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STEFAAN 1998

You can still clearly remember how your little daughter used to come knocking on the bedroom door, scared to death. He was back, she’d say with her pouting lower lip. The monster who walked around in the attic and would come down the creaking collapsible stairs. He was back, and at any moment he could eat her up. You had to help her, because you were her papa. You tried to reassure her by telling her that monsters didn’t exist and that no monster would want to walk on the fibreglass in the attic anyway. You even showed her the next afternoon: feel it, it stings. Your attempt to comfort her didn’t work. As you stood there with that trembling little body in your arms, you knew that it wasn’t the monster she was worried about. You wanted to promise her that nothing bad would ever happen to her, but you couldn’t do that. When you were small, you often prayed before going to bed that everyone would be all right: Mama, Papa, your little brother, and yourself. You made a tent of your sheets and prayed that prayer, whispering, with your fingers against your lips so you could feel the words, while you could hear the rumbling noises in the next room. A basin of water was being filled because your father had another headache and your mother was laying belladonna compresses on his forehead.

It’s Easter vacation and you’ve decided to spend these days with your family. You’ve cancelled all the appointments in your datebook. The reassuring everydayness of bedroom slippers, daffodils, and lawn mowers awaits you. Everything is very familiar, but you have changed.

The breakfast table is richly decorated. There are hard-boiled eggs, pains aux raisins, and chocolate spread. Although it isn’t Easter until tomorrow, Mieke would like to celebrate the Easter feast with the two of you today. Later her sister is coming by and she won’t have any time for such things. You see your daughter sit down at the breakfast table. You see your wife bite her lip to swallow her criticism of Sarah’s clothes and appearance. On the radio the news announcer is talking about a study that has shown that aggression among young people is increasing. ‘I wouldn’t want to be young today,’ says Mieke, and she means this as a bit of encouragement for her daughter. A couple of birds are singing outside so assertively that Mieke wonders whether they’re having a fight. Sarah laughs. This is the impetuous child again, not the recalcitrant teenager. With an appetite you don’t usually see in her, Sarah bites the ear off a chocolate rabbit that Mieke placed on the stiffly ironed tablecloth one hour ago, next to her cup of milk. Sarah makes no secret of the fact that she’s childishly pleased with the attention. She also gets an envelope containing money to buy something for her room. ‘Because if I buy it you’ll just think it’s ugly,’ says Mieke.

A heavy antique atlas is pressed into your hands, full of maps of these regions as they looked during the Middle Ages, faithful reproductions of the originals. It’s a gift. You haven’t even thought about gifts. Where has your head been? The three of you look for the place where your house would be located if you had built it in the Middle Ages. Apparently your house would be right in the middle of a brook.

Sarah jumps up and looks out the window, searching for traces of the brook. Your daughter is all skin and bones. You really ought to do something about it.

It’s a disease that many girls from her social background are suffering from. You see them, totally emaciated, biking up the mountain or jogging for hours in their baggy clothing. They’re nothing but stick figures, on the verge of collapse and always digging up excuses for not having to eat. Ambitious young women, every one of them, growing up too slowly in overprotective environments. They’re looking for ways to handle the immense pressure they live under. Everything they do is measured against what their parents have already achieved. Growth without end, climbing higher and higher, until you find yourself adrift with no point of reference. In your case it was a bit easier to outdo your parents.

Mothers bear an overwhelming amount of the blame for this. They keep a close watch on what their daughters eat, especially what they don’t eat. They reward them if they pass up dessert. They lead them to believe that fat people get fewer opportunities and are basically inferior. Self-control is the key word. How can you ever get as far as your parents if you can’t even skip dessert? Or one meal? Or two?

And you’re guilty as well. You ought to protect your daughter, but you don’t. You fall short in every respect, and you know it. It’s a thread running through your life. You let people bring disaster on themselves. These last couple of days you’ve been disguising yourself as a normal family man. It’s costing you all the strength you have. You’re already an outsider. You stand there looking in through the window at the world of number 7 Nightingale Lane.

