by Elske Rahill
She had been there – this past they thought they could assemble from murmurs and frigid scraps. They could ask her how it was. She could tell them how it was, if they wanted to know.
In school she sat beside a friendly girl called Livina, who holidayed in Germany every break and made fat whirling swastikas all over her copy book. To save water, Livina used a powder that her mother bought in Germany, sprinkled it on her feet, patted it under her arms and worked it through her hair. ‘As effective as a good scrub,’ she claimed, but she smelled like flour and like bone broth.
They were all Flemish girls in her class, and most had families in the Legion. Grietje remembered the thrill of the Easter play. They went to the school that evening to dress. The nuns had kept the fire in, and the girls huddled at the back of the class, shoulders and hips prickling with cold, tang of warming wool and unwashed feet, and Livina offering around her German powder.
As a child, Grietje was stout with dark brows that met in the middle, and it must have been for comic effect that they made her the devil. Her aunt loaned them the black cape and Sister Thérèse fashioned a headband with squat red horns. She fixed the horns onto Grietje’s head, rubbed coal into her brows and pinched her cheek. ‘A devil with dimples,’ she said. Dressed as angels and lambs, and Grietje as Satan, the girls walked two by two, their amber lanterns brushing slow smudges into the dark. What did they sing as they made their way to the town hall? A church song or something for the Legion? What she remembered was linking arms and singing at the top of her lungs, frost grazing the back of her throat raw.
Like most Flemish children, Grietje was raised Catholic. As a girl she gazed at a white-faced Christ and tried to warm to him, but by the time she put the first baby Louis in the ground she had seen enough of life to mistrust the tender embrace awaiting him. This first child was still a stranger, hardly pulled from her own flesh, when he ended. It was a thing she could choose to bear, like losing a limb. But the second Louis lasted longer. He had already weaned to words and steps, and had nine teeth when he died. And though the third came out here in Ireland, piglet-backed, red-faced as the natives with thin, dangling legs that would carry him up through the years, this solace did nothing to renew for her any meaning beyond the needs of this world.
Until her husband Theo died, the afterlife had seemed to Grietje a horrifying prospect – a world overpopulated with clamouring dead. It was for that reason that she wanted them both cremated – no flesh through which a soul might inch back to sensation, no worms or gases or facial hair growing like grass in the rotting muck that time would make of them. But now she felt him sometimes. He could be beside her, in the chair that sloped to the shape of his sore back, or at her shoulder while she knitted a sampler. Sometimes he was there in the morning, for bed was the worst part – sleeping alone, only her own heat to draw from, no Theo folding his knees up under hers; and waking alone, no breath in her hair, no feet to help into socks. She had said it to her granddaughter Dine – ‘Am I getting mad, Dineke? I feel him like he is just here. I can almost hear his voice.’ But Dine had just kissed her brow, and then her hand. She had smiled in that sweet, bewildered way that childless women smile at babies.
Theo had lovely feet – long, spare toes lined up in perfect gradients, silky light skin, soles plush like puppy paws.
*
Grietje left the newspaper spread big on the kitchen table and moved to her armchair to wait for them to come – her children and her grandchildren. One way or another they had all been summoned.
Louis’s wife had said he was away for the weekend, ‘golfing or something’. She had said it in a stringy voice that let Grietje know what she meant. Well, Bertha would track him down.
Where did they get him from? Her third Louis – round-backed and scald-pink when he came out, indignant squeal from him, then soft suckling as he worked fiercely on his own fist. Grietje had lifted up on her elbows, peered over the Sister’s shoulder and she saw the shape of the child and she heard the sound of it and she knew that this time she could not dredge up enough. That was in the clean Coombe hospital where women laboured quietly in close rows of beds, smoked and gossiped between contractions. By the time that happened Grietje was nearly twenty-three. Her heart had shifted and tightened. She held the baby to her skin and tried to believe in him, but her milk turned to pebbles. A kind Sister said she understood, told her to mix an egg yolk with donkey’s milk, gave her a glass bottle to take home, and an address for a donkey keeper, and that’s how Grietje fed this Louis. He was what they called a ‘long baby’. His legs would always be skinny, but he lived, and so did the fat little girls that came after him.
