o’clock in the morning. The girls sound as young as Sarah, Mieke says. The first few times she thought they were Sarah’s classmates calling to compare homework. The sluts talk with a voluptuous undercurrent punctuated by chewing gum, vulgar girls who all ask for Jean-Pierre, Jean, Jempy, their snooky-wookums, their darling. Mieke waits a few seconds and then lets the girls have it, explaining that Jempy has enough problems without having to deal with them, asking them how old they are, how they support themselves, and what they think they’re doing.
‘Oh, I’m already nineteen, Cindy,’ ‘I work as a cashier at the Unic, Viviane,’ ‘Okay, you win, I’m crazy in love, Gonda,’ she says, imitating them with contempt. She explains to the girls that her brother Jean-Pierre has a family—Sarah perks up her ears—and that he could easily be their father, after which the air-headed little bimbos start spouting, usually with heaps of self-confidence, that they don’t care, or that he’s better off with them, or—the coarsest of the bunch—that she ‘doesn’t need to hear from any sour old bag, but where is Jean-Pierre, goddamn it? You’re not finished with me yet. I’ve got his number now and I’m not giving up until I hear from my guy.’
Mieke fears the floodgates have been opened, she tells Stefaan when he gets back from Granny’s. Sarah is sitting in the armchair with her headphones on, but the sound is off.
‘We never should have let him stay here, not even once. You give them an inch and they take a mile.’ That’s the way she sees her brother, as a needy child, and that’s why it’s hard to refuse him. ‘With Jempy it’s always something. He was no end of grief for my parents, but even they always gave in when he asked for something. In a way Jempy is very special.’
‘Very special in the trouble he causes,’ Stefaan adds.
‘I’m much too good to show my brother the door, of course. But if we don’t take control of the situation now, just think what might happen.’ Mieke sees her brother being released and moving in with them, setting their house on fire with his cigarettes, ‘investing’ all their money in the one-armed bandits at the casino, and getting Sarah hooked on drugs while turning her into a smuggler. In her runaway imagination it’s only a matter of weeks before Mieke finds the floozies in their sexiest lingerie sitting on bar stools at the living room window and ogling the neighbours. And … and … and are they just supposed to stand helplessly by?
‘Calm down,’ Stefaan says to comfort her. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
Nothing seems to have changed when Uncle Jempy shows up again at the door two weeks later. Stefaan and Jempy are drinking port aperitifs in the living room. Stefaan has red cheeks from bicycling home so fast, a blush that heightens his youthfulness. He’s put on ‘Man Gave Names To All The Animals’ from Bob Dylan’s conversion album Slow Train Coming. It’s a happy, childlike tune which he thinks is just the thing for Sarah.
‘Iraq,’ Stefaan says to Jempy. ‘What’s going on there, anyway? Saddam Hussein has really gone one step too far.’
Uncle Jempy nods vaguely. The Persian Gulf crisis is not exactly his main concern, but Stefaan goes on while Jempy stares into his glass, surprised that a glass can empty so quickly.
‘Anyone who knows anything about the Second World War will tell you that something like this can’t end well,’ Stefaan says. ‘Saddam has his eye on Kuwait’s oil fields, and that’s just plain wrong. Saddam’s troops and their moustaches rolled into Kuwait one night on their rubber mats. That kind of unscrupulous greed and imperialism is suspiciously similar to the exploits of a certain Adolf so many years ago. The fact that the Americans want to take military action has nothing to do with left or right but with justice, and that’s what Bush wants.’
‘That’s right,’ Mieke calls out from the kitchen while stirring the leek soup. ‘History repeats itself if you’re not paying attention. It’s our duty to put a stop to it. The Americans set a good example.’ She turns on the exhaust fan, making it impossible hear the men in the living room, yet she keeps rattling on. Mieke can rant with uncommon ferocity about subjects that are so beyond her realm of experience that she can safely vent her own frustrations there. ‘Anybody who doesn’t want to join in is sticking his head in the sand,’ says Mieke contentiously to her daughter.
‘The oil fields that are burning there now are an enormous loss,’ says Stefaan the scientist. ‘Everyone has to do his duty and pull his weight, we all agree on that. And the tragedy that’s taking place isn’t really so far from us. It’s a small world.’
‘Yes, it’s a small world,’ says Uncle Jempy, and he refills his glass.
‘But I still wouldn’t want to have to paint it,’ says Mieke, who has just come in with a silver tray of Tuc crackers.
‘Isn’t that something for you, Jean-Pierre,’ Stefaan suggests as if he’s been hit by a flash of inspiration, ‘being a soldier? You’ll be getting out soon anyway, right? You’re a man of the world. A soldier does a lot of travelling.’
‘I’d miss my daughter,’ Uncle Jempy answers dryly.
‘You haven’t seen her in a year,’ Mieke says.
‘I don’t have to see her to love her.’
Weeks turn into months. Uncle Jempy stays for the unsolicited pinch of exotic care in the salt-free regime at number 7 Nightingale Lane. No matter how many girls Jempy hits on during his penitentiary leave, his only big loves, he swears, are Mieke and Sarah. His admirers send love letters and stuffed teddy bears to 7 Nightingale Lane, but playboy Jempy himself only sends cards to Mieke from prison, thanking her and letting her know how glad he is to be her brother. He becomes the resident ghost who shows up every few weekends on Saturday afternoon. Sarah can smell the aroma of old soup from the prison on him. She sees how her mother scrubs the traces of her brother from the carpets every Sunday afternoon after he leaves. He’s the man who is gradually attacking the family’s nervous system and slowly driving them to the abyss of a serious crisis.
‘Stuck, stuck,’ Jempy grumbles that Saturday afternoon in the kitchen, and he unscrews the cap from a bottle of Tabasco that Mieke’s can’t open. ‘Nobody should ever be stuck with anything. Stuck isn’t in my dictionary.’
‘By the way, I’m not going to be in your way much longer.’ Uncle Jempy tells them he’s on a bed of roses. Soon he’s being released on parole. And he’s gone gaga over a thirty-five-year-old lady and her two kids, who he’s going to adopt.
‘Roses with thorns, sounds like,’ says Mieke. ‘So cut the chit-chat. We have to be at Madam Cherry’s in the village at three.’
Madam Cherry is a frugal old woman who lived through the Great War and has a back as crooked as her fruit trees. At five-thirty every morning she mounts a ladder and climbs fifteen feet up into the branches. She’d rather risk her life than let all that magnificent fruit from God’s garden go bad or leave it to the birds. Even that pious lady, supermarket bag tied to her head to keep off the drizzle, has fallen for Uncle Jempy’s charms. She won’t let him leave without one more bucket of sour cherries. Nothing would please her more; he’s doing her a favour.
In the kitchen, juice is streaming from the pitting machine. The pits tap against the covered marble tiles like hailstones. The three of them are hard at work, as if together they had formed the conveyor belt of a perfect little family: Mieke washes and selects the cherries, Uncle Jempy runs them through the machine, and Sarah, down on her knees, gathers up the pits that fall beside it. The cherries leave red splashes of blood on the kitchen cabinets, which Sarah must wipe off immediately with a damp cloth. Sarah wheedles her uncle into telling them tall tales.
