said he would show him a place to find food. The bear knew the fox and his pranks, but was far too hungry to be suspicious. The fox told him to make a hole in the ice, and with his last strength, the bear managed to do it. Then the fox told him to sit on the hole dangling his tail in the water and wait for a fish to bite; he had tried it himself and it had worked like a charm.’
Out loud, the story sounded ridiculous. I knew he didn’t believe me, but he hung on my words all the same.
‘Then, the hunters came.’
I shouldered an imaginary rifle and closed one eye to take aim, which he couldn’t see in the dark.
‘And then? And then?’
He pulled down my arm, bending my thumb so far the joint cracked.
‘The fox escaped, of course. The bear wanted to, but his tail was frozen in the ice. He was stuck fast. He twisted and turned his bum, while the voices of the approaching hunters came ever closer. Panicking, he pushed and pulled, harder and harder … until his tail snapped off.’
My brother pondered for a while, then laughed in my face.
‘What a load of rubbish,’ he said, his voice more breath than sound.
‘It is, actually,’ I admitted. ‘But it could have happened that way. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It would have hurt the bear, when his tail started freezing. Animals don’t like being hurt, either.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, glad he had thought of that himself.
‘Sleep tight, Ratface.’
I called my brother Ratface, a name I gave him when he was less than a year old. Not because his hair was short and spiky; on the contrary—it was white and fine, and there was so much of it that people sometimes mistook it for a white cap when Mother took him to the bakery or the butcher’s shop in the village. She laughed about it.
‘People who say that are talking through their hats,’ Father said when she told us.
I called him Ratface because for months, he only had two incisors in his lower gums, and my parents started to worry whether the other teeth would ever come through.
-
MR VANTOMME LIVED close to the school. I knocked at the door and waited. Then I peeked through the semi-transparent net curtain, but nothing moved. I knocked again. No sign of life. Only by shielding the sides of my face against the sun was I able to detect movement inside, which turned out to be a cat, lazily stretching itself on the back of an armchair. Then I spotted an envelope, folded four times and wedged into a gap in the window frame. I wrenched it free, flattened the paper and saw the name Mr Bucht – 91 scribbled on it. Inside the envelope was a key. I slipped it into my trouser pocket and walked in the direction of Boezinge, to the house on number 91.
The key didn’t fit. I fumbled at the lock, pushed my shoulder against the door while trying to turn the key, tugged at it when that didn’t work, forced the key deeper into the keyhole, tried turning again, but the door wouldn’t open. Maybe I could get in through the back door. The garden was a mass of weeds. The key didn’t fit there, either. At the back of the garden, I saw a wooden shack with a heart carved into the door. I went back to the front and decided to kill the time sitting on the doorstep. Involuntarily, my thoughts wandered. The boys I saw earlier that day. Ratface could have been one of them. I had become used to the moments my thoughts turned to him, to seeing flashes of his presence in everyday objects, in animals, in the movement of an arm or a leg. My bum was starting to hurt. I stood up to walk back to Mr Vantomme’s house. This time, he was at home. I introduced myself politely and shook his hand. He smacked his lips. When I told him the key didn’t fit, he gave me a bewildered look, turned on the heels of his threadbare slippers and mumbled something to a row of photographs as he shuffled past them down the hall. He could hardly walk. I thought I saw some kind of lump between his legs, but decided that had probably been a pocket of air caught in the fabric of his oversized trousers. A moment later, a similar key was stuffed into my hand. He assured me this was the right one and apologized for the misunderstanding, saying he was but an old man, burdened with a failing memory. He asked me whether I had brought my wife and children along, as life would be lonely without them. And did I want a cup of coffee, because his wife had been dead these ten years and now his bitch Penny had also died last week.
‘Cancer,’ he said pityingly. ‘Body covered in lumps. Same as my own late wife. Can such a disease be passed from humans to dogs? Through a flea or mosquito bite, perhaps?’
I said it didn’t seem likely to me, that it was kind of him to offer me a cup of coffee, but that my journey had tired me out and I would prefer to go home.
The lock turned with a click, and the door opened without a squeak or creak. A promising start. The plainness of the living room also appealed to me: a table and two chairs, an armchair in the corner next to the window, and next to the stove, which was a kind of potbelly stove, a larder cabinet.
‘Everything a man needs,’ I mused. The back door didn’t open quite as smoothly. There was the shack with the heart door again. I cleared a path through the thistles and nettles until I reached it. The door handle came loose in my hand and didn’t seem to fit the mouldered hole when I tried pushing it back in. Leaving the door ajar, I pulled down my trousers. The seat felt damp, and I realized a moment too late that I didn’t have anything to wipe myself with. Some kind of large leaf would do. I emptied my bowels, hoping there was no one around to hear the repulsive noise. Through the cracks in the wall I could see a magnificent pink-orange haze where the sun had set. Standing up reluctantly with wet buttocks, I pulled my underpants up to my knees and hobbled to the weeds, in search of my leaf. Amazingly, I found just the thing, a broad leaf on a thick stem—probably rhubarb. I tore it off, bent over and wiped my backside. A cat in heat was wailing somewhere.
I climbed the stairs to look for my bed. With a bit of luck, it would even be made, though I doubted it when I saw the state of the stairs. Every other step was cracked. A recipe for a broken leg. I wasn’t disappointed when I entered the bedroom: there was a bed, even if it looked more like a large trough. And a mattress, too, or rather a bag filled with old straw, but soft enough. No sheets. It would do for now. The nights weren’t very cold yet.
I pictured myself lying there. My hands crossed on my belly. My feet side by side. Just like Ratface had lain at his wake. What if I died here in my sleep? Who would be the first to find me? Mr Vantomme? But he had a hard enough time walking, never mind climbing the stairs. He’d send over some handyman or other, in which case my body would be carried downstairs by a complete stranger. Perhaps he’d fall down through the cracks in the steps, corpse and all, giving me a posthumous skull fracture and brain haemorrhage. Blood leaking out of my ears. Soaking my hair. Just like Ratface’s. Scolding myself for my cowardly fretting, I turned to one side.
The caterwauling started again, closer this time. After yearning for silence for thirty torturous minutes, I got out of bed and tried to open the attic window. It was sealed shut. Besides, I didn’t have anything at hand I could have hurled at the creature, which I suspected was sitting in the roof gutter. Standing outside, in the light of a mottled moon, I couldn’t make it out anywhere. I climbed back into my trough, where I tossed and turned before finally going to sleep: the sea was rippling silver. I stared vacantly at the crestless waves. My feet stepped over the glistening silver and onto the sand, which gave way under the heels of my boots. Waves crashing against a distant rocky coast, my footprints walking away from the sea. Everything was silent. And I was alone. No squealing, naked women running up to me, breasts bobbing up and down to the rhythm of their steps. A bank of fog
