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MIEKE 1997

‘No luck?’ Mieke asks. Stefaan comes sauntering into the parlour. He’s been working in his shed for scarcely ten minutes. He smiles cautiously. Long ago, in the notary’s office where they first saw each other, he smiled at her in the same way. Back then she thought he was just shy. Mieke doesn’t know why he’s giving her that wordless smile now. She doesn’t see the humour in what she’s doing: arranging chocolates in three levels on a silver tray. She had to reach deep into the cabinet, behind the gold-rimmed plates and the heavy box with the silverware, to bring the tray out into the daylight. The tray is too beautiful and too impractical to use very often.

‘You try keeping it clean and polished if you have a whole family, a flower garden, and masses of antique rugs to look after,’ she says to Stefaan. ‘And where’s the cake server gone to? It’s unbelievable—just when I need it. Would Sarah have run off with it?’ She knows that Sarah purloins the mascara and tweezers from the maternal sanctum, so why wouldn’t she steal a silver cake server?

‘What’s happening tomorrow again?’ Stefaan asks with a smile. Is he excusing himself by smiling? She can tell him the same thing a hundred times but he doesn’t seem to absorb it. When he does the grocery shopping he’s sure to forget at least one product, as if forgetting was on the list as well. Sometimes he’ll suddenly storm into the hallway, only to come back after thirty seconds muttering, ‘What was I going to do again?’ She sometimes wonders what planet he lives on.

‘Elvira’s coming tomorrow for coffee.’ She’s said this to Stefaan at least twice. It’s been a long time since her bosom friend Elvira dropped in, busy as her life is.

‘Ah, Elvira, of course,’ says Stefaan. ‘I read that you can have your name changed for five thousand francs. You might tactfully mention that to Elvira.’

Even when they were together at boarding school ‘Elvira’ was considered an outdated name, but the choice of name probably had something to do with her origins. Elvira comes from very chic people, Mieke explains. Her husband doesn’t understand that kind of explanation. He starts poking at the mirror with his thick fingers.

‘The mirror really isn’t clean,’ he says quietly. It’s the antique mirror inherited from her parents, who were given the mirror by Baron Courtier. Her father did a lot of notarial business for him. The spots that Stefaan thinks he sees are flames in the copper background. A man can’t see such things.

‘Get away from that and help me here. Go get the step ladder and give me that blue Val Saint-Lambert vase,’ says Mieke, standing next to the big antique cabinet in the living room. ‘I asked Sarah to polish it. Now I’m curious.’

Stefaan grabs a chair, stands on it, and stretches as far as he can. ‘Stefaan, please, standing on the chair in your shoes. Have a little respect for our things.’ With a great deal of difficulty he succeeds in hooking the crystal vase with his forefinger and pulling it toward him. He hands it down to the anxious Mieke.

‘Just what I thought,’ says Mieke, turning the vase around. ‘As filthy as a cow’s backside. You really have to do everything yourself.’

‘Shall I give it a wash?’

‘No, never mind. You’ve helped enough. I’d rather you looked to see if the chickens have enough water. The poor things aren’t being treated properly here at all. You really should pay more attention to them. If you have animals you’ve got to take good care of them. At least that’s what I think.’

The house is her domain. The hobby shed and the chickens are his. She keeps her house up in her own way, preferably with as little interference as possible. Mieke spends the next hour working up a storm behind the closed doors of the kitchen and living room. Sarah is in her room practising new guitar chords. The gnarled chords play havoc on Mieke’s nerves, as if someone were sounding an alarm in code. Fortunately she has a vacuum cleaner to drown out the ghastly music. On she works, polishing feverishly, as if she were trying to keep ahead of Elvira who could walk in on her any minute with a big telescope to observe the secret preparations.

‘Stefaan!’ she shouts an hour later, running out with a red face. ‘Stefaan! We’ve been burgled!’

‘No!’

‘They took the cake server.’

‘Boy, you really scared me.’

‘But they stole the cake server!’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Well it’s true! The cake server is always in the same place. You know I’m very consistent about that. Sarah doesn’t have the cake server either. I’ve already asked her.’

