A Day with Mr. Jules. Diane Broeckhoven

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

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      The translation of this book is funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren — www.flemishliterature.be).

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      Whatever we have done with our lives

      makes us what we are when we die.

      And everything, absolutely everything counts.

       — The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

      The timeless half-hour between waking and getting up envelops Alice like a familiar piece of clothing. She floats in an imaginary womb, bobs towards a new day. Her body relaxes into the warm folds of the bed, her muscles and joints are weightless, her mind is a blank. Jules’s smell — a whiff of evaporated alcohol, nutmeg, and old man — lies like a dark shadow behind her back. As always, he is taking care of breakfast in the kitchen, his only contribution to the housework for as long as she can remember. Every morning at the stroke of eight he starts his ritual. Alice gets up when the aroma of fresh coffee prevails over the smells of the bed and she has spent enough time counting her blessings. She struggles to her feet from her lying position and feels how the skin around her hips and thighs squeezes like an elastic stretched too tight. Her shrunken breasts huddle against her ribs. She knows that the discomforts of the first hour will vanish with brief stabs, so that by noon she will be back inside her old body. More or less.

      *

      It had snowed. Alice looked out of the window and saw the street below blazing up white. She threw her dressing gown over her shoulders to trap the warmth of the bed in the blue terry cloth. She tightened the belt around her waist and slipped her hands into the pockets. In the yellowish light of a streetlamp, Bea, the woman who lived below, was busy clearing the snow from the footpath in front of the apartment building.

      “Eager beaver,” Alice thought.

      She stood still and listened to the alternating swishing and rasping of broom and spade, a marching brass band in the distance that never came nearer. She shivered and headed towards the coffee smell.

      “It has snowed, Jules,” she said to the rear of her husband’s head, which stuck out above the back of the sofa. Usually, he sat waiting for her in the kitchen, at a table set according to his strict pattern. Jules gave no reply, and that made her smile. He must be staring wistfully at the snow, thinking about the old days, when there were still real winters. Icy and raw. She trudged towards him, slowed down by her stiff knees. On an impulse she let her hand rest briefly on his thin hair. Carefully putting down her feet, she walked around the leather sofa and sat down beside her husband. The fact that he deviated from his own house rules so he could take in the wintry landscape through the wall of glass softened her mood. It gave her the unexpected gift of a brief spell of freedom. She didn’t need to toe the line straight away.

      She slid closer to him and felt the warmth of his shoulder against hers. Just for a second, she tilted her head to one side, until the rough fabric of his vest pricked her cheek.

      “It’s light and dark at the same time,” she said and smiled at their reflection in the large window.

      Jules didn’t reply. He sat perfectly still beside her, his hands on the sharp creases of his pants. In the kitchen she heard the last drops of water dripping through the coffee maker, followed by the finale of steaming and sighing. In the noisy silence that followed, reality sank in.

      “Jules!”

      Her voice shot from her throat, a frightened bird flapping up from the brush. She shook him, hit him, but the rigid body wouldn’t budge.

      “Jules!”