Читать книгу We and Me - Saskia de Coster - Страница 12

-

SARAH 1990-1991

‘How much did you get?’ Emily asks. They’re walking to the beat of the jingling fortune in Sarah’s pants’ pocket. It’s sixty francs and not a centime more. Sarah’s absolutely sure of that. She’s even more sure that she’s not allowed to walk here with Emily. Excessive contact with other people is not a good idea, Mieke says, even if you just happen to bump into them, even if it’s the girl across the street who’s like a sister to you and whose mother takes turns driving you to school. Not even then.

For an only child living in a villa on the mountain, the childhood years are a Kafkaesque labyrinth of rules and prohibitions. If you walk down the street you’re riff-raff, and if you play music in your room you’re committing a major crime because you’re making noise.

At the tinkling of the doorbell the owner of the newspaper shop comes out from his dark infernal lair full of children’s screaming and televised din in the back. This man, Mieke has assured her daughter, is going to try to cheat her. This upside-down camel, whose humps are hanging out in front, takes his own stupidity for shrewdness and is so stupid that he thinks his customers are stupid and that he can easily put one over on them. He makes a game of it and keeps on trying, over and over and over again, even though he gets caught on a regular basis.

The Libelle Rositas are on the camel’s counter. All Sarah has to do is take the magazine and count her change. Mieke has told her in no uncertain terms not to look around too much. There’s nothing there to interest her, especially in the back of the shop. Some of the magazines there are covered in silver wrapping paper with XXX written on them in black letters. As unusual as those obtrusive letters are, that’s how conspicuous and exposed to the real world Sarah feels. She conducts her transaction with downcast eyes, and when no change is forthcoming she turns to Emily, who follows their cleverly thought-out scenario and puts a twenty-franc coin on the counter. ‘And Marlboros for my mother,’ she says. ‘It’s three francs too much, but that’s all right.’ This is too quick for the camel. He puts a pack of Marlboros on the counter and goes to work with his Texas Instruments calculator, but the two girls grab the magazine and cigarettes and rush out the door before he can react.

Behind the town hall opposite the newspaper shop Emily strips the pack of its transparent skin. Sarah takes one of the cigarettes, sniffs it, and places it between her fingers as if she were smoking it. The gesture feels like freedom. Sarah isn’t allowed to eat candy because candy makes you fat, and if you’re fat you have fewer chances in life. Her mother hasn’t laid down any rules for smoking. A car drives past slowly. She quickly slips the sharp-smelling stick of pleasure into the sleeve of her jacket. Pleasure is best done as quickly as possible so you can get on with your normal life.

Along with that thought, an invisible angel of haste comes to perch on Sarah’s feathers. A delay of a couple of minutes can be reason enough for Mieke to call the police. It wasn’t long ago that she called in the police when a strange man set a ladder against the chimney. The man had come to the wrong house, he explained to the police. It was enough to get her mother to spend one whole hour combing her new rug. Sarah and Emily hasten up the mountain.

At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon Sarah returns to number 7 Nightingale Lane without any tears in her clothing. She slips in through the back door and goes directly to the bathroom. Behind the toilet, beneath a wooden construction meant to hide the toilet’s waste pipe, she hides the cigarette. Sanctimonious Sarah comes strolling into the kitchen. Contrary to all expectations, the one-person welcoming committee (Mieke) is not here to greet her. This is suspicious, since her mother can’t be anywhere else but home. What’s completely alarming is the pan of spaghetti sauce simmering unattended on the stove. In the middle of the afternoon, inferior food like spaghetti sauce, unattended—in this house that’s as unusual as a rhinoceros sitting on the sofa watching television.

Luckily the sound of her mother’s unique, high-pitched chatter can suddenly be heard in the living room, alternating with the gravelly voice of an unknown man. She hears the familiar, nervous click of her mother’s heels as she rushes into the toilet in the entrance hall.

Mieke usually leaves the door ajar for workmen, but only if there’s no other solution than to rely on their services. Mieke may praise the work of the electrician to the skies when he’s standing upright in the kitchen, his filthy shoes on a piece of cardboard, drinking coffee from a Villeroy & Boch cup and eating the pralines Mieke has urged on him (and withheld from Sarah for health reasons). But after he leaves she spends days talking about how the man spread mud all over the sheets on the cellar stairs with his ungainly clodhoppers without saying a word about it, how his work crew actually left the cellar looking like a brothel, and how they smeared her light switches with pitch—yes, she swears it, with pitch, which she won’t be able to get off in a hundred years.

Something is tickling the extremities of Sarah’s nerves: fear and excitement closing in together. Peering through a crack in the door, Sarah sees him. After ten years of life, Sarah beholds the first strange man she’s ever seen in this house who isn’t a worker. Legs wide apart, backlit, straight off the silver screen: a cowboy, a bad guy in torn jeans.

‘No, I won’t have it,’ she hears her mother say again. She must have rushed through her trip to the toilet. ‘You can eat, but then you’ve got to go.’

‘Settle down, Mieke, it spoils your looks. And that’s a damn shame for a good-looking woman like you.’

‘No, no, I mean it. This time I’m not going to let myself be taken in. You’ve caused me enough trouble.’

‘What are you talking about? We haven’t seen each other in ages.’

‘Why are you making it so hard for me? Why did you come here to give my family a hard time?’

‘Your mother-in-law, who doesn’t say a word to you, is welcomed here with open arms, but … ’

‘Open arms!’ Mieke interrupts, sneering.

‘ … and I get tossed out, even though I’ve come especially for you. I think that’s terrible.’

‘If you think it’s so terrible, get on your motorcycle and leave. I’m not stopping you. You’ll know where to go, or am I your only place of refuge?’

‘Mieke, I came here especially for you. You’ve always been special to me, you know that.’

‘Jempy, still the big charmer,’ Mieke says in a milder tone. ‘The spaghetti should be done, so you can eat. At least if you call spaghetti a meal. I expect Sarah any minute, by the way. She should have been home already.’

The man growls something unintelligible. A heavy cadence can be heard moving from the living room to the kitchen, right where she’s standing at the doorway, eavesdropping. When the door opens, Sarah flees to the utility room to continue her spying activities.

This strange man, intruding on a stable family that for ten years has been as unshakable as a sequoia, this daredevil, opens one drawer after another and rummages boorishly through their things. Mieke jumps between him and the kitchen cabinet and fishes a spoon out of the cutlery drawer. He takes the spoon and begins scooping straight out of the pot. Is he a member of a motorcycle gang, and has he taken her mother hostage? No, she never would have let him in. He can’t be a Jehovah’s Witness, either, because he never would have gotten past the front door. A worker? If he were, the whole house would be eerily covered in old sheets. The only people who ever come here, after much preparation, are Mieke’s best friend Elvira and her neighbour Ulrike.

