They don’t understand me around here. Since that September day, they haven’t noticed much of a change. My beautiful hair has not fallen out. My hands are no thinner, nor are they stained brown with nicotine. That Christmas Lucia and Hugo Kakebeke came to call and everyone saw us striking off across the fields in the highest of spirits in our shabby old fur coats, with Anatole trailing along behind us. Only a pup back then, he had misjudged the distance, covered it twice, and then had to drag himself over the final leg, hunched low on his paws.
Worst of all, of course, is the fact that I did not leave. I can’t say I understand it myself. I could have gone back to my own village, by the sea. My mother would have let me sleep late in the mornings, she would have bought new T-shirts for me—just my size—and when a little time had passed I could have looked out of my new classroom window to see gulls squabbling in the schoolyard. But that was impossible. There was something here that still had to be unearthed, though I had no idea what. Until that morning I had taken things easy. Until that morning I had a sense that as long as I did not disturb anything, spoil anything, I had an eternity ahead of me …
By ten thirty my classroom was bathed in sunlight. I strode past the rows of desks, shoes creaking, and tested the children on their geography homework.
“How deep is the Pacific Ocean?” I asked a little blond thing.
She looked at me gravely and thought a moment.
“A million fathoms.”
“How cold is the North Pole?” I asked the boy sitting next to her.
He lowered his eyes.
“Hundred degrees below zero,” he whispered.
I prodded the girl in the back row gently to wake her up.
“If you lay all the roads on planet earth end to end, how many miles would they stretch?”
She, too, took the question seriously.
“A hundred thousand,” she said calmly.
The class sat there looking up at me, helpful and attentive. I haven’t the faintest idea why I got it into my head to ask them these idiotic questions. Perhaps I wanted to see whether they would laugh at me. Perhaps I was begging these children for understanding and tolerance that might extend to the other bizarre questions that were tumbling harum-scarum though my mind. They like me. They think I am pretty. Today of all days, in my blue outfit, they think I am pretty. Strolling past the desks I had felt a small hand brush my angora cardigan once or twice.
“Put away your books,” I said. “I want you to draw me a lovely picture of some cows.”
I walked back to my desk and sat down. Chin resting on my knuckles, I stared down at the item of evidence propped up against the vase of flowers. On Thursday, March 2, 1970, I had been teaching at Pater Wijnterp Elementary School. That same afternoon, at two thirty, Ton had been behind the wheel of a car, pulling into one of those newfangled, automated garages.
Something had begun. Behind my eyes, a tiny mechanism had been set in motion. The whirring, though not unpleasant, ran on steadily and left me distracted. On several occasions, I walked out of the convenience store without so much as a goodbye. Silly mistakes in the children’s notebooks went uncorrected. I still had no trouble falling asleep, but for weeks I’d had no need of an alarm clock. With a jolt born of gnawing restlessness, I would wake at the first light of dawn and, thoughts from the night before still fully formed, I would get up and go downstairs.
I had collected my finds and laid them out in the living room. The contents of the drawers now covered the desk. The long dining table, one of the few pieces of his parents’ furniture Ton had wanted to keep after our marriage, was strewn with movie tickets, sales receipts, coins, buttons, pieces of string, his pocket diary: all items I had dug out by rifling through his pockets and a couple of bags. On the floor stood a box of family photos and documents, a modest collection, since Ton had sorted everything after the death of his father.
As soon as I entered the room, the restlessness subsided. My material was laid out before me, entirely at my disposal, nothing had been snatched away in the night. Secure in this knowledge, I was able to get dressed and put on the kettle. And then with a guilty glow, full of tenderness and love for the foolish creature, I could throw open the door and join Anatole on a ramble across the sodden field.
