At noon everyone withdrew into the twilight of the house, which seemed to rise from the cellar, where the child lay on the cold slab. Up in her room my mother has the maid help her out of her corsets — and I hear her snort in her sleep, here, in the afternoon of this story.
I wanted to sleep and stay awake at the same time, mount guard over things with the pomposity of our waking consciousness, but also to allow myself to sink into slumber, which like a good father knows us better than we want to admit and always remains realistic.
The roar of the guns, in the east, in the north, towards the south, mounted, ebbed away again, regained strength, a dull pounding, like that of giant fists on a table top far away. Sweat crept over my crown, through my hair, and ran down over the corners of my eyes, down along my nostrils. The pigs were baking in their terracotta mud bath, the cats spied on the deathly quiet explosions of the light through the keyholes of their pupils.
Only in Van Gogh did I rediscover those noons. His unstable suns and the sloppy Milky Ways in his black vibrating nights; the unbearable darkness which frightened him so much that he riddled it with stars as bright as the scorching luxuriance of the eternal noon of his madness. He knew the madness of the cats, but could not find their sleep, so the demon devoured him.
Noon is Emilie’s time. In her basement kitchen she undoes the apron, sinks down full-length on a chair which has long since given up complaining and whining about her weight, her prehistoric hips, and cools herself by waving her skirts — the sunlight makes the pans above the stove blush in their copper.
Noon is the smell of sea water, my father’s face hanging above the horizon of sleep, the bitter smell of iodine and the texture of sand that grates against my forehead in the hollow of his collarbone, between my calves and the long black hairs on his forearms — I feel his heart beating below my forehead, the beat of the artery in his neck. A little longer and the sunlight itself will clatter off all things, the photons will ricochet round like marbles — or my mother, whom I didn’t hear wake up, will pull me roughly by the shoulder and say that I am completely crazy, a religious fanatic, and isn’t one child enough to worry about, without knowing if he is still alive, if he is still unscathed and healthy.
She was not only my mother, the being who wove me from her own flesh and blood, a fleshy loom of generations. She was also, in an order beyond biology, the mother of identity. She wanted to establish me in the impatience that forces its way between us and the inexhaustibility of the world and the things in it, which as children we explore with the wings of Hermes on our ankles, and obliges us to compromise — impatience that charred in the afternoon, when praying did not help.
I’m sure that she taught me how to slaughter chickens or instructed me to help her wash the body of the little girl to point out to me that a human being cannot dawdle endlessly at the gate of infinity. One day we must turn round and, as it were, step back inside, accept the world in its external form and for convenience’s sake assume that all things are themselves: a chicken a chicken, a human being a human being — and as the chicken clucks, so a human being should obviously speak for itself.
I have never been able to become grown-up in this way and I remain astonished at the countless ceasefires that we sign daily, without reacting to the conditions with a curse or even the slightest sob, let alone a mocking laugh. But who am I? The kind of child that in the playground thinks the rules of hopscotch are for other people and convinces herself that her pathetic infringements win her admiration.
In the autumn when everyone became ill, I am helping my mother out of her underwear. While I strip her for her afternoon nap we start arguing — the only time we had a real argument. When I loosen all the hooks and laces from her corsage — the shell of belts and material falls off her, black as the wings of a bat (is it because she can breathe more freely that she bursts loose, breaks out) — I see her breasts lose their volume and spread out over her ribs. Her nipples look at me as if they want to say: forgive her, she is upset — and under the skin a soft emulsion shifts, towards the navel, around the hips (I think how beautiful she is, how bloody beautiful she is, my mother the swamp woman, certainly now she takes the pins out of her hair and her coiffure cascades with almost audible relief over her shoulder blades, a curtain of fine, long hair, a tapestry, chestnut brown stippled with grey).
I’ve forgotten why she bursts out, what exactly triggers it, why she is more sobbing that shouting, a sad rage that shivers out, through the fat on her hips, her navel, the tired breasts, the encrusted nipples (I think how beautiful you are, and why must you break down one day?). She refuses the nightdress that I hold up for her and try to pull over her head (I see her back in the mirror next to the window, the full moon of her bottom, the strand of hair that fans out above her hips). She stands there, fearful I would say, whining, eyes red, behind her back on the bedside table my father’s last letter before the war separated us. She covers her breasts with her arms — what is she trying to say, what is she shouting, what is she hurling at me in lumps, half word, half whining? She turns round, surveys herself in the mirror, pulls her hair over her breasts, Eve rejected, she looks at me with eyes swollen with tears, desperate — her hair seems to be streaming out through the window shutters (or vice versa, it is as if she wants to gather the whole battered world around her, the threadbare quilt of rows of houses, bullet holes, overgrown fields, streets with their damaged teeth of bullet-marked house fronts and the cemeteries and the graves and the dead and everything).
She sticks her forefinger in her mouth, perhaps she’s pricked herself again on the pins during that eternal mending — I heard her pulling open seams. With the twin sisters she pulled the sleeves out of old coats, as though they were drawing and quartering a heretic (I could hear from the tugs, the capricious strokes that something was wrong).
She says, I feel hot. I say, it’s freezing outside, Maman, it’s never been so cold. She lets me pull the nightdress over her head after all; I hear her moaning in the folds: “Why don’t I have normal arguments with my daughter?” She pulls the material over her trunk herself, and straightens the ribbons. “About flowers, fashion, theatre. Instead of over…” She looks up again into the mirror, her eyes fill with tears again, her chin trembles, she scrabbles for a word, “…consonants!”
I burst out laughing. She sent me a look like a projectile, went to her bed and pulled the blankets off while leaning on the bed with one arm. I went over to her, bent over to tuck her in, but she gripped both my wrists and gazed directly into my eyes.
I have never heard anyone whisper so sweetly, manage to spew her gall so viciously in my face, well aimed, with the finesse of a cobra: “T’as sacrifié ta prudence à ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir, n’est-ce pas, chérie?”
I turned round, walked towards the door — I thought, she’s got a temperature, she too, she’s delirious.
She waited until I was almost outside before giving me the fatal blow, in the back. Deliberately in the mixture of French and Flemish she always used when mocking me, she snapped at me: “Ne me dites pas des blaaskes, mamzel. Je le sens.” These “blaaskes” or bubbles were my transparent fibs.
I SAW HIM AGAIN a year after the death of the child. One afternoon the door of the church porch swung open and he disturbed my reflections, in the darkness of the aisle to which I often retreated when my mother sent me downstairs, to post letters, run errands or to deliver eggs to the elderly — jobs that I did quickly in order to take some time for myself, and I liked whiling away those few moments of freedom in the church because it was cool and dark in summer, and quiet when there were no services.