‘Oh, please, that’s no way to eat,’ Mieke laughs. ‘Where were you raised, in a pig sty?’

Normally her mother would jump out of her skin. Her lax, tolerant attitude is more than alarming for Sarah, who isn’t even allowed to eat an apple whole. This strange man is standing slipperless in the kitchen and scraping a spoon across the delicate surface of the Tefal pan. Who can explain it?

What Sarah reads into this is a passionate soap opera. Her mother is unpredictable, and in her unpredictable logic there’s always an explanation to suit her. So it’s quite possible that Mieke, who is one hundred percent devoted to her husband, has Another Man. Sarah gulps for air at this offensive speculation. It would be horrible, first of all for her but also for her father, who works so hard six days out of seven, mows the lawn every weekend, and sometimes just sits there staring so distractedly that it makes her blood run cold. If it’s true, he’ll have to leave the house and there’ll be a dreadful fight over her and the lawn mower. Those kinds of catastrophic divorces are common fare for the people in the village, her mother has always said scornfully: the riff-raff who switch partners at the drop of a hat and just keep passing the children back and forth.

The man abruptly interrupts his mechanical eating and slurping activities when he catches sight of Sarah the spy through the crack that gives away her hiding place. His jaw drops, his sauce-filled mouth emits warm air and gasps for the cold. He swallows and calls her by name. Sarah patters shyly into the kitchen. Like a Chinese serving girl on lotus feet, she carries the women’s magazine for her mother.

Standing before Jempy is a four-foot-six beanstalk in corduroy pants and a pullover with bright yellow daisies scattered across it like flowers in a green meadow. A large head is doing all it can to hold itself erect on the slender little body. Curious, wide-open eyes stare at him, almost as pitch black as the child’s bobbed hair. ‘You sure do look like your mother, unbelievable,’ says the man with delight as he tosses Sarah into the air like a featherweight package, catches her, gives her a hug and plants her in front of him on the kitchen floor in order to look at her from a distance. ‘The last time I saw you, you were just a little thing, two, three years old. What a pretty girl you’ve turned into. Don’t you remember your Uncle Jempy?’ Sarah doesn’t know what to say, and she stiffens as her cheeks turn crimson. Mieke stands behind her daughter and lowers her delicate hands onto Sarah’s shoulders as she would on a piano keyboard. This rare, tender contact clears away the cloud in her head.

‘This is Jean-Pierre,’ Mieke says to Sarah. ‘My brother and your uncle. He’s come to stay with us for the weekend. You may call him Uncle Jempy.’ And with this Mieke has supplied all the necessary information. Jempy, the man about whom Sarah has heard so many stifled comments such as ‘nail in my coffin’ and ‘nuisance’, is now here in the flesh, right in front of her nose, slurping spaghetti.

‘I’m going to stay here awhile, if that’s all right with you.’ Sarah’s uncle smiles at her.

After having tricked her way into the big wide world, the big wide world itself has come to her. It’s as if a new person had stepped out of the back room of her tender young life, someone Sarah has never seen before but always knew was there. This cowboy is a member of her family.

Mieke moistens her handkerchief with the tip of her tongue. She goes down on her knees to scrub a drop of sauce from one of the kitchen tiles.

‘Where’s my change?’ she asks Sarah.

‘I didn’t get any change.’

‘Just what I expected! Can you believe it? I told you, that guy from the newspaper shop is a real scoundrel. Cheating children like that.’ There’s sweat on Mieke’s upper lip. ‘Get out there right now and start weeding. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.’

When Sarah storms into the house after a lightning fast round of weeding, the stove exhaust fan is whirring at such a rate that the curtains are in danger of being swallowed up. The box of Useless Giveaway Presents has been taken down from the attic and all the perfumed candles in it are now lined up and burning in the kitchen, but the smell of cigarettes has penetrated even the most virginal spaces. ‘Please, Jempy, if you’re going to smoke, do it outside.’

Mieke and Uncle Jempy speak a language full of aspirated letters and amputated words that Sarah unfortunately has not mastered. They talk loud and laugh often. Sarah compares the two family members, combines their silhouettes, and comes up with a hilarious monster: some in-between creature with an agitated babble, roaring laughter, thin wrists attached to hefty arms protruding from shirt sleeves, and the legs of a gazelle in Romika slippers.

‘As long as you aren’t as naughty as your uncle,’ Jempy says, beating Mieke to the punch.

Stefaan works on Saturdays, much to Mieke’s displeasure. He’s just spent three days in bed with a peculiar chronic fatigue virus, so he’s going to have some catching up to do (Stefaan) and he’ll still have to take it easy (Mieke). After his Saturday work he slavishly drops in on Granny every weekend. He frequently tries to entice Sarah to come along by promising her cake, and sometimes he even uses emotional blackmail, but most of the time she doesn’t want to go. Granny smells bad and she doesn’t talk and she always looks so angry (as if she wanted to bewitch Sarah). That’s why she’s sitting at the kitchen table now, drawing music staffs. While Mieke makes herself presentable, Uncle Jempy takes his things to the guest room.

At seven o’clock Stefaan comes home, just as Mieke is putting the last dish on the table, as usual. He says Granny sends her greetings to Sarah, that she thinks about her a lot and is very proud that Sarah is really doing her best at school. Granny can’t possibly have said all that. Then Stefaan shakes Uncle Jempy’s hand. Jempy said he’s looking damned good, but what do you expect with a wife like his little sister? Stefaan doesn’t know how to respond to such a comment. He walks over to the record cabinet and interrupts Chopin’s lively romantic piano Prelude, setting Dylan on a long epic journey through ‘The Gates of Eden’.

Jempy jumps to his feet. ‘That reminds me,’ he says, and he runs over to a plastic bag from the Unic department store, ‘that I brought a present for you, Sarah.’

He rummages through the bag and hands her a CD from which the cellophane wrapper has already been removed. Sarah sees a comic strip drawing of collapsing skyscrapers with the freaks from Iggy Pop’s ‘Brick by Brick’ swarming in between.

‘Oh dear oh dear,’ says Mieke. Sarah puts the CD on.

‘Not too loud,’ says Mieke, ‘so we can still hear each other talk.’

The reeking sauerkraut is passed around, and on every plate there’s a skinned chicken fillet.

‘So healthy,’ laughs Uncle Jempy. ‘This is sure to give me stomach cramps.’ He leans back, hands behind his head, a joker who feels at home everywhere.

