Shutterspeed (11 page)

‘They had a whale of a time,’ said the master. ‘And so did I, to be honest. I had them find out the names of the German soldiers. They’d gone into hiding when the war ended. The Canadians found all four of them. Hadn’t eaten for days. Thin as rakes. Some Master Race! They scratched their names in the cement with their penknives – you can still see them, probably. But nowadays, what with my rheumatism…’ he patted his hip, ‘things aren’t as easy as they used to be.’

The antics on screen continued, with much waving of arms and splashing in the stream amid bare knees and rubber boots. There was something unreal about the scene, compounded by the whirr of the projector and intermittent clicks of the reel.

Around someone’s shins there appeared, as if by magic, an everted cuff of lacy foam and flying droplets, whereupon the legs shot up from the bed of the stream in a
wide arc over the bulrushes and irises until their owner landed on his two feet on the bank.

Mr Snellaert scratched his scalp. He was about to speak when the picture changed.

I saw a pair of muddy hands displaying a couple of dented, rusty shells with trails of duckweed.

‘Yes, that’s right, we found them in the stream. One of the lads had a rake with him. I had them cleaned. They’re over there, on the bookshelf.’

Meanwhile the camera zoomed out, somewhat jerkily. The hands grew wrists, forearms, and then suddenly a chin appeared, and a mouth with a crooked smile I thought looked familiar.

‘Now who could that be?’ said the master in mock surprise.

It was Uncle Werner. His blond hair stuck out on all sides, just like in the old photos. I recognised his speckled pullover and the collar of his checked shirt. He puffed up his cheeks and rolled his eyes in a squint.

‘Always up to mischief,’ Mr Snellaert grinned. ‘I even locked him in the coal cellar once because he wouldn’t stop acting the clown, and things got out of hand.’

I was only half listening. The film was very strange. The figures suddenly moved close together, as if someone had ordered them to stand in a row. Equally suddenly the group of five or six youths switched from peering into the lens to lurching backwards and flapping their arms.

‘Drat,’ said the master. ‘Must’ve rewound it back to front. I thought it looked a bit odd …’

One by one they leaned forward. As though taking their leave from an oriental emperor on whom no back was permitted to be turned, they retreated through the water to the brick mouth of the tunnel. I saw the handle of the rake sink between their heads and blend into the alder coppice.

‘Oh bother,’ grumbled Mr Snellaert. He made to switch off the projector. ‘Silly me.’

‘Wait!’ I cried.

In the middle of the stream stood my father. Legs wide, hands on hips, water up to his ankles, eyes screwed up against the sun. He brought his hand to his ear, seemingly to hear what the master was saying, then I saw him nod. He bent over and with his hands on his thighs began to move backwards to the dark hole in the railway embankment. He waved again, then crouched, looked around him for the last time, as if he would never see the world again, and was engulfed in darkness.

The image juddered, the film flapped loose from the reel.

‘He was the first to come out at the other end,’ the master said. ‘I remember it well. Never let a chance go by to crawl over or under things …’

The master switched off the projector.

‘Died far too young, did your pa,’ he said.

He walked to the window and pulled up the blinds.

‘You make sure you live longer than him.’

I took the book home.
Mysteries of Civilisation
. ‘Ziggurat’ was the most exciting word in it.

The car arrived at about half-past ten the next morning. They really couldn’t stay, they said, too busy. My mother’s brother wore his sunglasses and slouched against the car, smoking a cigarette while she went inside to take charge of my suitcase. She said it was very kind but they had stopped on the way for a quick bite on the dike at Blankenberge.

I merely shook hands with Uncle and Aunt – much too formally, I thought.

‘See you in a couple of weeks, then,’ said Aunt.

They didn’t come to the door to wave goodbye, and I didn’t look back as we circled the churchyard before turning into the high street and then taking the motorway.

NOW, WHENEVER I THINK BACK TO THOSE EARLY DAYS IN
my first nest, and to the years that followed, during which, until the age of sixteen or so, I spent at least two weekends a month there, I see myself walking alone along the fields, and nearly always it is summer. Encapsulating all my memories like a glass dome is the languid stillness of a day in July. A July of parched mud in the verge, a cat streaking out from under the hedge, and high in the azure sky a sports plane chugging faintly over a world devoid of human life.

The road is deserted. In the upstairs windows above the shop, the net curtains sway gently in the draught. The screen door clicks open and shut, the table is laid, the kettle is still warm on the hob, and up in the gutter pigeons dance the fandango.

My existence there is limited to seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling. When I look in the mirror I can see through myself. Maybe I’m in heaven.

A few days before Uncle Werner died I helped carry him from his sickbed by the window to the table. While Aunt
was in the kitchen heating the milk I cut his slice of bread into strips, watched him eat them with tremulous movements and heard him take greedy gulps from the large bowl he held to his mouth with fingers like desiccated wings.

He had turned into an overgrown, hoar-frosted child howling in the night because of his dreams, from which he woke in terror. Using my handkerchief for want of a napkin, I wiped the cream off his upper lip while our eyes met. I saw death in his bewildered gaze, which was something I had only read about in books and which seemed rather far-fetched and sentimental at the time, but I saw it in the whites of his eyes and in his dilated pupils gorging themselves on the living world for as long as they were able.