Theft is the only other logical explanation. Mieke begins formulating a profile of the perpetrator. A very special kind of thief has broken in, a thief who isn’t interested in the safe in the office cabinet hidden behind a whole bunch of binders, who also doesn’t care about the expensive art nouveau Horta vases or about all of Mieke’s twenty-four carat jewellery, but a thief who is interested in only one thing: a cake server.

‘That silver cake server is an heirloom from my father’s mother’s mother. Of course thieves would be interested in it.’

The thief went about his work so artfully that he managed to outwit the high-tech alarm system. It’s a balanced alarm system with fifteen all-seeing eyes mounted at crucial locations near entrances, garage doors, and windows that register the least bit of movement, such as the eyelash of a passing bat or a human being who unsuspectingly gets out of bed to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. Immediately, faster than the speed of sound, the alarm goes off at the Securitas surveillance company and the police station. Within a millisecond both the police and Securitas are at your front door. In the meantime, the alarm system is lowing like five million cows whose udders are being kicked.

Her husband and Sarah are mobilized to search for fingerprints and footprints belonging to the thief, who presumably was so clever that he struck during the day, thereby sidestepping their ingenious alarm system.

She prods her lethargic husband to call the police. His attempt to calm her down just adds fuel to her fire. After increasingly impassioned counterarguments from Mieke, the head of the household shambles reluctantly to the phone in the hope that Sarah, his offspring, will hasten to help him by uttering the liberating cry that the cake server has turned up. Just when Stefaan has explained the situation to the police in the most shrouded terms as ‘a possible break-in’, and they have said that they aren’t going to come out for a missing cake server and they wouldn’t even do it for the queen, and after Mieke has wondered out loud—so loud that they can hear it on the other end of the line via Stefaan—why in God’s name the people on the mountain have to pay handfuls of tax money, given the fact that government services refuse to help people, at that very moment Sarah calls out from the cabinet where the cake plates are kept: ‘Found it!’

Now Mieke remembers: she made a mistake when she put everything back five weeks ago. Her neighbour and German scholar Ulrike was paying a call (not: had dropped in for a cup of coffee) and had brought a not excessively large Javanese cake.

‘Good thing the police didn’t come,’ Mieke says, relieved and still shaking. ‘Those people have better things to do anyway. Everything always turns out for the best!’ She waves the cake server around triumphantly. Within a minute her composure is restored. The oxygen has made its way back to her brain.

In the kitchen, ironing the tablecloth a second time, she sees Stefaan standing on the roof of his hobby shed. He is her husband, essentially unfathomable. That’s why you stay with someone, because of all the question marks and surprises that remain despite the familiarity. That’s why, and also because of the lifelong promise to stay together for better or worse, of course. She looks at her quiet, unobtrusive husband.

At ten o’clock that night, as they stand side by side, each at his or her own sink, brushing their teeth, Stefaan asks, ‘Why are you going to so much trouble for Elvira? She’s just your girlfriend, isn’t she?’

‘That’s exactly why,’ says Mieke. ‘I want to give her a proper reception.’

‘It looks as if you feel inferior.’

The friendship between Mieke and Elvira goes way back, all the way to the fifties at boarding school. Through all the intervening years, their friendship has acquired an irreplaceable depth, even though they only see each other a couple of times a year, if that, and though their conversations may strike an outsider as superficial.

Stefaan clicks the bridge out of his mouth and runs it under the tap.

‘Ew, do you always have to show off that disgusting set of teeth? Isn’t it time for a replacement?’

‘Would you rather I didn’t wear it?’ he laughs, opening his gaping mouth wide. ‘That bridge is going to outlive me.’

‘If you intend to die just to be mean, I’ll kill you,’ says Mieke, and she kisses him on the shoulder. ‘And for the hundredth time, dry off that toothbrush!’

He smiles his toothless smile. He lost those teeth on the farm, where they took excellent care of every living creature except the human ones.

