Читать книгу The Woman Who Fed The Dogs - Kristien Hemmerechts - Страница 10

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The murderess-mother, the mother-murderess lies on the ground in the living room of her house. Sunlight streams in through the tall windows, but that isn’t much good to her right now. She thrashes about like a fish that has just been landed. Her mouth goes gulp, gulp. In her fall she has pulled the cloth off the table. It is now lying half on top, half underneath her. Fortunately there was no vase on the table, fortunately there was no water in the vase, fortunately there were no flowers in the vase, fortunately the cloth, well, the cloth is cotton, and can go straight in the washing machine. Thirty degrees, no prewash necessary.

The woman likes to keep her house neat and tidy. In the light of events everyone would regard shards and broken-off flowers as a negligible detail. Not her. Nothing is a detail for her. Everything must be in perfect order. Everything must be in perfect order. Everything must…

Shush, darling, shush.

She has hit her shoulder on a chest of drawers. In the hospital the doctor will notice and record the bruise, but won’t draw any conclusions. The doctor has an open mind. Prejudgements are alien to him, as is rushed work. He strives for scientific rigour and objectivity. Her husband does too, but her husband is not home. He is Dutch, an engineer with a demanding job. For now no one thinks it necessary to inform him of the drama unfolding in his house. For now it isn’t a drama for anyone. An epileptic fit is not a drama. On the other side of the ceiling are the cots with the bodies of the three youngest children, but for now the mother is the only one who knows that. And probably she doesn’t know herself anymore. A lightning bolt has struck her brain. It has yanked the glasses off her nose and thrown them obliquely onto her face. It sends electric shocks through her nerves. The neighbour who has been summoned to help does not dare touch her, for fear of also getting a shock, and she also keeps her little son away from the epileptic. From a safe distance she makes soothing noises, though she doubts their effect. She tells the children that everything will be all right. There’s no reason to panic. She says it without believing it herself.

‘Listen, there’s the ambulance already. It will look after your mummy.’

Knock, knock, who’s there?

She smiles a reassuring smile, although she feels anything but reassured. She knows that she’s going to have a sleepless night and that her son will have nightmares again later. If this goes on, she thinks, they will have to move. For her neighbour’s children it is different. They’ve become used to their mother’s attacks by now.

The ambulance crew come into the house. They know the woman and they know the family. It’s not the first time that they’ve screeched to a halt in the drive to give first aid. ‘Where are the three little ones?’ one of them wants to know, while the other tends to the mother. ‘Upstairs,’ says the eldest son. ‘Mummy has given them a bath.’ The paramedic looks at the neighbour, who interprets his look as a request, which it is. She goes upstairs. ‘They’re in their beds,’ she says when she comes back downstairs. ‘They’re sleeping like logs.’

Dull-witted neighbour. Who can’t tell the difference between a dead child and a sleeping child? And dull-witted ambulance men, because why would the mother put the tiny tots back in bed after their morning bath? At night it’s bath then bed, and in the morning it’s exactly the other way round.

You have to test the temperature with your elbow. Before you dip the baby in the water, you must check with your elbow that the water is not too hot, or too cold. Too cold is less bad than too hot. Children can stand cold better than heat. In the winter it was always a struggle with Gilles to get him to put his coat on. And a hat he would always pull off. So I asked M for money to buy Gilles a hat with flaps for the ears and cords you can tie. Gilles was so angry. He just kept tugging at that hat. The harder he tugged at the cords the tighter the knot became. ‘He has my stubbornness, said M, ‘but not my brains.’—‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’ And I gave him a butterfly kiss: brushing his lips with mine.

Sometimes I think: if I could begin anew, I’d do everything just the same. You can’t choose in life. You can’t say: I want the main course, but not the aperitif, or the dessert, or the liqueur. You can’t say: I want my children but not him. You have to go via him to have the children. And those children are wonderful. Even Lhermitte would not have killed them.

But that neighbour, then, really thought that those children were sleeping peacefully in their beds. And the paramedics believed her. Why shouldn’t they? They took the mother to the hospital and left the neighbour in a house with three dead bodies in it.

They will probably all be wondering: ‘Couldn’t we have saved the children? Isn’t it partly our fault?

