Shutterspeed

I STILL HAVE PHOTOS FROM THOSE DAYS, SHOWING ME
fair-haired and sandal-shod. My father holds me by the hand as we stroll along meadows dappled by the shade of poplars, during summers that now seem greener and slower than they were. By the wayside, at the foot of the railway embankment, on the rise to the bridge, my father startles butterflies on the flowering hemlock, and their motion, like my wonderment, is arrested in mid-air.

This is the timelessness of the world when he was still around and I had barely arrived. For all that I am there in the picture with my eyes riveted on the pebbly road, doubtless to avoid losing my footing, and for all that I cling so tightly to his hand, my existence has yet to begin.

I must be about two years old, and it is probably August. The sights around me are finite and warm. From end to end the horizon is serrated by lines of trees cropping the surfeit of sky. Everything about their meandering boughs suggests regularity. A train passing each hour. The stroke of a bell every fifteen minutes, high in the echo chamber above the roof tiles.

By the paling around the rectory I see walnuts dropping from overhanging branches, splitting open like skulls on the cobbles. After sundown sparrows swoop around the house in search of spiders lurking in the crannies of weathered grouting. The upstairs windows are open, with net curtains that hang motionless behind the screens. Up there, over one of the display windows flanking the front door, is the room that is to be mine, the room that once belonged to my father and Werner, his twin brother.

The table with its single drawer, the bookshelf, the chair. Up on the mantelpiece the picture of John Kennedy, from which position it was never moved, not even by me. The cherrywood wardrobe. The grass-green bedspread. The pre-war lino, fractured between feet and floorboard. The bed, which they must have shared like two sardines in a tin when they were boys, and which started out too big for me just as it did for them, and then became too small.

Two glass-fronted shop counters on the ground floor, then a doorway to a long passage leading to the back of the house. From the ceiling dangle the legs of almost life-size dolls, looking like hanged men in clear plastic bags, side by side with bicycle wheels, pitchers and fly swatters.

Daylight filters darkly through the cluttered window displays into the shop, where shelves and storage cabinets with drawers stretch from floor to ceiling. Racks of bottles and jars, some of them filmed with dust; rows of liqueurs
from godforsaken times, tiers of brightly coloured pill-boxes – the salves and potions of Uncle Werner’s sideline in dubious remedies for every conceivable ailment. Hanging gardens of tinned pineapple, apricot and peach teeter on the brinks of precipices. Further back, like treasure-hunters’ bounty, gleam glacé cherries in tall glass jars. A glass showcase, fitted with a lock by Aunt Laura, Uncle Werner’s wife, holds a polar region of crystal bottles and phials of essential oils, so ethereal and precious that they are almost sold by the drop.

The shop-front is still recognisable. You can tell from the size of the windows that they were once used for display, but the walls are no more than a shell; the house itself has moved elsewhere. The inside doors now open on to rooms in other remembered houses, leading from one to the other in seamless transition.

Dates are irrelevant. One moment I am standing with my feet in a zinc tub, twisting round to peer at my buttocks in the mirror, the next I have just been lifted from my cradle and am being wrapped in a blanket by a woman.

There are also spaces without walls, only the chequered pattern of a tiled floor strewn with jigsaw pieces. I can feel the cold tiles beneath my feet, I can hear whispers that sound as if they are coming from a tube somewhere in the passage behind me. I am far too young to understand what they are saying, but I have a sense of voices being lowered on account of me being here and my father having gone.

Coming home after work on a Friday night he would
have sweets hidden in his fists, or else disappointment. He was never empty-handed.

I can see them now, the fists of a manual worker, thick fingers, coarse dark hairs on the wrists, and the palms so hard-callused as to give the impression of stone or some other lifeless, carved material.

All the rest, the dark hair that was almost as dark as mine is now, the thick lashes, the eyes set deep in their sockets, are things I am not sure if I remember or am just imagining. The fists, though, I am sure about.

He was a little sturdier than his twin brother. Broader shoulders, bigger bones. Their mother always said he had stayed inside her the longest and had kicked Werner out first, and that she had had to stop him from sucking both her breasts dry.

