Читать книгу A Day with Mr. Jules - Diane Broeckhoven - Страница 6

The timeless half-hour between waking and getting up envelops Alice like a familiar piece of clothing. She floats in an imaginary womb, bobs towards a new day. Her body relaxes into the warm folds of the bed, her muscles and joints are weightless, her mind is a blank. Jules’s smell — a whiff of evaporated alcohol, nutmeg, and old man — lies like a dark shadow behind her back. As always, he is taking care of breakfast in the kitchen, his only contribution to the housework for as long as she can remember. Every morning at the stroke of eight he starts his ritual. Alice gets up when the aroma of fresh coffee prevails over the smells of the bed and she has spent enough time counting her blessings. She struggles to her feet from her lying position and feels how the skin around her hips and thighs squeezes like an elastic stretched too tight. Her shrunken breasts huddle against her ribs. She knows that the discomforts of the first hour will vanish with brief stabs, so that by noon she will be back inside her old body. More or less.

*

It had snowed. Alice looked out of the window and saw the street below blazing up white. She threw her dressing gown over her shoulders to trap the warmth of the bed in the blue terry cloth. She tightened the belt around her waist and slipped her hands into the pockets. In the yellowish light of a streetlamp, Bea, the woman who lived below, was busy clearing the snow from the footpath in front of the apartment building.

“Eager beaver,” Alice thought.

She stood still and listened to the alternating swishing and rasping of broom and spade, a marching brass band in the distance that never came nearer. She shivered and headed towards the coffee smell.

“It has snowed, Jules,” she said to the rear of her husband’s head, which stuck out above the back of the sofa. Usually, he sat waiting for her in the kitchen, at a table set according to his strict pattern. Jules gave no reply, and that made her smile. He must be staring wistfully at the snow, thinking about the old days, when there were still real winters. Icy and raw. She trudged towards him, slowed down by her stiff knees. On an impulse she let her hand rest briefly on his thin hair. Carefully putting down her feet, she walked around the leather sofa and sat down beside her husband. The fact that he deviated from his own house rules so he could take in the wintry landscape through the wall of glass softened her mood. It gave her the unexpected gift of a brief spell of freedom. She didn’t need to toe the line straight away.

She slid closer to him and felt the warmth of his shoulder against hers. Just for a second, she tilted her head to one side, until the rough fabric of his vest pricked her cheek.

“It’s light and dark at the same time,” she said and smiled at their reflection in the large window.

Jules didn’t reply. He sat perfectly still beside her, his hands on the sharp creases of his pants. In the kitchen she heard the last drops of water dripping through the coffee maker, followed by the finale of steaming and sighing. In the noisy silence that followed, reality sank in.

“Jules!”

Her voice shot from her throat, a frightened bird flapping up from the brush. She shook him, hit him, but the rigid body wouldn’t budge.

“Jules!”

Another bird. A small, wary one.

He didn’t react. He sluggishly yielded when she grabbed him by the shoulders, her fingers bent like claws. Jules was dead. She couldn’t believe it but had to. He had died during the most blissful moment of her day, her half-hour in the womb. But first he had done his duty. He had set the table and made coffee.

*

It struck her as so odd that she had sat beside him and for all she knew he was alive. She had talked to him, thinking he was going to get up, walk to the kitchen with her, and sit down at the set table. The thought calmed her. Jules wouldn’t really be dead until his death had penetrated her to the very bone. As yet, the truth only pulsed on the outside, in her nerve endings. It floated in through her pores like drizzle.

“It’s awful for the ones who are left behind,” she whispered, and the glibness of that ridiculous phrase reassured her for a moment. She laid her hand, still warm from the bed, on his, which felt cool. But not cold.

*

They had talked about dying, of course. They had shared their fear of degenerating into human wrecks. Jules always bristled when she said that being senile didn’t strike her as catastrophic at all. It seemed a carefree existence to her. No more bothering your head with keeping things running smoothly, but nurses patiently spooning the last driblets of life into you, your little girlfriends from kindergarten, and your first, secret boyfriends, who would turn up unannounced. With that final bit in particular, she was able to get his back up. He had been her first sweetheart. He had initiated her into life and love. Even fifty years later, he didn’t tolerate any jokes about so-called rivals.

“Think for a moment of those who are left behind, rather than of yourself,” he would say then. “Imagine you would no longer recognize me. Or Herman, or the grandchildren.”

