Thirty Days. Annelies Verbeke

doesn’t see Madeleine until he’s clearing up. She called out to him earlier that she was going shopping. He leaves the house promising to be back the next day, while she puts a considerable quantity of pasta away in a cupboard and ice-cream cakes in an empty freezer.

      ‘Hungry,’ she says.

      At home he finds Cat, also looking into an empty freezer compartment, but peering and groping. Her face is tear-stained. The packs of spinach, the bag of croquettes, and the leftovers of soup she’s pulled out stand near her feet weeping too.

      He wants to take her in his arms but the scene dissuades him, first because he finds it disturbing, then because of a suspicion that he can explain all this, although he doesn’t yet know how.

      ‘I’m going crazy,’ she says.

      ‘No you’re not,’ he says.

      ‘I no longer know what I dreamed and what’s real. Yesterday I went to get something out of the freezer and I saw a box at the back that seemed to have been hidden there.’

      With secret pleasure he decides to let her tell the whole story.

      ‘When I open it up there’s a little guy made of ice inside, about as big as my forefinger, dressed in a loincloth and a pair of those straw legwarmers, with a shield and a spear. Beautifully made, I’ve never seen anything like it. All ice. No idea if it was supposed to be an African. Its face made it look white. I put it back in the box and thought: I’ll have to ask Alphonse—the fact that I forgot isn’t normal either!’

      He sees her dismay—greater, crazier than he’s used to in her—and wants to interrupt, but she rattles on.

      ‘And now it isn’t there, because of course it never was, I’m imagining things and that I imagine things is my own fault!’ She ignores the placatory arms he holds out to her, his lips pouting to say something. ‘Because I’m not sick, or only in my head. I’m not sick any longer, I lied.’

      What is she saying?

      He looks at the rising water in her eyes, watches it pour over the rims.

      ‘The tests?’ he begins.

      ‘I’m cured.’

      ‘But that’s great, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t know what he’s feeling, doesn’t know who this woman is or why she’s allowed him to live in hell for the past two days. Before her sobbing intensifies, her expression mimics his own: a mouth that slips from smile to horror and back again.

      ‘That’s what you wanted more than anything, isn’t it? To be healthy? It’s what I wanted more than anything!’ The tighter his embrace, the smaller and more angular her body becomes, until he lets go because he no longer recognizes it. ‘Why?’ He needs to know. After all the youth it cost her to defeat the enemy, why does she want to collaborate with it? Is this a version of the Stockholm syndrome? ‘Why did you lie?’

      ‘Before I got ill it always seemed as if I was going to lose you.’

      He can’t believe she’s saying this.

      ‘No. Don’t go away now.’ Sure enough, he’s at the door, in the hall, covering the last metre to his van. ‘It’s better to talk about it straight away,’ he hears her call through the half-darkness before the car door cuts off her voice. He thinks so too, in theory, but it seems his foot wants to press the accelerator and he has to flee any delay that could bring him to a halt.

      He wonders how come the radio is tuned to a classical channel. ‘Liszt,’ says a voice by way of a starting shot. He knows little about classical music. Is it pure chance that even the music is suddenly different from anything he knows? He’s no idea where he’s driving to, but he does know that he has to drive and that a shaft of beauty is filling the car. The piano sounds so lovely at first, so orderly, to the point of pampering. Night falls over the endless rows of trees—what kind of trees? are they ash?—on both sides of the road, trees whose leaves are changing and then letting go because they’ve been sucked dry by the trees, which made them to store food, to eat from when winter comes, because trees know how to survive. He wants them to embrace what the music says, to pamper him, to make him turn round. But a small rodent has crept up to the highest piano keys and it’s now multiplying and mice are hurrying in dense throngs up the neat stalks, out of the ground into the sky, and when they throw themselves from the branches they become descending bells, then bell-ringing that catches the sky unawares. The twilight dissolves into night.

      He turns off the music and leaves the engine running. Was it true what she said, that she might have lost him at any moment before she got sick? It was true. He remembers the turmoil of times past, the thirst, recalls a firework competition he took part in with friends, coincidence really, not even their style, a random detail that strikes him as symbolic of those days: a firework competition. There were loud nights with lots of movement, with stages and audiences, for him, with crowds dancing on the spot, ogling at women, smiling, full of disbelief about how he met his girlfriend.