In a garden of long ago she sits on a chair, wide-kneed, still dazed from giving birth, her infant sons like small Buddhas on her lap. Uncle Werner looks at once earnest and unconcerned, while my father’s gaze seems turned inward, or just vacant. Sated, full, the pair of them.

On the day of their baptism my father sleeps through the whole ceremony, a small bundle of newbornness in white lace. Even as the priest pours water on his forehead from a brass shell, he does not stir.

At the festivities afterwards he and his twin lie forehead to forehead in a wicker cradle festooned with lilies: fists bunched, eyes shut tight, knees drawn up against bellies, as though still resisting the dread passage from womb to world.

Beneath his eyelids the pupils twitch to the rhythm of unsteady dreams. In his oversized head his spirit must already be branching out into all those brain cells.

His fingers grasp at everything and nothing. When someone strokes his cheek, so gratuitously veined with life, his face reciprocates with a wide grimace which he has yet to learn is a smile and connected with pleasure.

They were inseparable. Forever side by side, identically dressed, posing in relatives’ gardens, where he trailed after his twin among the flowerbeds, apparently without ever getting his clothes dirty.

He always seems to freeze in a self-conscious pose, hands on the stomach, face slightly averted, with that narrow-eyed look of his that shoots past me as if to say: ‘Don’t touch, don’t look, let me be. I’m not here.’

The sight of me wearing the same strained expression at the age of about twelve, here, in the doorway of the shop on a Sunday in late May, still gives me the vertigo of someone posing on a cliff edge.

It is the day of my First Communion. The shop is closed. Aunt Laura has hung sheets across the bottom half of the display windows, because her wares need protection from the summer glare, unlike us, for whom the spiked morning sunlight holds no menace.

There are three of us standing on the doorstep, huddled together as if there isn’t enough room for us all in the picture. I wear grey knee breeches and a tartan blazer over a shirt with a bow tie, my cheeks still on fire
after Aunt’s harsh scouring. Uncle Werner wears his usual kindly, slightly loopy grin as he rests his hand on my shoulder, looking down at me as if he were my real father.

My lips are curved into a smile that has clearly been cajoled out of me. My sweaty, satin-gloved hands clasp a soft leather-bound missal with gilt-edged pages and a string of rosary beads.

I am visibly embarrassed by my knee socks and my sissy appearance in general.

Emerging from the church afterwards, standing on the steps amid hats and collars, partially screened by Aunt’s coat swinging open as she raises her arm to steady her hat for no good reason, I offer the same dutiful smile, but my eyes are guarded, as if I had only just noticed the photographer focusing on me and had braced myself in the nick of time for the all-seeing lens.

I look straight into the camera, my face like a raised fist against the dark background of the portal. In the way I have quickly struck a pose, one foot slightly in front of the other, left hand on my hip and the right in my trouser pocket, I recognise the wish to resemble my father and fill his frame with my own.

I wanted to feel what he had felt, to feel it tingle in my own pores on the very same spot where he once posed for the camera, bathed in an equally summery sunshine which, over the years, turned his complexion sallow. He wore a similar blazer, only speckled. His shirt, tie and shoes look old and worn in the photo.

It was taken just after the war, so perhaps only the jacket was new.

At the post-Communion party I am the centre of attention: a grave-looking boy occupying the place of honour beneath the mantelpiece in the invariably stuffy front room. I am delivering the
coup de grâce
to the lamb-shaped frozen dessert, apparently oblivious to all those bored elbows propped on the table.

Displayed on the sideboard at my back is the candle Aunt Laura bought for me, inscribed with my name, Joris Alderweireldt, in gilt lettering beneath a Lamb of God holding a crucifix in its front paws.

Later, when the table has been cleared, I unwrap the parcel Uncle Werner deposited on the sideboard in the morning with a conspiratorial air, saying it was not to be opened until later. I do my best to look surprised and pleased as the wrapping paper parts to reveal a black case containing a hefty pair of binoculars, smelling of new.

There I am, reaching inside the case for a narrow envelope wedged in the bottom. I remember my heart leaping then sinking at the sight of the familiar hand, a neat copperplate with a hint of the schoolgirl disciplined by years of ruler-wielding nuns.

