Herman smiled and looked as well. Now he saw the cadavers in razor-sharp relief. Then they went all blurry again.
‘Magda’ll come by later to pick up some of your pâté,’ Walter continued. ‘Set aside a nice big slab for her.’
Bracke’s Blaashoek Pâté. Herman realized he urgently needed to whip up another batch. Today.
‘I’ll be going, you’ve got your hands full here,’ Walter said, placing his foot on the pedal, ready to push off.
‘Do you hear them too, at night?’ asked Herman.
Walter took his foot off the pedal.
‘Pardon?’
Herman hesitated.
‘Do you hear them too, the turbines?’
In Walter’s face were the eyes of the gaping sheep.
‘Do I hear … I’m not sure I get your drift.’
‘I thought maybe you also … that you …’
Now Walter looked as if he felt the cold metal of the electric pistol in his neck that would turn him into a lamb chop.
‘Never mind.’
The postman squeezed Herman’s shoulder. ‘You take these little piggies to market, and I’ll deliver a few more bills.’
He winked and rode off. Herman followed the sinewy body and the dark mop of hair, and wondered if he was the only one who heard the turbines. That couldn’t be. Surely the drone deprived someone else of a good night’s sleep? The awful idea that he alone lay awake night after night, that he alone endured that torture, made his spine stiffen. As though he dangled in the delivery van among those hunks of meat.
He looked over the rooftops and saw them.
‘Monsters,’ he muttered.
◆
A new girl had come to live in the subsidized housing. Walter inspected the name on the envelope. He peered through the letter slot, as though she might be standing there on the other side, waiting for him. Nothing but an empty hallway. He smiled at his own foolish thought, pushed the letter through the slot and rode, whistling, to the next mailbox.
◆
Saskia Maes did not wake up from the clatter of the letter slot. She had already been awake for about an hour, waiting for the moment that she might hear the postman, in the almost unbearable hope that he would not pass her by again today. She had given up waiting for the clatter; the hope had turned to certainty that today, too, she would receive no answer. Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing her a letter? Letters got written to important people. Not to a nobody like Saskia Maes. No, she had to face facts: she stood at the bottom of the social ladder. Not on the second rung, not even on the lowest one. She was a piece of lint under the mat where people wiped their feet. That is what she was thinking when Walter De Gryse pushed an envelope addressed to her through the slot.
She sprang out of bed, threw on her bathrobe, ran—skipped—through her ground-floor apartment, opened the door and peered into the hallway. There it lay, just behind the front door, a white rectangle that beckoned her the way a banknote beckons a homeless person. She trotted into the hall, the blood flowing thicker and faster through the veins in her throat, and her eyes latched onto the envelope. She was halfway through the hall when she got a massive slap in the face. Not from an open palm, but from the realization that the letter was not for her. She stood still for a moment. The letter was for Bienvenue, the Senegalese asylum seeker who lived upstairs. Of course! How could she be so stupid as to think otherwise? Because you just are stupid, a voice in her head answered.
She gingerly approached the letter, her legs wobbly and her eyes fixed on the still-illegible address. Then she noticed that the name above the address was short. Too short to be Bienvenue’s unpronounceable full name. Her heart leapt. And then she saw it clearly: ‘Ms. Saskia Maes’, in elegant feminine handwriting. Underneath: ‘Blaashoekstraat 27’. There should have been an ‘A’ after the number, because she lived in apartment A and Bienvenue in apartment B, but that was a technicality. Now more than ever it was just a detail, now there was proof that someone considered her worth writing to, and that within a few seconds she would know what they had to say. Above the address was something else that made her heart skip a beat: the logo of the insurance company in the city. It was the letter she had been expecting for days now.
The envelope tore open under her nervous fingers.
The letter was folded neatly into thirds, with only the address, the date and the salutation visible.
Dear Ms. Maes, it said. They called her ‘Ms.’, and ‘Dear’! A wave of pride flowed through her body. That pride evaporated when she read the rest of the letter.
Dear Ms. Maes,
Thank you for your interest in the position of secretarial staff member. We have studied your application thoroughly and I regret to tell you that your qualifications do not meet those necessary for this vacancy.
We will keep your résumé in our files for future reference. Should there be an opening more suited to your profile, you will be most welcome to submit a new application.
Yours sincerely,
Severine Baes
Director, Personnel and HR
Severine Baes, what an impressive name, Saskia thought, although she had no idea what HR meant. She folded the letter back into the envelope and shuffled to the apartment. Severine Baes’s last name might differ from hers by just one letter, but their lives were worlds apart. She could understand it, the rejection letter. They had studied her résumé and had come to the only logical conclusion: that she was not fit to participate in society. Her initial pride sank in her stomach like a hunk of congealed fat. She was stupid, homely and useless. And a weakling, for she was unable to hold back the tears. There was only one thing she could do: crawl back into bed and allow Zeppos, her three-month-old cocker spaniel, to lick her tears dry.
◆
There was no pâté. Magda De Gryse already saw as much. She was third in line at Herman’s Quality Meats, after old Mrs. Deknudt and the wife of that stinking-rich veterinarian Lietaer. Her relief at the refreshing coolness of the butcher shop was short-lived. While Mrs. Deknudt read out her order she had plenty of time to inspect Herman’s deli counter. After allowing her gaze to drift over the farmer’s brochettes and country steaks, she noticed a gap between the Beauvoorde pâté and the chopped liver. That gap was where the summer pâté—or what Herman rather ludicrously called ‘Bracke’s Blaashoek Pâté’—should have been. But now there was a gap as empty as the skull of her dear Walter.
She sighed and had a good look at Herman, who by mistake had just wrapped up 500 grams of steak tartare instead of ground beef, and had to start again. When he reached over the counter for the container of tartare, his hair fell in greasy strands over his sweaty forehead. His hands trembled. His usually rosy cheeks were pale, while the swollen skin under his eyes was a gruesome shade of purple. He settled up with Mrs. Deknudt. Where was Claire, anyway? Off shopping for dresses in the city again?
‘Really, Herman,’ Deknudt said, ‘now you’ve given me back a twenty instead of a ten.’