‘I like it, Mama.’ Sarah wants to show her mother that she’s grateful—for the food, for Uncle Jempy. Ingratitude, as her mother always says, is the devil’s workshop.

‘Isn’t there any ketchup or mayonnaise, sis?’

Uncle Jempy is waited on hand and foot. He smothers his food in ketchup and mayonnaise that emerge from some secret stockpile, since these leading causes of American and French heart attacks never appear on the table here. Sarah gets half a teaspoon of ketchup, just this once, and she has to make sure she doesn’t abuse the privilege.

‘The food inside isn’t very healthy. Yesterday there was a whole family of worms in my mashed potatoes … ’

‘Inside where?’ Sarah asks.

‘In jail,’ Jempy answers.

‘Change the subject,’ Mieke hurries to interject. ‘How’s Sonja doing?’

‘Don’t talk to me about that woman.’

Uncle Jempy eats with relish and is perfectly relaxed. A man of the world.

‘Yeah, Stefaan, at least you chose well. If Mieke wasn’t my little sister I’d know for myself.’

‘Hey! Jempy! What a thing to say!’ Mieke laughs.

Stefaan smiles his empty smile. He has to agree with Jempy, but if he were to say so he’d be implicating himself in an indelicate story with incestuous overtones.

After dessert—yogurt with sugar—Sarah stays at the table, sitting silently. She makes herself small and keeps her mouth shut, hoping they’ll forget she’s there so she can stay up late, like Emily. On Saturday nights she’s allowed to take her down comforter to the conversation pit and watch TV for as long as she wants. Sarah wants to learn everything about Uncle Jempy.

‘Say, Sarah,’ says Mieke, ‘we’ve had enough of that racket. Put some decent music on.’

Stefaan stands up and lets a waterfall of nasally tones roll out of the speakers and over their heads.

‘Jempy, come on, you know this one,’ Stefaan says.

‘“Subterranean Homesick Blues”, I’ll say I know it,’ says Jempy, and he chimes in with the twenty-four-year-old Dylan, ‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’.

‘That’s the beginning of rap music, Sarah,’ Stefaan says, his arm draped over the back of her chair. ‘Listen to it carefully.’

‘I don’t know this song,’ Sarah answers.

‘It’s better she doesn’t know it,’ Mieke says. She refills the water glasses.

‘Is the cellar under water?’ Jempy chokes out a laugh.

‘We have tea, too,’ Mieke says. ‘Camomile or mint?’

At nine-thirty on the nose Stefaan reminds Sarah that it’s time for bed. She gives her mother a kiss and hesitantly reaches out a hand to her uncle, although he says he’d rather have kisses like a real cowboy.

She never expected that her mother would have the same dark blood as a terrorist. The Delhaize Supermarket, where Mieke and Sarah go every week to fill two shopping carts with high-priced provisions, was the target of the so-called Nijvel Gang a couple of years ago. The terrorists mowed down several innocent customers. All of a sudden, the similarities between the world being reported in the news and Sarah’s world weren’t just superficial points of contact; now the two coincided perfectly. They made the news. She watched the news broadcast and saw the cash registers where she always folded open the brown bags, and the shelves at exactly her eye level that were full of candy, perfumed erasers, and stick-on earrings. Jail is too good for those men, Sarah often heard from her mother’s armchair. It was all so exciting.

Stefaan kneels beside her bed for a good-night kiss. Sarah takes advantage of his position by firing questions at him. ‘Was Uncle Jempy in jail before he came to us?’

‘Uh, that’s something you don’t have to worry about.’

‘I’m not worried about it. I just want to know.’

‘Yes, Sarah. Uncle Jempy is in jail, but this weekend he has vacation. The director of the jail is letting him spend a weekend home, and apparently he can’t think of a better home than his favourite sister’s house, where he hasn’t set foot for at least six years,’ Stefaan tells her.

‘Why is he in jail?’

‘Mama and Aunt Lydia would rather not talk about it.’

‘Is Uncle Jempy a terrorist?

‘You watch too much news, Sarah.’

‘Why did they arrest him then?’

‘Why on earth do you want to know?’

‘He’s part of my family, he’s my uncle.’

‘Granny is part of your family, too. She’d so much like to see you again. You have to be nice to old people, Sarah. Before you know it Granny will be gone and then you’ll be sorry.’

‘But if people are dead, they’re still part of your family, right? Isn’t your little brother part of the family anymore?’ It feels as if she’s touched something red hot, something that will hurt her father and leave a mark. She knows very well that this is forbidden territory.

‘Sarah!’ His lower jaw begins grinding as if he were gnawing on a bone. ‘That’s enough talking. Time to go to sleep.’

‘Papa, you’re weird.’

‘Go to sleep. Now.’ Stefaan doesn’t even plant the customary cold kiss on her forehead but simply turns off the light. When he returns to the living room, Sarah goes to the top of the stairs and listens.

‘She left me in the lurch, took my own kid away, and now I’m supposed to pay her?’ she hears Uncle Jempy say.

‘That alimony is for your daughter, birdbrain,’ Mieke interrupts. ‘To buy her food and clothes and to pay for her school books.’

‘My daughter doesn’t even want to go to school. It’s to pay for Sonja’s jewellery, that’s what it’s for. I worked for her all during our marriage, day and night. If she decides to run off I’m not going to be stuck with all the responsibility.’

‘According to the law … ’

‘I know you’ve studied it all, but I don’t give a shit about the law.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘I wipe my ass with the law. You have your principles, I have mine.’

‘So you’re all locked up and sitting pretty and we’re left holding the bag.’

Her mother’s sideswipes come galloping up to her while her uncle’s bass tones remain submerged under the water of the ceiling like whales. In a little while the refrigerator’s built-in freezer door shuts with a click. Would they be eating that bright yellow, grainy, passion fruit sherbet? Sarah and Mieke brought it home yesterday. The cashier at the Delhaize was handing out free products. For Mieke, anything free is suspicious by definition, but she had no choice than to accept the sherbet because it’s rude to refuse a gift. Everyone but Mieke has been going out of their way to avoid the Delhaize since the Nijvel Gang held it up. But she won’t let herself be scared away. Besides, the last place that the gang would want to attack anytime soon is this Delhaize. What’s there to interest them? After the glass bowls have been spooned clean and shoved into the dishwasher, Stefaan announces that he’s turning in. Mieke patters to the hallway to lock the five locks on the front door. Preparations for night-time are underway at number 7 Nightingale Lane.