He only spoke once. ‘Joris,’ he said. I had a feeling it was more an unconscious reflex at the sight of my face than true recognition, but I responded with ‘Pa’, anyway.

Aunt sat at a corner of the table and watched, seeking to glean some slight comfort from every sip of milk he took, every morsel of bread, although she knew it was hopeless.

Each time I visited she put her hands on my shoulders and said: ‘Still growing, I do believe’, whereas it was she who was shrinking in my arms.

I cannot think back to the pair of them without being reminded of my school compositions. Not because of their headings, but because of the illusion that every utterance
from those days could still safely be erased. I see myself happily brushing the rubber crumbs off my page, unperturbed by the gouges left in the paper by my sharp pencil.

When we had carried Uncle back from the table to the bed, Aunt said that quite honestly she hoped it would be over soon. It might sound a bit strange to hear someone say this about the person with whom they had shared everything for the past fifty years, but as far as she was concerned it was preferable to be sad about him being dead than about him having to suffer so much in life, such as it was. This was no life, she said, not for him and not for anyone else.

She sat on the chair by the bed in which Uncle lay on his side, his face to the window. Her hands lay on her lap; she wore the nylon flowered apron which, in the old days, she would put on in the kitchen and whip off before sitting down to a meal, but which she seemed to wear all the time nowadays. When Uncle became restless she would automatically put her hand on his arm without interrupting her litany, and rub her thumb over the back of his hand until he quietened down.

I think you could call their marriage a happy one. It had a special aroma, of which I was probably more aware than they ever were. It wafted across my face every day. It lingered in the fibres of the bath towels, it floated over the lavatory when I lifted the seat and could smell their water. They never flushed after a pee, presumably out of thrift, and considered it very affected of me when I started doing it.

They thought that life in the city was to blame, that it was one of those wasteful habits I had picked up from my mother. But I didn’t do it because I recoiled from their intimacy, I did it because I wanted to smell my own water. I felt hurt when they called me a townie, even though I knew they meant it kindly.

I was not there when he died and I regret that now. My regret has grown fiercer over the years and at the same time gentler, for regret seems to me to be the guaranteed interest that life pays out in ever more generous instalments. I called his name. He craned his neck and raised his hand in a reflex as I passed the window on my way down the garden to the road. Three days later he was dead.

After the funeral Aunt kept the hospital bed. She was finding it harder and harder to climb the stairs. So every night she left her clothes on the very chair she had sat on during her vigils at Uncle’s bedside until his heart gave up, crossed herself, and heaved herself into the bed downstairs.

I did not call very often, and never stayed long enough. I saw her arranging biscuits in a circle on a plate which she sent sliding across the table towards me like a lifebuoy.

‘Have another,’ I heard her say. ‘They’ll only go stale otherwise’, which was her way of pleading for me not to go just yet.

I don’t recall her ever voicing concerns about what state she would be found in, but I do know that last thing at night she never failed to rinse her fork and spoon, set her
plate and cup in the drying rack over the sink, hang the towel on its peg on the back of the kitchen door, drape the folded dishcloth over the tap, and moreover that she never failed to put her slippers side by side under the chair before getting into bed. No chance of being caught unawares, the way an unguarded moment is captured on camera.

She died in her sleep, head lolling sideways, newspaper on her lap. I received a phone call from the woman next door who looked in several times a day and whose conversation was larded with the sort of idle gossip I used to overhear in the shop, where the dead littered the conversations like discarded shopping lists.

She had eaten well that afternoon, and had looked well, too, said the woman; she had apparently been dead only a few hours when they found her, and according to the doctor had probably never known, just slipped away. The neighbour had been given my number some while ago in case anything happened, and she told me to look in the top drawer of the dresser. Aunt had left a note there, for the sake of convenience.

‘No flowers, Joris,’ it read, ‘and I want the cheapest coffin. Don’t forget to go to the bank. Pay the undertaker with what’s in the account and keep the rest for yourself. The notary will see to everything. You can rent out the shop if you like. The roof is still good, only the windows are in bad shape. Your ever loving Aunt Laura. Give my regards to your ma.’

The house had long since grown too big for her, for all that it had shrunk to a few downstairs rooms. The shelves in the shop, unused for the last eight years or so, still held an assortment of unsold food tins, and also some bottles of liqueur, which had turned to sugar. Now and then when I visited she would open one, making the crystals crunch under the screw top.

Practically every drawer I looked in contained old savings stamps, forgotten coupons, bits of string, corks, all the bits and bobs she always stored away because you never knew when they might come in handy.

The wardrobe upstairs was still filled with their clothes. Uncle’s bowler hat, the only remnant of his wedding outfit, still lay on the shelf, and from a hanger swayed a clear plastic shroud containing Aunt’s coat with the fur collar, her only smart outer garment, which she was so anxious to keep in pristine condition that one day, during Mass, in the sanctified hush of the consecration, a single stray mothball dropped out of the lining and bounced away over the flagstones. She pretended not to notice, although she paled.

