and beseeching and promising, to stop beginning our conversations with ‘How’s the book going?’, he began them with: ‘I know I mustn’t ask, lad, but how’s the book going?’ Not out of malice or to tease me, it was stronger than he was. And he suffered from it more than I did.
The expression, generally so crafty, with which he tried to assure the outside world that, all in all, things weren’t too bad with him—‘life goes on, you’re confronted with it and you’ve got to get on with it’—and that wink, so confidential, with which he informed God and Everyman that, bearing in mind the sad circumstances, he could not be in a better place than here, in this home with the best reputation in town, with its generous car park, with its excellent nurses and young interns, ‘and as regards food it’s incredible here: if the mussel season begins we have mussels that week; if there are new herring, we eat new herring’—that waggish look, that reassuring wink, they disappeared as soon as he sensed I was there. The memory of a tiny article in a corner shot out unstoppably, an arrow through a tank, and the torturer looked at the accused painfully again, yearning, for a moment broken, with watery eyes even: ‘I know I mustn’t ask, lad, but how’s that book of yours going?’
He was counting on me for nothing less than a minor reincarnation. The resurrection of Josée as she had been, through the years, on and off the boards. She had given birth to me? I must do the same for her. At least for him, and preferably for the whole world. Just as she had gradually broken down before his eyes, fragmented, unravelled, had little by little slid away, escaped him word by word—I had to rebuild her, sentence by sentence, page by page. Loss of language restored by language. That was all an undertone in his language, in his condemnation of just a few syllables, spoken with a look in which all the possible loss of the whole human species fleetingly gathered.
Immediately afterwards, in the twinkling of an eye, his face cleared up and there followed another stream of contented personal declarations. Cheerful, monomaniacal, passionate—as if he had to convince other people, but mainly himself. Mantra for a man alone: that he could ‘really’ not be anywhere better than here, in this oversized room ‘actually meant for two people’, with a view of greenery and even of a fountain, and with all those attractive staff around him, and nowadays he even had massages, for his sore back and painful hip, albeit from a male physiotherapist, ‘a good lad who knows his job, and you can have the occasional laugh with him—but well, a woman’s hand? That is and remains something completely different.’
After which he concluded with an iron train of thought of his own manufacture, butcher’s logic which linked those therapist’s hands with flesh and back massages and food: ‘When the hunting season begins, we eat partridge or rabbit, accompanied by a baked apple full of blueberries, with a head of chicory, caramelized by the country butter, and with real potato croquettes.’ He said that dreamily. Licking his chops. Already pouring himself a Wortegem gin, as his first aperitif of the day. Before drinking and clinking glasses in thin air, toasting one of the photos. ‘Your health, my girl.’ Without yet mentioning that book of mine.
Until his next greeting.
-
HE NEVER READ a word of what you are reading at this moment. He died and what I had written up to then I threw away, shortly after his cremation, shortly after his ashes were shaken out of the urn onto the same meadow, on more or less the same square metre, as her ashes, only a few years before.
United at last.
I erased what I had written radically and ritually, deleted it charitably, during a night that brought insight and austere melancholy, after I had stared for hours at the screen of my laptop as if into a mirror and could scarcely stand the sight any longer. Delete. Delete. Consign to the Lethe.
That same day I started again, on this, this novel that must not become a novel, not belles-lettres but not rubbish either, an improved Bible and an anti-book in one and the same cover. Starting again, in anger, looking straight into the digital mirror in which these words obediently appear as my fingers type them, and these too and these too. I type them manfully but am ashamed at so many lost hours, so much faint-heartedness. Embarrassed by my flight into other projects, to other places, into words other than the necessary ones. And look, even now, even after beginning again, I still had to go on for pages and pages—and hence still in flight—about so much other than the essence. So be it. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Even in the case of this renewed writing I first need flanking manoeuvres, epic feints to the square millimetre, encircling processions of monsters and trolls, from Gilt Mary to Napoleon, from hot-air balloons to Cape firefighting helicopters. A caravan of swaying anecdotes and barking woes. A parade of old acquaintances, veiled in couleur locale and perfumed with sweet memories. A force of manly facts and consoling market-stall holders rushing to my aid—Mie Wust, a pious nun, Justine Henin—in the hope that they will provide me, who have recently become a full orphan, with surrogate support, inspiration and help, I who never thought I would have to deal with inspiration and help, certainly not from outside, and certainly not here, at this loving liquidation, this intimate settling of accounts, a book which in my arrogance I had thought in anticipation would scarcely need a writer. It would compose itself, through the energy of its core.
It didn’t. The cocoon did not allow itself to be cracked just like that. Diffidence is still there, in full force. And I am not going to apologize for that. Diffidence is part of the whole, perhaps even the central theme. Anyone who knows the answer can shout it out. I can only hope that the serried ranks of my demons and dwarves, my memories and my wounds, move in a centripetal vortex, and that that whole pathetic procession—why not here, within about three lines?—may finally be reduced to silence, at its own axis. In the frighteningly calm eye of the inwardly circulating whirlwind which it has itself produced.
And, well I never. The dust descends. Here it lies. The key, the quintessence, the spell. Staggering, simple and hard. This book is unavoidably also the story of this book, which refused to let itself be written while my father was still alive.
It has nothing to do with fear of failure with regard to him, the fear of not succeeding in his commission to raise her from the dead with my words. He of all people would never have disavowed my literary labour of Lazarus. He would have welcomed every attempt, however inadequate or mediocre, as a complete miracle, would have acclaimed it as a wonder of the world. Even more so than with my other titles, he would have stocked up on copies from the local bookseller, a few dozen in total (‘I can’t begrudge the man the money, can I, we’re all shopkeepers together?’), gift-wrapped and all, in order to distribute them shamelessly and, despite my spluttering protests, to the whole staff, against all the house rules, in exchange for a kiss from the ladies and a shared drink with the men.
Fear of failure? The real reason is crueller. I type it with resentment, disgust even. Watch, as these cool words appear, just like that, on my screen and your page: his death was necessary, in reality and on paper, before I could really begin. Her life cannot be described without his, and vice-versa. That’s what you get with those bloody eternal loves, those inseparable lives from an earlier period—they were proud of the fact that they had never exchanged a French kiss with anyone but each other, and I have never met anyone who contradicted that or even cast doubt on it.
For the book that he awaited so passionately to appear he had first to follow her. His end was one of the links in what he would have liked to read and distribute himself, with a kiss as thanks and drinks as his reward. ‘Your health, my girl.’
There is a persistent and widespread misconception, among connoisseurs and laymen alike, that writing means ‘preserving’. Establishing what existed, as it existed. Of course it is the other way round. Writing is destroying, in the absence of anything better. Only then and as a result does what you are writing about pass away. Literature is letting go. Writing is dispelling.
So come on then. Say farewell—you too. Draw a thick, bold cross
