my change?’ she asks Sarah.
‘I didn’t get any change.’
‘Just what I expected! Can you believe it? I told you, that guy from the newspaper shop is a real scoundrel. Cheating children like that.’ There’s sweat on Mieke’s upper lip. ‘Get out there right now and start weeding. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.’
When Sarah storms into the house after a lightning fast round of weeding, the stove exhaust fan is whirring at such a rate that the curtains are in danger of being swallowed up. The box of Useless Giveaway Presents has been taken down from the attic and all the perfumed candles in it are now lined up and burning in the kitchen, but the smell of cigarettes has penetrated even the most virginal spaces. ‘Please, Jempy, if you’re going to smoke, do it outside.’
Mieke and Uncle Jempy speak a language full of aspirated letters and amputated words that Sarah unfortunately has not mastered. They talk loud and laugh often. Sarah compares the two family members, combines their silhouettes, and comes up with a hilarious monster: some in-between creature with an agitated babble, roaring laughter, thin wrists attached to hefty arms protruding from shirt sleeves, and the legs of a gazelle in Romika slippers.
‘As long as you aren’t as naughty as your uncle,’ Jempy says, beating Mieke to the punch.
Stefaan works on Saturdays, much to Mieke’s displeasure. He’s just spent three days in bed with a peculiar chronic fatigue virus, so he’s going to have some catching up to do (Stefaan) and he’ll still have to take it easy (Mieke). After his Saturday work he slavishly drops in on Granny every weekend. He frequently tries to entice Sarah to come along by promising her cake, and sometimes he even uses emotional blackmail, but most of the time she doesn’t want to go. Granny smells bad and she doesn’t talk and she always looks so angry (as if she wanted to bewitch Sarah). That’s why she’s sitting at the kitchen table now, drawing music staffs. While Mieke makes herself presentable, Uncle Jempy takes his things to the guest room.
At seven o’clock Stefaan comes home, just as Mieke is putting the last dish on the table, as usual. He says Granny sends her greetings to Sarah, that she thinks about her a lot and is very proud that Sarah is really doing her best at school. Granny can’t possibly have said all that. Then Stefaan shakes Uncle Jempy’s hand. Jempy said he’s looking damned good, but what do you expect with a wife like his little sister? Stefaan doesn’t know how to respond to such a comment. He walks over to the record cabinet and interrupts Chopin’s lively romantic piano Prelude, setting Dylan on a long epic journey through ‘The Gates of Eden’.
Jempy jumps to his feet. ‘That reminds me,’ he says, and he runs over to a plastic bag from the Unic department store, ‘that I brought a present for you, Sarah.’
He rummages through the bag and hands her a CD from which the cellophane wrapper has already been removed. Sarah sees a comic strip drawing of collapsing skyscrapers with the freaks from Iggy Pop’s ‘Brick by Brick’ swarming in between.
‘Oh dear oh dear,’ says Mieke. Sarah puts the CD on.
‘Not too loud,’ says Mieke, ‘so we can still hear each other talk.’
The reeking sauerkraut is passed around, and on every plate there’s a skinned chicken fillet.
‘So healthy,’ laughs Uncle Jempy. ‘This is sure to give me stomach cramps.’ He leans back, hands behind his head, a joker who feels at home everywhere.
‘I like it, Mama.’ Sarah wants to show her mother that she’s grateful—for the food, for Uncle Jempy. Ingratitude, as her mother always says, is the devil’s workshop.
‘Isn’t there any ketchup or mayonnaise, sis?’
Uncle Jempy is waited on hand and foot. He smothers his food in ketchup and mayonnaise that emerge from some secret stockpile, since these leading causes of American and French heart attacks never appear on the table here. Sarah gets half a teaspoon of ketchup, just this once, and she has to make sure she doesn’t abuse the privilege.
‘The food inside isn’t very healthy. Yesterday there was a whole family of worms in my mashed potatoes … ’
‘Inside where?’ Sarah asks.
‘In jail,’ Jempy answers.
‘Change the subject,’ Mieke hurries to interject. ‘How’s Sonja doing?’
‘Don’t talk to me about that woman.’
Uncle Jempy eats with relish and is perfectly relaxed. A man of the world.
‘Yeah, Stefaan, at least you chose well. If Mieke wasn’t my little sister I’d know for myself.’
‘Hey! Jempy! What a thing to say!’ Mieke laughs.
Stefaan smiles his empty smile. He has to agree with Jempy, but if he were to say so he’d be implicating himself in an indelicate story with incestuous overtones.
After dessert—yogurt with sugar—Sarah stays at the table, sitting silently. She makes herself small and keeps her mouth shut, hoping they’ll forget she’s there so she can stay up late, like Emily. On Saturday nights she’s allowed to take her down comforter to the conversation pit and watch TV for as long as she wants. Sarah wants to learn everything about Uncle Jempy.
‘Say, Sarah,’ says Mieke, ‘we’ve had enough of that racket. Put some decent music on.’
Stefaan stands up and lets a waterfall of nasally tones roll out of the speakers and over their heads.
‘Jempy, come on, you know this one,’ Stefaan says.
‘“Subterranean Homesick Blues”, I’ll say I know it,’ says Jempy, and he chimes in with the twenty-four-year-old Dylan, ‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’.
‘That’s the beginning of rap music, Sarah,’ Stefaan says, his arm draped over the back of her chair. ‘Listen to it carefully.’
‘I don’t know this song,’ Sarah answers.
‘It’s better she doesn’t know it,’ Mieke says. She refills the water glasses.
‘Is the cellar under water?’ Jempy chokes out a laugh.
‘We have tea, too,’ Mieke says. ‘Camomile or mint?’
At nine-thirty on the nose Stefaan reminds Sarah that it’s time for bed. She gives her mother a kiss and hesitantly reaches out a hand to her uncle, although he says he’d rather have kisses like a real cowboy.
She never expected that her mother would have the same dark blood as a terrorist. The Delhaize Supermarket, where Mieke and Sarah go every week to fill two shopping carts with high-priced provisions, was the target of the so-called Nijvel Gang a couple of years ago. The terrorists mowed down several innocent customers. All of a sudden, the similarities between the world being reported in the news and Sarah’s world weren’t just superficial points of contact; now the two coincided perfectly. They made the news. She watched the news broadcast and saw the cash registers where she always folded open the brown bags, and the shelves at exactly her eye level that were full of candy, perfumed erasers, and stick-on earrings. Jail is too good for those men, Sarah often heard from her mother’s armchair. It was all so exciting.