That Sister wrote ‘Liam’ on the birth certificate, instead of ‘Louis’. Theo had to sort it out afterwards. It was a terrible mess, but the Sister meant to be kind, ‘For the child’s sake, love,’ she said. ‘You don’t want him going through life foreign.’
When Louis was four there was a fire that ate their house to a husk without even licking her children. That was because she bundled all three of them into a buggy, threw a wet blanket over it and pushed it through the door. That was a clever thing to do, but there was also a kind of miracle to the four unblemished corners of the blanket. Afterwards on the scorched lawn an itinerant woman in a white-and-blue shawl said, ‘Your troubles are over now.’ Theo thought Grietje was tootle-loot when she told him about that woman. She didn’t tell him that she thought she recognized her way of peering up from her cowl like something hunted.
*
Grietje sat with each hand cupping an armrest, her back straight. Into the silence she said, ‘Theo,’ and the sound embarrassed her but she said it again, ‘Theo. Pouske. Theo.’
Theo would have known what to do – such sharp lines he could draw up with words, building them easily into clean logic. But her mind pulled up only a wild, mute grief. The face of a mime she had seen once on Grafton Street – a painted face, all oily white except the eyebrows, and an expression of outrage so comic and sorry it made her eyes sting.
She remembered the journalist, Tiernach, because it was an unusual name and one she didn’t like, and because they had talked so much about him after he had come to the house. She was not tootle-loot yet, for she remembered his face across twenty years, and she had only met him once. He was young and sure of himself, with a triangular little head and pale, fidgety eyes and a smoothness of brow she had only seen on zealots of one kind or another – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Brothers, Livina DeSmedt – a sloped brow polished like a shield against uncertainty, salmon scalp clashing under yellow-orange hair.
It was a Wednesday morning when Theo received him. It had been agreed with the editor – the boy could write what he liked, so long as Theo had a right to a written reply. He asked Louis to be there – Louis who was sullenly beginning to learn the ropes. It was a sensitive time for Theo, passing the business on to his son like that, and he could be bossy. Theo sat behind his desk and the journalist on the other side of it, a big flat tape-recorder whirring between them. Louis was given an armchair off at the side. She could remember her son’s face lost beneath all that hair, nose perched like an inquisitive bird on his moustache. He had winced when the journalist sneered at the tea she brought in on a tray with buttered biscuits.
‘Tea with tea biscuits,’ the journalist said. ‘Do you Belgians always take things so literally?’
After the Tiernach fellow had left, Theo’s neck stretched tall with anger. ‘Where are Vincent’s standards,’ he said, his head jerking as he spoke, ‘sending me an ignorant pestkope like this? I had to explain him everything – he didn’t know a thing about the Flemish – and he accuses me of all kinds! Got verdomme! The boy doesn’t know where Flanders is on the map. He thought the Flemish Legion was started by the SS. Started by the SS! Idioot. Idioot. Idioot! He has not even done the smallest research. After all we worked for, all we have given this country, to have some ignorant pestkope come in like this...’
Louis left with
hardly a word. ‘Useless boy,’ Theo had muttered, ‘brainless little cockerel, sitting there with his furry lip saying nothing. Where did we get him from?’
She and Theo talked into the night and in the morning she had typed up Theo’s letter to the editor: ‘Dear Mr Bell, I do not know my blood type – do you know why? I have no letters tattooed beneath my left arm, nor my right arm either. You are very welcome to check me over...’ Vincent Bell had pulled the article. He had phoned Theo: ‘I appreciate,’ he said, ‘that in his over-enthusiasm, our young journalist may have jumped to unfounded conclusions. He is not a historian, you see. He does not know the ins and outs perhaps. In any case I do not deem it responsible to publish material that may be slanderous. Let us forget it, Theo. No hard feelings.’