The next day, at exactly two twenty-eight, Mieke is sitting in the flowered armchair, in the sleek, uncompromisingly vacuumed showroom interior that is her living room. The subject of Elvira’s divorce will be carefully avoided, as usual. Whether Elvira is really divorced from that German, and exactly what her marital status is, Mieke dare not ask. Mieke’s whole life is contained within the facets, nuances, and shadows of the verb ‘to dare’, especially its negative form. Not true, she says to Stefaan in her own defence when accused of a lack of daring; it’s not a question of daring but of tact. The word ‘tact’ is something her father drilled into her. It’s constantly ringing in her ears. Every time she hears someone ask a young childless couple when they’re going to start their family, every time she senses a shred of heartache in her friend Elvira, the word ‘tact’ begins resounding in her head. It’s her job to receive Elvira tactfully. She cannot place any stumbling blocks on the path of their friendship.

Being discreet is so undervalued these days. Discretion is a sign of deep respect for Elvira. That’s why Mieke never asks about the details of her life, such as her relationships. Each time they’re together she can see how appreciative Elvira is. Any angling for juicy bits is strictly forbidden. It’s a deprivation of freedom. Shoving a painful question under someone’s nose is like holding a pistol to their head. She cannot ask Elvira why her relationship with that blue-eyed German is on the rocks, or if there’s any truth to the rumour that he has a child locked away in an institution somewhere. For her part, Elvira is the only one who has not asked Mieke any questions about her brother Jean-Pierre. She’s probably already caught wind of the stories that he was involved in all kinds of unsavoury business, that he did time in prison for refusing to pay child support, that he’s a womanizer who tears through life in a permanent state of drunken mania and collapses every now and then, only to wrestle with a minor depression. Elvira never asks, parenthetically and ever so delicately, what so many others do: What’s happening with that brother of yours, anyway?

Mieke licks her index finger in order to turn a page of the Home Country magazine lying in her lap when the doorbell rings. It’s not at all unexpected, yet she jumps out of her skin. Mieke runs through the afternoon in her head at top speed and smooths out her skirt.

Elvira travels the world over with the fabulously rich. She’s accustomed to a bit more than a humble abode like this one with a cup of tea, a Marcolini bonbon, and a slice of cake. There hasn’t been any discernible movement at her rose hip-encircled villa a few streets away, not for weeks—not even for months, according to Ulrike. When Elvira isn’t travelling she’s only too glad to switch from the housing estate to her apartment in the European district of Brussels. It’s her proving ground for new conquests, Ulrike claims rather tastelessly.

The doorbell rings again. Oh dear oh dear, she’s too slow, she’s too deep in thought. Through the peephole she sees a bouquet. The spring roses sail in toward her as soon as she opens the door. Then from behind the blushing bouquet Elvira comes into view. Stefaan was the first to notice the similarity between Elvira and Mieke’s sister Lydia: both are strikingly tall, slender figures, close to emaciated, like a drawing in a fashion magazine consisting of a single willowy line on the page. Elvira is a woman who wears Chanel and gets away with it, even better than Coco Chanel would have herself. To tell the truth, Mieke has to admit that Elvira sometimes appears too fashionable, which may be why she attracts the attention of the wrong men. On the other hand, Elvira has it all: that worldly-wise yet distinguished look, the well-timed compliments. The pants suit she’s wearing today fits her perfectly; only she could bring it off.

The two women kiss each other warmly. Of course Elvira wastes no time in complimenting her on the impatiens growing in the front garden. Mieke attaches great value to this exchange of formalities, proof of their years of attentive friendship. Elvira looks a few years younger than the last time they met. At that time she walked in with a furrowed brow and stiffly folded arms, and the conversation was particularly painful.

‘Don’t mind the mess,’ Mieke says.

Mieke and Elvira make quick work of their tried and tested scenario: commenting on the weather, road construction, and each other’s clothing. Barely seated, Elvira confides in Mieke that ‘yet another relationship is on the rocks’, as if she were talking about a relationship between two unknown individuals she was observing from a distance. Mieke is ruthlessly strict when it comes to marital fidelity, but that doesn’t apply to Elvira. Elvira is different. She’s the victim of men who fall for her money. She falls for their charms—or rather, she has a need for vast amounts of love, but the men would rather grope around in her pockets while she murmurs in their ears that the whole world adores them, just to get a compliment in return, just one, just half of one. At dinner parties with couples, Elvira has wisely been showing up alone more and more often in recent years, after having coaxed a couple of idiots to accompany her and probably having read pitying disapproval in the eyes of her girlfriends.