Ten minutes of tooth brushing and make-up removal later the house is sunken in deep repose. After a great deal of foot-stamping, brooding, tossing and turning, and with the distant thunder of hunger in her belly, Sarah still hasn’t fallen asleep. She’s thinking about her father’s little brother. What would it be like if he were still alive? Or if he had only been dead a short time and then came back as a little brother for herself and a friend for her papa? Now there’s probably nothing left of the little brother. Uncle Alain has turned into a tiny little person, like all the other dead people. These little people roam the earth endlessly without ever bumping into each other. Her father works with little people, too—viruses, bacteria—but they’re bad little people. Maybe Papa thinks his brother was kidnapped by those bad little people. She thinks it’s really sad for him, but she’s glad Mama has found her brother at any rate.

The next day Uncle Jempy is snoring loudly on the sofa when Sarah comes down for breakfast. Seven bedrooms and he sleeps on the sofa, is Mieke’s litany. His feet are resting on the ceramic figure of a Chinese warrior. Next to him on the sofa is an empty bottle of Marie Brizard, keeping him company like a shameless lover. He had a go at the liquor supply that gaily decorates the writing desk. As soon as Mieke turns on the juicer he opens his eyes. He comes into the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee. Mieke presses her lips together.

‘It’s Sunday. The weekend is as good as over,’ she says. ‘Better leave now, then you’re sure of not being late.’

He nods, puts his hand on Sarah’s head and musses her hair. When he goes outside to smoke a cigarette, Sarah begins to whine: ‘Why are you chasing him away?’

‘We’re not chasing him away,’ Mieke snaps at Sarah with the same combativeness that she uses in her exchanges with Jempy. ‘Uncle Jempy has to go back. The weekend is over and we’ve done our duty again, more than our duty.’

On a clear Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1990 Stefaan has once again been unable to get Sarah to come see Granny. Granny still has her presents for Sarah’s tenth birthday, Stefaan said before leaving the house alone. Ingratitude is of the devil, isn’t it, Mieke? But more than anything else, Stefaan wants to keep his daughter away from Jempy, who’s bound to show up at the door again sooner or later. As long as he can’t find an adequate solution for protecting his household from this guy, with his female admirers calling on the phone and the bill-collectors coming to the door (a bailiff!), he’ll have to take his daughter away to a place of safety. His appeal doesn’t make much of an impression on Mieke. Sarah will just stay at home with her.

Of course Mieke likes to see her brother, but every time he comes it takes an enormous amount of nerve-racking deftness to let Jempy into her house in such a way that the neighbours don’t notice. Fortunately he doesn’t have penitentiary leave every weekend, his behaviour within the prison walls being far from irreproachable. But once he’s in the house it gives her secret pleasure. Jempy is able to shake something loose in her, a kind of playfulness that she can’t activate with Stefaan. Even so, it would be better for Jempy to start looking for something for himself. Every time he comes, Jempy assures her he’s in the market for real estate, but you can’t rush something like that because it’s too easy to make a bad investment.

It won’t be long before Jempy is released for good, something Mieke can hardly bare to contemplate. If her brother was the only one she was focusing her worries on, she thinks she could manage. But Mieke also has a family, and neighbours. And a mother-in-law who has taken to calling every other minute to talk to her granddaughter. As if that weren’t enough, she also has to fob off all the lady friends.

It was Sarah who picked up, that first time a call came for Uncle Jempy from a certain Leslie. That phone call was the first in a whole series, as if the girls were standing in line at the phone booth. All sorts of women call, one after another, twenty-four hours a day but mostly after ten o’clock at night or before ten o’clock in the morning. The girls sound as young as Sarah, Mieke says. The first few times she thought they were Sarah’s classmates calling to compare homework. The sluts talk with a voluptuous undercurrent punctuated by chewing gum, vulgar girls who all ask for Jean-Pierre, Jean, Jempy, their snooky-wookums, their darling. Mieke waits a few seconds and then lets the girls have it, explaining that Jempy has enough problems without having to deal with them, asking them how old they are, how they support themselves, and what they think they’re doing.

‘Oh, I’m already nineteen, Cindy,’ ‘I work as a cashier at the Unic, Viviane,’ ‘Okay, you win, I’m crazy in love, Gonda,’ she says, imitating them with contempt. She explains to the girls that her brother Jean-Pierre has a family—Sarah perks up her ears—and that he could easily be their father, after which the air-headed little bimbos start spouting, usually with heaps of self-confidence, that they don’t care, or that he’s better off with them, or—the coarsest of the bunch—that she ‘doesn’t need to hear from any sour old bag, but where is Jean-Pierre, goddamn it? You’re not finished with me yet. I’ve got his number now and I’m not giving up until I hear from my guy.’

Mieke fears the floodgates have been opened, she tells Stefaan when he gets back from Granny’s. Sarah is sitting in the armchair with her headphones on, but the sound is off.

‘We never should have let him stay here, not even once. You give them an inch and they take a mile.’ That’s the way she sees her brother, as a needy child, and that’s why it’s hard to refuse him. ‘With Jempy it’s always something. He was no end of grief for my parents, but even they always gave in when he asked for something. In a way Jempy is very special.’

‘Very special in the trouble he causes,’ Stefaan adds.

‘I’m much too good to show my brother the door, of course. But if we don’t take control of the situation now, just think what might happen.’ Mieke sees her brother being released and moving in with them, setting their house on fire with his cigarettes, ‘investing’ all their money in the one-armed bandits at the casino, and getting Sarah hooked on drugs while turning her into a smuggler. In her runaway imagination it’s only a matter of weeks before Mieke finds the floozies in their sexiest lingerie sitting on bar stools at the living room window and ogling the neighbours. And … and … and are they just supposed to stand helplessly by?

‘Calm down,’ Stefaan says to comfort her. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

Nothing seems to have changed when Uncle Jempy shows up again at the door two weeks later. Stefaan and Jempy are drinking port aperitifs in the living room. Stefaan has red cheeks from bicycling home so fast, a blush that heightens his youthfulness. He’s put on ‘Man Gave Names To All The Animals’ from Bob Dylan’s conversion album Slow Train Coming. It’s a happy, childlike tune which he thinks is just the thing for Sarah.

‘Iraq,’ Stefaan says to Jempy. ‘What’s going on there, anyway? Saddam Hussein has really gone one step too far.’

Uncle Jempy nods vaguely. The Persian Gulf crisis is not exactly his main concern, but Stefaan goes on while Jempy stares into his glass, surprised that a glass can empty so quickly.

‘Anyone who knows anything about the Second World War will tell you that something like this can’t end well,’ Stefaan says. ‘Saddam has his eye on Kuwait’s oil fields, and that’s just plain wrong. Saddam’s troops and their moustaches rolled into Kuwait one night on their rubber mats. That kind of unscrupulous greed and imperialism is suspiciously similar to the exploits of a certain Adolf so many years ago. The fact that the Americans want to take military action has nothing to do with left or right but with justice, and that’s what Bush wants.’