How often that has been said about me: she could have saved them. Throw her in prison, because she could have saved them. She must never be released, because she could have saved them. She did nothing to save them, though she could have saved them. She deserves the death penalty, because she could have saved them.

Again and again, like a record stuck in a groove.

I’ve been in prison for sixteen years because I didn’t save them although I could have saved them. So they say. They weren’t there, but they know for sure that I could have saved those girls.

If it were all so simple.

Perhaps the paramedics and the neighbour could have saved the tiny tots, but they’re not in prison. They are getting psychological help to deal with the trauma.

The father did not save his children either. He was in a meeting while his wife was suffocating his children. With laughing gas, they say. How did she get hold of laughing gas? Can anyone tell me how she got hold of that laughing gas? Who sold it to her? Shouldn’t the seller have asked what she planned to do with it? Can anyone in this country who wants to murder someone just buy laughing gas? And where do you buy it?

I hope that neighbour will feel guilty for the rest of her life. And the paramedics too, who were too stupid to go and check on the children for themselves. Let it gnaw at them, eat them up, like maggots eating a corpse.

It would have been too late to save them, wrote the papers.

How can they be so sure? Why is it too late in one case and not in the other?

Their brother found them: a boy of eleven who had to find his dead brothers and sisters. Even for a gifted child that is appalling.

Gilles was eleven when we were arrested, right in front of him. That’s an age at which they’re very aware of everything. It leaves its mark.

I don’t know if the three murdered children were in the same room. That wasn’t in any newspaper.

Journalists can’t know everything. They do their best, but they can’t perform magic. Sometimes they have to dig and dig in order to find answers.

I always cooperated. When someone asked me a question I answered, even if I didn’t know the answer.

It’s better to give some kind of answer than none.

That’s what they said at school when you had to take an exam.

If you say nothing, you make a stupid impression, or a dull one. Here in prison too I answer all questions. It’s a matter of politeness.

The children were highly gifted. And the mother was ill. There was epilepsy and another disease the doctors can’t really say much about. My Mummy and I experienced that. My Mummy was always tired, just like that woman. When my mother had cleaned the house, she couldn’t get out of her chair for the rest of the week. But she didn’t kill me. I never thought for a second: now she’s going to murder me. What child thinks that of its mother? No one expects something like that.

That mother was close to despair. She didn’t know which way to turn. She thought: I’m going to die soon and there’ll be no one to look after my gifted children. She couldn’t send them to school. She could, but her children were bored out of their skulls. So she kept them at home and taught them herself. What was to happen to her children when she was no longer there?

And so they’ve always got an explanation.

There can never be any pity for women who murder their children. However sick they are. They are sick, not their children.

What are they to do next? Can she see her children? What does she say to them, or to her husband? And what does he say to her? Does he still live in that house? Does he sleep in the bed he slept in with her? Where their children were conceived? And where does she sleep?

The papers don’t write anything about that. They can’t stop writing about me, but not another word about her. As if it never happened. Let’s forget it. Hush it up. They must have paid off the journalists.

An invaluable piece of advice, sir: go back to Holland. Take the remaining children with you and leave your wife in Belgium. Forget her. She doesn’t exist, she never existed. And no pity, especially not that. There are no excuses for what she did. Epilepsy! Does she really think that other people don’t have problems?

According to Anouk many women in here pretend to have epileptic fits. They lie squirming on the floor of their cells. Or they bang their heads against the wall, supposedly because they’re hearing voices. Some women will go to any lengths to get attention.

‘We don’t let anyone die,’ says Anouk. ‘If someone really needs nursing, they get it. But women who play-act we ignore. Or we give them a laxative.’

They’ve never given me a laxative.

I’m going the right way, says Anouk. The way that leads to the exit. I can smell the outside air. When I breathe in deeply, I can smell it.

A day seldom goes by here when you don’t hear an ambulance. Beepobeepobeepo. Perhaps they are police cars. I never used to pay attention to whether there is a difference between the siren of an ambulance and that of a police car. And I paid no attention to the murderess-mothers either. I didn’t read any papers. When I had to take the children to the doctor’s, I leafed through the magazines in the waiting room, that was all. I didn’t follow the news. Neither did M. We had no time.

