mouth feels as sticky as a honeycomb. According to her doctor she doesn’t drink enough water. That was eight years ago. Now the doctor himself has died. Her son comes into the room with a carrying case. He zips the case open and takes a video camera out of the padded interior. Melanie’s heart skips a beat. Is this the present? It’s an ungainly metal hulk with one big, round eye.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see her?’ Stefaan asks.
He carries the camera in his arms like a child. The camera is frightfully expensive, which is exactly why Stefaan bought it. Stefaan wants to spend money on his daughter. He’s just itching to replay the scene that he observed with his own eyes through the lens of the camera. Now he wants to see it with his mother. He can also send the images from the camera to the television via a cable, an extra option he has paid a pretty penny for.
‘You’re not going to tell me … ’ she says. She shifts the fulcrum of her body and raises her right buttock. A loud salvo is heard. Because of her deafness she cannot hear the sound of her own farts. Both her hands grasp the arms of the chair as if her body were about to fly upward, but it abandons the effort under so much weight. She struggles for breath, all the way down to the deepest tunnels of her massive body. The hand that had just been flapping freely lands on her prow, the other points to the unwieldy apparatus that Stefaan is cradling in his arms. Another of her verbal assaults is brewing. ‘ … you’re not going to tell me … that the birth is recorded on that thing?’ She nearly faints.
‘That’s right,’ Stefaan confirms enthusiastically. He crouches next to the television console and tries to connect the camera to the TV via the cable.
‘What will they think of next?’ Melanie spits out, along with another handful of words. Her unusual loquacity has to do with an attack on the present age. ‘No matter where you turn today, everything is out there for all to see. My goodness, a little baby can’t help it if he comes into the world in his birthday suit, but I don’t have to see your wife in all her glory, thank you very much. It’s become a regular scourge these days—there’s an ad for a new gas stove and bang, they have to put a naked lady in it. That’ll warm things up all right. Who wouldn’t be cold walking around in their altogether? Or yesterday in the theatre section of the newspaper. Yes, they have the nerve to call it theatre, getting undressed down to their last stitch with everyone looking on. To say nothing of that modern art nowadays! It’s all an excuse to show off a lot of filth. That guy with his whore and her bare breasts, the two of them in a sculpture. And we’re supposed to think it’s beautiful? Coarse, cheap, vulgar, too dreadful for words, that’s what I say. You can go ahead and call me old fashioned but it’s the unvarnished truth.’ Then she falls silent and her words hang in the air, until a new fart resounds through the room to conclude her powerful tirade. Stefaan is still down on his hands and knees. He’s trying to make sense of the doodles formed by the wires on the living room floor.
‘Never mind, I don’t need to see it.’ Melanie hoists herself out of the armchair and propels herself to the cellar. She walks like a drunken goose. Since her second episode of thrombosis she’s had trouble walking upright. In the cellar there are pots, pans, and a whole supply of canned goods. There are also ten-kilo bags of keeping apples that a farmer sells in the housing estate from his old-fashioned pull cart. It’s always pleasantly chilly in the cellar, winter and summer.
A cauldron of soup is cooking on the kitchen stove, waiting for the return of the house’s inhabitants. It must be said that Stefaan’s mother knows something about cooking, at least about everyday cuisine: meatballs in tomato sauce, rabbit with prunes, and pudding with ginger biscuits. He tastes a spoonful so he can compliment his mother when she comes back up from her air-raid shelter. The soup is more or less tasteless. The lack of taste betrays the nervousness she feels about the birth of her first grandchild. He won’t say anything about the soup because then he’d have to be honest. That’s the way he is: he can’t lie, but he can keep his mouth shut.
Mieke can keep her mouth shut, too. When after two months she realized she was pregnant, she didn’t share her big secret with Stefaan right away, even though she knew how much he was hoping for a pregnancy. That was something he never quite understood. It offended him somewhat, but as a doctor he knew that when a woman gets pregnant she isn’t always herself. The hormones take over. Mieke told him later that she knew exactly when her mind, and not just her swelling breasts, whispered to her that she was pregnant. When she heard the report on the radio about those two East German families who had fled to the West in a homemade hot-air balloon, she wondered whether she had the right to force a child into the world. Before you knew it the dictatorship of the Iron Curtain would spread all the way to the North Sea, and where would they fly then, with a baby, without a hot-air balloon?
For Stefaan there had never been the slightest doubt. It’s their job to make sure the child is properly equipped to cope with life’s challenges. He needs them to have a child so he can be complete. He can still hear his own overly zealous arguments. Of course we’re going to be happy. You’re going to feel like a total woman. Our marriage will blossom. Yet Mieke still wasn’t sure. She didn’t actually utter the a-word, but he felt her thinking it. Then one day he got angry, very angry, and began talking about infanticide. It hadn’t really mattered whether he lost control or not when she said there was more to it than that, that his desire for a child was all out of proportion. ‘People without children are depressing people,’ he said, cleverly quoting her father. He knew that was her weak point. Her father had made his opinions all too clear when they were first married. A few years later the man died of a heart attack. For her mother his death was devastating, and she died soon afterward from the aftershock. ‘I know, people without children are depressing people,’ she had moaned. ‘There’s no way back.’ She was referring to the crushing responsibility. In a moment of weakness you could get bogged down just thinking about it. Then you’d go crazy and you’d never get around to having a baby.
They got through it together. It took patience and persuasiveness, but she got used to the idea. One month later he started catching her singing little tunes to her unborn child. Her swelling body did have its discomforts, from heartburn and infuriating itchy nipples to swollen ankles, and the enormous embarrassment. She was terrified of losing her slender figure and turning into a blob. She was ashamed of what she called her whale of a body, although the rounded forms made her more of a woman than she had ever been before. She stopped going outside. For the first time she cancelled the six-month check-up visits to the tenants of her properties.
Luckily they have a villa with a large garden. The garden is surrounded by tall rhododendrons. Mieke was able to keep herself well-hidden in the villa during the final weeks. Villas are ideal places for hiding your shame. A house is a body around your body. Would the little one in Mieke’s belly be ashamed, too? It was a pointless question, since the little one was still hidden away. Shame presupposes the presence of other people, and she wasn’t expecting twins.
During the last week Stefaan’s mother came to help out, her face as long as a fiddle. Mieke responded by complaining that she was a prisoner in her own home. The two women avoided each other as much as possible. Mieke thinks that Stefaan’s mother is jealous of her own son. When the tension became too great between Mieke and her mother-in-law, Melanie disappeared into the cellar and Mieke took refuge in the bedroom behind closed shutters, with a compress on her forehead and her swollen ankles resting on the footboard of the bed. In both the cellar and the bedroom it was fresh and safe.
‘Voilà!’ Calmed and even in relatively good humour, Stefaan’s mother resurfaces from under the ground while Stefaan has gone back to fiddling with the SCART cables. She’s tidied up her favourite spot again, the storage cellar. It needed it, she insists.
‘It’s got to be clean for when mother and baby come home. The baby may not see much yet, but even a moron can see spiderwebs. You have to keep your house clean, no matter what. Taking a little pride in your housekeeping, that’s the basis of all happiness. But a man wouldn’t understand
