Authors: Erwin Mortier
“It took him fifty seafood banquets to raise the funds,” Willem said. “My father couldn’t stand it any more. After the third one he wrote a cheque. That stopped them.”
“… and then our entirely renovated typing classroom,” the priest continued, “for which Mr Villeyn has quite rightly been campaigning for years.”
“Villeyn, rhymes with villain,” Willem murmured.
I wondered how he knew all these things. “Have you got an older brother here by any chance?”
He avoided my eye. “I’ve been put back a year. Tried too hard.”
Father Deceuster looked ecstatic, as if he were about to levitate. He held forth about a schoolboy’s duty to be a good Christian and drifted into a muddled discourse on happiness, which in his view was to be found in little things. Screwing up his notes, he wished us a good term and good progress on our road to a strong and healthy adolescence.
There was a feeble round of applause.
Mr Bouillie took a brisker line. He took the mike from the priest and barked, “I am going to call out your names followed by an A, a B or a C. After roll-call I shall give you a signal for you to go to the teacher holding your designated letter.”
He pointed to the far end of the yard, where three teachers were standing on the step in front of a wooden gate, each holding up a sign.
I was given a B.
So was Willem.
“We’ll be together, then,” I said.
We crossed the yard and went to our respective teachers.
“It’s Vaneenooghe,” Willem said, “which isn’t too bad. He teaches religious education.”
“I want you to file in an orderly fashion and I don’t want to hear another word,” Mr Vaneenooghe said.
He paused. “Not another word,” he repeated.
When everyone was quiet he snapped his fingers.
The row started moving.
Willem nudged me.
Mr Vaneenooghe pushed against the gate, which swung wide open as if it were the mouth of hell.
A
FLIGHT OF BLUESTONE STEPS
took us to the upper level, where neon strip lights flickered. We filed down a narrow passage with wood panelling along one wall. The other wall had high windows through which you could see grey sky, lamp-posts, and a cable swaying in the breeze.
Mr Vaneenooghe held open the door of our cage. He ushered us in with a gallant bow. “Do come in, gentlemen,” he said.
We were surrounded by stark green walls, the only relief being a crucifix hanging slightly askew over the blackboard and a faded poster showing a lad chewing a straw. The caption underneath read, “Hope is the Fountain of Youth.”
The wood of the desks was far too hard to carve your name in the surface, the gleaming varnish was indestructible. I picked a desk in the middle, somewhat nearer to the door than to the blackboard.
“Mind if I sit next to you?” Willem asked.
I said I didn’t mind.
We both looked on with interest as a young lad in front of us unzipped his school bag lovingly and took out a tartan pencil case, a sharpener in the shape of a cow, a wooden ruler, a pair of compasses, a protractor, a bicoloured rubber,
a marker pen and two tubes of glue. He crossed his arms in eager readiness, and seemed somewhat taken aback when Mr Vaneenooghe instructed us to raise the lids of our desks.
“You’ll find all the exercise books you need inside,” he said.
Each exercise book had a photograph of a school on the cover—all of them different but all run by the same religious order. The same shoeboxes everywhere, the same paved school yard. No doubt they all had their own Mr Bouillies to patrol their borders.
Disheartened, I rested the lid against my forehead.
“Anything wrong?” Willem asked.
I shook my head.
“You can take them home with you after school today,” Mr Vaneenooghe continued, “so you can put your names and numbers on the covers.” There were dotted lines to indicate where. Everything had been thought out beforehand, nothing would be left to chance.
Back at my old school Mr Snellaert would be herding a new flock into his classroom, where the walls were covered in photographs and postcards. Sums would become palpable as if by magic, as real as the click of the beads on the old-fashioned abacus he still used. On the walls he would unroll maps as big as Gobelin tapestries, he would usher his pupils into the great halls of history and unfold Belgium as if it were an imaginary kingdom encompassing regions such as Lorraine, with its sombre resonance of Teutonic ruins. Harnessed in his grey suit of armour he was ever on the alert for the slightest sign of a scaly claw, a forked tongue, so that he might sally forth and save us from the demon of boredom.
Mr Vaneenooghe, on the other hand, seemed to have stepped straight out of a cut-price clothing store. His suit
looked as though it was still on the hanger as he moved stiffly about the classroom. His enthusiasm, however, was clearly moth-eaten.
Making a pretence of geniality, he perched on the corner of his desk and waited patiently until we had all stored away our exercise books. Then he got up and crossed to the blackboard. He let out an exaggerated sigh as he picked a piece of chalk from the ridge and wrote in capital letters
GOD IS OUR BEST FRIEND
. He turned round to face us and rubbed his hands while a plaster smile peeled from his lips.
