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The translation of this book is funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren – www.flemishliterature.be)
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ni le bien qu’on m’a fait, ni le mal
tout ça m’est bien égal
EDITH PIAF
non, je ne regrette rien
◆
falling falling
down in silence to the ground
ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS
rapture
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AND THIS IS the story of a stroke, devastating as an internal lightning bolt, and of the agonizingly slow decline that over the next two years afflicted a five-fold mother and first-class amateur actress. Her life had always been dedicated to the spoken word, hard work, healthy food for all the family, economical indulgence and affordable hygiene from head to toe. And yet she of all people was repaid by life, which she had always honoured—employing limited means and unbridled ambition, proud stubbornness and stubborn pride—with ingratitude and blunt cruelty.
She lost first her speech, then her dignity, then her heartbeat.
Everyone who knew her had always expected that things would turn out differently. That her heart, fragile and wonky as she always called it herself, would not wait for two years. It would stop beating as soon as that mouth of hers could no longer speak, no longer scold, praise, taste, snigger and declaim—and I’m still omitting arguing and puffing frugally on her filter cigarettes, lighter and lighter as the years went on, and I’m still overlooking the contemptuous pursing of her thin lips when she didn’t like something. I shan’t even mention the mocking raising of one corner of her mouth and the opposite eyebrow when she wished to indicate that no one need try to tell her anything about her trade, her methods of upbringing, her cookery books, her view of excellent theatre or the rest of human existence.
And I’d like to warn you, reader. If you don’t like works that are largely based on truth and simply supply the missing parts from imagination; if you’re put off by a novel which according to many people cannot be called a novel, because it lacks a proper head, a beautiful curly tail and an orderly middle section, let alone contains a respectable coherent story by way of intestines; if texts that are at the same time a lament, a tribute and a resounding curse make you ill, because they are about life itself and at the same time present only one dear relation of the author—then the moment has already come for you to shut this book.
Replace it on the pile in the shop where you are standing, push it back among the other books on the shelf in your club, your rest home, your public library, your friends’ drawing room or the property you have forced your way into.
Buy something else, borrow something else, steal something else.
And miss my mother’s story.
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he
(OR: THE STORY OF THE STORY)
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TO EVERYONE ELSE: just take a look at that photo on the front cover. It’s definitely her. Beauty is not necessarily passed down from mother to son.
Even in her own family, the Verbekes—an old dynasty of architects, builders and stonemasons, in which the men were mostly big but always bony, the women mostly tall but always with rather angular faces—even in her own family, then, it was not clear where so much beauty and elegance had sprung from. She was the youngest girl in a family of twelve. There should have been fourteen, but one brother died nameless at his birth, and another, having been properly baptized, died in his cot.
There were enough brothers left not really to feel the loss.
She, the smallest and daintiest of the dozen, was the only one allowed, at the tender age of sixteen, to study in French, in Dinant, for a whole school year, and afterwards even in English for a few months, in Northampton. Something to do with Domestic Science, Bookkeeping, Etiquette and Putting the Finishing Touch to All That. Something to do with strict regulations, exciting changes of scene and a few friendships made for life.
We are talking about just before the Second World War, the declining years of an unthreatened and seemingly endless interwar period, in which little Belgium, la petite Belgique, flourished as never before. For the first time since the ravages of the Great War, the worldwide conflagration of 1914–18, its franc was again called the European dollar, for the first time too its handguns and its regional beers became famous all over the planet. Its vast Congo—a world within a world, unfathomable in its customs and murderous in its climate—vomited an endless stream of colonial goods over the motherland, which with the aid of a ruler and a shoehorn would have fitted about eighty times into its colony. Out of that wild tropical empire everything continued to well up that could serve as a foundation and adornment of prosperity—from rubber to ivory, from copper to cobalt, a high plateau of zinc and tin, a cascade of diamonds, a sea of palm oil and cocoa, oceans of petrol, without forgetting the gold, and the uranium and the works of art in crude bronze and ebony. The little motherland capitalized on all this, handsomely in fact, thanks to its age-old trump card: its position at the core of Europe, right on the intersecting lines from London to Berlin and from Paris to Rotterdam.
You can’t have a much better position in Europe, except when war breaks out.
But despite its nascent civil aviation industry—operating in white and blue, since its national colours were too similar to those of Germany—and despite its dense railway network with sturdy Belgian-made engines, and despite the breakthrough of a home-grown super-limousine, the Minerva, ‘the Rolls Royce of the Continent’, despite all that and much more, the interwar period in Belgium outside the capital—‘Bruxelles? Petit Paris!’—and, come on, outside Antwerp and Liège of course, and on you go, outside Ghent and Mons too, and naturally also outside Charleroi—finally, to sum up: in the provinces and the depths of the countryside the interwar years in Belgium were somewhat reminiscent of the late nineteenth century. But without the carriages and the horse trams, and with more comfortable clothes in which, above the belt at least, a button might occasionally be left undone.
Also a woman who smoked in the street was still considered scandalous, also the dance halls that were popping up everywhere were intended for the working classes and the rabble; also the teacher-priests stood at the entrance of the increasingly popular cinemas, noting the names of pupils
