desk before continuing—Catechism in classroom four. Experience had shown that the boys found learning the texts by heart difficult, so they started them early, in August. I suddenly wondered how on earth my father had managed to get me a job as a teacher in a Catholic school. I wasn’t christened, hadn’t attended church as a child, had not received my first Communion and had never been instructed in religious subjects. The finger had stopped tapping and was frozen in mid-air like a hook.
‘The classroom is at the end of the corridor,’ she said. The hook straightened out as she pointed in its direction. ‘Incidentally, it will also be your classroom.’
So there I was, on a Friday afternoon under a sunny cotton-wool sky, peeking in through the window of my classroom. And there they were. Caught in a shaft of light slanting down from the tall window. My class. The boy in the first row was sitting on his own. He was wearing a smart white shirt. His hair was combed to the side, parted on the right. I would have bet my last cent on his name being Marcus Verschoppen. I recognized the twins, too: scrawny, ginger-haired boys. I looked at the sombre walls, the portraits of the Belgian Kings, the cupboard with its halo of grime, and high above the blackboard, directly over the portrait of King Leopold II, Jesus Christ.
In my mind, I started decorating the almost maliciously bare classroom with wall charts, drawings by the boys and poems. I imagined the children’s voices and the music that would bring it back to life. I would even put these abandoned windowsills to use. I jumped when a hard object hit the window with a bang, cracking the pane. It was then they spotted me—a new face, caught peering in through the window. They stared at me for several seconds, united in uncertainty, until the lips of the boy in the second row moved. Then came the laughter, collective, a bomb of voices exploding into the outdoors through the gap underneath the door. I turned and walked away.
-
‘DAVID?’
‘David?’
Opening my eyes, I saw my little brother’s head as a dark patch in the semi-darkness of the room. He was sitting upright, his knees pulled up. A block of moonlight tumbled in through the skylight, from nowhere.
‘What is it?’
‘Why don’t bears have long tails?’ he asked.
I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’
‘No! Now!’
He used to do that to my parents, too. Every time they went to bed, he would be sitting cross-legged in his cot, wide awake. My mother said it was the fault of the noisy steps, that the creaking woke him. He didn’t make a sound, until my parents had changed into their nightclothes and climbed into bed, and the house had gone eerily quiet—then he started. Question after question. I was sometimes jolted from my sleep too, in my room on the other side of the landing. Not by his reedy voice, or Mother’s answers. But by Father. By the sound of his spanking my brother’s bottom to get him to stop. Or his thundering string of curses just before the spanks. Then came the crying, which only stopped when Mother got out of bed and cradled him in her arms. They argued about it. Mother wanted to keep my brother in their room a little longer, while Father, who had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work, wanted to throw him out, cot and all.
His questions were usually about animals. That was my doing. During the day, I dragged him through the garden where we lifted the patio flagstones and watched the earthworms, ants and woodlice panic as the roof of their world disappeared. Some frantically tried to crawl away, others scrambled through exposed tunnels, creeping and writhing over each other. We bored into holes and crevices with sticks, digging out eggs and larvae. Then we would stroll down the gravel path to the kitchen garden without giving the garden shed, its windows covered in fairy-tale cobwebs, a second glance. To the hedge. That was the boundary. Pointing through the hornbeam hedge to the woods, I told him that large, wild animals lived there: foxes, deer, badgers. Even wild boars with curved tusks. Bears and wolves, too, I whispered with wide-open eyes. At that point, he’d turn round and run inside. In the evening, the questions rose like bubbles in the descending silence of the night.
‘Mum? Mum?’
‘Shush. Keep it down. Dad needs his sleep,’ Mother whispered.
‘How many wolves live in the woods?’
‘Wolves? Silly boy. There aren’t any wolves here.’
‘But David says there are.’
I always giggled when I heard that.
‘David is pulling your leg,’ Mother said. ‘I’ll box his ears tomorrow.’
She never did.
‘And bears?’
‘No bears, either.’
‘Mum?’
‘Go to sleep now, or Dad will get angry.’
The morning I woke up to the sound of axe blows and cracking wood, I knew at once what was going on. Looking out of my dormer window, I could see Father chopping up the cot. The image shocked me—the violent blows of the axe, the same one he used to chop the chickens’ heads off.
‘Four’s the perfect number,’ my father told me when I had run downstairs to join him. ‘There won’t be any more.’
He was dragging the chopping block into the garden, to hack the planks into even smaller pieces. His axe came very close to his thumb. At every chop, I was afraid he would lop off his thumb, black-rimmed nail and all. From then on, my little brother and I shared my bed. I was ten at the time, he was four.
He dug his elbow into my side.
‘Why doesn’t the bear have a long tail?’
I didn’t have the faintest idea, but remembered a story from one of the books Mother used to teach us to read.
‘A very long time ago, his tail froze off,’ I said.
‘No it didn’t!’
‘Shhh! Be quiet.’
He was silent for a while, watching the door closely.
‘So how did it happen?’ he asked, once he was satisfied there were no footsteps coming up the stairs and the door stayed shut. Slowly pulling up my knees and clearing my throat with a deep, guttural sound, I tried to remember the rest of the story.
‘The monster awakens from hibernation and rises up from the ice valley,’ I improvized. Giggling, he tried with all his strength to push down my knees. He had never succeeded before. It gave me time to think, to frame my answer to his question in my mind. The wooden bedframe creaked. He was leaning his full weight against my legs. Slowly, I let them slide down.
‘Now tell me!’ he whined.
‘Well, it happened one very cold winter. So cold, the ice on the ponds was thirty centimetres thick,’ I said. I took hold of his hands and held them apart at approximately the right distance.
‘This thick?’ he asked incredulously.
I nodded, looking at the two round spots in his face where his eyes were. Silver moonlight surrounded his head. I went on.
‘Once upon a time,