The heading would have been the usual ‘My darling boy’. Perhaps I was too young, perhaps not, to get a sense of the stiltedness, the hesitation before putting pen to paper, possibly even a smattering of guilt or remorse sweepingly glossed over by how much she missed being
with me today, and did I like the Spanish stamps. Spain, land of tangerines and St Nicholas, who showed considerably less reluctance than her to board a boat or train.

Aunt leans back in her chair, giving one of the wry smiles she reserves for signalling disapproval. There is a hint of unease in the faces around her, whereas I look quite serene, and it is only now that I realise how much energy it cost me to hold up the letter, which was more like an oversized postcard, as if I am going to read it aloud.

Over the scene hangs a pall of silence, shot through with the painfully measured ticking of the mantel clock. Twenty minutes to three. Outside, the hens have settled in their dusty hollows, over in the churchyard the gravestones are blistering in the heat.

There is no one ‘from her side’, as Aunt used to call my mother’s relations. They must have lost touch over time. There are a few photos, not many, in which one of her brothers is to be seen: a man with a pointed moustache and dark glasses, his teeth bared in a forced smile that seems all the grimmer for the glint of gold fillings, while I blow out candles or skip around a Christmas tree.

He has her lean build, her long fingers, and a vulnerable agility which, here on this camping holiday on the moors, does not tally with how I remember him. I am sitting in the long grass at his feet playing with a bucket, while he looks out over the car towards the tent and the figure of a woman picking daisies on a rise farther off.

The various homes belonging to members of her family are intertwined in my memory to form a single labyrinthine building with a different season at each window. The straight-edged lawns, the well-trodden paths, the chicken runs edged with elder have all come together in one vast garden of secret walks and terraces shaded by spreading branches. Beyond the trees rise the house-tops, cool, stately, aloof, darkened with soot or rain, as if the brickwork were steeped in its own shadow.

My mother looms palely in dim interiors filled with massive furniture, a blond toddler at her knee, her brothers forming a defensive rampart around her. At the age of eighteen, in the company of some relatives – on her birthday, perhaps – there is no sign of the rebellious spirit she must have possessed for her to invoke her clan’s contempt by marrying beneath her. I see a young girl, frail and prim in a jacket and skirt, her hair up, blinking against the harsh afternoon sunshine as she poses among overblown peonies on a lawn, two pigeons like snowy napkins in the grass at her feet.

She stands among the tables laden with refreshments, partially obscured by summer hats, shoulders, politely smiling faces and hands arrested in mid-gesture, and chats with her friends – ladies in the making with handbags and summer gloves they would prefer to keep on when shaking hands with gentlemen. She is a Nachtergaele, a name that resonates in the village. There is no trace of the awkwardness I feel every time a camera is pointed at me, the same awkwardness as my father’s and which
always makes me, like him, look like a photo within a photo hanging crookedly on a wall in the final moment before it shatters to pieces on the floor.

At a fairground dance she sails across the floor in the arms of one of her brothers. On another occasion she claps her hands for the boys’ sack race on the lawn. A fine-tuned mechanism of civilities and platitudes governs her gestures in these snapshots, tempering her response to jests by removing their sting.

On an outing, beneath the cherry blossom, surrounded by her beaming girlfriends, she winks coyly at the camera as she raises a foaming tankard to her lips. At the same instant a man at the next table – my father, as it turns out – beckons a waitress, leaning so far back that his head almost touches her ear. They seem utterly unaware of one another.

Somebody snapped the pair of them in a field of ripe corn, peering happily over the swollen ears. That summer the fathomless sky was a shade of blue that only the earliest colour photographs were able to record. Studio-enhanced, no doubt.

Later, they hold hands as they gaze over a mountain lake, two unassuming silhouettes standing at the edge of a glassy stretch of water encircled by steep cliffs and snow-capped peaks. He carries a rucksack, she leans on a walking stick. The light has an icy clarity, making them seem almost as transparent as the feathery clouds high over their heads, swirling around the mountain-tops.