*
During midday break I saw Roland again. He was sitting at the far end of the refectory with five of his mates, close to the podium where Father Deceuster had appeared a moment before to make the sign of the cross and wish us “a pleasant meal”, whereupon the clatter of spoons in soup bowls took over and I wrenched the lid off my sandwich box.
Willem had gone home. I was surrounded by boys I had no inclination to get to know any better. They were chattering away, undaunted by Mr Bouillie, who was on the prowl among the tables for irregularities of behaviour.
Here too, seniors and juniors were kept apart. The hall was divided down the middle by a step. From the lower section the deep voices of the older boys floated up to me, and I wondered whether I would ever thrive in these surroundings like they did, quite uninhibited by the sense that it was all a farce.
At half-past one we went outside. Basketballs bounced out of the shed into the school yard. A boy asked me if I wanted to join in, but I declined the offer. I wanted to be invisible, to blend into
the brick and concrete background like a chameleon, and later on, when the bell rang to signal that it was time to go home, to take on the colour of grass and trees again. But effacement was impossible. No matter how hard I tried to avoid being noticed, I kept feeling Mr Bouillie’s eyes boring into my shoulders.
Still, there were certain places that seemed to elude his omnipresence. Blind corners at the back of the bike shed, by the gymnasium wall, where hastily stubbed-out ciggies, sweet wrappers and general litter suggested clandestine delights, quick, urgent and sweet.
On the far side of the yard, where it adjoined the monastery, Roland and his mates huddled together by an overgrown laurel bush. Mr Bouillie was at the opposite end, working his beat with the assurance that is the preserve of the truly mighty. His movements were predictable, like the passage of a comet or a shower of meteors, and for the moment he was well out of range.
A frivolous curl of smoke rose from the leafy bush. A few boys on the lookout gestured a warning, taking care not to attract too much attention. By the time Mr Bouillie came round again, they had dispersed into pairs or threesomes, conversing casually as if nothing had happened.
I hoped Willem would be back soon, but yet another bell rang out, this time for us to return to the refectory. When we had all taken our places at the tables, which had been cleared in the meantime, Mr Bouillie snapped his fingers to signal the start of an hour of silent study.
Once I had written my name down on the covers of my exercise books I couldn’t think of anything else to do. The smell of soup still lingered in the air over the tables, and the only sounds intruding on the silence were Mr Bouillie’s steady footfalls and the odd slap of a ruler being brought down too brusquely.
The other boys at my table were busy doing sums. I took as long as I could to write my name down, after which I opened my R.E. exercise book and reread what Mr Vaneenooghe had made us write down about God, Whose hand was ever on our shoulders, either in encouragement or in fatherly reproof.
We had been told to draw a circle. “If you take the dot in the middle to be God,” Mr Vaneenooghe had said, “you can add another dot to indicate your own position.”
I would have preferred to put myself somewhere outside the circle, but had the feeling that this wouldn’t be considered right.
“Aha, a marginal position yet again,” Mr Vaneenooghe had said with a glance at my drawing, while his beard crinkled around a threadbare smile.
I was interrupted in my musings by the clatter of a pen falling on the floor and the scrape of a chair. I turned round and saw Mr Bouillie grabbing one of the new boys by the nape of the neck and holding him out in front of him like a rag.
“No fidgeting during study hour!” he scolded, pushing the boy up the steps to the podium, where he had to stand with his back to the rest of us and “think things over”.
Stifled sobs could be heard in the refectory. Mr Bouillie adjusted the cuffs of his jacket and went about his business.
I sat there wishing I could erect a sort of electric fence all around me, the way they did in the science-fiction comics I was addicted to. An invisible, impenetrable dome, inside which I could seal myself off from the surrounding moonscape and at the same time prevent the hatred that was oozing from all my pores from being noticed by everyone. I clenched my teeth and put little pencil marks in the margins of my exercise book.
The afternoon dragged on. Lessons started again at half-past two. The clouds lifted briefly, and the most excruciating
boredom I had ever experienced came pouring in through the tall windows.
A man wearing a wide tie and pebble glasses opened his briefcase. He instructed me to say what my name was in French: “Je m’appelle Antoine.” “Et vous?” he inquired, turning to Willem. “Mon nom est Guillaume,” he replied. He was obliged to add “J’ai aussi une petite soeur. Elle s’appelle Kathérine.” He glanced at me sheepishly.
The wide tie was followed by a skinny fellow wearing a foul-smelling jumper. He unrolled a miserable little map against the blackboard showing Belgium’s major concentrations of industry, all the sectors of which he proceeded to enumerate in the humdrum drone of a fly buzzing aimlessly around a lamp.