Sister Virginie says that the nuns in the convent watch the news every day at one o’clock and at seven, and that I can watch with them. ‘We’re not unworldly,’ she says. ‘How could we pray for the world if we didn’t know the world?’ How could they have prayed for me if they hadn’t followed the stream of reports about me? And then she opens her prayer book and shows the photo of me in her missal. My photo in a prayer book!

I will realise, she says, that most people have a completely wrong idea of life in a convent.

Most people have a completely wrong idea of life in a prison too.

That’s true, she says. And that she will miss her visits to the prison once I am living with them. And no, she doesn’t intend to choose another prisoner to take pity on. God sent her to me.

She talks as if it is all sewn up: my release, my move to the convent, my welcome by the sisters. She has even already made my bed up. And no, it is not as narrow as the one I have to sleep in here. That is more of a camp bed than a conventional bed.

‘Hope is poison,’ I say.

‘Despair is poison,’ she corrects me.

‘What is the first thing you want to do when they let you out?’ Or: ‘What would you do now, at this moment, if you were free?’

Most women answer: go shopping. If they answer. Or: have a bath with lots of bath foam or oil. Because here we can only shower. And a new towel every day, because here we have to dry ourselves for a week with the same one. And then they start talking about brands and smells and colours, and about a bath in the shape of a heart or a shell or a square bath, or a bath with a jacuzzi, and that goes on until you have the feeling you’ve had a bath. No kidding.

Or they say: lying in bed all day with my man. With a man, it doesn’t matter who. Renting a gigolo, spreading jam on my nipples and all over my sex and making him lick it up. Not jam but honey, or chocolate paste.

And then there’s always one who pretends she has heard ‘all over my legs’. ‘What? Jam all over your legs?’

‘Sex!’

And she says they can start practising, as you don’t need a man for that.

Don’t hear that smut. Don’t think of the hours in bed with M and a girlfriend of his. He called her Sasha, because in the skating rink she wore a white fur hat, and a fur muff. Real chinchilla. She claimed. Stolen from her godmother’s wardrobe. Sometimes she put the hat on in bed. And she stroked my back with the muff. So soft! And M was jealous because I sucked her nipples, but we couldn’t both suck his penis, could we? I had to leave his nipples alone. He couldn’t stand me touching them, so I sucked her nipples. Or bit them gently. What else was I supposed to do? Stare at the ceiling?

And later, while the two of them were at it, I got out of bed and danced bare-arsed with the muff as my only item of clothing. I fluttered through the room, I sang and leapt about, and those two stopped to look at me. I swear it’s true! They preferred looking at me to going on fucking, I was so beautiful. Beautiful and elegant and attractive, and strong, really strong.

He’ll get up and come to me, I thought. He’ll want to stick his prick in me. And he got up. His prick was gleaming with the moisture from her cunt. He bore down on me like a knight with his lance, and she got out of bed too, they both wanted to be with me. I went on dancing and dancing, while they grabbed me and kissed me and licked me. I, Odette, was their queen. Their mighty queen, their Salome.

I know what some women here do with each other, but I don’t join in, ever. Not even if I want to terribly. It would be a trap. The next day it would be all over the papers. I would be called the instigator, the violator. The things I’ve experienced here! Indescribable. And the worst ones are those who come on friendly.

This is my greatest fear: that Sister Virginie is setting a trap for me. That she is making me believe that I can go and live in the convent, only to pull out at the last moment and make fun of me. You fell for it! Then she tears the crucifix from her neck, and spits on it. Who says that she’s really a nun? What if the devil has sent her?

‘You don’t have to trust me, my child. Trust in God.’

But perhaps I’m the gullible sod.

She mustn’t think that I’m going to pray with her every day in that convent. Or that I’m always going to watch the news with them. And she definitely mustn’t think… but no, they’re too old for that, and too chaste.

You never know these things of course.

‘In that area a mother doesn’t know her own daughter.’ My mother said.

But later she said: ‘I always knew.’

And she said: ‘Rotten to the core.’

She had said to me about her sex life: ‘I always let your father have his way. If he wanted sex while I was having my period, we had sex while I was having my period. If he wanted to lick me while I was having my period, I let him lick me while I was having my period. That’s the best thing a woman can do. If she wants to keep her man, if she’s serious about him.’

Of course it’s the best thing.