Elvira tells her about her latest conquest, Orlando. He made a vast fortune in the world of commercial art galleries by snatching up a whole roomful of Dubuffets when they were still going for less than five thousand francs per picture. This Orlando kept Elvira dangling for so long that that she finally showed him the door out of sheer misery.

‘Yes,’ says Mieke, ‘they really can string you along.’

‘Orlando,’ says Elvira. ‘God, how could I not have seen it? He spent more time in front of the mirror than I did, and that tells you a lot. He blow-dried his hair every day. Those bracelets, those little gestures—it’s all right as far as it goes, but then going out with all those young guys, it was just too much.’

‘Oh,’ says Mieke. She’s thirsty; she needs a drink. ‘I can understand that. That was just too much.’

‘It’s a setback,’ Elvira concludes. ‘I’m a whole lot happier without him, without all those lonely nights of waiting. It’s much better to go through life alone than with a man who doesn’t give you what you deserve.’

Mieke can agree to that one hundred percent. ‘It’s never simple.’

‘Men,’ Elvira sighs. ‘Wouldn’t it be much easier if you and I were to live together, for instance? It can’t be that hard, can it?’

Mieke’s heart turns somersaults. She searches Elvira’s face. She needs a reaction so she herself can react. Elvira laughs heartily; together they laugh heartily.

‘I think the same thing sometimes,’ Mieke confesses. ‘Women are so much easier.’

In the middle of the conversation, as Elvira is drinking the glass of water she asked for, Mieke suddenly remembers the beautiful bouquet of flowers. Leaving the flowers to perish on the counter in their transparent collar is most ungrateful. She jumps to her feet.

‘How can I be so inattentive,’ she stammers. ‘The flowers.’

‘I’ll keep you company in the kitchen.’

While Mieke frees the flowers from their translucent cellophane in the spotless kitchen, Elvira lets her eyes wander across the lawn and the austere beauty of the bare trees. Mieke fills the waiting blue Val Saint-Lambert vase with water from the tap. She has caught herself smiling. She can’t help it, it just makes her happy, every time Elvira comes here to her house and finds satisfaction in the paltry things that are offered her.

‘What a stunningly beautiful garden you have,’ says Elvira. ‘I ought to spend more time in my villa up here. Believe me, you really miss plants in an apartment. And that boxwood at your front door, that’s a thing worth seeing all by itself.’ It’s true. Sometimes people come to a stop just to gaze at the lovely, dark green boxwood, gleaming with health, as big as a giant’s head. They don’t realize the superhuman attention that such a bush requires. Fortunately gardening is one of Mieke’s favourite activities.

On Wednesday mornings, before school is out, Mieke often drives to the garden centre, where she buys out half the contents of a greenhouse with the help of her credit card. Nature may not pay much attention to her, but she certainly pays a great deal of attention to her country garden. She laid it out herself, rooting around in the soil to drive the weeds from her primroses. She’ll have nothing to do with the Greenpeace hooligans; Mieke is green avant la lettre.

‘I ought to spend more time out in nature,’ Elvira resolves.

‘Oh, Elvira, I’ve seen your patio in Brussels, and the next day I went out and bought the very same terracotta pots. If you look carefully you can see them there next to the boxwood, but they don’t have anywhere near the same effect as yours. Here they look like thimbles.’ Now she’s indirectly insulting Elvira, she thinks.

‘Gosh, how gorgeous,’ Elvira sighs.

‘No!’ Mieke cries in an attempt to hold Elvira back. As if Elvira were being magnetically drawn by the oak tree, she walks right up to the long window in the dining room, behind the open kitchen. How could Elvira be heading for the only spot in the house that Mieke didn’t clean this morning, not even with the vacuum? To divert her attention, she puts the kettle on the stove. ‘Please, Elvira, have a cup of tea. Go sit down and take a piece of cake.’

‘Mieke, do you have anywhere else to go this afternoon?’ Elvira asks over her shoulder, mesmerized by the tamed forest outside.

