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MIEKE 1998

The telephone rings at number 7 Nightingale Lane. Mieke is in the kitchen patting dry some oyster mushrooms. You must never run oyster mushrooms under the tap. They’re sponges that absorb every bit of moisture. Once they come in contact with water you might as well throw them away because you’ll never be able to sauté them properly. The paper towels that Mieke carefully places on top of the mushrooms keep sticking. She suspects the man in the poultry and game shop of having dampened them. You can charge quite a bit more for oyster mushrooms that way because it triples their weight. Her fear is that she won’t have enough of them for her dinner with Elvira tonight.

She stares at the fleshy mushrooms in her hands and lets the importunate telephone keep on ringing. The composure that she has tried to force on herself for weeks with regard to Ron has yet to take effect. On the contrary, every encounter is a scene from a movie that she plays over and over again in her head as she falls asleep. It never loses its clarity. She has an infinite capacity to remember every word they’ve ever exchanged. She turns Ron’s words every which way and looks at them from every angle, like diamonds she can endlessly admire. There’s little to admire, however, about Sarah’s categorical ‘no’. That ‘no’ was a direct response to Mieke’s question, asked in the silkiest tones, as to whether Sarah might sound out Madam Jules concerning the possibility of her mother organizing a party—a prestigious party to benefit the foundation that, by the way, would not cost Madam Jules a single franc—at the castle where Sarah spends more time than she does at home. Her daughter barked out the ‘no’ before she was even finished talking. That’s a hard one to swallow. Especially if you’ve already piqued the attention of your girlfriends at the foundation by describing the whole setting, and you’ve already explained to them that your daughter is the best friend of the nobility who now inhabit the domain. No one has a child as difficult as hers. No one.

Sometimes she has a strong urge to drive to Brussels, to Rouppe Square (or wherever it is that the reporter Jan Balliauw does his stories about riots and drugs), and to pick up a substantial supply of drugs and give them to Sarah. ‘See how modern I am? I’m not as backward as you think. Here, have fun.’ After which her daughter would stare at the life-threatening stuff in her mother’s hands with her eyes popping out of their sockets, turn the little Ziploc bags over and over again, conclude that it was all genuine, gasp ‘Mama, don’t use this!’, promptly throw it all in the toilet, and flush. In every one of these fantasies Mieke sees herself triumphant. Unfortunately she doesn’t like to drive the car in a dangerous, hectic metropolis like Brussels.

‘Haven’t you ever had the feeling that you’re the maid?’ Ulrike asked her yesterday. ‘The maid who’s supposed to just keep her mouth shut, and certainly not ask any questions. All sorts of things happen when those kids get together. You stand there watching them, but you have no idea what they’re talking about, and you can’t make head nor tail out of all those hand gestures and those so-called dance steps.’ Ulrike dunks a homemade cookie in her coffee, where it breaks off and sinks inexorably to the bottom like a submarine. ‘And then that gloominess. Wearing black, can’t stand even a ray of sunlight, getting their kicks out of blood and hacked-off limbs, and those horror files about serial killers. Brrr. I still remember that in my day I was happy with a flowery dress and a day at the beach.’ Mieke’s thoughts flit from there to a stolen hour with Ron on the virginal beach at the Zwin.

Mieke grabs the hare by its sinewy legs and removes it from the greaseproof paper. The dark red, lean flesh is invisibly riddled with shot. The animal was shot on one of her own properties. Every year the tenants give her a pheasant or hare they shot themselves as a gesture of sympathy. Her tenants are the children of the tenants her father knew so well. It’s been going on like this from generation to generation, without a single problem.

The phone won’t stop ringing. The clock on the wall says it’s exactly three in the afternoon. It’s six hours earlier in Boston. Three minus six is nine o’clock, she calculates. She’s almost sure it’s him, Ron Hoffman. She lets the phone ring, since she doesn’t want to give him the impression that she’s always home.

For the very first time she’s serving store-bought croquettes instead of homemade, a bit of tomfoolery that she now allows herself. Stefaan says it’s not a waste to buy ready-made, it’s just a bit of pampering. The pitiful objects she encounters in the aluminum tray emblazoned with a wild boar, the logo of the poultry and game shop, are disappointing: most of the bread crumbs have fallen off and the croquettes themselves are dented. Her definition of pampering does not include dented croquettes.

The phone has been ringing long enough. There are limits. Mieke tosses the croquettes into the fodder bin for the chickens and picks up the receiver. ‘Hello, Mieke De Kinder,’ she says. When there’s no answer she repeats the desperate, futile ‘Hello?’ All she hears is the murmur of a distant sea.