My father thought that women were infertile during menstruation, said my mother. That’s how it began. And when he knew better, he went on doing it.

Each to his own.

My mother lost far more blood than I did. And for longer, for seven or eight days at a time. I always knew when she had her period, because the sheets were dirty. ‘My blood’s too thin,’ she said. ‘It gushes out.’

We left the sheets as they were until after her menstruation. There was no point in putting clean sheets on since the next morning they were dirty again.

My father had damaged something inside. She didn’t want to admit it, but it was true. He was a saint for her. He was a man. They could do whatever they liked. They wrote the rules themselves.

I never want a man again.

Never. Again.

‘They all want the same thing, Odette. There’s not one you can rely on. Except for the gays, but they’re not men.’

And I wanted it too. I wanted it too.

I felt it in my stomach, in my cunt, in my throat.

Oh yes. Now. Please, please, please. Don’t stop. There, yes. More. And hoping you won’t have to beg. That he won’t stop before it comes. And that he won’t notice how badly I want it.

But I don’t want it any more now. I don’t want to want it anymore.

‘You must pray, my child.’

‘Yes, sister. I shall pray.

I pray.

Even after I’m released I shall pray. I shall pray in the chapel, and I shall pray in my room, and in the kitchen and the dining room and in the garden. I shall pray the whole time, everywhere. I shall even pray in the bathroom. Lead me not into temptation, lead me not into temptation. And thank you for this chance, and forgive me, forgive me. I shall be like the Hare Krishnas we sometimes saw in Charleroi, Hooray Krishnas, M called them, but without a tambourine or pink and ochre robes, and I won’t shave my head either, and of course I won’t sing Hare Krishna but Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord be with you the Lord be with you the Lord be with you. They should lock those maniacs up, said M. Christ, a person could no longer do his shopping at his leisure in his own town. Yes, M, of course, M, it’s a disgrace, M. I would have liked to walk with them, think of nothing, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, pray for us poor sinners and blessed is Jesus, the fruit of your womb, le fruit de vos entrailles, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs, poor sinners, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort, pray for us poor sinners now and in the hour of our death our death our death.

And when I have prayed enough, perhaps I’ll go to the hairdresser, a real hairdresser who takes the time to massage my scalp, and treats my hair with lotions, and asks if I’d like a coffee and then brings me a cup with a biscuit, or a praline. A hairdresser who calls me ‘madam’. ‘What would madam like?’ ‘Did madam have a particular style in mind?’ ‘May we recommend madam our new shampoo?’ ‘Is madam considering colouring her hair?’

Madam considers whether she is considering it.

Even the nuns don’t pray twenty-four hours a day.

Do they go to the hairdresser? Do they cut each other’s hair? Or their own hair?

Sister Virginie’s hair looks as if she cuts it herself. Fortunately she doesn’t shave it, and so she won’t ask me to shave my hair off.

Those poor women after the war… And they just went with the Germans so they could eat. What were they supposed to do? Let themselves starve like the Jews in the camps?

A person’s first duty is to survive.

Thanks be to God that they did not shave my hair off here in prison. If He wishes I will cover it with a cloth. With a scarf. Like Audrey Hepburn and Cathérine Deneuve, or Jackie Kennedy. Or like my mother when she came back from the hairdresser. And cleaned the house, in her weekly battle against dirt, which was mine too. My battle, I mean. And my dirt, I assume.

Please let me go to the hairdresser, God. And perhaps to a beauty salon too. I have never set foot in a beauty salon. They say you feel reborn. The pores of your face are opened up with steam for deep cleansing. All the dirt in your body evaporates. You feel reborn, just as our house was reborn every Saturday.

Me in a beauty salon. Un institut de beauté.

I’ll give it a try.

If I could choose, if someone were to say: go ahead and choose, do what you like—I’d go to the hairdresser at the seaside. First a beauty salon, then a hairdresser, and then shopping. Not necessarily to buy anything but simply to see what is in the shop windows. Lèche-vitrines. And perhaps going in somewhere and buying something after all, for me or the children. And eating mussels washed down with a glass of wine. All in one day. In Knokke. Or Le Coq. Or Ostend. But not in Blankenberge. And definitely not in Middelkerke.