‘That’s right,’ Mieke calls out from the kitchen while stirring the leek soup. ‘History repeats itself if you’re not paying attention. It’s our duty to put a stop to it. The Americans set a good example.’ She turns on the exhaust fan, making it impossible hear the men in the living room, yet she keeps rattling on. Mieke can rant with uncommon ferocity about subjects that are so beyond her realm of experience that she can safely vent her own frustrations there. ‘Anybody who doesn’t want to join in is sticking his head in the sand,’ says Mieke contentiously to her daughter.

‘The oil fields that are burning there now are an enormous loss,’ says Stefaan the scientist. ‘Everyone has to do his duty and pull his weight, we all agree on that. And the tragedy that’s taking place isn’t really so far from us. It’s a small world.’

‘Yes, it’s a small world,’ says Uncle Jempy, and he refills his glass.

‘But I still wouldn’t want to have to paint it,’ says Mieke, who has just come in with a silver tray of Tuc crackers.

‘Isn’t that something for you, Jean-Pierre,’ Stefaan suggests as if he’s been hit by a flash of inspiration, ‘being a soldier? You’ll be getting out soon anyway, right? You’re a man of the world. A soldier does a lot of travelling.’

‘I’d miss my daughter,’ Uncle Jempy answers dryly.

‘You haven’t seen her in a year,’ Mieke says.

‘I don’t have to see her to love her.’

Weeks turn into months. Uncle Jempy stays for the unsolicited pinch of exotic care in the salt-free regime at number 7 Nightingale Lane. No matter how many girls Jempy hits on during his penitentiary leave, his only big loves, he swears, are Mieke and Sarah. His admirers send love letters and stuffed teddy bears to 7 Nightingale Lane, but playboy Jempy himself only sends cards to Mieke from prison, thanking her and letting her know how glad he is to be her brother. He becomes the resident ghost who shows up every few weekends on Saturday afternoon. Sarah can smell the aroma of old soup from the prison on him. She sees how her mother scrubs the traces of her brother from the carpets every Sunday afternoon after he leaves. He’s the man who is gradually attacking the family’s nervous system and slowly driving them to the abyss of a serious crisis.

‘Stuck, stuck,’ Jempy grumbles that Saturday afternoon in the kitchen, and he unscrews the cap from a bottle of Tabasco that Mieke’s can’t open. ‘Nobody should ever be stuck with anything. Stuck isn’t in my dictionary.’

‘By the way, I’m not going to be in your way much longer.’ Uncle Jempy tells them he’s on a bed of roses. Soon he’s being released on parole. And he’s gone gaga over a thirty-five-year-old lady and her two kids, who he’s going to adopt.

‘Roses with thorns, sounds like,’ says Mieke. ‘So cut the chit-chat. We have to be at Madam Cherry’s in the village at three.’

Madam Cherry is a frugal old woman who lived through the Great War and has a back as crooked as her fruit trees. At five-thirty every morning she mounts a ladder and climbs fifteen feet up into the branches. She’d rather risk her life than let all that magnificent fruit from God’s garden go bad or leave it to the birds. Even that pious lady, supermarket bag tied to her head to keep off the drizzle, has fallen for Uncle Jempy’s charms. She won’t let him leave without one more bucket of sour cherries. Nothing would please her more; he’s doing her a favour.

In the kitchen, juice is streaming from the pitting machine. The pits tap against the covered marble tiles like hailstones. The three of them are hard at work, as if together they had formed the conveyor belt of a perfect little family: Mieke washes and selects the cherries, Uncle Jempy runs them through the machine, and Sarah, down on her knees, gathers up the pits that fall beside it. The cherries leave red splashes of blood on the kitchen cabinets, which Sarah must wipe off immediately with a damp cloth. Sarah wheedles her uncle into telling them tall tales. She wants to know what kinds of crimes the other prisoners were in for.

‘Sarah, give your uncle some peace and quiet.’

‘Yeah, Sarah, how about you tell me something? Or let me hear what you’re learning at the music academy. Where’s your guitar?’

Sarah doesn’t dare. She’s much too shy. ‘Some other time, uncle. I’m all messy right now.’

‘Yes, Jempy, she’s right. Leave her alone or my whole living room will be covered in cherry juice. I don’t know how she does it, but somehow she manages.’ Sarah, who for more than ten years has come to know Mieke’s sardonic speech pattern like the back of her hand, is surprised by the cheerful undertone of her mother’s comment.

They’re all in high spirits. Mieke even makes a joke when she hears over the radio that gangster boss Patrick Haemers is being put under additional surveillance in prison. She says she’s going to set an extra place tonight at supper tonight for Jempy’s buddy, because he’s certainly going to find a way to escape despite the extra surveillance. Fine with her, she says. He looks like a respectable young man, with his blue eyes and beautiful sweaters. Who’s going to wash the sweaters, she wonders? In response Uncle Jempy throws a handful of cherries at her head. Everything falls silent. Only the news presenter continues. Sarah looks at her mother. Tears are suddenly streaming down Mieke’s cheeks. ‘That’s not allowed,’ she sobs, ‘you’re not allowed to do that.’ Uncle Jempy puts an arm around her shoulder, tries to calm her down, and promises he’ll clean everything up. Against all expectations he actually does, wringing out shammy cloths until the water runs clear and the kitchen has lost a layer of paint and is back to being a proper place for preparing the evening meal.

That evening, just as all four of them have swallowed the last of their soup, the telephone rings.

‘Oh dear oh dear, who can that be?’ Mieke asks. Oh dear oh dear: her life is set to the rhythm of oh dear oh dear. Oh dear oh dear (get a fresh tablecloth) in response to a drop of milk next to a glass; oh dear oh dear (the power of nature) said in astonishment at the sunflowers, which are so abnormally large this year; oh dear oh dear (is that for me?) of silent pride in the surprisingly beautiful bracelet she got from her husband and daughter for Mother’s Day; oh dear oh dear as a bell tone (what danger is lurking now?). Oh dear oh dear.

Mieke thinks Jempy should answer the phone, since she’s a hundred percent sure it’s for him. They don’t know anyone so rude as to call during dinner, except maybe Granny, who makes a game out of calling at the most ungodly hours for the most trivial reasons. The last time it was to say that Sarah was ten years and eleven months old. The poor thing is starting to lose it.

‘Let it ring,’ says Uncle Jempy. ‘I’m hungry.’

