It’s about time I saw André and Alain again anyway. Look, God, I’m tired, I’m really tired. You aren’t planning on keeping me here much longer, right? You don’t have to answer me. Just say no or yes. They don’t need me here any longer. I can see it everywhere I look. In the faces of the people around me who say: how much longer is that bitch going to live? In the mirror that grins back at me with a twisted smile, and in the ridiculous calmness that has crept into my life. There are days that I hardly move at all, or hardly make it from my chair to the kitchen.
‘It’s not about me. It’s about my family. I don’t want them all to bleed to death. All those accidents, they have to stop. All those tragedies and all those deaths, I can’t take it anymore. If you have to have one more of us, dear God, then take me.
‘I just want to ask you in a friendly way to please keep my request in mind.
‘Thank you for your attention, dear God.
‘If I might add just one more thing: in the end it’s in your best interest as well. If fate visits us one more time, I swear, I won’t believe in you anymore.’
-
MIEKE 1990
Today Mieke has bought white cabbage and vinegar. Sauerkraut has never been on the menu at 7 Nightingale Lane, but Stefaan kept insisting, so she’s going to make sauerkraut. Mieke has had to overcome her suspicion of the questionable cheap ingredients, vinegar and cabbage. Sauerkraut—the name itself says it all: a combination of something sour and something that can produce dangerous intestinal gas. A food item that in all probability was invented by some bored fool on an ice-cold afternoon in the unattended kitchen of a lunatic asylum. Making sauerkraut could easily take half a day, she has estimated, but she’s been charging ahead due to sheer nervousness. At half past two in the afternoon she’s well ahead of schedule. Preparing this peasant German specialty has not been enough to calm her nerves. There’s real work that will do that: getting down on her hands and knees, endlessly combing the little threads of the rug in the living room like a nervous house cat scratching a scratching post. It’s an aberration that Mieke allows herself when she has worries.
For a woman like Mieke, the world is not a round globe or a flat pancake but a maze with lots of entrances and just one exit that can only be found with the compass of a highly principled upbringing. She learned this during her childhood from her father, a strict man with impressive curling eyebrows that emphasized his wisdom, a prosperous notary of considerable prestige who specialized in corporate law, the proud head of a respectable family with a classic beauty of a daughter, a rebel of a son, and a well-behaved, sweet latecomer to whom they gave the name Mieke. To the great relief of her parents, now more than ten years deceased, Mieke has followed in their footsteps. She is an intelligent woman with class and style, an icon of the values that her parents instilled in her, a radiant beacon of normality in the sea of chaos of 1990.
Mieke’s parents were already quite old when they had her. First there was Lydia, the eldest daughter of Gerard and Camille De Kinder, then came Jempy, and finally it took another twelve years for Mieke to be brought into the world. Mieke’s sister and brother quickly escaped from their parents’ home. Her father the notary, however, was decidedly present throughout her entire childhood. His desk was in the front room of their house. Mieke spied on the many people who came to visit him. People not only came with legal questions but they also brought him their moral problems and dilemmas. The pastor himself felt aggrieved. Mieke had enormous admiration for her father, although her upbringing was a confusing, benumbing cocktail of totally contradictory ingredients. Her father was not only a notary who had a friendly word for everyone, but he was also a dictator who demanded that his children get up every day at six o’clock on the nose, that they keep themselves hidden whenever visitors came, and that they always address him with the same two words: yes, father. At arbitrary moments he was suddenly the loving papa whom they could go to with all their questions, and he surprised his children with extravagant toys. As a child of a father like that you don’t have a clock to tell you when such a moment of grace is about to arrive. Mieke developed her own rigid logic that she lowered over all contradictory signals like a bell jar.
In the living room Mieke sinks down onto her latest acquisition, a hand-knotted Persian rug that took more than three hundred thousand hours to make. She likes her house to be well-ordered and tidy. ‘Other people can do as they like in their shacks,’ she says, ‘but here everything has got to be clean.’ Just what her father used to say approvingly to his floor-mopping wife. The word ‘shack’ does not really apply to the home of Mieke and Stefaan on the mountain. By ‘clean’ Mieke means: not a single hair is allowed to hang from any of the chair legs, not a mote of dust is given the time to flutter down over the bergère armchair, the residents don’t have to keep making arbitrary decisions about where to leave their various things, and all the tassels on the rugs lie straight. The furnishing and maintenance of the villa is a huge job to which Mieke has devoted herself with love.
To keep her shrieking nerves under control she combs the threads of the rug. She combs away Sarah’s habit of shrugging her shoulders when Mieke explodes over the spots of India ink on the white kitchen table; she combs away the child’s pathological indifference because it drives her wild; she combs away the shrill chords that her daughter tries to coax out of her guitar as if she were, uh, Nana Mouskouri. The combing doesn’t fail to have a calming effect. She combs until all the threads are lying neatly side by side and she can breathe a sigh of relief and keep on combing because it does her so much good. Combing rugs helps her the way a glass of wine can help, or stroking a puppy, or covering a baby’s bottom with talcum powder. Yes, it’s a private thing.
Mieke started her curious hobby after Sarah was born. Determined to work off the mushy pudding belly of her pregnancy, ravenously hungry, she spent many hours on her hands and knees combing the rugs. She ruined her knobby knees with all that combing. The doctor mentioned something about housemaid’s knee.
All that rug combing made Mieke slimmer and less gloomy than she had been during the first days of her new life as a mother. No one spoke of postnatal depression back then, a condition that hadn’t yet been diagnosed in their circles in the year 1980. Indeed, the word ‘depression’ was a generic term for lazy people who liked to attract attention by being lackadaisical, nothing that couldn’t be cured by a cold washcloth in the morning, extra hard work during the day, and a good swift kick in the backside. And even if the illness had been known, the proud Mieke would never have allowed her affliction to be characterized by such a banal medical term. Postnatal depression or no, the birth of Sarah had shaped the rustic style of Mieke and Stefaan’s household interior in any case. A house without tassled rugs was not an option for Mieke. She bought heaps of expensive Persian rugs during the months after the birth and she combed herself silly. She may have gone a bit too far, in retrospect, yet combing was certainly better than lying around in bed, wretched and lazy, like a mussel in its shell.
While she’s combing, Mieke runs through all the vexatious possibilities of what can go wrong when a ten-year-old child goes on a one-mile walk. Two days ago Sarah had her birthday, and in addition to a crown and a cheesecake with ten candles Sarah was allowed to pick out a gift. Sarah resolutely chose to go on a journey on foot and without supervision to the village newspaper shop. Her daughter is inventive, that’s one thing you can say about her. And Mieke is a woman of her word: front door open, a coin in Sarah’s hand, and there she goes to the newspaper shop to buy herself a Libelle Rosita magazine. Mieke does not feel easy about this. It’s the very first time she’s let her daughter out on her own. She curses herself for allowing it. Sarah is far too docile, far too good. If anything were to happen to her, Mieke would never forgive herself. Of course there’s no way that Sarah would ever be taken hostage by Palestinians or hit by a car in the silent housing estate, or swept up by hookers from the village. No way. But even so, the most unexpected things are often the first to happen. Especially to a clumsy, innocent child like Sarah, who would give her money away to a moustachioed man in a white van in exchange for a lift.
