men, because why would the mother put the tiny tots back in bed after their morning bath? At night it’s bath then bed, and in the morning it’s exactly the other way round.
You have to test the temperature with your elbow. Before you dip the baby in the water, you must check with your elbow that the water is not too hot, or too cold. Too cold is less bad than too hot. Children can stand cold better than heat. In the winter it was always a struggle with Gilles to get him to put his coat on. And a hat he would always pull off. So I asked M for money to buy Gilles a hat with flaps for the ears and cords you can tie. Gilles was so angry. He just kept tugging at that hat. The harder he tugged at the cords the tighter the knot became. ‘He has my stubbornness, said M, ‘but not my brains.’—‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’ And I gave him a butterfly kiss: brushing his lips with mine.
Sometimes I think: if I could begin anew, I’d do everything just the same. You can’t choose in life. You can’t say: I want the main course, but not the aperitif, or the dessert, or the liqueur. You can’t say: I want my children but not him. You have to go via him to have the children. And those children are wonderful. Even Lhermitte would not have killed them.
But that neighbour, then, really thought that those children were sleeping peacefully in their beds. And the paramedics believed her. Why shouldn’t they? They took the mother to the hospital and left the neighbour in a house with three dead bodies in it.
They will probably all be wondering: ‘Couldn’t we have saved the children? Isn’t it partly our fault?
How often that has been said about me: she could have saved them. Throw her in prison, because she could have saved them. She must never be released, because she could have saved them. She did nothing to save them, though she could have saved them. She deserves the death penalty, because she could have saved them.
Again and again, like a record stuck in a groove.
I’ve been in prison for sixteen years because I didn’t save them although I could have saved them. So they say. They weren’t there, but they know for sure that I could have saved those girls.
If it were all so simple.
Perhaps the paramedics and the neighbour could have saved the tiny tots, but they’re not in prison. They are getting psychological help to deal with the trauma.
The father did not save his children either. He was in a meeting while his wife was suffocating his children. With laughing gas, they say. How did she get hold of laughing gas? Can anyone tell me how she got hold of that laughing gas? Who sold it to her? Shouldn’t the seller have asked what she planned to do with it? Can anyone in this country who wants to murder someone just buy laughing gas? And where do you buy it?
I hope that neighbour will feel guilty for the rest of her life. And the paramedics too, who were too stupid to go and check on the children for themselves. Let it gnaw at them, eat them up, like maggots eating a corpse.
It would have been too late to save them, wrote the papers.
How can they be so sure? Why is it too late in one case and not in the other?
Their brother found them: a boy of eleven who had to find his dead brothers and sisters. Even for a gifted child that is appalling.
Gilles was eleven when we were arrested, right in front of him. That’s an age at which they’re very aware of everything. It leaves its mark.
I don’t know if the three murdered children were in the same room. That wasn’t in any newspaper.
Journalists can’t know everything. They do their best, but they can’t perform magic. Sometimes they have to dig and dig in order to find answers.
I always cooperated. When someone asked me a question I answered, even if I didn’t know the answer.
It’s better to give some kind of answer than none.
That’s what they said at school when you had to take an exam.
If you say nothing, you make a stupid impression, or a dull one. Here in prison too I answer all questions. It’s a matter of politeness.
The children were highly gifted. And the mother was ill. There was epilepsy and another disease the doctors can’t really say much about. My Mummy and I experienced that. My Mummy was always tired, just like that woman. When my mother had cleaned the house, she couldn’t get out of her chair for the rest of the week. But she didn’t kill me. I never thought for a second: now she’s going to murder me. What child thinks that of its mother? No one expects something like that.
That mother was close to despair. She didn’t know which way to turn. She thought: I’m going to die soon and there’ll be no one to look after my gifted children. She couldn’t send them to school. She could, but her children were bored out of their skulls. So she kept them at home and taught them herself. What was to happen to her children when she was no longer there?
And so they’ve always got an explanation.
There can never be any pity for women who murder their children. However sick they are. They are sick, not their children.
What are they to do next? Can she see her children? What does she say to them, or to her husband? And what does he say to her? Does he still live in that house? Does he sleep in the bed he slept in with her? Where their children were conceived? And where does she sleep?
The papers don’t write anything about that. They can’t stop writing about me, but not another word about her. As if it never happened. Let’s forget it. Hush it up. They must have paid off the journalists.
An invaluable piece of advice, sir: go back to Holland. Take the remaining children with you and leave your wife in Belgium. Forget her. She doesn’t exist, she never existed. And no pity, especially not that. There are no excuses for what she did. Epilepsy! Does she really think that other people don’t have problems?
According to Anouk many women in here pretend to have epileptic fits. They lie squirming on the floor of their cells. Or they bang their heads against the wall, supposedly because they’re hearing voices. Some women will go to any lengths to get attention.
‘We don’t let anyone die,’ says Anouk. ‘If someone really needs nursing, they get it. But women who play-act we ignore. Or we give them a laxative.’
They’ve never given me a laxative.
I’m going the right way, says Anouk. The way that leads to the exit. I can smell the outside air. When I breathe in deeply, I can smell it.
A day seldom goes by here when you don’t hear an ambulance. Beepobeepobeepo. Perhaps they are police cars. I never used to pay attention to whether there is a difference between the siren of an ambulance and that of a police car. And I paid no attention to the murderess-mothers either. I didn’t read any papers. When I had to take the children to the doctor’s, I leafed through the magazines in the waiting room, that was all. I didn’t follow the news. Neither did M. We had no time.
Sister Virginie says that the nuns in the convent watch the news every day at one o’clock and at seven, and that I can watch with them. ‘We’re not unworldly,’ she says. ‘How could we pray for the world if we didn’t know the world?’ How could they have prayed for me if they hadn’t followed the stream of reports about me? And then she opens her prayer book and shows the photo of me in her missal. My photo in a prayer book!