Mieke is aghast. Elvira doesn’t want to leave already, does she? She can’t, that’s not possible, that’s never happened before. Her legs are trembling. The silver tea pot she’s holding trembles with her. She hears herself emit noises that sound like the babbling of the Indian woman in the film Sarah used to love. ‘Uh, uhm, uh.’

Elvira comes over to her. ‘I’m glad we’re seeing each other again. Shall we just relax and have a cup of coffee?’ She places a hand on Mieke’s trembling forearm.

‘Coffee?’ squeaks Mieke. ‘So no tea then?’ She’s bought five different kinds of terribly expensive tea from the new tea shop in the city. She was assuming that Elvira was still in the caffeine-free phase, as she was the last time. ‘What is it?’ Elvira asks, as she leads her to the living room and helps her into the armchair. ‘You’re so tense. Are you all right?’

‘I’m perfectly fine.’ There are so many reasons to be tense. It’s not that she wants to be tense as such, absolutely not. But there’s so much work. It never stops. There’s never a moment when she can lean back and say: now my work’s done, that’s that.

Elvira, on the other hand, has it easy. She has no steady work. Not that Mieke wants to put Elvira down. For someone with her background, the work she does is astonishingly humble. With her fortune Elvira could just as easily lounge around on a desert island, but she doesn’t do that. She chooses to lead an active, useful life. She has saved a couple of historic buildings from destruction. No one asked her to come to the defence of those buildings; she just did it, out of pure love for the collapsing facades and the miserable interiors. In her own words: she wanted to restore to those rooms something of their former greatness. Blenheim, the British country estate and home of the Churchill family, who were living beyond their means, was consigned to the National Trust partly through Elvira’s intervention. She was at the White House when the First Lady organized a dinner to benefit the restoration of a White House wing. Every year she opens the doors of her parents’ mansion, now renovated and classified as a monument, to a small select group of underprivileged children. They’re invited to spend an entire day looking around and singing. In the evening they’re served a candlelight dinner. It must be an enormous job organizing something like that.

‘Why are you so nervous?’ Elvira asks.

‘I’m not … I don’t know.’ It’s a machine she can’t shut down. The gears keep turning, even when she sleeps.

‘Do you give enough thought to yourself?’ asks Elvira.

‘Yes!’

‘You would come to me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you, Mieke? Whatever it is, I want to help you. Is everything all right between you and Stefaan?’

‘Stefaan is a good man. Everything is fine.’ Mieke is almost choking.

Elvira leaves to go to the bathroom. When she comes back, she launches into an elaborate speech about building preservation. Mieke is so restless that she can barely acknowledge Elvira’s description of the new foundation, whose goal is to raise funds from private sources. There are so many buildings that can use their help. Of course they can’t save them all at once, but they’re going to go about it systematically, supporting a couple of projects each year. Elvira sees something grand and international.

‘There are businessmen in Shanghai, Boston, and London who would like to help restore buildings. The new organization will help their companies free up the necessary capital. We help people put their money to the right use. It’s still embryonic,’ Elvira tells her. ‘I’m still in the exploratory phase, but I wanted to sound you out to see if you’d be willing to assist us with your legal expertise. We could make good use of your persistence as well. It’s a foundation, so we won’t be making any profits, but all expenses will be covered. What I wanted to ask you, in friendship and without obliging you in any way: would you take on the job of treasurer? I’d be very honoured.’

Mieke glances at Elvira from the corner of her eye, at how she pats her lips so meticulously and looks at her with an encouraging nod.

‘What do you think, Mieke?’ she asks quietly. ‘Are you in?’

Half of Mieke, the extremely sceptical, self-protective half, is insulted and thinks: forget it. This is a question meant to snap the poor little housewife out of her lethargy. We’re not falling for that. But her other half literally starts growing. As if the flowers in her armchair were growing along with her, that’s how she suddenly feels, elevated high above the living room. She’s ready to go over to the new personal computer in the office right then and there and draw up the first draft of the foundation’s statutes.

So Mieke assumes a cautious expression and bites into a bonbon. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she says finally. ‘But don’t worry, your plans are safe with me.’ Asking Mieke to be discreet is like asking a drop of water to be wet.