Willem sprawled at his desk. “I could just do with a good kip.”
He cracked his knuckles.
“De Vries, sit up straight. No slouching or slacking in my class,” came the voice from the blackboard.
Willem drew himself up slowly, drummed his fingers on the top of his desk and puffed out his cheeks.
“Moron,” I heard him whisper.
*
The four o’clock bell unleashed anarchy. Mr Bouillie stood in the flurry of departing bicycles, flailing his arms as if he were trying to net a school of herrings and hated to see any escape.
Roland was cycling way ahead of me and Willem. He was in a team with his mates, talking and shouting, but they fell silent at a stroke when they spotted a bunch of fluttery schoolgirls in blue uniforms starting off home on their bikes.
The girls stopped en masse by the bandstand on the square, dismounted and tied their jerseys around their hips to shorten their skirts. They were like wading birds on the shore of a lake, chattering away, darting looks at the boys dawdling by the cafés on the edge of the square, bouncing the frames of their bikes against their thighs as they talked.
“Do you want to hang about for a bit?” Willem asked, hunched nonchalantly over his handlebars.
“My father said I should stick with my cousin over there,” I said.
Roland did not seem to be in the slightest hurry. He had tied his jacket on his luggage carrier and had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was now deep in discussion with some other boys.
The atmosphere was tense. Surreptitious looks flashed to and fro. Racy comments ricocheted off the pavement. The girls would be flapping their wings and taking off next.
“You’ll be taking the road through the wood, won’t you?” Willem said. “We can wait for him there.”
We crossed the market square on our way out of Ruizele and cycled uphill, not stopping until we reached the point where the road plunged in among the trees.
Willem pulled back his long hair into a ponytail, which he secured with an elastic band.
“It’s not allowed at school,” he said.
Leaning on his handlebars with his arms crossed, he gazed out over the roofs, the hospital grounds and the church tower with gold lettering over the belfry:
Destructa 1914—Resurrecta 1920
, it said.
“Are you always so serious?” he asked.
“Dunno…” I said haltingly. I had never thought about myself in those terms, really. Maybe that’s what I was: serious.
I knew I had been much jollier in the past, when there was a heap of parcels under the Christmas tree or when it was my birthday. But none of the presents I’d had for my first Communion a couple of months ago had given me the same kind of thrill.
Even my elation at Uncle Roger’s gift of a wristwatch had been short-lived, for it was too blatant a reminder of the rules and duties that would govern me from now on. You had to see to it that it didn’t run ahead of the proper time or slow down and even stop altogether. The face had a little window showing the date, which changed all by itself at midnight exactly. I knew this because I’d stayed awake on purpose. The next morning my thumb was sore from the grooves on the winder.
Time was something I wanted to get away from. I had the feeling that my new school was nothing but a front for a factory or military laboratory, where time was a weird, newly discovered serum that was injected directly into our veins in order to test how much of it we could take without falling asleep or becoming unruly. Even the soup which we were served daily—and which, so I discovered later, got thinner and thinner from Monday to Friday until it was little more than water with flecks of green—had time floating in it.
I heard Willem snigger.
“Dreamer,” he said.
I wasn’t dreaming. There was too much too look at, too much to see. My eyes were funnels into which the world kept pouring images. The real homework I had to do each evening was to sort all these impressions, classify them, put them in little boxes, fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle so they wouldn’t hang around in the night and get tangled in my sheets.
Why was Roland the way he was? He was pedalling up the slope towards us, chattering to his mates. Why did everything about him seem to fit? He talked in the same way as he pedalled his bike: in a no-nonsense, blunt kind of way. His thoughts resembled massive cupboards in his head. They remained shut until the ground tilted suddenly and the contents tumbled out like saucepans clattering to the floor. Compared to him I was a servant girl: furtively opening drawers, taking dresses from wardrobes and holding them against my front in the mirror, making sure to put the clothes back without creasing them.
He and his mates ignored us as they rode past.
Willem swung his bike round. We freewheeled down the slope under the trees. The past couple of hours slithered away like water off a duck’s back.
That very morning I had cycled past his house without knowing that he lived there. It was on the corner between two avenues. The gaps in the rhododendrons showed glimpses of a big garden. I noted a slide, and a gaily coloured sculpture on the lawn: a roly-poly woman with flowers painted all over her. The house loomed in the shadows. It was rather peculiar, dark and greenish with streaks of damp on the concrete exterior. The curving walls with large windows seemed to have been designed to spare as many trees as possible.
“Thank goodness that’s it for today,” said Willem. He swerved into the front garden and made for a mass of honeysuckle and ivy with a carport underneath and a glass door.