Your wife can do it: live a more or less happy life, full of worries but single-minded. It seems to follow a certain law. The more energetically she makes her way through life, the less power you retain. The more enthusiastic she is, the more aloof you become. When she caught on to the fact that she could no longer count on her husband, and she realized that he didn’t give a damn whether she dished up packaged soup for him or homemade soup she’d spent half the day working on, the scales fell from her eyes. She decided to put herself first, and that increased her happiness considerably.

Mother and daughter have no need of anyone else. It’s a fair exchange: Mieke can keep a close eye on Sarah within the grounds of number 7 Nightingale Lane, and in exchange Sarah can have uncontrolled mood swings, ups and downs that switch and overlap in the spring of her life like rain falling while the sun shines. When you see those two bent over your atlas, you know your role has been played out.

Your sister-in-law Lydia is coming to visit from New York. ‘Lydia and her professor doctor engineer,’ Mieke has been saying for years when referring to Lydia and her workaholic husband, Christopher J. Delaney, the professor of materials science. Lydia and her husband enjoy the elaborate meal Mieke prepares for them. Mieke spends three quarters of her time in the kitchen, so you’re left with the job of trying to converse with your sister-in-law and her taciturn husband.

The next day Lydia throws an improvised party for her Belgian friends in a rented commercial hall. She dumps cans and jars of food onto plates and plunks them down on a row of tables in imitation of a buffet. Mieke cries shame. Her sister Lydia is swimming in money but won’t spend a franc if she can help it. The hem is hanging from her skirt and her husband is missing a canine tooth.

‘She’s just not interested in those things,’ you say.

‘Tut-tut, that’s no excuse,’ says Mieke.

There’s one more obligation to be met that day. In the Dennenhof Rest Home, cake is being served in the room of Mieke’s great-aunt. The lady is the sister of Sarah’s grandmother. She’s very interested in Sarah’s ‘music makery’, as she calls it, and she’s so charming and sassy that Sarah is incapable of maintaining her surly, cool appearance. You’re too tired to sit up in your chair and too nervous to stay in the small, overheated room. After a while you volunteer to take the cake dish and the coffee back to the cafeteria. Your wife goes to the visitors’ toilet farther down the corridor. You pause for a moment at the door. The old woman asks your daughter to turn up the radio. Apparently the station selector has been frozen at the same old folks’ station for years. A tango hurls itself against the walls of the sweltering little room, which are covered with photos of deceased loved ones.

‘Would you like to dance with me?’ the old woman asks your daughter. At first Sarah pretends not to hear, but the woman asks her a second time, louder now: ‘Would you like to dance with me?’ Your daughter complies. She takes the frail woman by the hand and dances a slow dance with her. The woman dances with her eyes closed, thinking back to earlier days when she danced the tango with her husband on Sunday afternoons in their winter salon.

We, too, dance along. We pirouette gracefully around the dancing couple until we get dizzy.

They shuffle through the room. The fragile old woman dances with her wrinkled little head against your daughter’s shoulder. Walking on tiptoe, you leave the room to keep from disturbing the scene. You see Mieke approaching from far down the corridor. You dive into a side passage.

Your getting acquainted, engagement, and marriage—those steps followed each other so matter-of-factly. Looking back, each step could be perfectly predicted. First living together in a small apartment that could qualify as modern. Curtains with big orange flowers on a brown background, wall-to-wall carpeting right up to the bathtub, and an intercom system: those were the items that made the rent respectable. Mieke wanted a minimum of comfort, after all; you agreed to whatever your wife wanted, certainly after both of you had made the joint decision that Mieke would pursue the most honourable but least valued calling in the world as soon as you had had a baby. As a housewife she would be able to devote herself to everything she had neglected for so many years. There were so many unnamed things that she hadn’t learned, so much she had done without in her protective home environment, with a dominating, capricious father and a submissive, highly respectable mother. Who knows, she could even take tennis lessons. The two of you built an enormous villa, tried for years to have children, and then finally Sarah was born. You had the hope that she would raise you up, but gradually it began to dawn on you that you were growing smaller and smaller.

This is the last necessary step.

It’s all so logical. You go back to the room where your daughter is dancing with the old woman. There’s your daughter, there are we, standing in the midst of life. And you, you’re already gone.