Shutterspeed (12 page)

Aunt gave me a nudge in the ribs. ‘Look, Joris!’ she cried, overcome with delight.

I could see the path leading to the church and the leafy crowns of the lindens on either side. An early Sunday morning in summer. The door is open, the service has just ended. The first worshippers to depart appear at the threshold, farmers donning their caps and lingering for a chat. Hands are shaken, more people emerge from the church, the forecourt fills.

Aunt comes into view, wearing her Sunday coat. She stops to talk to a few women I don’t recognise. Hélène Vuylsteke makes her appearance on the steps, holding the girl by the hand. Dispensing polite greetings left and right, they step briskly towards the high street, where their chauffeur is waiting at the kerb. Before getting into the car Hélène twists round to wave at Miss van Vooren, who has just emerged from the church beside the priest, clasping her missal with both hands.

It must have been during that final summer, some time after the fair, mid-July perhaps. The ruddy glow of the brick boundary wall, the colours of gravestones, linden leaves, garments, hair, hats – they all look so much richer than the way I remember them that summer.

But it was none of these things that moved Aunt to nudge me in the ribs. Her excitement was caused by a figure suddenly dashing across the screen from left to right, and then reappearing in a flash, like a swallow swooping over a country lane.

I had not noticed it was me until Aunt cried ‘Look!’ for
the second time. I am chasing my classmates, or they are chasing me. I snatch caps off boys’ heads, dodge their grasping hands, stumble, regain my balance, swerve around groups of chatting villagers, vanish. A second or two later I am racing over the cobbles in the opposite direction.

Uncle tries to slow me down, I see him remonstrating with me, but I don’t seem able to stop. I fling a cap in the air, evidently not mine because a boy with ginger hair lunges forward to catch it, but I jump and swipe it away. I see myself yelling voicelessly. I do not remember the words I shouted any more than I remember the happy, high-spirited boy leaping nimbly over cobbles and gravestones with his shirt tails flapping out of his trousers.

IN THE END I SETTLED FOR THE SECOND MOST EXPENSIVE
coffin, mainly because the undertaker’s snootiness got on my nerves and I wanted to be done with it. The nine-thirty service – the least expensive option for a change – was attended by no more than a dozen mourners. A tremulous requiem rose from the throats of four old biddies in the choir. The priest hurried through the rites with a voice that seemed to issue from a drainpipe, and during his sermon confused Aunt’s name with that of the deceased due to be consigned to the earth an hour later.

It was February, not the jolliest of months in which to die. Beyond the cypresses enclosing the graveyard I glimpsed the manor, its windows all shuttered and the beeches spreading leaflessly on either side. In previous years I had heard that the house was mostly unoccupied, except for a few weeks in summer and the occasional weekend during the hunting season.

‘That hussy’, as Aunt always referred to the girl, had in the meantime become engaged, perhaps to one of the posh young men dancing attendance on her one evening
in the foyer of a Brussels theatre. It was the only time I’d set eyes on her since I left the village, and I was holding a glass of white wine in each hand as I made my way to the bench where my mother was waiting for me, no doubt gauging whether I was sufficiently at ease in what she called ‘the world’.

Isabella Van Callant. She must have been about eighteen at the time. She wore her jet black hair in a thick pony tail threaded with strands of glitter, and laughed uproariously each time one of her admirers leaned over to whisper some little joke in her ear. I thought she was showing off.

She did not recognise me. Our eyes met, and she fixed me for a moment or two, during which a light frown spread across her forehead. Perhaps the sight of me tripped some vague recognition, perhaps I was just staring at her too openly.

She turned away. Her low-cut dress exposed a back and shoulder-blades dotted with moles.

‘T’es maigre comme un clou,’ I said to myself.

I stayed at the graveside until the workmen were ready to heave the slab in place. When Uncle Werner died Aunt had ordered her name to be chiselled into the bluestone in addition to his, and her date of birth followed by a dash, which could now be complemented by the date of her death.

Since then the concession has been extended twice already. Eternity seems to be less and less durable these
days. On both occasions I hesitated by the reception area in the council office, thinking how absurd it was that even the dead were charged for bed and board despite a leaky roof and mould-infested walls, but both times I signed my name at the bottom of the form and paid the dues. That burial vault is a millstone round my neck, or an anchor, or a stake in the ground to which I am chained like a sheep in a field, and I cherish my chain.

The grave resembles a king-size double bed, notwithstanding its triple occupancy. On the mattress lies a crucifix of polished black granite. Aunt resides on the left-hand side, and on the right, roughly at Uncle Werner’s feet, rests my father, considerably smaller in death than his twin brother, although the reverse was true in life. I picture them sometimes, crumpling up with laughter on the shared, heaving mattress, like children staying over at a friend’s house.

