all light. Rumour has it that exposure to too much brightness is disastrous for ornaments in French biscuit—refined white earthenware very suitable for depicting longing faces, and hands with fingernails covered in jewels, down to the minutest folds in crinoline. But it is excessively brittle since it has only been fired once. ‘Does that surprise you? [she, contemptuously] You know what the French are like? Great panache, but little aptitude for hard work and thoroughness. Even dusting they do half-heartedly over there. It’s no accident that when we say “in the French way” we mean “carelessly”.’
Anyone looking around doesn’t get the impression that skimping jobs or dust will ever have a chance in this room. Although obviously not every biscuit ornament has a right to equal protection. On every cupboard corner, every windowsill and every table there is one simply gleaming in full light, usually surrounded by knick-knacks in terracotta, or dishes with or without fruit in them, or vases with or without flowers in them, or travel souvenirs in plastic and papier-mâché, or photos in frames of all sizes, or ashtrays in all shapes and colours, or plants and miniature cactuses in a wide variety of pot holders, from modern Delft blue to authentic Cologne pots—one even in plasticized papyrus, a present from a thoughtful visitor to Egypt.
On the mantelpiece stands a three-part set with exuberant embellishments and gilt work, imitation-eighteenth-century, the centrepiece of which (a petrified whipped-cream cake) supports a round clock, a Cyclops eye wearing a monocle, which you can swing open to wind up the clock with a toy key. You can turn as hard as you like, the elegant hands won’t budge: the internal spring snapped off decades ago. The outer elements of the trio—a female (left) and a male courtier (right), who each step forward out of a summer house—are actually two vases, which no one dares use because with flowers they would tip over off the mantelpiece, straight onto the gas radiator, which looks like a filled-in open hearth with a copper cover.
If you wanted to see Josée Verbeke politely irritated—although she knew well enough that you were just teasing her—you had to go into her living room, looking around with a sigh at the knick-knacks which she had accumulated over the years, and inquire: ‘Where’s the blunderbuss? This is just like a shooting gallery at the fair. And I don’t think two hundred pellets will be enough.’
You could have said the same thing in her bedroom, if she let you in at least, which she was reluctant to do, because there must be etiquette, and etiquette likes privacy. [she, displeased] ‘Not everything from before the occupation needs to be thrown overboard. The Germans destroyed much more than Zelzate and Zeebrugge, and later the Cinema Rex in Antwerp, with a flying bomb, the cowards. Manners were never the same again. And the royal family even more so.’
All her curios are on ornamental napkins or lace doilies, most of which are round and not much bigger than a beer mat. However, some jewels are assembled on a single oval napkin, itself ringed with a halo of fringes. The figurines are arranged on it as if for an extravagant group portrait. In it a porcelain ballerina from before the First World War can happily keep her crossed hands under her chin and raise her pointed foot up and to the side next to the obituary card of a former supplier of smoked ham and brawn, who a month ago had been run over on his bike by a municipal bus. ‘The man had only just retired. [she, melancholy] Even his bike was brand new. The things that happen.’
Beside the deceased supplier of charcuterie there stands, cool as a cucumber, the wooden, slightly Cubist fisherman that she herself brought back from Japan—the furthest journey ever granted her by the theatrical bug and theatrical societies, thanks to an exchange project between the Flemish Association for Catholic Amateur Theatre and its naturally Shintoist counterpart in the Land of the Rising Sun.
The pièce de résistance of the collection is placed on her big cupboard, which is an angular and sparsely decorated affair, almost three metres long, with six square doors and whose main stylistic feature is robustness.
Her eldest brother, an architect, designed it himself and had it made just before their marriage, during the penultimate year of the war, when oak was prohibitively expensive and scarcely available. One of those six doors locks, and during my childhood was always locked. Behind the tough oak were the most expensive strong drinks and many of their little secrets.
(I knew where the key was, and on the few occasions when they went out in style—to the Mayor’s Ball, or the Annual Celebration of Christian Shopkeepers, and were suddenly out all night, ‘because [she, worldly-wise, pig-headed] what if someone occasionally goes out? Then it’s better if he does so properly. There’s nothing better, after a night of dancing and pleasure, than a hearty breakfast: a pan of eggs and bacon, fresh brioches from the baker across the road and two pots of really strong coffee; then opening the butcher’s shop with fresh heart and trying to keep your eyes open until the evening, when you can shut up shop again’—those few times, then, that they went out were sufficient for me, also staying up all night, and sometimes at intervals of six months, to read Jan Wolkers’ Turkish Delight and Jef Geeraerts’ first Gangrene novels, books I had heard so much about, although not from my parents, who nevertheless simply had them in their mysterious cupboard.) (All other papers, including their marriage certificate, their passport and a handwritten accounts book with lots of deletions and addition sums, I left untouched. One should not try to know everything about one’s parents.)
I still haven’t said what that pièce de résistance is, on top of her long cupboard, in the centre in all its splendour. A sculpture, again in biscuit, but this time as big as a squatting cat. The Holy Family, painted in pastel shades. Mary, Joseph and the baby, with on its right shoulder a dove peeping round guiltily.
‘Make sure [she, deadly serious] that no one tries to deny you that sculpture if anything happens to us. It’s an heirloom from your grandmother. It survived the flight from West Flanders to here, during the last big gas offensive when your grandfather and her had to flee as fast as they could with the horse and cart, with the maid, a son and a daughter, and just a fraction of their belongings, including this sculpture. It’s a miracle that it didn’t get broken on the way in that wild torrent of refugees in which people and animals were trampled underfoot. It’s older than your father, who was born here in the Vermorgenstraat. If you don’t like it, you can get rid of it, I’m not crazy about it myself. But don’t ever let anyone take it away from you. It’s yours.’
The sculpture is on an oval wooden base and under a glass bell jar, to stop it getting dusty. Under that wooden base is also a napkin, of antique Bruges lace. When their house contents are sold off, in just over a year’s time—he leaving alone for the oversized room in his old people’s home, she for the institution for human jetsam—the lace napkin and the glass bell jar will fetch more than the Holy Family.
They have now almost finished their pizza and their salad, and are listening, chewing attentively, to the weather forecast, which this evening is being broadcast to them by their favourite weatherman, the one with the moustache. That gives us the chance, before the fatal moment arrives, to cast a quick glance over the rest of the setting. The decor is half the story.
The candelabra has three arms, each of which is gilded and elegantly curled and ends in a matt-glass rose, at the heart of which is a bulb. The arms are all attached to the outside of a ring, also gilded. On the inside hangs a graceful chalice of cut matt glass, hollow side upward. Underneath, at the centre of the chalice, a gilt protuberance hangs down, like the point of an inverted First World War German helmet, pointing to the round living-room table just below, the one with the glass top that rests on a wickerwork base. One of the few possessions that will survive the move to his oversized room in the old people’s home.
Apart from a wall clock and a pair of bone-dry holy water fonts—a crumbling palm branch has been pushed behind each of them—only monumental items are displayed on the walls. Above the mantelpiece: a mirror with bevelled edges and a luxuriant frame, again gilt, almost as high and as wide as the chimney breast itself. On the wall opposite: a machine-woven tapestry, in which two late-medieval