They’re having schnitzel with fried new potatoes and broccoli tonight, something uncommonly unhealthy and festive at the Vandersanden-De Kinder home.

‘Please answer it,’ Mieke says. ‘Then we can have our dinner in peace.’

Uncle Jempy goes over to the phone. He listens for a few seconds and barks a few short phrases into the receiver, such as how much and where and now’s not a good time but anyway and it’ll be all right because it’s you and so close already. He hangs up.

‘I’m going out for just a minute, be right back,’ he says, and without further ado he goes out to the hall. The heavy front door closes behind him. They hear an old jalopy come to a halt, idle noisily, and take off again.

Mieke thinks it’s rude to start without Jempy. The three of them sit there twiddling their thumbs around the steaming dishes. They can wait for twenty minutes. For two hours even. When the two hours are up Mieke’s so mad at her brother she could strangle him, but unfortunately he’s not here. He’s a disgrace, he’s rotten, he’s a bad influence on Sarah, a rat, everything that’s bad. She thinks it’s outrageous and incomprehensible that she still lets herself get mixed up with that prick. They’ll never again see that money they lent him, guaranteed. And so forth. And so on. She rushes to the kitchen and starts washing the cooking pots. Stefaan and Sarah pick at the food behind her back. Mieke comes back to the dining room and sweeps the entire evening meal from the table. Before Stefaan and Sarah can utter a word of protest, the cargo from the brimming dishes sinks to the bottom of the garbage can. Shiploads of the most delicious food descend into the depths, just like that, irrevocably lost.

‘This has got to stop!’ Stefaan roars suddenly. He slams his hand on the table like a peasant in a black-and-white Flemish film from some distant Sunday evening of yesteryear.

If there’s something Stefaan can’t laugh about, it’s this: the food he has a right to, that he’s looked forward to after a whole day of drudgery, being picked up before his very eyes and mercilessly tossed out.

‘This has got to stop, I said!’ Stefaan repeats.

‘What?’

‘That thing you do, plucking the rugs bare!’

‘What are you talking about now?’

‘The rugs.’

‘Is it that you don’t like them? You helped pick them out yourself, so don’t come complaining about it now.’

‘You spend hours at it. It’s just not normal.’

‘It’s because your daughter makes a mess of my rugs. That’s why. She’s out of control. I don’t know what to do with that kid.’

‘Hello, I’m still here,’ says Sarah, who’s sitting at the table.

‘The problem isn’t Sarah,’ says Stefaan. ‘It’s not Sarah at all! Any child would get nervous with all that hysteria in the air.’

‘That child is just being defiant.’

‘Stop it. I don’t want to talk about Sarah.’

‘Oh, right. That’s true, too. How could I have forgotten? We’re not supposed to talk about problems in this house.’

‘Oh, yes we are. There’s nothing I’d rather do. But you refuse to talk about the biggest problem of all,’ Stefaan roars all at once. His voice is loud enough to leave scorch marks, as if the volume had accidentally been turned up to full blast.

‘Oh dear oh dear, are you all right? Is everything okay?’ Mieke asks, suddenly the very picture of peace, and brilliant in her role of solicitous wife.

‘Your brother!’ Stefaan explodes.

‘Now it’s all my fault?’

‘Yes, he’s your brother and he can do whatever he likes here, wreck the place and toss out our dinner … ’

‘He didn’t do that.’

‘You know what I mean.’ Stefaan is gasping for breath.

‘What?’

‘If he wasn’t your brother, you’d call him the biggest piece of riff-raff ever.’

‘I understand, Stefaan,’ Mieke says, nodding more sympathetically than a therapist with a patient. ‘I understand, and I see through your jealousy perfectly. I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault that you don’t have a brother anymore.’

Stop! We can’t just shrug this off. All the colour drains from the room. No one dares take a breath. We’d step in and do something if we could. Stefaan, just let it pass. It happened in another lifetime.

‘What do you mean?’ Stefaan pants. ‘What do you mean? I’m not going to be drawn into this. No, not me.’

‘You’re right. It’s my fault,’ says Mieke, who has shocked herself with her cruel swipe.

‘That’s not what I’m saying. You’re also just the product of your upbringing.’

‘Yes, thanks a lot,’ she says, cloyingly sweet. ‘At least I had an upbringing, not obedience training like animals on a farm.’

Stefaan snorts like a mare who’s just run a race.

‘You come home and stick your feet under the table and you don’t have five words for me.’ Mieke rolls out the heavy artillery.

There’s a lather of rage on Stefaan’s lips. His voice cracking, he shouts, ‘I work myself to the bone and it’s still not good enough.’

‘How hard is it to be friendly to your wife every once in a while, someone who toils away all day long? Sometimes it feels like I’m living with your mother.’

Sarah watches as her parents take turns placing stones on the scale of love, a scale that isn’t made for such weight and soon gives way, leaving two people facing each other, trembling with rage, overwhelmed by the debris of all those complaints, their hearts headed for some unknown depth, quivering, swirling, each one determined for the very last time not to be taken in by this comedy, which has been going on for more than ten years and which no one with an ounce of sense in his head can call a good marriage.

‘It’s all my fault, all of it,’ Mieke cries. ‘I should be dead! Where’s a gun?’

‘Calm down!’

‘Just kill me, that’s all I ask. Do me a favour and kill me.’

‘There’s no talking to you.’

‘But I am talking, right? I’ve even come up with a solution.’

It’s either the hunger or the commotion, but Sarah suddenly feels faint. She drops down against the wall. She can’t get any air. Now she knows for sure: her parents are going to get divorced because they hate each other.

Together they begin howling at the moon, at the stars, at each other’s darkest, most hateful, most unbearable shadows and delusions. Stefaan can no longer control himself, and with all the outraged fury and strength he has in him he kicks at the door to the utility room, the only door that isn’t made of oak. The door answers with a crunch. He’s left hanging in the splintery hole. He begins hopping around on one foot, the other having been swallowed up by the gaping mouth in the door. He isn’t able to wrench himself loose.

‘Now that’s a solution,’ Mieke cries.

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Stefaan says, instantly pale and serene. Blood is starting to flow where his ankle has disappeared into the door.

‘Oh dear oh dear, you’re bleeding,’ cries Mieke. She hurries to the kitchen and comes back with a bucket and a sponge. She wipes the blood from his leg and begins to scrub the surrounding floor. Blood, stubborn stuff.

As in the most idiotic slapstick comedy, the front doorbell suddenly rings. Mieke, torn between two places where her presence is required, decides to complete her tasks one after the other.

‘Stefaan, everything is going to be fine,’ she keeps repeating as she squeezes the sponge into the red water.