The monstrosity was paid for by my mother, so I learned later. Even now, when I stand at the foot of that grotesque cradle of death, I have a feeling that they were somehow let down, done down, done away with, no doubt for my own good.

The anger welling up each time I stand there is not directed at them, but subconsciously at my mother. My mother, who enabled me to attend the best schools, to travel as much as I pleased and to take my pick from the pert middle-class girls she presented to me like strongly scented bouquets.

I suppose I paid her back by adopting the role of obnoxious teenager. The moment I realised this all the resentment fell away, and I was left merely with a person in her late fifties who dyed her hair the wrong colour and wore oversized earrings, a woman who had no connection whatsoever with the beautiful, dark-haired young mother looking down at the small boy hugging her shins as he watches the ducks in some pond.

The grandchildren she hoped would some day arrive never came. I would have made a far too posthumous sort of father.

I was taken ill that Friday evening in September when I returned to Stuyvenberghe after my first fortnight at the Jesuit school. I still take the same trip now and then, just to feel the city leaching from my shoulders as the train rumbles across the River Leie.

I had felt a hot swelling in my throat all week, on top of which came a splitting headache in the last couple of days. When I swallowed I could hear my eardrums creak. I felt bruised all over like a fruit about to burst with fermenting pulp.

When the train left the last suburbs behind and started across the river, I propped my elbows on the table beneath the window and pressed hard, as though moving my bowels. Release took minutes to arrive, racking my midriff like birth pangs until it all came out in waves.

I felt myself gushing out of my body and turning into someone else in the same compartment, someone with a
stricken look, watching the tears run down the face of the child sitting opposite with his cap on and his travellingbag between his feet, suffocating in a sadness both harrowing and brief.

I heard my own sobs reverberate against the wood cladding of the compartment. I heard the rails thrum beneath the wheels, rumble in my midriff. Through the window I saw vegetable plots, garden sheds and alder bushes flash past in the twilight of a day that had known little sunshine. It was around seven, the evening rush hour was over. There was no one in the compartment besides me.

We sat there like brothers, or like sweethearts who haven’t dared to tell their parents yet, forehead to forehead, mouth to mouth. I felt the tears trickling down my hands into my sleeves and my cap sliding off my head and on to the table.

Someone slid the door open. The ticket inspector rapped his punch against the metal surround and said good evening. While I hunted frantically in my pockets he whistled a jaunty tune. Perhaps he was new at the job. When he handed me my ticket back I wanted to crawl under the bench out of mortification.

I pulled myself together, dried my cheeks with my handkerchief, folded my arms and leaned forward on the table. I tried to count the far-off church towers, but in the gathering dusk it was increasingly hard to avoid seeing my face reflected in the glass.

In the blue evening haze, the village roofs were settling in around the church like lambs in the fold, under a huge sky balancing precariously on the bell tower. I could hear the high-tension cables hum as the train gathered speed on its way to the horizon.

The cafés on the station square had already lowered their blinds. A cat ambled along the edge of the pavement. From some buildings wafted the sound of the evening news; elsewhere spoons clattered in saucepans.

Past the rectory garden I turned left to strike across the churchyard as usual, but I came upon a metal barrier behind which a tent of grey plastic sheeting had been erected. Red-and-white strips had been tied between the lindens, one of which had a sign nailed to its trunk saying
WORKS EXIT
. Muddy tyre tracks fanned out on the asphalt of the high street.

I had to take the long way home, past my old school and past Miss van Vooren’s house, which was engulfed in the shadow of the cedars that would, in years to come, press against its walls like fingers. I was shivering with fever, my cheeks were on fire.

Dogs began to bark in the back gardens on the other side of the hedges lining the church lane. Worm-eaten apples hung from the branches among the last remaining leaves. I felt my weekend bag scraping against my ankle. The fever engulfed me in waves of Saharan heat.

It had started to drizzle. All around me the smell of long-parched earth yearning for rain floated up from the cracks in the pavement.

On the near side of the church, against the north transept, the graveyard had not yet been cordoned off. The gravestones stood erect, shoulder to shoulder, like a row of house-fronts in the greenish ground that rarely got any sun, but on the far side, over the brick wall, more barriers and tents awaited me. The shop looked out on a mass of plastic sheeting. Against the wall by the choir lay the nozzle of a hose, agape like the maw of a prehistoric beast.

I pushed open the door as Aunt was serving her last customer, who glanced over his shoulder to see who had come in. I heard him say, ‘Well now, here’s the student.’ The handle of my bag slipped from my grasp.

‘Gracious, lad,’ cried Aunt, ‘whatever’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ I replied, but I couldn’t stop shaking.

‘Children,’ said the customer, ‘a never-ending worry, eh?’

