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.
*
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.