Stefaan can’t think of anything better to do than smile his eternal smile and say, deathly pale, ‘I’m going to deal with this. Everything is under control. You go get the door.’ He tries to pull his foot out with a single tug but the door refuses to release its prey from its mouth of splinters.

‘Sarah, help me out here!’ Stefaan calls out. ‘Go get a saw and hammer out of the garage.’

More exemplary than ever, Sarah deals with this moment of crisis by playing the role of obedient child. She goes out to Stefaan’s gigantic do-it-yourself arsenal and picks out a hammer and a small jigsaw.

‘If that’s Ulrike again with more of her penny-pinching, I’ll get rid of her fast enough,’ Mieke grumbles. Her neighbour Ulrike is extremely well off. Her husband is a professor of economics and sits on dozens of boards of directors, yet Ulrike loves a bargain. For months now she’s been trying to convince Mieke to have a sauna installed so both of them can get a twenty percent discount. But it isn’t Ulrike. Marc from across the street, not exactly the shy type, slips right past Mieke and walks into the dining room uninvited.

‘Marc! What a surprise!’ Mieke runs after him.

‘Hi, Mieke. I have a question for Stefaan. My regular golf partner just cancelled, and … ’

‘I’d go get him but he’s in the shower,’ Mieke says. ‘Sorry, Marc.’

Marc shoots a glance into the kitchen and sees Stefaan struggling at the door.

‘Excuse me, Mieke,’ and he deftly pushes her aside. ‘I’m going to give Stefaan a hand.’

Like a genuine action hero, he forces his way into the kitchen. ‘This looks like child’s play compared with what I do in the operating room every day.’

‘Leave it, Marc,’ Stefaan mumbles, but Marc has already grabbed the jigsaw and is skilfully carving his way through the wood until he reaches Stefaan’s leg. In no time at all Stefaan is standing with both feet on the floor. Marc looks at his work with satisfaction. After a slap on the back for Stefaan and a wink for Sarah he sails back to the front door.

‘Stefaan is in the shower,’ he says to Mieke, who has gone purple in the face. Marc now has a cluster bomb of gossip on hand that he can set off all over the neighbourhood. The hole in the door is repaired the next day, but too sloppily to ever meet with Mieke’s approval, as if a visible sign were needed of the struggle between two people who will do anything to really see each other. No one in the neighbourhood seems to have heard about the hole in the door.

It’s a peculiar coincidence, but on the few rare occasions that Sarah goes with her father to see Granny it’s invariably raining. Today, too, the roads seem slippery. Rain in Belgium is like the great leader in a dictatorship: it pops up everywhere. Rain is the starting point of every banal exchange and it seeps into every conversation. You can’t do anything about the rain. You can tie a plastic bag over your head like the old ladies and walk around Easter-egg fashion, you can put on a bright yellow poncho that makes you lose control of your handle bars, but these aren’t real solutions. You can also put on a sour face, as Granny does so well. It doesn’t even have to rain for her to do that. Granny’s face is permanently set on bad weather, at least whenever Sarah sees her, and fortunately that’s no more than three times a year. Even Mieke has insisted that Sarah go to visit her today. The old woman is so eager to see her granddaughter again, her only granddaughter. This is her eleventh birthday, and according to Mieke she’s a big girl now and she can do nice things for other people every once in a while.

Granny is sitting all hunched up in the armchair with a thermos and a cup of cold coffee beside her. On her instructions Stefaan goes to the refrigerator to get a box of pastries and places it on one of the dozen little side tables that are spread out all over the bungalow. When he comes over to her, she squints up at him and asks, ‘Is that Sarah?’

‘No, Stefaan,’ Stefaan shouts. He gives Sarah a nudge, making her stand in front of her grandmother.

‘Stefaan?’

‘No, now it’s Sarah!’ Sarah screams.

‘Ah, Sarah! My little lamb. My sight is so poor. Every day it gets a little worse. And I can hardly hear anything anymore, either. Say, it’s very curious, but you’re really starting to look just like your grandfather André.’

The old woman spontaneously starts trembling and crying from all the emotion. Old people can cry when they see a sparrow eating a fat ball on their back porch or a little child standing with their hands on their hips asking where the teddy bear is, or when they get an ordinary friendly nod from the baker, putting his hand on theirs for a second, after they’ve explained that these days one hard roll is enough to fill them up. The waves of agitation splash about in the little bucket that is still her world. Granny wipes her tears away with a crusty handkerchief and crosses herself over and over again. ‘How old are you now, Saaaraaah? Eleven years old, eh? Yes, eleven, yes, yes, eleven, I’m so happy, and then twelve and … You’re going to be a big strong girl. Always eat well—right, my dear?—to make you big and strong. Give her a pastry, why don’t you?’ Has she been saving up all her words for Sarah’s birthday?

Papa and Sarah have been sitting in her parlour for fifteen minutes already. There’s a sultry old noise in the background, as if the house had been set to a Russian wartime channel that’s still being broadcast from Siberia. Granny stares ahead with glassy eyes and endorses all sorts of obscure things, more to herself than to them. She’s already repeated Sarah’s name ten times. She’s a strange old lady, but maybe the only reason Sarah thinks she’s strange is because they don’t know each other. What you don’t know is always strange. Granny has pressed three thousand-franc notes into Sarah’s fist, a precious secret. She knows Stefaan saw her do it; he was too explicit the way he turned his head to the other side.

‘Your battery, mother, your battery,’ Stefaan shouts.

Granny wriggles a snail out of her inner ear. ‘I thought I heard something peeping. You see that? The battery from your hearing aid is dead.’ A son takes care of his mother. Hanging on the wall behind Granny are two yellowed photos in wooden frames. Even before she could talk, Sarah knew she was never, ever to say anything about those photos. Mama made that clearly understood. Granny lost a child. That unutterable grief turned her to stone, Mama says, the few times she speaks about Granny without a trace of venom. She usually can’t resist adding that there are some people who become more human because of setbacks. Granny has never exchanged a single word with Mieke, that’s how heartless and jealous she is of her son’s happiness. Even ‘hello’ is more than she can manage, Mieke says, ‘and that is the unadulterated truth, I’m really not exaggerating.’

‘Every day,’ says Granny.

‘What every day, mother?’

‘I ask him every day.’

‘What do you ask, mother?’

‘I ask him to come and take me.’

‘Here’s a nice one.’ Stefaan points to one of the pastries with his fork and places it on Granny’s plate. ‘One with marzipan, a little pig—you like those, don’t you?’

‘That child needs to eat well. Give her another pastry. And take one for yourself.’ Granny straightens up. ‘Eat it all up. Whatever’s left you have to take with you.’