I couldn’t put one foot ahead of another, so overpowered was I by the aromas coming my way like the old familiar faces of elderly relatives approaching in carpet slippers.

The smell of peppermint, freshly roasted coffee, smoked ham, snuff tobacco. The smell of cinnamon, of wild thyme, and the primness of the lavender sachets piled up at the far end of one of the shelves, waiting to suffuse every wardrobe with moth-free eternity. My ears were tweaked, I was tapped under my chin, I heard whispers. I saw the tins swell up on the shelves, I could hear their
contents slop like digestive tracts. Beneath my feet the floor appeared to tilt and sway.

A cramp in my midriff doubled me up and prised open my jaws. I began to retch.

‘Good Lord,’ cried Aunt, rushing out from behind the counter with her apron held out in front of her. ‘Not on my floor! I only just mopped it!’

I pushed her away. ‘It’s nothing, I’m all right again now.’

‘Hurry up inside, then,’ she said, drawing herself up. ‘Werner!’

At the end of the passage I saw Uncle rise to his feet in the yellowish light of the reading lamp, beneath which he had no doubt been engrossed in the paper.

He turned and saw me. ‘Oh my poor boy, poor poor boy …’

He held out his arms. I sucked my lungs full of air to stave off a fresh wave of nausea, broke into a run as if my life depended on it, and hurled myself into his embrace. It was more of a head-on collision than a hug.

I can recall the rest of that evening in the minutest detail. During the intervals when the fever abated somewhat and a rush of coolness buffeted my bones, I was overwhelmed by a sensation of clarity no less beguiling than a mirage. The tureen filled with steaming broth, the dark brown loaf on the breadboard, the thick slices of macerated meat Aunt dished out, the wine-red checks on my sleeves. I was wearing Uncle’s dressing gown, which he had made me put on when he rinsed out my vomit-soiled shirt in the kitchen.

Outside, the Virginia creeper became tinged with mauve in the fading light, until the leaves were absorbed into the darkness of the garden. I heard Aunt saying they had no right to put me on a train by myself in the state I was in, and Uncle responding with a soothing ‘Now then, Ma’, to make her stop grumbling.

She had given me an aspirin. I sucked the pink tablet as judiciously as I could in order to prolong the bitterness on my palate and luxuriate in my invalid status. I don’t know if it was in fact influenza that had felled me. The preceding weeks had been harrowing. The city had swallowed me up in a chaos of honking vehicles, tram-cars jangling down streets on the end of electric tethers, office blocks periodically disgorging workers, esplanades inundated by civil servants waiting to be scooped up by water wheels of buses.

And then there was the playground with its colonnaded perimeter, where robed figures glided over the tiled walk as if they were airborne, where the hands of the clock reigned supreme, ruling lessons and breaks, causing bells to ring, sirens to go off, and stairs to shake under the recurrent stampede of feet on their way to the classroom or gymnasium.

Aunt made me comfortable in the armchair by the stove where she always sat when it grew chilly in the house. I remember how debilitated I felt as I nestled myself against the back of the chair in the luxury of the oversized dressing gown and a pair of Norwegian woolly socks, likewise oversized, as if I were retreating into a shell which, although
it felt too big for me, would shortly prove too stifling, too starved of oxygen.

For despite the pain of those first weeks away from home, despite the cool and mechanical welcome afforded by my new environment, a world bereft of grass growing between cobbles and languorous afternoons to be whiled away at will, my imagination had been fired: as I marched down the school corridors that reeked of floor polish I could not take my eyes off the succession of maps lining the walls.

Snuggling down further into the armchair I listened to the music of the house, the slap of Aunt’s playing cards on the tabletop, Uncle crinkling his newspaper into labyrinthine folds for supposed ease of reading. The unpretentious symphony of familiarity, with that far-off door that would not stop banging, the leaky tap in the kitchen pattering a paternoster into the sink, the wind gusting down the chimney and the slightly out-of-kilter storage unit halfway down the passage, which always gave a loud indignant grunt when its doors were yanked open.

After the clock struck ten, Uncle asked whether I wanted him to carry me upstairs.

‘Oh please, don’t exaggerate,’ I said gruffly, and the hoarseness in my throat persisted in the following weeks until the last trace of my boy’s voice had been abraded out of existence.

From my bedroom window I could just see over the barrier. I could make out the shapes of the gravestones. Some of the crosses sagged, huddling together like lambs.
I saw a giant shovel, the outstretched arm of a crane. It was as if the subsoil had melted during the day, as if the stones had slipped from their moorings and would now drift this way and that on the surface until the cold of evening froze the ground again.

Fingernails of rain tapped against the window pane. A breeze played in the tarpaulins, making them reflect the silver-white shimmer of the street lamp.