Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 22

18

‘Kristel! Post!’

Sister Marie Immaculata has a pseudo-strict manner that belies her sweetness and helps her keep order. She knows how important post is – it’s obvious from the silent gathering of usually boisterous girls. The unruly herd has miraculously transformed into waiting rows of ramrod-straight little grey stakes. We all want to know if we still exist in the outside world. My mother has written to me, as she does every week, the content always similar – what’s happening at the hotel, Dad, Aunt Mary’s moods, and the weather in Utrecht, as if it were different to here. I should have had a postbox at the hotel. Would my mother have put a daily letter in it? Perhaps she needs this modest distance, this absence, in order to write the words she doesn’t say.

My mother’s letters are colourful. Aunt Mary knocked out a drunken customer who wanted to take her upstairs. The hotel boiler broke suddenly, making the temperature plummet and the customers flee. My father is away more and more, likewise searching for a little warmth.

I like these letters. The softness of the paper, my mother folded between my fingers. Often there are crossings-out and the faint smell of sherry, and stains blurring her neat handwriting. I wait eagerly for these letters, this belated attention.

My mother never saw how happy her dull words made me, how I wrung my hands as I waited and smiled when my name was called. Every week I hung on the pretty lips and perfect diction of Sister Marie Immaculata.

I have a good time at this strange boarding school, imposing my passive rule, spending cheerful, normal, sporty years there. Running, swimming, jumping. Letting off steam, making my changing body move and sweat.

I start smoking. Even the sisters smoke on Sundays. Like my father I favour filterless Camels, whose strong smoke scratches my throat. I am proud of this adult act that I can accomplish without coughing, tough like him.

Is there any option but to behave like your father, and mother? Can one break with this need to belong? Perhaps with age and the ravages of poor imitation.

The maths teacher is called Hees Been. He has a gammy leg which makes him wince when he stretches it out. He is fairly young, and more interested in the changing curves of our bodies than in geometry. He has a long lock of plastered-back hair, on which he unconsciously wipes his snot when he sneezes. I enjoy playing with this easy prey, making him pay for my disgust. I fold over my waistband to make my skirt as short as possible, then retrieve imaginary bits of chalk from the floor, bending gently in two, sensing the top of my thighs becoming visible, feeling the cool air on the lower parts of my bottom and watching the teacher’s face turn red. He says nothing, he is watching me, my buttocks are a vision to behold. His confusion and my power make me feel good. Everyone is laughing and I smother my own giggles with my back to the class. Then, stunned and naive, I sit back down in the first row, inhabited by the short-sighted and those whose surnames begin with A. I am delighted with my demonstration – if not mathematical then at least physiological.

Sister Gertrude speaks to us in perfect Queen’s English. I like the language, and soon realise that it’s the key to getting away. Sister Gertrude’s hairstyle is a black-and-white rectangle perfectly aligned with the dark arm of her steel spectacles, making her resemble a shoebox. Sister Gertrude is ugly, but kind.

My father says you have to be ugly to become a nun.

Sister Marie Andrée teaches French and history. She tells us about the war in her warm, solemn, captivating voice. With her class unusually silent she describes the never-forgiven invasion, the suffering of a nation, the confiscated bicycles, the people starving to death and eating grated tulip bulbs.

That cruel, intimate image stayed with me for a long time. Lovely bright tulips, twofold and useful. At flower shops I sometimes imagine being given the option: ‘Would you like your tulips grated, Ms Kristel, or in a bouquet?’

My mother talked to us about the war, too. At a very young age she used to go off on her wooden-wheeled bicycle – there weren’t any tyres left – and cycle for hours to swap a piece of silverware for some potatoes. One night, exhausted and empty-bellied, she had knocked on a farmhouse door and pleaded her hunger. The generous peasant woman sat her down at the table and gave her a melted-cheese pancake so rich, so big for that concave belly that my mother was ill for several days, and had to stay at the woman’s house. My mother used to say that she was going to find her, so she could thank her and take the opportunity to have her to stay instead.

Dutch people are thrifty and they bear grudges; on holiday in Germany they’re still prone to exclaim, ‘Give me back my bicycle!’ Mine had stayed at the hotel. Just as well – I was always falling off because I was so dreamy and lazy I had forgotten to pedal.

Father Gianotten is so modern and believes so much in love – ‘because God is love’ – that he has married one of the schoolgirls.

Sister Christine bears the heavy burden of our sexual education. She is clearly overwhelmed by this unrequested mission, and speaks in a brittle monotone of a threatening world. Men are governed by uncontrollable urges due to the hormones that run through their veins like poison, and women spend their lives trying to escape these male urges. The rest – the detail, the reproductive technique necessary for humanity’s survival – is in Latin. Those whistling words are messengers from another world; they leave me pensive.