A few hours later, there I’d be, sipping coffee with a couple of colleagues. Half an ear tuned to the tenor of the cries from the schoolyard, we would chat about some TV show and meantime I would be trying to recall if I had turned over a particular photograph—the schoolboy in what looked like a new suit, arms stiffly at his sides—in case a date might be scrawled on the back. And it felt like I was being held in check. Impatience sent the blood rising to my cheeks.
To begin with, Lucia was little use to me. She came over a couple of times a week, hearty and cynical as ever. We cooked dinner together and talked. She offered to give me horse-riding lessons, insisting that her mare was the most docile animal you could imagine. The summer of my wedding, Lucia had also returned to the North, using her part of the inheritance to purchase a disused property on a secluded stretch of land. Her horse was first to make the move. After a dogged renovation, much of it carried out with her own hands, Lucia followed, and had taught at the riding school ever since. She saw no point in my detective work. For a while, I suspected her of blunt insensitivity.
“When was this?” I asked her.
She was sitting on the floor inspecting Anatole’s teeth and looked up reluctantly at the color photograph I was holding, an outdoor scene snapped from the farmhouse one summer’s day. A collection of children and adults out on the lawn, sitting around a table in the sunshine, framed by the dark stable doors. All posing for the camera, except for one little girl who could not contain her laughter. Swallowed by the light, smiling, glass in hand, these people had consented to halt the course of their lives for a moment.
“How should I know?” she said and peered closely at the dog’s coat. “He’s got a tick.” She crooked her thumb and index finger and they disappeared among the hair.
His father I recognized. The woman leaning back without a care in the world was probably his mother. Then there were uncles, aunts, two plump cousins. Ton was a schoolboy in short pants and sandals. Curls tamed in a side part, eyebrows bleached by the sun. Lucia was leaning into him, trying to suppress a burst of laughter with outstretched fingers while keeping her eyes on the lens.
“Why were you laughing so much?”
She shot me a testy look.
The day came when I asked her point-blank. “Why did he do it?”
I screamed it at her over the din of a paint sprayer. Lucia had lined the walls of her attic with fiberboard tiles and was giving them a coat of whitewash. I had been helping out where I could, impressed by her strength and precision. She wielded the high-pressure contraption like a weapon. Hitting the off button, she half-turned away from me, put the sprayer down, and kicked it hard. My own anger flared in a heartbeat, had perhaps been building for some time. I circled her in two brisk steps, determined to look her in the face. At first, she avoided my stare. Then she met it full on. What reality had we crossed into? For a moment we stood opposite each other, raw with anger. Fists clenched, grimacing with pain, helpless rivals who knew each other through and through in their fight for the same man.
The intolerable moment passed. It passed with our mutual consent. What were we supposed to do with it? Surrounded by the beat of the flapping plastic that still covered the front of the house, the sound of the wind, wood freshly sawn, whitewash, the sound of here and now, the lack of understanding, the unfathomable lack of understanding between Lucia and me.
“He just did,” she said, with our mutual consent.
As we left the house, she told me she had seen the pistol once, as a little girl. Their father had laid the weapon down on the living room table, wrapped in a clean white diaper from the layette purchased when either she or Ton was born. In the lamplight, he unfolded the cloth. She looked on, reached out and tou
ched the metal briefly. She remembered thinking how much fun it would be, how easy, to curl her finger round the trigger and squeeze. But then, she had been only nine years old.
One evening in June, Lucia and I were sitting out back, talking under the overhang by the kitchen. A mild rain fell. Wine cooler within reach, one of my—no longer our—wedding gifts. A bottle of Pouilly to mark my birthday. Lucia flicked the butt of her cigarette into the damp dusk and began reminiscing about her brother’s hitchhiking vacation. She, seventeen at the time and envious of his freedom, had wanted to know every detail when he got back home. Ton and the girl had managed to hitch a ride in a sports car that had taken them all the way to a village west of Paris in a single trip. They had slept in the open field, amid Van Gogh landscapes. The girl had a habit of laughing in her sleep. They spent a week in Valmondois, where a tottering old priest had given them lodging in a room that was swathed in red velvet: the chairs, the bedspread, even the walls up to shoulder height. Ton dubbed it the Bishop’s Suite. There was a river nearby where, with a bit of luck, you could catch fish with your bare hands. On Sunday, their host said Mass in a neighboring hamlet where, apart from a frail old lady who declaimed the tale of Poil de carotte all through the liturgy, they were the only worshippers.