‘May be slanderous, Vincent?’ – Theo’s voice travelled all the way down the hallway. From the kitchen she could hear him – ‘May be? I will come to your office right now. I will raise my arms above my head and you can look me over and tell me if you see my blood type written there for that is what the SS did, Vincent, or must I be tattooed as a victim now to prove my innocence?’
Vincent and Theo had patched things up. But Vincent Bell was dead now, and so was her Theo, his voice strangled by the stroke and burned to ash; now the Tiernach fellow could say what he liked.
Schijterd.
Her Theo could never suffer fools or cowards and he was never a hypocrite.
He never lied, even when it was convenient, but Grietje did. Grietje could tell white lies and darker ones too. At the beginning, when they came here and had very little, she could say that she had eaten when she had not; she could lose an early pregnancy and call it a spot of women’s trouble. Once she had buried a miscarriage at the back of the garden. She had taken the tea towel from around it so that it would crumble quickly into earth. It had a wizened, long head and frog legs and a tight little penis like a pea shoot. Theo had never known how she could fib. More than a fib was the betrayal about the letter – a lie she still squirmed beneath, but one she knew, all the same, to be a right thing. He was very down when he wrote that letter to Louis. Her poor Louisje. Even if Theo meant what he said, he would not have written such things if it were not for the stroke that was storming his brain, hooking his lip up, stiffening his neck and sending the anger crackling out of him.
She didn’t open the letter immediately – the first lie was the nod she gave when he asked had she posted it. She held her breath as she nodded, for the letter was stashed in the lining of her handbag. The second betrayal happened a few days later, after his final stroke. The envelope was sealed with Theo’s trusting tongue, but she could not destroy it without reading it first. There were no surprises in the ugly things written there. He was ashamed of his son, he said – Louis had no integrity, he reduced their life’s work to profit margins, he went with the herd in everything, had no conscience of his own, he was to be cut out of the will... It was true that the pretty teas and massage oils that the firm produced now were not of Theo’s standards, but how could they be? Louis could give no more than himself.
Her son had always been a strange child, awkward with people, clumsy with words, given to sickening silences and cold-faced tears. It was a misfortune that Grietje attributed, sometimes, to her petrified breasts and the way that for many weeks after the birth she found she had difficulty looking at the baby’s narrow red face. As he grew his shyness hardened to look like arrogance, so that few people ever saw her Louis for who he was.
She had dropped the letter into the fire, so she would not have to think on those things again.
She could remember walking Louis home from school one afternoon. He was clodhopping beside her with his frizzing dark hair and those skinny legs – she knitted him thick, long cotton socks, trying to bulk him up beneath his clothes – it was raining and he was under the umbrella with her, and then he was gone. When she looked back she saw him crouching by a bush. He put his fingers to his lips as she approached, and nodded to a little robin only a foot away, beneath a shelter of leaves. His face then – black, close-set eyes and that queer upper lip; too long and peaked as though it hurt, quivering with awe at the speechless world; the brazenness of the bird, the smell of rain calling worms up from the earth, and his own silence. After a pause she called to him and he began to run, his limbs clattering like a puppet’s. All the way home she was warm with the rush of relief, and she said it to Theo that evening, ‘There is something in Louis you know. There is something in that boy that people don’t often see.’
Her son liked freesias – their scent, and the way each stalk trickled down from a simple bloom to pearly buds. They came from Africa, he told her, and magpies came from India. When he was studying for his finals – poor boy, cramming so painfully on a subject he was not made for; he would have been happier flying an airplane or fiddling with car engines – she would wait until he went downstairs for elevenses, and then she would arrange bouquets of white freesias in his room, angle a bowl of seedless green grapes beside his desklamp. His smile then, a secret smile that made his moustache fan out. ‘Thank you Mammy.’
*
When the phone rang, Grietje cursed, ‘Got verdomme,’ because the sound startled her and because, although they had done a wonderful job with the hip replacement, she had pain again – pain standing up from her chair. In any case she didn’t like to discuss things on the telephone. ‘Just come,’ she had told Dine. ‘Just come,’ she had said to Bertha, who hung wailing at the other end of the phone, ‘Mammy. How dare they print a picture of my daddy like that.’