Well, that would be the survivors’ problem, wouldn’t it? she thought. But she didn’t express this totally self-focused opinion. It seemed so peaceful to her to vanish on the threshold of death into a bank of fog, where memories slowly faded and sounds ebbed away. She even found the dying of life in this manner romantic. The end of a French film where the colours dissolved into a pastel-coloured vista. Fin!

There had been moments when she had fervently longed to not recognize Jules. But he was branded into her skin. He could never become invisible to her.

*

To die suddenly, painlessly, without fear — that’s what he would choose if he had a choice. A push in your back from a gigantic hand, no chance to brace yourself. The feeling a fly must have in the split second when the folded newspaper is raised above its doomed body. Now that was awful for those left behind. And rude, to disappear from life without any warning.

All right then, if Jules wouldn’t let her drift into dementia, she opted for a beautiful, contemplative deathbed. Not too long, not too short. Pain and degrading physical details such as diapers and bluish limbs were things she repressed. She would lie in a warm nightgown between freshly ironed sheets, with a silvery grey rinse in her hair and manicured nails. She would be able to tell Jules everything she had bottled up for fifty years. That she hated him and that she loved him. That there had been times when she wanted to walk out on him and that she was glad she had stayed. That she had wanted to be free and knew she was tied to him with every fibre of her being. Things you don’t say to each other in the setting of day-to-day worries. They would hold hands and forgive one another. For everything. His jaw joint would briefly move under his slackened skin, a sign for her to hold back. But in these ultimate circumstances he would control himself. He wouldn’t get angry and reproach her. He would let her die in peace. Already miss her before she mustered up the strength for her last breath.

*

Alice was so engrossed in her fantasy that she forgot for a moment that she herself was now left behind. When this inescapable truth struck her again, her eyes filled with tears. She wiped her cheek and, with her wet hand, patted the back of Jules’s hand. The chill of death was burrowing under his skin. She stood up, soaked up the white light that fell mercilessly into the room. Then she sat down on the oak coffee table, directly opposite her husband. Not sure what to do, she studied his face. His eyes were half closed, like those of a child overcome by sleep while playing. On his lips — was it her imagination, or did they have a blue tinge? — hovered the shadow of a smile. Had he felt the big hand in his back pushing him across the borderline between life and death? Only then did she notice his glasses lying on the floor. She picked them up, automatically wiped the lenses clean on a corner of her bathrobe, and slid them carefully onto Jules’s nose.

He hadn’t suffered, Alice knew. That reassured her. She wondered if she should close his eyes. In films, she had seen how surviving relatives pressed the eyelids shut with a delicate movement of their thumb. She got up, walked over to Jules’s right, took off his glasses, and laid her hand on his face. She trembled. Last summer, she had found a little sparrow that had fallen from its nest near the apartment building. She had carried it upstairs and held it in her hand, the only conceivable place to let it die. After one last shudder it was dead, but still wrapped in warm downiness. The touch of Jules’s eyelids and the nearly imperceptible caress of his lashes in the palm of her hand reawakened the little bird. She hastily withdrew her hand. She couldn’t do it. The amazement on his face would disappear if she did. She sat down on the low table again. Saw the surprised, almost shy look in his eyes that made him young and vulnerable. Better to leave it this way.

*

When her gaze wandered down again, she saw his stocking feet on the Persian carpet. She smiled. “Oh, Jules,” she said, shaking her head. “Where are your slippers? You’re going to have ice-cold feet in a minute and you’ll end up with a chill on your bladder.”

She went to the bedroom, where the peculiar white light had filtered in, too. The window should be opened, which was really Jules’s job. Now she did it herself. The effort resonated through her bones and set off a chain reaction of jumbled thoughts. How would she manage? How was she going to get through the day without Jules? How would she live without him? She forced herself to think only about his leather slippers and went in search of them through the small apartment. She looked in the bathroom and, although she knew better, lifted the lid of the wicker laundry basket. Her heart was in her mouth. The totally pointless search for her dead husband’s slippers prevented her from bursting out of her skin. From overflowing her banks.

They stood neatly in line under the set table, directly under his plate. This is where he must have felt the first, warning pressure from the hand in his back, Alice suspected. He must have hurried over to the sofa in his socks, before slipping over the edge of the abyss. She sat down in his chair, kicked off her own small mules, and stuck her feet into Jules’s leather boats. They received her in their warm interior just as she had received Jules in the past. The emotion surging through her legs and hips into her belly stopped her for a moment from getting up. But she recovered and shuffled to the living room, where she sat down opposite him again.