‘Mieke,’ Elvira whispers. She bends forward and tries to catch Mieke’s attention with her big, brightly made-up, almond-shaped eyes, ‘it’s time you started thinking about yourself.’

‘Yes,’ Mieke laughs shyly. A childless woman can only advance so far into her world.

‘How’d it go today?’ Mieke asks.

‘Nothing special,’ says Stefaan. He stirs his soup vigorously. It makes a whirlpool. ‘Restructuring is coming up. There’s a lot of uncertainty but everyone’s trying to cooperate—except for the unions, of course, as usual.’

‘Is that why you have to play with your soup?’ Mieke asks nervously.

‘We want to record a demo,’ Sarah tosses in.

Mieke serves the Brussels sprouts and meatloaf. She grumbles about the power of the unions. They’ve single-handedly created the vast safety net of the Belgian state. The Belgian state, where a person can get benefits from the Public Centre for Social Welfare just like that, after years of not having done a lick of work, and where civil servants at the Ministry of Administrative Garbage Collection sit with their feet up on their desks and cling to their permanent positions, only to demand early pensions and then to enjoy a cushy old age while working illegally off the books, chopping down trees in the Sonian Forest and selling the firewood for a small fortune to people who live in the villas, where they also charge you an arm and a leg for painting your shutters, while their wives get their health insurance paid for them because they’ve been declared disabled as nurses due to a painful toe, and in the meantime their children keep repeating the same year at school over and over again thanks to scholarships paid for with money from people like Stefaan and her, who themselves get zero-point-zero francs from that safety net even though they’ve worked hard, too, and have chipped in more than their fair share. It’s all the fault of the socialists. That’s Mieke’s clear-headed analysis, and no one at the table dare contradict her, because she’s right.

‘What’s for dessert?’ For someone with a sweet tooth like Stefaan, dessert is the main course.

‘There is no dessert,’ says Mieke.

‘Why not?’ asks Stefaan.

‘I don’t need any dessert,’ says Sarah stoically.

‘I’ve decided to start taking more time for myself,’ Mieke answers.

‘Me too,’ says Sarah.

‘Why?’ Stefaan asks.

‘Why?’ Mieke almost flies at his throat. ‘Don’t I have a right to it? What about when Sarah goes off to college and I’m living here alone with you? Am I supposed to take your laziness as my role model? I don’t think so. I’m taking time for myself. Period.’

Stefaan stammers something about of course you should, and so on and so forth. It’s hard to use words to straighten out what’s crooked, especially the crooked things in Mieke’s head. She’s eager to start making up for all the time she’s lost, all that well-intended, poorly spent time.

‘What are you going to do then?’ Stefaan asks.

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

‘Whatever Elvira’s doing, probably,’ says Sarah.

Mieke thought she had figured out years ago what to do with the time that’s left after cleaning the whole house like a maniac, dusting the vegetables, reading the magazines from A to Z, and double-checking the shopping list. She made a conscious choice not to cultivate a dependence on drink, like half the housewives in her neighbourhood. She writes in her diary. Yet more and more often she’s seized by the feeling that it’s not enough. Something is missing.

‘Time to start thinking about yourself,’ that’s how Elvira put it, although Mieke would argue that it’s more complicated than that. She’s not a victim hiding out in a villa in the woods. She writes that in her diary. And she’s not a parasite, although she realizes that she spends entire days in this house thinking about herself and doing everything she can to make herself happy, or at least to keep everything under her control. She sees herself reflected in everything, but doesn’t every woman do that?

Actually, she’s not worried about anything. Well, there’s Sarah, who’s unmanageable, and Stefaan, who walks around like a beaten dog. But that’s a path in her head she’d rather not take or there’d be no stopping her and she’d make herself a nervous wreck.

What if she could see her daughter and her husband apart from herself, she writes. Sarah as a girl who dresses too warmly in the spring, who’s too reserved when she goes to the village shop and too cheeky with adults, but who’s actually a fairly decent, clever, pretty girl. Stefaan as a good-looking man for his age who’s too self-effacing and who works too hard so his family always has what they need (although Mieke, simply because of her inheritance, has more money than he could ever bring in).