Marcel (6 page)

Cyriel was sitting in the biggest chair on the veranda, with cushions at his back and a tartan rug over his legs, which were propped up on the footstool Wieland had occupied before. He was wearing spectacles; the frames were slightly heavier than in the photograph taken forty years ago. The lenses enlarged his eyes in their deep sockets, making him look like an old carp gasping for breath.

The grandmother inclined her head sideways to catch what he was saying. I saw her stuffing a sheaf of papers into her handbag just as I came into the room.

“I kept them all for you,” I heard Cyriel say. His voice came in weak little gasps. Under his chin the flaccid skin sagged over his Adam’s apple, which rose with each laboured swallow to vanish into the wrinkles for a long time. Out of each nostril came a plastic tube connected to an oxygen cylinder suspended from a metal frame behind his chair.

“You should have them, they’re no use to Anna … His last letters … I still can’t read them without … You’re a strong woman, Andrea …”

The grandmother’s chin started to tremble and her lips were nowhere to be seen, the way they were early in the morning when her false teeth were still in their glass by the tap and she went about the house in her quilted dressing gown, her slippers flip-flopping on the floor. They were like camels’ feet in the sand. She even had a camel’s hump. When her shoulders sloped forward her spine made a bump between her shoulder blades. Without her false teeth she
seemed quite desiccated. Her face would shrivel up, as though the water reservoir in her hump had run dry.

Cyriel had heard me come in. He turned his head in my direction and extended his hand. His fingers were bony and wide at the tips. They looked like drumsticks.

“Ha, the young grandson!”

I could feel the tremor in his fingers when he shook my hand.

He looked up at the grandmother, who was putting her handbag down at her feet.

“Marcel to a tee …”

“He’s inherited his mother’s eyes,” she said, “but for the rest – an out-and-out Ornelis.”

Cyriel turned to me again. “So you’ll be another staunch Fleming, will you?”

“That depends,” the grandmother said.

In the meantime Wieland had appeared with the camera, an unwieldy contraption in a dark leather case.

“I suppose I’ll have to use the flash,” he said eagerly, fitting a fresh film into the slot. “The sun’s gone now, and there’s not much light here because of the sheets on the roof.”

Mechanically, as if he were loading a gun, he clicked an outsize metal disc onto the camera. He held it up against his nose and stepped around the veranda like an automated Cyclops.

“Must find the best angle.”

The grandfather rose from his chair. “Quite an old model, isn’t it?”

“Never gave me any trouble …” Cyriel gasped. “Bought it in Cologne … Made in Germany, never wears out …”

“And then they say Germany lost the war!” Anna chimed in. “You should see their industry. All those factories …”

“You’ve all got to move a bit closer together,” Wieland instructed, posting himself in a corner of the veranda.

The grandfather stood next to Anna on one side of Cyriel’s chair. The grandmother hovered on the other side with me planted in front of her. All of us focused on Wieland’s Cyclopean lens. Cyriel crossed his arm over his chest to hide the oxygen tube.

Wieland was clearly enjoying himself.

“Now if you all say cheese,” he cried, “then you’ll look as if you’re laughing … One … Two …”

“Never mind about that,” Anna said, “what’s there to laugh about, anyway?”

The whoosh of an umbrella bursting open was followed by a blinding light.

Six weeks later the photograph was prominently displayed in the grandmother’s glass-fronted cabinet, at the foot of the Yser Tower. We are all on it, white-faced, as though the flash had drained the blood from our veins.

The funeral mass was attended by a crowd of boys in short trousers. They stood in the nave swinging Flemish Lion flags so vigorously that they churned up a strong breeze. Wieland, with bowed head, shuffled in the wake of his elder brothers and sisters behind the coffin. Our eyes met briefly. There was no flicker of recognition as he set his features in an expression
of dramatic grief. His mother must have got her way in the end, for he had had a haircut. His jet-black hair was much shorter now, although still long enough for him to toss it out of his eyes.

“Sad, very sad” was the only thing the grandmother said all the way home. Her handbag bulged with the papers Cyriel had given her. I had seen them when Wieland took the photograph: a thick wad of envelopes, yellowed and frowsty-looking, slit along the top.

Arriving home the grandmother left her handbag on the chest in the hall as usual. She took her coat off, helped the grandfather out of his, hung both coats on a hanger and disappeared into the parlour.

“He’s had it,” I heard the grandfather say, before the door shut behind them.

The grandmother went to the kitchen to make supper. I could hear her banging cupboard doors.

The handbag stood on top of the chest. All I needed to do was reach out my hand – one of the envelopes was sticking out. I drew it out between thumb and forefinger.

The beams of the house stretched and settled plaintively in the heat of the summer afternoon. She, who otherwise heard everything, heard nothing now. She rattled the pans and filled the kettle.

I undid a few buttons and slipped the envelope inside my shirt.

Upstairs, in the attic, I spread the letter out flat. The pencil had faded with the years, and the spidery handwriting
was hard to read. It said something about tomatoes being “wonderful here. Four, five kilograms per plant, and as sweet as apples.”