“I’ll put your slippers on right away, and then I’m going to have breakfast,” she said to his surprised face. “For the last time, I’ll drink your coffee. And I need to think, now that you don’t do that for me anymore.”

She leaned down and the muscles in her upper legs tightened painfully. But it had to be done.

“Come on, don’t let me do all the work,” she urged Jules. His left heel fitted snugly in the hollow of her right hand.

But his lifeless leg was heavy as lead. Neither his knee nor his foot would bend. Alice refused to accept defeat. She lowered herself onto her knees on the narrow strip of carpet between the table and his legs, and wrenched and wriggled until at last the two slippers were on Jules’s feet. On an impulse, she slid her hands into his pant legs and took hold of Jules’s legs. Her caress reached up to his bony knees. His calves breathed coolness, as if he had walked barelegged through the evening air. She lifted the hem of his pants and glanced at the bluish white shadows that gave his skin the colour of skim milk. The same colour as hers. She abruptly withdrew her hands from Jules’s legs and buried them in her pockets. In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of coffee and spread a slice of bread with apricot jam. She ate, stirred, and swallowed. She looked at the patch of bleached world outside and once again heard a marching brass band growing louder in the distance. Alternating short and long scraping by someone clearing the snow from the sidewalk. At least she wouldn’t fall on her face when she went shopping later. Did she have to go shopping today? Would she ever have to go shopping again? She couldn’t imagine herself alone between the supermarket shelves, without Jules stage-managing things. A nervous little laugh rose in her throat.

*

What was she to do? Call a doctor? Herman? He must have gone to work already. Then she would get Aimée, his wife, on the line. Alice resolutely shook her head. Herman had to find out from her that his father had died. Not in a roundabout way. Or was Aimée not a roundabout way? She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. It helped to keep down the panic that started fluttering again. Just below her stomach this time.

She opened the refrigerator door and remembered, rather than saw, the contents. They were going to have lamb chops today, with rosemary and garlic. Jules loved them. He had put them into the supermarket cart yesterday without consulting her. Alice could never completely banish the woolly little lambs from her thoughts and usually slid her portion onto his plate.

The crisper compartment revealed the cloudlike contours of a cauliflower. The clammy taste and the shabby smell in the kitchen always reminded Alice of the grim war years. She wasn’t going to have cauliflower today, and definitely not lamb chops. She tossed the meat package into the nearly empty freezer, shivering when the cold blew against her robe. Holding two greyish green fillets of sole, she hesitated, then exchanged them for a box of shrimps. Half a pound. She would eat those all by herself at lunchtime, she decided expansively. She would go to the supermarket a little later to get two big bright red tomatoes. Bulging shrimp-stuffed tomatoes, that’s what she felt like. To complete the meal, she’d make fries with homemade mayonnaise. Her mother had taught her never to beat mayonnaise or bake bread when she had her period because everything was bound to go wrong then. Alice laid her hand on her belly and smiled. Her mayonnaise would turn out well and taste of the past. And Jules wouldn’t spoil things by dropping a cheap jar into her shopping cart. He thought it was nonsense to stand there whisking yolks until your fingers cramped up just to save a few pennies. He explained there were salmonella bacteria in raw eggs, which could kill you. Jules knew everything. But today she chose not to worry about it.

*

Alice cleared the table. It didn’t take long, because the cupboards, the counter, and the table were all within two steps from each other. Meanwhile, her thoughts sorted themselves out in her head. First, she would get washed and dressed, put a bit of lipstick on her dry lips, revive her sagging hairdo with the tip of her comb. While she dressed, Jules always read the newspaper. In the past, that is. Yesterday. When she came out of the bathroom, she always circled the room with her duster, following a fixed route, her gestures those of a tired conductor. In the meantime, Jules read the events worthy of mention to her. Minor news and human suffering interested her more than political intrigues and war. His collection usually involved snatched handbags, petty theft, and a murder or two. The closer the scene of the crime, the worse Alice felt about it, and the more merciless her judgement was. Do you know what they should do with someone who breaks into the place of a defenceless old woman? Yes, Jules knew. He rustled the paper as he folded it, so he wouldn’t hear her torture practices.

