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WE 1991

Stefaan is away on business visiting a daughter pharmaceutical company in China. He left three days ago. Sarah watched her parents as they stood intertwined at the front door and heard the disgusting smack of their kisses.

Mieke and Sarah are managing just fine. When Sarah unsuspectingly hops down the garden path to the rhythm of the lively orchestra she conducts in her head, intent on feeding the cheese rinds and old sandwiches from her lunchbox to her feathered, two-footed friends, she pays little attention to the blooming flowers and insects all around her. But she does notice the humming engine of a blue striped station wagon coming up the driveway—on a Sunday, of all days, the only day of the week when everyone in the housing estate is at home. The station wagon parks there in full sight. Mieke is at the front door in a flash.

She throws up her hands in innocence. ‘No idea where Jean-Pierre De Kinder is,’ she tells the officers truthfully. She has learned not to lie or distort the truth to men in uniform. If they suspect she’s lying, they’ll take off their caps during the interminable silence that follows and look straight through her with their myopic little eyes, a trick meant to humiliate her so thoroughly that the truth can be extracted without effort. If she comes right out and tells the unvarnished truth of her own accord, the station wagon will disappear from the driveway more quickly, and the neighbours—those sluggards on the corner, for instance, who lie around in bed until noon—are less likely to have seen it.

‘No idea where Jean-Pierre has gone. He said he had business in South Africa. I haven’t heard anything from him in months.’

‘Neither have we,’ says the officer. ‘We’ve come for something else. Is your husband at home, perhaps?’

‘No, he’s on a business trip in China.’

‘Do you know a Mrs. Melanie Plottier?’

‘That’s my mother-in-law,’ says Mieke.

‘It is our duty to inform you,’ says the officer, eyes downcast, voice lowered, ‘that Mrs. Melanie Plottier passed away this morning. She had a frontal collision with a tree. Her seat belt was not fastened and unfortunately her head impacted the steering wheel. All efforts to save her came too late.’

‘That can’t be true, sir. Granny is deaf and blind.’ Mieke is begging them to see that she’s right, although she herself saw Granny’s Fiat crawling up the driveway like a zigzagging snail only a couple of weeks ago. ‘Deaf and blind, I tell you.’

‘Indeed it can,’ the officer insists. ‘We’ve seen worse than that.’

‘How is it possible that someone who can’t see a blessed thing and is as deaf as a post is let loose in traffic? It’s simply scandalous that such people are allowed on the public roads. These kinds of things should be heavily fined. For years I’ve been pushing for the mandatory renewal of drivers’ licences every other year, with a test, for everyone, young and old,’ Mieke says belligerently. She seems to believe that by making this speech she can save Granny’s life.

As long as she keeps talking and insisting on a reasonable explanation, she can hold reality at bay. The fact that Granny is dead isn’t the worst of it. It had to happen sometime. But what Mieke dreads like the plague are the practical implications. All her plans for the coming weeks are thrown into disarray. Not that, anything but that.

‘Oh, by the way, ma’am,’ says the officer. ‘We’re supposed to ask you why you sent your mother-in-law out into traffic in her vulnerable condition. But given the dramatic outcome we’ve decided not to pursue that any further.’

‘Is that part of your job description now?’ Mieke asks. ‘To come and blame people for tragic automobile accidents?’

As soon as the bumbling police have left and Mieke is back behind the closed door, the reality of their message hits her. Granny has never had a word to say to her, never even deigned to look at her. Mieke was too chic, too upper crust, too nervous, too this and too that. She in turn found her mother-in-law a singularly insufferable female. They had tacitly agreed to keep out of each other’s way or, at the very most, to limply shake each other’s hands in caustic silence if it couldn’t be avoided. Nothing can break that silence now. But Mieke is the one who’s been saddled with Granny’s death. What’s this going to involve? To begin with, Mieke will have to notify Stefaan, make a lot of phone calls, dress the child in black, throw together a wardrobe for herself, help her husband, arrange for the funeral, and comb all the rugs. Granny is the last elder to go. Mieke has drawn up a checklist from previous funerals. But even though all funerals look alike, every funeral is different.

Stefaan returns immediately from China, blaming himself the whole time for letting Granny drive the car. As soon as he arrives home, calm and collected, Mieke tells him what one of the police officers had just reported to her on the phone. Melanie had had a heart attack first, which is what caused her to drive into the tree. It was a painless death, if that’s any consolation. Utterly silent, Stefaan swallows his words and his tears.

