The woman likes to keep her house neat and tidy. In the light of events everyone would regard shards and broken-off flowers as a negligible detail. Not her. Nothing is a detail for her. Everything must be in perfect order. Everything must be in perfect order. Everything must…
Shush, darling, shush.
She has hit her shoulder on a chest of drawers. In the hospital the doctor will notice and record the bruise, but won’t draw any conclusions. The doctor has an open mind. Prejudgements are alien to him, as is rushed work. He strives for scientific rigour and objectivity. Her husband does too, but her husband is not home. He is Dutch, an engineer with a demanding job. For now no one thinks it necessary to inform him of the drama unfolding in his house. For now it isn’t a drama for anyone. An epileptic fit is not a drama. On the other side of the ceiling are the cots with the bodies of the three youngest children, but for now the mother is the only one who knows that. And probably she doesn’t know herself anymore. A lightning bolt has struck her brain. It has yanked the glasses off her nose and thrown them obliquely onto her face. It sends electric shocks through her nerves. The neighbour who has been summoned to help does not dare touch her, for fear of also getting a shock, and she also keeps her little son away from the epileptic. From a safe distance she makes soothing noises, though she doubts their effect. She tells the children that everything will be all right. There’s no reason to panic. She says it without believing it herself.
‘Listen, there’s the ambulance already. It will look after your mummy.’
Knock, knock, who’s there?
She smiles a reassuring smile, although she feels anything but reassured. She knows that she’s going to have a sleepless night and that her son will have nightmares again later. If this goes on, she thinks, they will have to move. For her neighbour’s children it is different. They’ve become used to their mother’s attacks by now.
The ambulance crew come into the house. They know the woman and they know the family. It’s not the first time that they’ve screeched to a halt in the drive to give first aid. ‘Where are the three little ones?’ one of them wants to know, while the other tends to the mother. ‘Upstairs,’ says the eldest son. ‘Mummy has given them a bath.’ The paramedic looks at the neighbour, who interprets his look as a request, which it is. She goes upstairs. ‘They’re in their beds,’ she says when she comes back downstairs. ‘They’re sleeping like logs.’
Dull-witted neighbour. Who can’t tell the difference between a dead child and a sleeping child? And dull-witted ambulance men, because why would the mother put the tiny tots back in bed after their morning bath? At night it’s bath then bed, and in the morning it’s exactly the other way round.
You have to test the temperature with your elbow. Before you dip the baby in the water, you must check with your elbow that the water is not too hot, or too cold. Too cold is less bad than too hot. Children can stand cold better than heat. In the winter it was always a struggle with Gilles to get him to put his coat on. And a hat he would always pull off. So I asked M for money to buy Gilles a hat with flaps for the ears and cords you can tie. Gilles was so angry. He just kept tugging at that hat. The harder he tugged at the cords the tighter the knot became. ‘He has my stubbornness, said M, ‘but not my brains.’—‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’ And I gave him a butterfly kiss: brushing his lips with mine.
Sometimes I think: if I could begin anew, I’d do everything just the same. You can’t choose in life. You can’t say: I want the main course, but not the aperitif, or the dessert, or the liqueur. You can’t say: I want my children but not him. You have to go via him to have the children. And those children are wonderful. Even Lhermitte would not have killed them.
But that neighbour, then, really thought that those children were sleeping peacefully in their beds. And the paramedics believed her. Why shouldn’t they? They took the mother to the hospital and left the neighbour in a house with three dead bodies in it.
They will probably all be wondering: ‘Couldn’t we have saved the children? Isn’t it partly our fault?
How often that has been said about me: she could have saved them. Throw her in prison, because she could have saved them. She must never be released, because she could have saved them. She did nothing to save them, though she could have saved them. She deserves the death penalty, because she could have saved them.
Again and again, like a record stuck in a groove.
I’ve been in prison for sixteen years because I didn’t save them although I could have saved them. So they say. They weren’t there, but they know for sure that I could have saved those girls.
If it were all so simple.
Perhaps the paramedics and the neighbour could have saved the tiny tots, but they’re not in prison. They are getting psychological help to deal with the trauma.
The father did not save his children either. He was in a meeting while his wife was suffocating his children. With laughing gas, they say. How did she get hold of laughing gas? Can anyone tell me how she got hold of that laughing gas? Who sold it to her? Shouldn’t the seller have asked what she planned to do with it? Can anyone in this country who wants to murder someone just buy laughing gas? And where do you buy it?
I hope that neighbour will feel guilty for the rest of her life. And the paramedics too, who were too stupid to go and check on the children for themselves. Let it gnaw at them, eat them up, like maggots eating a corpse.
It would have been too late to save them, wrote the papers.
How can they be so sure? Why is it too late in one case and not in the other?
Their brother found them: a boy of eleven who had to find his dead brothers and sisters. Even for a gifted child that is appalling.
Gilles was eleven when we were arrested, right in front of him. That’s an age at which they’re very aware of everything. It leaves its mark.
I don’t know if the three murdered children were in the same room. That wasn’t in any newspaper.
Journalists can’t know everything. They do their best, but they can’t perform magic. Sometimes they have to dig and dig in order to find answers.
I always cooperated. When someone asked me a question I answered, even if I didn’t know the answer.
It’s better to give some kind of answer than none.
That’s what they said at school when you had to take an exam.
If you say nothing, you make a stupid impression, or a dull one. Here in prison too I answer all questions. It’s a matter of politeness.
The children were highly gifted. And the mother was ill. There was epilepsy and another disease the doctors can’t really say much about. My Mummy and I experienced that. My Mummy was always tired, just like that woman. When my mother had cleaned the house, she couldn’t get out of her chair for the rest of the week. But she didn’t kill me. I never thought for a second: now she’s going to murder me. What child thinks that of its mother? No one expects something like that.
That mother was close to despair. She didn’t know which way to turn. She thought: I’m going to die soon and there’ll be no one to look after my gifted children. She couldn’t send them to school. She could, but her children were bored out of their skulls. So she kept them at home and taught them herself. What was to happen to her children when she was no longer there?
And so they’ve always got an explanation.
There