She decided to wear the same clothes as yesterday. A brown skirt with a rusty red woollen cardigan she once knitted herself. It was a bit tight around her bosom. She was so caught up in the prospect of a perfectly ordinary day that she suddenly stood rooted to the spot in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. It had completely slipped her mind that Jules was dead. He still sat there in exactly the same way as half an hour ago. Yet she noticed that while she ate breakfast the last trace of warmth had drained from his body. Along with the last flicker of animation. Perhaps it had registered with him too that life had escaped from all his pores.

“Relax a bit, Jules,” she said. “I’ll fetch the newspaper in a minute.”

It was part of his morning ritual, not hers. But today all the patterns needed to be broken. Jules never went downstairs before he had washed, dressed, and shaved. They laughed together about slovenly women emerging from other apartments in faded dressing gowns to go and fetch the morning news. About men with striped pyjama legs under their raincoats, the smell of the night surrounding them like an aura. People have no manners anymore, they would say to each other.

With bent head she sniffed the smell of her own body, pulled the terry-cloth tie of her dressing gown firmly around her waist and sat down in front of Jules on the coffee table. She would have sworn he smiled.

“I’ll put on my coat over my nightclothes and listen first for rumbling in the elevator shaft,” she reassured him.

No one was going to notice that she, too, had lost her manners. She wouldn’t give anyone a chance to ask how Mr. Jules was.

*

His presumed smile took on a slightly worried twist. Did he arch his eyebrows for a fraction of a second? Or did it only look like that? She dismissed the thought of the supermarket. She would just imagine those tomatoes this afternoon. She shouldn’t go and walk around the store by herself. Everyone would ask after Jules. What was she to say then? That he was sitting, dead, on the sofa at home? He wasn’t dead as long as she told no one. He was alive for as long as she wanted him to be. She still had so much to tell him. It would all surely come to her as the day progressed. Everyone should leave her alone today.

*

She resolutely got up and, on an impulse, stroked his cheek. She froze. He was ice-cold, his skin had turned to marble. Life seemed to be draining away from her too. She dropped down on the sofa beside him and pressed her face against the rough tweed of his shoulder. A dog begging for warmth. An unmistakable chill had taken possession of his whole body and penetrated his clothes. His male smell had also vanished, and she missed that even more than his physical warmth. Soap, skin, coffee, familiar pet — it was gone. He sat there like a skillfully executed copy of Jules in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Alice cried. Her tears dripped into his shoulder pads and fell on his yellowish right hand. When she stood up, she could feel his body briefly leaning towards her and then righting itself again.

*

She had better forget about the newspaper and lie down beside Jules, her head in his lap. She should start making phone calls. But she checked herself. If doctors, neighbours, and undertakers began to take charge of her husband, he would be lost to her in an hour. For ever. They would carry him out of the apartment within the hour. In a coffin, which they’d have her point out in one of those albums. She couldn’t let that happen, could she?

She hurried to the side room and took a plaid blanket out of the closet. In a flash, she spotted the chessboard on the small antique table, with all the pieces at the ready for a game.

David, she thought with a start. She had forgotten all about David. At ten sharp he’d be at the door for his chess game with Jules.

The blanket. The newspaper. The time. David. The four subjects tumbled around in her head and gave her wings. She flew to the kitchen, saw on the clock that it was not yet a quarter to nine. The plaid blanket had once lain on the backseat of their first car, a stately Fiat 1400 with plump cheeks and a high back. She put it over Jules’s knees.

“There you are, dear,” she said softly. “Otherwise you’ll get much too cold.”

Now that she no longer saw his bluish white hands, with the network of stiffened veins beneath the skin, he looked less dead than he was. Next, she grabbed her navy blue raincoat from a coat hook in the hallway and slipped it on over her dressing gown. In the mirror, she saw three layers of fabric bunching up around her knees. I look a fright, she thought, remembering with a smile an expression of her youth. Girls nowadays didn’t say that anymore. She poked her head tentatively into the little hallway, where another apartment opened out on as well. A young working couple lived there. They would surely be stuck in some traffic jam by now. She pressed the worn-down elevator button, into which her finger fitted perfectly, and heard the mechanical sighing and groaning starting up. In the little cage, she whizzed down six floors. She clutched the bunch of keys in her coat pocket as if it were a life buoy.