After a day of desolation and phone calls from distant family members, Stefaan wants to have a talk with Sarah. He says this with his back to Sarah while blowing his nose ferociously into a kitchen towel. Mieke sees this and shudders. She feels like pushing his tear-streaked face into the towel like a naughty kitten, but the choking that would produce is palpable enough. The entire weight of all the family tragedies that Granny managed to endure with her peasant strength has now been shifted to Stefaan’s shoulders. The weight gets heavier with every death.

‘That’s what heaven is, Sarah: tiny little bits that search for each other because together they form one whole thing. Those little bits disappear and the later generations push another row upward,’ he says to Sarah as if he were explaining Mendeleev’s periodic table. He puts his hand on her head, stands up, and walks to the living room. Bob Dylan’s ‘Every Grain of Sand’ fills the air. It’s the bootleg version with a German shepherd barking in the background. Sarah knows this song. She hears the docility in every one of the twanging phrases.

Stefaan goes to the bathroom and washes his face with cold water. He peers into the mirror. ‘Do you realize that you and Sarah are the only remaining members of the Vandersanden family?’ we ask him in chorus. ‘The only ones. And it’s all your fault.’ We point an accusatory finger at him, at a couple of moments in Stefaan’s history that were better left unsaid, a list of crude blunders that he cannot undo. He takes down a rough towel that’s been dried outside on the line and rubs it long and hard all over his face, as if this can scrub away all his troubles.

On the morning of the funeral a limousine drives past the villa at number 7 Nightingale Lane. This was Granny’s wish. A bizarre detail. She has permitted herself this one frivolous act after a life filled with nondescript scenes that were remarkable only in their normality, edged with the black fringe of tragedy.

‘The notary is drunk,’ Stefaan has said over and over again. ‘This can’t have been my mother’s wish.’ But the limousine comes by anyway, just to be on the safe side, since that’s what it says in the last will and testament of Melanie Vandersanden-Plottier. In the same will she has also instructed that she be buried with her little son and her husband.

The family of three rides behind the hearse, where the coffin is bobbing around inside. A closed coffin, the undertaker has emphasized. He didn’t even let them choose. A limousine is a Hollywood invention, so Sarah grabs her chance to play movie star, just this once, for just a little while. She sits in the back seat, waving at the crowds on the way to the church like a leading lady about to pick up her Oscar. Sarah’s not what you would call glamorous in her black nun’s skirt, but even so she puts on her prettiest smile.

‘A limo and my mother. There’s no way that makes any sense. And cut it out, Sarah.’

The one everyone feels sorry for is Stefaan. He spent five long hours last night busily placing service booklets on the chairs of the church and penning a little poem, his last greeting to his sullen mother. At four in the morning he was still in the attic thumbing through photo albums. He also knows perfectly well that his mother wasn’t going to live forever and that she quite probably felt her own death approaching, but it’s the smell of death that makes his flesh crawl, that throws him back to a place he doesn’t want to be. It’s cold there, it’s bleak, and he hears the cracking of ice.

‘It’s the death of your little brother, too, isn’t it,’ says Mieke. ‘That’s coming back, too.’

‘No,’ says Stefaan curtly.

Before getting out of the limousine he takes another sedative at Mieke’s urging. She’s never seen her husband so shaken and devastated. It’s not as if it’s never happened before, though. Every now and then he has to stay home from work because his nerves are wound too tight. Just lying in bed, brooding and moaning, you’d never see a woman doing that. Mieke reads the brief text he’s written as a goodbye to his mother, going over it several times. She’s keeping in mind the possibility that she will have to read it aloud to the gathered mourners. Anticipation is her best friend in crisis situations. Half an hour later it’s quite clear that Stefaan isn’t fit to read anything aloud. The sedative is much too strong; not only does it dull his feelings but it also makes him experience the funeral through a heavy fog. He can barely stumble to the front of the church. Mieke takes him by the arm and leads him to his place, and with a gracious, not too cheerful smile she steps up to the lectern and reads out the corny bit of poetry.

The evening of the funeral they drive past the home of the deceased one more time to appraise the general condition of Granny’s residence. The house of Stefaan’s mother is not the home he grew up in but a new rudimentary structure full of dried flowers and air fresheners. Stefaan is planning to clear the house out as soon as possible and rent it.

‘Do we really have to look at it today?’ asks Mieke. ‘What’s the hurry? It’s not on fire, is it?’