‘Where are you going, mother?’

‘Leave a body in peace for a change. To my own little corner, Stefaan, please.’ She walks to the cellar door and pushes the door open. ‘I’ll be right back. You just eat.’

When Sarah stands up to take a second pastry, just like her father, she looks through the tongues of the sanseveria and sees the foolish face of Berta the goat. Berta is spying on them through the window. She’s what gets Granny out of bed in the morning. The ancient goat moved with Granny from the farm to the bungalow. Berta is covered in rough, shabby fur and she has dirty legs, but Granny thinks she has magical powers. She’s also immortal.

‘Granny is starting to forget things,’ says Stefaan to his daughter. ‘Getting old like that isn’t easy.’

After quite some time a huge box comes into the living room with Granny behind it.

‘My heart is at rest now that she’s eleven years old. And it’s the men in our family that cause all the problems, right, Stefaan? I’m not going to say anything. Listen, son, how are you doing these days? Can I have a little peace and quiet?’ babbles the old lady merrily as she starts setting out the contents of the box on her side tables. She presses a knitted octopus into Sarah’s hands. And the figure of an angel. And a songbook from twenty years ago. And a mother-of-pearl necklace.

‘Don’t worry, mother, everything is perfect. Look at Sarah.’

‘Too bad I don’t see so well,’ says the rotund little woman. ‘That’s my mother’s jewellery, Saaaraaah, so take good care of it. Then you can wear it yourself some day …’

‘Why are you giving all your possessions away?’ Stefaan asks with alarm.

The most motley collection of junk has found a home in this box: a damaged extension cord entangled in a very expensive necklace, Hummels, Druivelaar calendars still in their wrappers, a green lampshade, pen holders made from toilet paper rolls that she and her girlfriends fashioned in the parish hall. ‘We take what the people don’t want anymore after they’ve wiped their bottoms and make something beautiful,’ Granny explains.

Granny keeps handing things out and rattling off instructions on how you can use vinegar to clean crystal glasses but not biscuit porcelain. She keeps it up for quite some time before dropping into her armchair, exhausted, and silence descends on the bungalow once again. Her world is a box whose lid is slowly closing.

‘That Jean-Pierre,’ Stefaan sighs in an attempt to resuscitate the conversation, ‘he’s more than anybody can handle.’

‘It takes all kinds, eh?’

‘Mieke’s had it with him. I’m going to throw him out.’

‘Mieke will do that herself,’ says Granny. Outside Berta the dwarf goat bumps her snout against the window pane. ‘Our Berta is going to outlive me, poor lamb. And it won’t be long for me, you know.’ Sarah nods meekly. Surprisingly enough, Granny smells just like Jempy. She has the same wild smell, the smell of a neglected animal.

Granny gropes for another pastry from the plate, breaks it in two like a consecrated host and shoves both pieces into her mouth at once. She keeps shaking her head as a mysterious little smile forms around her mouth, bursting with disbelief in this world.

‘Sarah, I’m so glad I’ve been able to see you just once more. Really, would you believe that I don’t have much time left?’

The very last quarrel between Uncle Jempy and Mama wrenches him from Sarah’s young life just as abruptly as when he entered it. There’s a lot more at stake than the hundred-thousand-franc debt that Uncle Jempy racked up in one night and for which number 7 Nightingale Lane was presented with the bill. This is a war being fought out between continents, a clash of ideologies and genes. Mieke is insisting that Jempy leave at once.

He raises his yellow fingers to his chapped lips as if needing time to reflect on this coup de grâce. ‘I’m not wasting my time here any longer,’ he finally says. ‘Belgium isn’t worthy of me. Yes, go ahead and say that Jean-Pierre De Kinder is too big for his boots. Belgium has never given me anything.’

‘You’ve never given Belgium anything, either. It’s easy to let yourself go the way you have. If I were to let myself go, there’d be a lot involved. We’re made of the same materials, but you’ve built a shack and I’ve built a villa. To each his own.’

‘Oh, madam is feeling superior again. Everything I’ve built up has been taken from me. Well, I’ve seen enough, I’m leaving.’

‘So go. I’m not the one who stood here on the kitchen tiles begging to be taken in. For just a little while. Well, that little while was up a long time ago. You’ve already had your good times here. I have to think of my family, too. We’ve done our duty.’

‘Ça va, ça va. You don’t have to put up with me anymore.’

‘Okay, go then.’ She opens the back door.

‘Oh, sweetie, I … ’—the click of a Zippo, the cowboy needs to refuel, to keep up his nicotine level—‘I’m starting out fresh. I’m going to launch a wine business in South Africa. Beautiful country, no bullshit. Anyone who wants to work hard there can make it.’

‘Will you please not smoke in the house?’ says Mieke.

Stefaan is behind her, nodding.

Jempy storms up the stairs and starts making a terrific racket, but Mieke flatly refuses to rise to the bait and climb the stairs to see what Uncle Jempy is up to. After half an hour he’s standing at the top of the stairs with a blue Samsonite suitcase in his hands.

‘Well, that’s nice of you. That’s my suitcase,’ says Mieke.

‘It’s the least you can give to your very own brother. You won’t have any more trouble from me. And you’re really going to miss me, that’s for sure.’

‘Give me that suitcase.’ Mieke blocks the way to the back door.

That’s the last straw.

‘No, I’m not giving the suitcase back.’

‘What’s in it anyway?’

‘Don’t you trust me?’

She jerks the suitcase out of his hands. The suitcase flies through the air and crashes to the floor. The latches give way. The lid of the suitcase falls open. It’s completely empty. There’s absolutely nothing in it. Uncle Jempy leaves with the empty suitcase, aching with humiliation and as poor as a church mouse. He turns around one more time, throws his powerful arms around Sarah and says, ‘You’re going to go far, kiddo. Just like your uncle.’ He plants a kiss on her forehead, looks his sister over one more time from head to foot, and strolls out through the back door .

‘We did that well,’ says Stefaan as they watch him leave. ‘We won’t be seeing him anytime soon.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ says Mieke with a hint of sadness, ‘but our family comes first.’ She repeats this a few more times during the evening, as if she doesn’t fully believe it herself.

Traces of Jempy’s presence persist long after his departure. A registered letter arrives at number 7 Nightingale Lane sentencing Jean-Pierre De Kinder in absentia for fraud. The number of love letters for Jempy that continues to pour in is impressive.

‘Go get the letters,’ Mieke tells Sarah, and together they light a fire in the fireplace for the first time this season. The Vandersanden-De Kinder family warm their hands on spelling mistakes, exploding golden hearts, and foolish sentences about painless, eternal love.