My parents-in-law used to have a chalet in Middelkerke. On a campsite. They called it a ‘chalet’ but it was no more than a glorified caravan, a shed. Of course that mustn’t be said and stupid Odette could not keep her big mouth shut, and went rattling on about Knokke this and Knokke that, and how sweet the little shop was where my mother bought her gloves every year. It was such a funny sight, all those gloved hands on pedestals in the window. Leather gloves, yes yes, calf, that was the supplest.

Forget it, Odette. It was stupid of you, you got your punishment, your well-deserved punishment. You learned to hold your tongue, and you owe him a debt of gratitude for that, down to the present. How would you have kept afloat here if you hadn’t learnt to hold your tongue? Speaking is silver, silence is golden. He can’t do any more to you. Not even when you’re released. Then you’ll be able to go to Knokke as often as you want. And he won’t. He can’t even go to Blankenberge or to Middelkerke. He can only go from one prison to another, from one courtroom to another, till he drops dead.

Idiot, who thought he could escape.

I’ll escape, he won’t. When I leave this prison, I will do it surrounded by police officers, lawyers, judges, bailiffs, warders, magistrates, and a document in my hand with signatures and stamps and seals, perhaps even that of the king, who trembles and shivers, and who held the country together so bravely when M and I had turned it on its head. So that they can’t shut me up again, ever. And then I’ll go to the seaside. One fine day I’ll go to the seaside. Nothing and no one will stop me. And I’ll go and eat a dame blanche in the Titanic. If it still exists.

Much will have changed. I must be prepared for that, says Anouk. It will be a shock. And I won’t be able to return to prison if I want to.

Does she really think I shall want to do that?

The Titanic was called the Titanic because the owner’s grandmother had gone down with the ship. She had a rich, sickly friend, who had paid for both their passages. The friend wanted company. A woman alone day and night on a boat like that gives men ideas, even if she is sickly. ‘Now, be careful,’ said my mother, ‘some women are out for that. They like nothing better.’ My mother was not that kind of woman. Neither was I.

The ice creams in the Titanic were served in boat-shaped dishes and named after ships. You could get a catamaran, or a barge, a sloop, a yacht, a rowing boat, a tanker, a tug, a schooner, a galleon and naturally also a titanic. That was the most expensive, and the most delicious. If my mother was in a good mood, she would order two titanics. And a glass of elixir for herself. I was too young for that. Later, she said, when I was married. Then I would also have to have my hair cut and have a perm. And I would sip elixir, the only strong drink a respectable woman could afford to drink in public without jeopardising her reputation.

The walls of the ice-cream parlour were decorated with photos of the Titanic and the drowned grandmother. You saw passengers cheerfully embarking and waving large white handkerchiefs at the people on the quayside and at the brass band, which was still playing. A circle had been drawn in black ink around the face of one of the waving figures. ‘Emilie?’ someone had written beside it. The last photo was of a lifeboat with about ten people in it. They were all that was left of that laughing, waving crowd.

The friend had neither a husband nor children, but the grandmother did. Her sons were three, five and eight years old at the time. Their portraits were also hanging there, as children on their Mummy’s lap, and as grown men. They had suffered greatly from the loss of their Mummy. Actually they had never got over it.

‘She would have done better to stay with her children,’ said my mother. ‘What was there for her on a ship like that? But well, she wanted to take it easy. Women who want to take it easy had better not have children.’

Yes, Mummy.

She never set foot in a beauty salon.

Perhaps it would have been better if she had.

Shame on you, Odette! I don’t want to hear that kind of thing again! What a cheek!

Sorry, Mummy. It won’t happen again, Mummy.

I thought she was so ugly. Even with her most chic silk scarf and her Chanel lipstick and her Lancôme powder and her diamond earrings—a present from my father on their tenth wedding anniversary—I thought she was ugly. And I think she knew. I couldn’t keep anything secret from her.

She would have done better not to tart herself up. It made her uglier.

Who did she do it for?

God rest her soul. Died while her daughter was in prison, and was loathed by the whole country. The fruit of her womb. Le fruit de ses entrailles. La pauvre.

They buried her next to my father. Her name and date of birth had been carved in the tombstone for over thirty years. And there was also room for me, she said. I bet she was counting on dragging me into that grave with her. If she had had the chance, she would have done it.