‘Berta,’ Stefaan says. He wants to be strong, as he was after the death of his father. Not letting things slide, but dealing with them. It’s Stefaan’s strategy for combating grief: fighting back by taking his fate in hand, organizing a game of arm wrestling to see who’s the strongest, himself or his grief. Sarah is the first to discover that the stubborn dwarf goat has turned her shaggy back on her allocated bit of grass and sallied forth into the wide world. At her prodding, Mieke searches for a photo of Sarah and Granny with Berta the goat clamped between them. The plan is to cut Berta out, photocopy her picture, and distribute it throughout the neighbourhood under the heading ‘MISSING’.

The days that follow are mainly taken up with the requisite driving back and forth to the recycling centre. The glass container gets a bellyful, an entire cellar of freight. Most of it consists of empty bottles of an old-fashioned anise liqueur known as Marie Brizard, a liqueur that hits you over the head like a hammer, so stupefying that you sit in an armchair in silence from morning to night while the world passes you by and your goat comes to look at you through the window every now and then.

Mieke, who has spent days on end doing her very best to resist spewing venom all over Granny out of a sense of decency, and also out of a kind of protective reflex for her badly shaken, grieving husband, gradually returns to familiar territory.

‘All those little side tables,’ says Mieke, ‘with all those glass rings on them. Just like Gustave, the lush, who rented my house in Ghent for only a year, thank God. How could you not have seen them!’

Anyone who’s ever emptied out the house of someone who has died has bumped into little things with a long history. A hairpin stuck behind the frame of a photo of her deceased son, a whole supply of Fisherman’s Friend breath fresheners, useless bowls full of unused, brittle elastic bands, a comb with only three teeth, modern Adidas sport shoes with Velcro closures that the old lady loved to wear on her home trainer out on the porch. A life that you carry off, relocate, recycle. No one comes away unmoved.

All four of the parents of Mieke and Stefaan are dead. The roof above their heads has been blown away. They’re next, Mieke realizes. And who will they leave behind? Sarah. They waited a long time for Sarah. It never seemed to work. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. They kept it up to the point of weariness, but there are defects in nature, too. Mother Nature has her forests and her deserts. Mieke was more a rather arid place.

For a long time Mieke has wanted to keep a diary. Now there’s only one thing standing in the way and that’s Mieke’s sense of duty. As the product of an overly Catholic, old-fashioned upbringing, Mieke has to give herself permission to do something that has no immediate purpose. Writing down your thoughts in a large notebook doesn’t really do anybody any good. But Mieke excels in convoluted arguments: she finds secret ways to fool herself into thinking that not only should she write such a book but that it is even her duty to do so, for posterity. And that, fortunately, takes all the pleasure out of it. Once again she feels safely constricted in her corset of duties, and under this compulsion she begins keeping a close eye on her daughter, searching for funny remarks and spontaneous (or not so spontaneous) slips of the tongue to give her diary more colour. For an outsider, such an addiction to duty might seem agonizing, but once you’re addicted you discover what an exceedingly pleasant and engrossing way of life it is.

Yet sometimes she secretly hopes for a little peace and quiet. Stefaan or Elvira ought to insist that she put on the brakes once in a while because she does everything she can to keep active, to demand the most from herself, and occasionally to reach so deeply into her reserves that when she gets up in the morning she’s already dizzy from a whole night of brooding about what has to be done the following day.

Mieke begins her diary like a friendship book, the kind that young girls used to circulate among themselves. What word should she use to describe herself? Say someone asked her who she is. What if her name just wasn’t enough? What if someone were to say: okay, fine, Mieke Vandersanden-De Kinder, but who are you really? How can you define yourself in a way that’s more or less conclusive?

She would never answer ‘a woman’ because she’s no feminist. Feminists are angry women who want to be men. That’s wrong. The world would be in terrible shape with only men in it.

‘Sister of Jean-Pierre De Kinder’ is something else she would never say, although she loves Jempy very, very much. There’s no real reason for it. He never saved her from drowning or stepped in to help her on those dates that never took place behind the church. It’s just the fact that for his entire life he’s always been his audacious self. What he lacks in resources he makes up for in charm and charisma. But if she were to say all that out loud she’d be tying herself up in knots, because she’d have to explain the whole endless story of Jempy and his adventures. Now he’s in South Africa. In all likelihood he’s doing well, since she hasn’t heard anything from him for a very long time. Unless he’s calmly drinking up his whole stock of wine. Oh dear oh dear, could that be true? She writes ‘CALL JP’ in her notebook. Jempy is a master of cliff-hangers. That’s what she appreciates most about him. At the same time it irritates her no end—that, too.