“Butry,” I said.
She turned to face me and, in the light of the outdoor lantern, I saw her features twist into an expression I had never seen before.
“What?”
“That was in Butry,” I exclaimed and dashed into the house.
The diary was exactly where I had left it. I knew there was nothing more to prove by flicking through the pages, but I wanted to see the notes with my own eyes. There! There they were! Why hadn’t Lucia come to see? Look, here it is, written in ballpoint. Friday, August 2nd: arrived in Paris, on to Auvers. Tuesday, the 5th: Valmondois, beautiful weather, 78°, grand bed in Bishop’s Suite. Then Sunday, the 10th: Butry, farewells, heading south … I heaved a deep sigh. These things had actually happened. Tonight, all these facts had been filled with life: with sleeping laughter, with a deep-blue starry night, a room of red velvet, flailing fish, with a childlike creature who knew her classics … The stuff of real life, from this moment on.
I put the diary back in its place, among the other exhibits.
Since my absence had become too much for her, my mother pulled into the driveway unannounced one midsummer morning to entice me back home for a week or two. She had redecorated my room, she said, and hung my favorite painting on the wall. I know her well and almost instantly hit upon a stratagem to resist my evacuation. My dear mother is a talker and a woman who likes to get things done. And so, in high spirits and chatting all the while, we began to check off the chores that had been staring me in the face for months. She left as evening fell, more or less reassured. I walked her out to her car, kissed her fondly, and closed the car door as she started the engine. She immediately rolled down the window so that she could wave goodnight. I watched from the path as the maternal arm disappeared into the darkness of the road.
In the freshly scrubbed house, I returned to my post at the desk. As I rubbed my fingertips back and forth across my forehead, I felt the strangeness of the day ebb away behind my eyes. The whirring in my head, and its unlikely hint of happiness, began to carry me off again.
As they so often did, the hours evaporated without my noticing. I got up once to brew a pot of coffee and look for my smokes, and out of nowhere the clock struck midnight. By this stage, I had become intimately acquainted with the contents of the desk drawers. Roughly speaking, the items fell into one of two categories. The notes, stencils, and syllabi of a degree in law, and a discursive analysis of the latest methods in greenhouse horticulture. All the evidence on both sides spoke of someone who had been hard at work with complete conviction. When we met, Ton had been on the brink of graduating in law; five months later, he was a farmer. A little queasy from coffee and smoke, I considered the fact that my husband had been a man capable of decanting his passions from one vessel to another without the least hesitation.
During these months, I was not troubled by the thought that everything I stumbled across was entirely his business. His textbooks. His farmer’s overalls and clogs. His house that, despite the renovation we had plunged into with typical newlywed enthusiasm, had remained his parental home, complete with the two childhood bunk rooms under the stable roof. It was among these things that his secret lay, not with me. To my surprise, the top shelf of the bookcase turned out to be full of books on polar expeditions, north and south. I had never even known it was an interest of his.
But there came a day when, hands trembling with rage, I grabbed the still life on the bathroom shelf and flung it away. Shaving brush, shaving soap, razor: objects that knew more of him than I did. It was maddening, sickening. With every step of my investigations, he seemed to withdraw further into himself, to grow colder, lonelier.
I redoubled my efforts. At night I got up to listen to his music. He had been a jazz lover, the big bands especially. Basie, Ellington. At full blast, The Individualism of Gil Evans burrowed its way into my head. Sounds he had heard.