What fascinated me most of all was the great bird on the outside, with its curved beak, strong talons, spreading tail feathers. Miss Veegaete would love it.

THE DRESS WAS ALMOST READY. THE BUTTONS STILL
needed to be sewn on and it had not been pressed yet, but it hung grandly on its hanger against the wardrobe door. In the gathering gloom of the sewing room it was like a deserted fortress looming up out of the clutter of fashion magazines, bolts of material and dress patterns. Putting my head under the skirt and just standing there in the purple sheen was enough to make me feel as if I were Miss Veegaete herself, large and bloated, bosoms and all.

Evening rolled down the attic stairs, percolated into the corners of the rooms, trickled imperceptibly down the walls, robbing the furniture of its colours, its distinctive features, and eventually its contours. Miss Veegaete’s dress became a capacious, floating shadow pressing up against its alter ego in the wardrobe mirror. Dress and mirror image seemed to hug one another in the night, two wavering silhouettes in search of a body.

The grandmother had sent me off to bed early as usual, and as usual I had crept out from the covers within the hour. The evening freshness cooled the roof, which gave out a
surprisingly loud salvo of clicks. As the night wore on a soughing sound ran through the rafters, as if the house were sagging into a leisurely pose. Stella would be doing the same at this hour. After supper she hung her apron among the dishcloths in the kitchen and withdrew to listen to her radio: a soft male voice burbling genteelly from her room.

At the end of the corridor the door to the parlour was ajar: a dark slab with light around the edges. Tiptoeing into the beam, I was able to see the grandmother sitting at one end of the table. All I could see of the grandfather through the crack was his elbow resting on the tabletop.

I moved closer. The grandmother was wearing her reading glasses. She was holding one of the letters Cyriel had given her. The others lay in a pile between her and the grandfather.

I saw her lips move, but could not hear what she was saying. She must have been speaking in a low whisper. They always kept their voices down after I had been sent to bed. She was reading aloud, and as she read I saw her nod her head. Her eyebrows shot up intermittently, and I could hear the grandfather’s little grunt at the end of each sentence, indicating that she could proceed. When she faltered I knew it was because he was interrupting her. I saw him clench and unclench his fist.

The grandmother shook her head vigorously, paused a while and then went on nodding. The grandfather’s hand rose up above the tabletop, as if he were addressing an invisible third party occupying the chair opposite him. His hand reached out two or three times, at which the grandmother shook her head with mounting agitation.

“That’s not true, and you know it …”

Her voice faded.

“What does it matter,” I heard him say. His hand stopped moving.

They fell silent.

Then the grandmother resumed her reading, only to raise her eyes from the letter almost immediately.

“A lot,” she blurted, in a surprisingly loud voice, which evidently shocked her, too. “It matters a lot,” she continued, sinking to a whisper, “to me.” She patted her chest with her left hand. “A lot.”

She replaced the letter in its envelope, which she laid down on her right before taking a new one from the pile.

She read aloud for the next hour or so, working her way steadily through the pile of letters, spreading them out flat, folding them again and adding them to the slowly growing pile to her right. Now and then a fresh disagreement flared up, which soon subsided.

Finally all the letters were in the pile on her right. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. I heard the scrape of a chair as the grandfather rose to his feet. I strained to hear whether he was heading for the door, my mind racing with calculations as to how long it would take me to hide on the stairs to the attic.

The attic – where the raincoats of the dead in their mahogany wardrobe would have melted into the inky blackness by now. So would the great-grandmother’s astrakhan coat, which Stella slipped off its hanger when she thought
she was alone. It reached almost to her ankles, and the sleeves were far too long for her short arms. She wrapped it tightly around her body, turned her back to the wardrobe mirror and twisted round to see how it looked, gauging how much she would have to take it in at the waist for it to fit snugly around the hips. She studied the angle of the collar on her chest, shook the lapels, did up buttons and undid them again, judging the effect all the while with darting, beady eyes.

“Stella puts Oda’s coat on sometimes,” I tittle-tattled one day, when she and the grandmother were standing at the kitchen table sifting flour. I felt guilty immediately.

Stella blushed bright red and shot me a searing look. For a time the only sound was the soft slap of her hands on the dough.

The grandmother stood with her back to us rinsing a saucer under the tap.

She was taking her time. She placed the saucer in the rack, dried her hands on her apron, sat down, rolled up a sheet of kitchen foil with a nonchalant air and then said sharply: “She’s not the only one …”

Her words plunged a dagger in my ribs. I cringed.

“What grown-ups do is their own business,” she went on. “If they want to act the
madame
, it’s entirely up to them.”

Stella stopped kneading abruptly, her hands lay still in the bowl with dough as though she had suddenly decided to become a house plant.

“But every self-respecting housewife knows she ought to dust her paws with flour first. Stops the dough from sticking.”

All three of us seemed to freeze into a
tableau vivant
, until a moment later the grandmother turned to the sink again and Stella went back to slapping her dough. I was reminded of a herd of elephants sloshing across a muddy pool.