‘Sister of Lydia De Kinder’ then? Yes, of Lydia De Kinder, wife of Professor Christopher J. Delaney, engineer, who occupies a chair at Columbia University. His field is materials science, with a specialty in superconductivity (Lydia always drones on). Lydia with her four children. Mieke as sister in the shadows, in other words. No one in the chic town of Ghent, in upstate New York, has ever heard of Mieke De Kinder; she’d bet her life on it.

She could say ‘daughter of Gerard and Camille De Kinder’. She honours her deceased parents—that goes without saying—but what did her mother Camille ever do to improve herself? The answer is a terribly sobering ‘nothing’, except being wife-of. Melanie, Stefaan’s mother, was a farmer’s wife. She was much more in control. And as soon as she retired, she joined the Farmers’ Wives Union to become a surly participant in the card-playing afternoons and homeland pilgrimages.

You’re mainly the family that you make yourself, that’s what she thinks. ‘Wife of Stefaan Vandersanden’: that’s who she is. So she was never daughter-in-law of Granny Vandersanden. Supposing someone asked her who she was. She’d probably answer: ‘First of all I’m the mother of Sarah.’ That’s what Noor, queen of Jordan, said in an interview recently.

Good, so she’s mother of Sarah Vandersanden. But what does that mother of Sarah Vandersanden do? Is she a housewife? Also very degrading. A diary fanatic? Something to work toward. This diary is going to be her project, because she knows enough about herself to realize that she needs something else in her life besides her family. That’s a nice insight to begin with. Mieke closes the notebook, puts it away in the drawer of the desk and goes to the living room to remove withered leaves from the indoor plants.

Stefaan longs for a place of his own for keeping his music, his tools, and his heirlooms in order. He demands a hobby room. ‘A hobby room?’ Mieke sputters. ‘Are you going to start inventing hobbies?’ When he tells her about the old tools from his parents’ farm and how he wants to polish them, Mieke becomes more receptive to the idea. ‘You mean a shed, a junk shed?’ Stefaan gets her blessing for his hobby shed, to be built at the back of the garden. Before he even has a chance to consider his plan from a broader perspective, she has gone ahead and consulted with Elvira, her good friend and arbiter of taste, and drummed up an architect and a construction firm. An official from environmental planning also shows up, who is pleased to receive a fat tip. For Mieke, a new project has presented itself on which she can direct her energies.

A chain reaction is unavoidable. Now that Papa’s getting a hobby shed, Sarah wants a pond. Stefaan is dead set against this ‘ridiculous’ idea and blocks it with a well-considered argument: ‘Out of the question. You like cats, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ says the unsuspecting prey.

‘Cats drown in ponds,’ Stefaan points out.

‘Squirrels dip their dirty, germ-infested tails in them and infect the whole biotope,’ Mieke chimes in. A pond is kitsch and kitsch is the bastard child of style and class. Before you know it there’ll be a gnome with a fishing pole on your lawn or a stone frog with a little crown on his head. No, nip it in the bud, that nonsense.

Mieke supervises the work on the hobby shed with heart and soul. Putting up an extra outbuilding—her father would have been proud to see her carrying out this ancient Flemish custom. It’s thanks to her eagle eye and the managerial capacities mastered by every housewife that within scarcely three weeks a miniature house is erected in the back garden with hot and cold running water, electricity, a desk, a sturdy workbench, and a whole battery of tools on the fibreboard walls. Gutters lead the rainwater from the roof to the cistern, and the tiles on the floor form a fleur-de-lis pattern.

The evening of the project’s completion, Mieke makes an exception and lets Stefaan drink two glasses of red wine instead of the customary ration of one. For inexplicable reasons she tears into him in bed that night, demanding sex twice without any fuss or wheedling, as if they were a couple of kids—or at least that’s how Stefaan imagines that kind of sex to be: turbulent, awkward, deeply satisfying. For a moment the thought flashes through his mind that maybe he’s made a new child, but he knows that those days are gone forever.

Stefaan is reborn the first evening he sets a ladder against the outer wall of his hobby shed and climbs up on the roof. He knows that from now on things can only get better. No more valleys, only peaks. Although peaks are also valleys standing on their heads.