I don’t know if I want to go there. I don’t need to go. I can see that grave in my dreams, I’ve been there so often. Week in, week out.

There are so many other things I want to do. Especially with the children, if they want to. Please let them want to. All those lost years!

Don’t think about it, Odette. Don’t think about it.

What I’d most like to do is sit on a bench in a park. Feel the sun and the wind. Hear the birds sing. Watch the ducks on the water. Forget prison exists. And go to the seaside, to the seaside, to the seaside. Stroll along the promenade. Dance.

M was a good dancer. That came from skating, he said. ‘All good skaters are good dancers.’

He didn’t think that I was a good dancer, or a good skater, but I danced and skated better than his first wife. He thought I was prettier than her. I thought so too. Everyone thought so. He was afraid she would never find another man after him. He said, ‘I can’t leave her in the lurch, because otherwise she’ll never get to fuck again. Do you know what that means to a woman of her age to realise that she will never fuck again? I can’t do that to her.’ He organised a special party for her to which he invited all the bachelors he knew. And they had to bring the bachelors they knew. He acted as DJ. He had never done it before, but he did it very well. He played only bambas and slow romantic numbers. And he gave free beers to anyone who danced with his wife. While she had no one else, he felt responsible for her. He told me that immediately, on the very day we met. I realised that I had to take her as part of the package. And that I was lucky not to have to take his mother as well. Some men demanded that, he said, but I could treat him as if he had no mother. Or father either.

I can’t say even approximately how often the three of us went out together, I and his first wife, and I often looked after her children, his children too, and then there was Sasha-with-the-fur-hat, until I was really sick, absolutely sick of it, and then he gave that party to find a new man for his first wife.

It was a bit embarrassing for her. Everyone knew why M was giving the party. And his friends felt obliged to dance with her. She wasn’t stupid, was she? She was only too aware. She would have preferred everything to stay as it was.

Not me.

We went together to buy clothes for her. He almost never came up with any money, on this occasion he did. He realised that something had to happen. He had even sent her to the optician for prescription contact lenses, but she couldn’t wear them. She claimed they made her eyes sting. ‘You’ll get used to them,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. She could be very stubborn. You wouldn’t have thought her capable of it, but she was. The worst thing was that she could not return the lenses to the optician, or the products she had bought. All money down the drain.

She had been an orphan for years and years. No one had taught her how to make herself presentable. She wouldn’t have learnt it from the nuns in the orphanage.

She and I must have tried twenty shops before we found something that was sexy, but not vulgar or ridiculous. We get home and she puts it on, and I make up her eyes dramatically, so that even with those glasses on her nose they are still seen to their best advantage. I give her my lipstick and she makes up her lips in front of the mirror, and she runs her tongue over her lips, and suddenly I see M looking at her, and I think: help, soon he’ll want to keep her.

Because she had something. Not at first sight, but when you got to know her better, and if you could picture her without those glasses… If I’m really honest, I have to admit I can see what M saw in her.

We would have done better to buy some new frames for her. She would have had years of pleasure from them.

She was determined to buy shoes with heels and those fine straps, but she wasn’t used to them. In the end she danced in her bare feet. At the beginning of the evening she kept changing partners, but after a while she danced with the same one the whole time. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Here in prison there is also dancing sometimes, but I don’t join in. Women dancing with women are almost as pathetic as women having sex with women. That was different with Sasha and me. We wouldn’t have touched each other without a man present. We did it for M. We knew it excited him. That was our aim.

If I ever dance again, I will dance alone. Or with a man. A real man who gets an erection when he dances with me. Like that man at the party for M’s first wife. ‘Nights in white satin, never reaching the end.’ It went on and on. ‘Cause I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you, oh how I love you…’ And the whole time I felt that thing between us, and I thought: M will kill him. If he knows what that guy has in his trousers, he’ll kill him. And me too. I didn’t dare leave him standing in the middle of the dance floor. That would really have drawn attention to us. When the number finally finished I made it clear as discreetly as possible that I had had enough. Then I joined M at the mixing desk. He said nothing about the man, but he trod on my toes, without saying anything. He didn’t have to say anything.

Sometimes I think that I think of those murderess-mothers in order not to think of him for ten minutes.