An antique dealer was interested in the counters and display cabinets. I told him he could take everything if he cleared out the rest of the house as well. All I kept were the albums and a malachite paperweight, which I don’t recall seeing anywhere but on the edge of Aunt’s dressing table, and never holding down papers or envelopes.

I came upon the box she kept their love letters in, an
old chocolate box tied with a ribbon, but the letters had gone. Aunt must have torn them up, or burned them. As a boy I never dared to snoop in that box, for fear that the satin paper lining would rustle all too accusingly if I raised the lid. No one will ever know what they wrote in those letters, but I can imagine the stilted expressions of their affection without having read them.

Why is it always the letters people burn when they want to have a go at rewriting – or editing – their history? Why is it so seldom the photos that get thrown away? The festive gathering, the outings, the everyday snapshots, all those slivers of light rescued from oblivion by the dry click of a camera. All those images of people, young and old, fresh-faced or careworn, all the commotion, the laughter, the long faces, the dreamy looks, the vacant stares – why are they perceived to be less damning than words inked on paper?

Sometimes I wish the fabric of time were light and transparent, that it came in sheets that I could roll up at will and tuck away out of sight behind a pile of books, only to be taken out when I feel like it. But what the past does to me is nail the years to my ribs so that they clad and cage me in a vicarious body, making my father’s shadow loom large each time I furrow my brow, and my mother beat her arms like wings and hop in the air at each peal of my laughter, in which I can hear the echo of hers.

Who knows how many splinters of individuals whose names I’ve never heard of reside within my body? How
many people am I unconsciously imitating in the way I sit on a chair, lift my glass, try to hide my impatience, snore in my sleep, press my lips together when I think, or put my hand to my chest when I listen? I see my great-grandfather, who died before I was born, making exactly the same gesture.

I did not set foot in my old room, although the door was wide open – Aunt had left it open for years to prevent things getting musty inside. Everything looked the same as in the beginning: the bed, the writing table, the grass-green bedspread, although the photo of Kennedy, still up on the mantelpiece, was very faded. There was no trace of the room having been occupied by me. If I had looked in the bottom of the wardrobe, I suppose I might have found the binoculars I used to point at the full moon in the hope of identifying the Sea of Tranquillity. So much the better for the antique dealer.

One day, when Uncle was still alive but already having difficulty walking, Aunt asked if I would fancy accompanying her to a film evening in the village. I did not dare say no.

The event was held in the parish hall. A crowd of pensioners milled about the projector. Aunt Laura beamed left and right, saying, ‘Oh yes indeed, this is Joris – you know, George’s boy.’ Someone remarked that I was even taller than my father at my age.

‘Stuyvenberghe of Old’ was the title of the first film.
One of Mr Snellaert’s sons was now in charge, the master having moved to a nursing home after a stroke. The father’s hobby had evidently been passed on to the son.

He had made a compilation of the material his father had shot in the old days, although some sequences must have been even older. Films in which blobs of white or black appeared periodically beside the flying buttresses of the church, then still in possession of the pointed spire that was blown up by the Germans in the war. Jerky images of children trudging down the cobbled high street in wooden clogs lined with straw for warmth, dogcarts laden with milk churns, smiths at their anvils, country fairs, pilgrimages, and then all at once, in the rich Technicolor of the fifties, wheatfields with peasants tying the ears into sheaves and bundling the hay. Silent films, to which the master’s son had added a soundtrack of schmaltzy German songs.

Next came ‘Panoramic View from the Dike’. Violin glissandos skimmed the surface of the canal. The master had evidently turned in a full circle, sweeping the lens across fields, meadows, banks of brushwood and lines of poplars, then across the water, the village beyond, the tower, and yet more fields, as if to say: all this is about to get the chop.

I used to believe my father persuaded my mother to take so many photos of him and me together as a way of forestalling his misfortune, perhaps because he sensed that his days on this sublunary stage were numbered and that he needed to leave evidence for me when I grew up. The pictures he took of me, in my cradle, with my building
blocks, in the back garden, under the apple trees, gave me a sense of his already being in some distant future, peering down at me through a chink in his afterlife.

I think he took to drink for the promise it held of other dimensions besides the four he already knew, for the euphoria of escape from the here and now, the straitjacket of stiffening joints, hardening arteries and diminishing opportunities.

During that film evening with Aunt I recall feeling embarrassed by her utter absorption in the show, which caused her to hum along with the soundtrack and sway her head from side to side in blissful affirmation, especially when the tree-lined alleyway to the manor came into view. I never told her what the girl had said about my father that afternoon at Hélène’s coffee party.

I did drop some hints to my mother. On one of these occasions she burst out with ‘He was on the bottle even before we were married … How can you think I had an easy time? I was barely out of my teens, for Christ’s sake.’

I needed to grow quite a bit older before I could bring myself to take her in my arms, and even then I didn’t mean it, I must confess, but on the other hand perhaps I meant it more than most. My own private history has its share of dark passages, which I tend to skip when browsing in the past, although my reaction to other people’s obfuscations has always been to demand explanations, clarity, some kind of holdfast, and then to break with them in despair – and insist they return all my letters.