidden whenever