be fitting, in accordance with our legendary Flemish national character, which bursts with modesty—a discreet weathervane or a sluggish dragon, one of those scaly monsters that enjoys being routed by the archangel Michael.
However, the people of Sint-Niklaas are not known for their discretion or modesty. As a result their Mary does not look as if she will ever permit herself to be routed, and certainly not with enjoyment, not even by an archangel. She is as high as two houses, our Mary, wears a crown on her head and carries a child on her arm. Our Holy Mary as a fertile empress armoured from head to toe in shiny gold leaf. Consequently she is popularly known as Gilt Mary. When there is sufficient mist, despite all the gold leaf, to remove her from sight, the popular sneer is that Gilt Mary is on her travels again, and that she can well afford it, with all that precious metal and all her spare time, because only one child? You can hardly call that a time-consuming task, hardly even a family. One is none.
Today there is no mist, far from it, there is a slight rain of fine sand, but apart from that it is a brilliant Sunday in September, and the colours are as unruly and shiny as in a Breughel painting, the ordinary people cheer and drink and eat hamburgers with fried onion rings and fresh tomato sauce, while—above the festive stalls and the chewing chops—a squadron of airships takes to the sky. They rise above our chimneys and slates, above our fashionable roof terraces and densely populated balconies packed with waving local celebrities. They brush past many gables belonging to cafés with names like De Graanmaat and Hemelrijck, or shops with names like Weduwe Goethals & Dochters, where they sell crystal glasses and cutlery boxes lined with blue silk, and of a chip shop called Putifar, after the circus donkey in a children’s book.
They shoot upward, past the front of our relatively recent town hall, upward past the façade of our ancient jail—a former prison which in your childhood served as, what symbolism, a library, and which they shortly plan, what a sign of the times, to convert into lofts, just as they want to convert everything into lofts nowadays, even former libraries where you were once able to wreck your eyesight reading books, without a moment’s regret, and where at a certain moment there wasn’t one book left, according to your age category, for you to read, and where the librarian—may his memory be honoured, his name praised, his bloodline blessed—then gave you permission to start on the books of the next category, on condition that you talked to no one about it, and that was what happened.
They brush past that significant gable, failing by a whisker to pull off the gutter, plus some tiles from the year dot. Then they finally make for the open sky, the boundless heavens, majestic and silent, high above our roofs and courtyards and yet floating away precisely over the great access road on the ground floor, our Parklaan, which, surprise surprise, passes a park and is already jam-packed with hooting pursuit cars whose passengers wish to follow with their own eyes the Calvary of their favourite, secretly hoping for a cautious accident—the year before one landed in a castle moat, three got caught in barbed wire, and two crashed in the Westakkers military zone, almost resulting in an international emergency, since we are talking about the heyday of the Cold War.
At the end of this Parklaan, right above the busy junction with the secondary motorway from Antwerp to Ghent, the aerial flotilla seems becalmed for a moment. Just for a second the inverted pears and figs and plump women’s buttocks just hang there hesitantly in the air, dangling like Christmas baubles without a tree. Then they resolutely choose a course. Not toward Ghent or Antwerp. Not to Hulst in Holland, but to Temse on the Scheldt. In so doing they first float past the local shopping mall, the Waasland Retail Centre, which when it was created seemed like a good idea with its ample parking facilities and covered shopping arcades, but which for years has been sucking the life out of the town centre like a tapeworm sucks the libido out of a prize pig that was nevertheless intended to provide semen for the whole region during its lifetime. And then at last, and with my apologies again for the long digression this time, but that’s how I’m made, that’s how people tell stories and commemorate in my area and in my family, that’s what our language is like, what our flesh is like, expansive. We’ll have to learn to live with it, you and I, at least for the duration of this saga, but so be it—after that Retail Centre, the balloons float above a section of green suburbia where, according to tradition and semantics, a patch of bog once lay that was noted for its population of frogs. It is still called the Puytvoet, but it must have been drained over the course of time, although the meadows and fields and football pitches of The White Boys FC are still convex in shape in order to facilitate the run-off of the generous precipitation for which our Low Countries are so renowned.
The streams of the Puytvoet are deeper and more numerous and every few metres boast a specimen of our beloved moisture absorber, our drainage soldier: the pollard willow, from which in earlier times we carved our clogs. The dirt paths too, the potholes and edges of which we have tried for years to repair with rubble and ashes from our stoves—a week later they have disappeared, like every kind of hard core, from half-sleepers to sections of wall, you name it, everything is swallowed up by our insatiable earth, which with its restless jaws can grind up a cosmos, from cat litters to skeletons, from coachwork to clapped-out pianos—those earth paths too then are lined, on both sides indeed, with water vacuum cleaners.
But these are slender sisters of the pollard willows which we call Canada willows and which, elegantly and supply and lithely rustling, wave their crowns and their silver leaves at the fleet of balloons high above them.
And there, finally, on the ground among the pollard willows and those Canada willows, in a plot carved out by streams and dirt paths, yes there, over there in her vegetable garden in her favourite swimsuit, black with a white pattern, looking up with one hand over her eyes, in her bare feet by a modest bonfire of dried potato tops—there she is. With that band in her hair.
She looks reflective or admiring, it is not clear which. Perhaps she is listening to the roaring song of the burners, a jubilant choir up above. Or perhaps she is just following the coiling veil of smoke twirling from her own fire to where it dissipates into nothing.
Or perhaps she is measuring one of the balloons with the naked eye, wondering how many evening dresses a skilful seamstress could conjure up out of it if there were yet another costume piece in the programme, Le Malade imaginaire or L’Avare—‘there’s always a demand for Molière, at the box office at least’.
A reflective woman in a vegetable garden, beneath a firmament of fabulous beasts, on a Sunday in September. A multicoloured and strangely soothing spectacle.
At least if there isn’t a storm and it doesn’t rain cats and dogs and the whole thing doesn’t have to be postponed until next year’s Liberation celebrations.
But a promise is a promise: this must not and will not be about balloons in the shape of figs or a crate of beer, but about my mother and her unacceptably cruel end. I have run away from this book for long enough, novel or no novel. It should have been written much earlier. Allow me a timeout to explain that to you. It will not, I promise you, be a delay. On the contrary, it forms part of the mourning process, at a time and in a community that has lost the ability to mourn. The lament no longer has a raison d’être. Sorrow must either be suppressed or lead to something productive.
And I am an obedient bastard of those two possibilities.
I have dragged my feet and bickered like never before, hiding out of cowardice from a pain that I had swallowed down without digesting it, but also without wanting to digest it. Because before I could abandon them to the great forgetting, my dismay and my pent-up concern, before I could submerge and dissolve in the Lethe of everyday life, I just had to do something with them. I had to convert them, with a click of the fingers pouring gold from lead, mindful of King Midas, because I can do that now, I told myself, ‘make something out of nothing’, capture something for ever, although only on patient paper. It’s all I’m good for. From mud to marble in no time at all.
Yet I still couldn’t start. A prey to continuing grief as if