It was only by magic that she could have found me out. I had put everything back in the old travelling trunk exactly as I had found it. Socks on top, in bundled pairs. Underneath were the trousers with their sickly-sweet smell of camphor and dust. Under the trousers were the three shirts. Two grey, one checked. At the bottom lay school textbooks and exercise books, with much-thumbed labels. Marcel Ornelis. Class C. Saint Laurens. Inside were stock-raising techniques, domestic fowl and cattle breeds, irrigation methods, with pencilled scribbles in the margin, faint from being erased:
Fly Bluefoot fly!!
All hail to Flanders!

The shirts did not match the picture in my mind’s eye, which was of a slim figure, military, clean-cut. A dark shape scissored out of the night. The check shirt had a peasant collar. He must have worn it buttoned up to the top, the same way it now lay folded in the trunk. He may have rolled up the sleeves on hot days. Up to the elbows, or over them. Probably over.

Glory to our Flemish Heroes!

He would have pencilled his slogans in secret, hiding behind the boys in the row in front. Perhaps he had shielded what he was writing with his left hand. He would have rubbed them out himself, later on. Possibly at the behest of a teacher. Or he might have been afraid, or ashamed, as if
he had scrawled an obscenity on the wall of one of the lavatories. The older boys sometimes did this, even in Miss Veegaete’s lavatory. She would sweep out of her palatial privy seething with indignation, an empress stepping onto her balcony to face the rebellious rabble below.

Every single item had been replaced in the trunk in the correct sequence, for hadn’t I had plenty of practice observing the strictest order each Friday anew, portrait after portrait? I had even dusted the lid with my handkerchief so as to remove any fingerprints. Perhaps I had been too fastidious. Perhaps I had made the trunk look suspiciously spic and span. Now, in the early hours of the night, it would be filling up with black water, up to the brim and over, like an overflowing bathtub.

The grandfather switched the light off over the sofa. The grandmother folded her glasses and put them in their case. I sloped back to my room and drew the cold sheets up to my chin.

The familiar sounds of their nightly ritual wafted towards me. A Steradent tablet fizzing in a glass on the bathroom shelf. The splash of water on their faces, hands, wrists, while they grinned toothlessly in the stillness. The creaking of their joints, or it could have been the lining of their slippers, as they shambled down the corridor. The grandfather checked all the rooms, opening doors, glancing inside, and shutting them again. By the time he reached my door I was lying on my side, breathing through parted lips with studied regularity.

I knew without opening my eyes that he was standing in the doorway with his hand on the doorknob and his mouth twisted into an involuntary rictus. His flabby lips made soft smacking sounds. Finally he shut the door. A moment later their bedsprings groaned weakly under their combined weight.

I had learned to keep my mouth shut about the footsteps in the dead of night. I had mentioned them only once.

“You’ve got too much imagination, you have,” she had said. “You’ve got so much imagination it doesn’t fit inside your head. It’ll be the pigeons you can hear. Or your grandfather, when he goes to the lavatory.”

His footfall was familiar to me. He favoured his left foot to spare his bad knee. Hard-soft, hard-soft came the creak of his slippers, or was it his joints, as he headed to the bathroom and back again.

Perhaps she was right. It would be the pigeons – they certainly behaved as if they carried on until late at night. All the other birds would be up and about by sunrise, while the pigeons spent half the morning perching side by side on the gutter, a row of befuddled feathery balls on little legs. All that was missing were ice packs on their heads. They were the culprits – but then again maybe they were not. The veils of the night were more than a match for commonsense explanations.

Moonlight seeped through the slit under the door toward the bedstead. From the sewing room it inched across the
corridor as the night took its course. First it cast a long sliver of light on the floor, then receded slowly, blurring the space.

Miss Veegaete’s dress dangling against the wardrobe door would be all silvery by now, but I did not dare sneak inside to take a look. The attic had come alive. The rafters creaked from one end of the house to the other. I told myself it was the pigeons.

Outside, the neighbours’ dog barked at the stars and rattled its bowl. It was a bad-tempered, ugly creature, but I was grateful for the noise.

The night wore on. The cold rose up from the ground, penetrating the walls. The atmosphere was rife with little ticks and sighs; the kitchen utensils seemed to be vying for space, clicking and rattling like so many blackbirds singing to claim their territory. The moon was setting, and in the attic an inky blackness started pouring from all the cupboards and chests, cascading down the stairs. I couldn’t see a thing. All around me the dark pressed up against the walls, rustling behind cupboards and nibbling at the woodwork. Rats or mice behind the skirting boards. Perhaps.

I considered my options: count up to ten thousand, say, or do some more praying, or pretend that fairies really existed and I could make any wish I pleased. What if it worked? What if all the stuff that fell off the table were to band together? A strip of suede. A tuft of fur. What if all the snippets of serge joined forces with a couple of buttons? They could enlist the tangle of basting threads on the floor, and bribe a dozen thimbles while they were at it. They could invade the table drawer and conspire with the lame zippers. Murder in
reverse. A new perspective. A more bearable tomb. So he would stop roaming the house in his stockinged feet, all the way from attic to basement, pausing at my door, deathly quiet, jealous of me – Marcel to a tee but for the eyes which I got from my mother. Until finally I was numbed by sleep and my head dropped like the lid on the travelling trunk.