‘Just come,’ Grietje had said, ‘and telephone to Louisje too, will you please? He is off somewhere.’
‘Mammy...’
‘Just telephone to Louis, please Bertha. And pull yourself together darling.’
Yes, it must be Bertha again, calling from her car that way that made her voice sound all alone down the bottom of a well. Before lifting the receiver Grietje settled a kitchen chair up beside the phone. She braced herself for more tears. Bertha would always pull on her like this, she could not be trusted to release Grietje into old age.
‘Yah.’
‘Nazi bitch,’ said the voice – not somebody’s real voice, someone speaking in a lower, rougher voice than their own – ‘Rot in hell with your Nazi husband.’
‘Oh!’ Grietje let a whoop that could, in other circumstances have been mistaken for joyous surprise.
She left the receiver springing at the end of the cord while she checked the back door and the front door and set the house alarm. Then she sat in her chair to wait for them to come, her children and her grandchildren. She felt her pulse too quick and hard for her veins, dredging too much excitement from a stock of weary hurt. She thought, I am an old woman now. She would not weep, not for some cowardly schitjerd, but she covered her face and spoke into her hands, ‘Theo.’ Death was soon and it was a time for closing, not for opening, and explaining, and assembling and reckoning with the world for all the fragments that time tossed up.
*
Her granddaughter Dine came first, tapping timidly on the window, her skull pushing blue under colourless skin. ‘Poor Dineke,’ whispered Grietje, kissing her, for Dine was neglected-looking, hair uncombed and the pouches beneath her eyes tinged with kohl.
‘I am sorry to worry you, Dineke.’
‘Let’s get you some coffee, Bomama,’ said Dine. ‘Coffee. Let’s have some coffee and I’ll butter some biscuits.’
Grietje felt brave with her grandchild there, for Dine had Theo’s thick, shapely lips and his seriousness... but then Dine showed her another paper. ‘What Brews Beneath?’ demanded the headline – ‘The Belgian herbalist who founded Ireland’s leading natural remedy brand may have been a member of the SS...’ It was not the headline that startled her, but the picture beneath it – it was a building she had not seen in over sixty years – that building in Brussels that would make you cross the street and take the long way around, because of the cold that came off
it, and the terrible things that might have happened there, and the secret Jewess upstairs of their flat, who disappeared so silently that by the time Grietje noticed she could not remember the last time she had heard her slip out by the basement door. To think on her made Grietje’s throat block, a drowning feeling in her breath.
There was a documentary that her grandchildren watched and wept at one evening in the living room, and when Grietje said, ‘Could it be true, such disgusting things? Don’t you think they exaggerate?’ they snapped at her and were ashamed of her and said yes and everyone knew it Bomama, you must have known it, and she said she never saw such things, not in Brussels, but she did know that there were small children in factories all day making the clothes that they buy cheap and negroes in slavery for their diamond rings. ‘You know that don’t you?’ she said, ‘but also you don’t know.’ And then even little Dine was ashamed of her and went to vomit in the bathroom. But that was many years ago now.
That upstairs ghost was a quiet old woman all alone, her head always cowled and dipped, a grief-stricken face and no story and never even a bonjour. On the run, is what they thought, and so they didn’t speak of her, even amongst themselves. Not until after, and even then – well, where was the point in going over it?
Was she forgetting something now, now that she was old? Sometimes now, in the night, light silvered like rips in the dark, pelvic curves moving slow, slow – is that a man? Not a man nor a woman. Those are other shapes they plant now into her dark. Those are nightmare shapes and why do they pull her into their nightmares like this? Railway tracks and everybody walking and sorry sorry, but the sorry feeling can come to anyone for there is so much in the world to be sorry for. The sorry feeling does not mean it was she who saw or she who was there on the bone-slivering nights they show now on the television. Some people want angels and all that but all Grietje longs to know is a black night at the end.