Early one afternoon, as the rain hammered down, I installed myself at the arched window in the stable—surely a boyhood hideaway of his—only to jerk awake to the sound of my own murmuring. Somewhere a clock struck five, from all sides came the urgent lowing of cattle, there was a smell of burned leaves and, gazing out as he must have done, I saw open skies, where the rain had given way to a light reflecting so brightly that I did not know where to look.
I got up as fast as I could, determined to pour myself a stiff brandy and knock it back in one gulp. In my haste, I yanked open both doors of the kitchen dresser recently tidied up by my mother. Arms spread wide, I scanned the shelves. Where was the bottle? My gaze skimmed neat rows of pots and preserving jars and lit upon three labels written in a faded motherly hand. I picked one out. Brandied raisins. September. Then came a date that had become illegible in the course of what must have been a dozen years or so.
I slurped down the raisins and drained the liquid. Three jars of soaked fruit and old brandy disappeared inside me and stirred up a glow of gratitude. Overjoyed, I sat there at the kitchen table. Night fell. I did not move. Even the empty jars and sticky spoon failed to spur me to action. I reveled in my drowsiness. I grinned at my clarity.
“If you want to know who your husband was,” an unassuming inner voice suggested, “it might not be a bad idea to find someone who can tell you a thing or two about his mother.”
I waited on the doorstep. The echo in the house died away. Hands thrust in my coat pockets, I looked at the house number and the glossy coat of Brunswick green staring me in the face. You could wait a long time at this door, I sensed. As if something inside had to be hidden away first.
At last she appeared on the threshold. Mieke Renes. Smiling, arms outstretched.
“You of all people!” she cried. “Believe it or not, you’ve been on my mind for quite a while.”
Once she had ushered me into the living room, she bustled into the kitchen to make tea. She left the doors open and bridged the distance by firing off the kind of questions that barely call for an answer. How are you doing? How’s your new class?
“Oh yes,” she said a little later, as we sat facing each other. “I knew his mother her whole life long.”
I didn’t have to do another thing, not so much as raise a finger. No need to liven things up with a question or a smile. Mieke Renes was able to give her memories free rein, since Ton’s mother’s life had for a large part been her own. Her village, her school. Her unspoken, unrequited love.
And so I wasn’t always able to tell exactly which of the girls had long brown hair, which of them in 1930 thought it was an unbelievable adventure to write in ink, who knew exactly when and how deep to plant seeds in the soil, who would burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter or could launch into an anecdote at the drop of a hat, and who had been in love with a st
rapping young farmer.
Not that it mattered much. After a while, it mattered so little that I didn’t even try to keep track: the Depression years, the war, the two lovers who married shortly after Liberation Day. Whatever she said, every word circled around Ton.
Eventually, she interrupted herself.
“Now then, what can I fix you to drink?”
Her face flushed and happy, she pulled the cork from a bottle of port, aged for thirty years. I eyed the glass warily, the ghost of the brandied raisins not yet put to rest.
Just as we had raised our glasses, a couple of loud thumps sounded through the wall.
“What was that?” I asked, and in the same moment I realized that her bedridden father must still be somewhere in the house. In the village I’d heard talk that he wasn’t long for this world, a few more weeks at most.
“Three knocks,” Mieke Renes said impassively. “He’ll be wanting his dram.”
But she remained seated and picked up her story where she had left off, with Ton’s outpouring of grief after the death of his mother. I nipped at my port, already feeling the effects. I had no objection to getting drunk again, but I had hopes of pacing myself this time. “Sure,” I thought calmly. “Tell me about it, death and the havoc it wreaks.”
Looking to the side, I could see through the bay window and out into the street beyond. The narrow sidewalks. The women with their shopping bags. Saturday. In front of a shop sign, a poplar tree was swaying in the wind. I felt a fondness for it somehow, a riddle I recognized but would never be able to solve …
“Well, what do you think?” Mieke Renes exclaimed.
Sleepless Night Page 5