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WE 1998

A black Volkswagen turns into the street. Like an uncertain beetle it moves past the properties by stops and starts, feeling its way along the house numbers on the mail slots (never on the fronts of the houses themselves). When it reaches the Vandersanden’s imposing mail slot the car comes to a halt. Safety belts are clicked open. The reflection on the windows makes it difficult to see who’s inside. There are two of them, a man and a corpulent woman. Before getting out of the car they put their caps on their heads. Two arms of the law in timeless dark blue, the uniform colour they share with cloistered nuns and mail carriers.

A white bolt of panic flashes before Mieke’s eyes as she opens the front door. The powers that be have sent a female police officer and not just a policeman. A woman communicates better, has more empathy. It’s part of the strategy, although it might also be a coincidence. They’ve come to get her; she’s being punished for all her illicit fantasies or, who knows, even for child abuse. Once again, she’s gone five steps too far in her disaster scenario. Calm down, she exhorts herself. The policewoman tries to meet her gaze. Chestnut brown eyes pin her down, a friendly nod. Mieke nods instinctively in return.

Eschewing niceties, the two bombard Mieke with a series of questions whose answers they already know. Whether Stefaan Vandersanden lives here, whether she is his lawfully wedded wife, whether it is true that they have a daughter named Sarah. She fights against the moisture that has suddenly welled up in her wide open eyes, totally out of nowhere. Breathe, look, register. The police uniforms for women are none too flattering. Especially for a buxom little squirt of an agent who’s trying to strike an attitude. The policewoman asks if they might come in for a minute. Mieke is too overwhelmed to hide her honesty; she’d rather they didn’t.

The policewoman insists. They’d prefer that Mieke sit down. She actually says this. Mieke takes a deep breath, balls her ice-cold fingers into fists, and asks politely if they would please tell her what they have to tell her without beating around the bush, and if they would then leave her property. In one brief moment of consultation the two officers exchange glances. Then the policewoman begins speaking. Barely three minutes later the officers are compelled to take to their heels. With heads bowed they get back into their black car.

Ulrike knows that they also send policemen to your house in cases of serious tax evasion. Well, that could never happen to the Vandersandens, of course. She’s with Evi on that point. There’s no getting around it: Mieke can use their help, since an uninvited guest in a blue uniform is enough to scare the living daylights out of you. They’re both ready to come to Mieke’s assistance. Marching in step, Ulrike and Evi cross the street to number 7 Nightingale Lane.

Immediately their eyes fall on one alarming detail. The Vandersandens’ front door is open wide but there’s no one to be seen. Ulrike calls out the name of her neighbour, her girlfriend, who has either forgotten to shut her front door or has fled the house.

They hear a stifled moan, an animal sound, an emotionally starved cat who threatens to scratch if the little girl stretches out a hand to pat it.

‘Mieke?’

The moaning is coming from behind the eight-foot boxwood. No one in the housing estate has such a boxwood at their front door. Some have normal ones; some get a tiny new one every year, as Evi does. This plant is at least twenty years old. The care it requires is not insignificant: one winter of inattention, one night of close to freezing temperatures, and the boxwood dies a quiet death.

Evi keeps quietly calling Mieke’s name. The moaning sounds more stifled in response. The woman who is programmed to never make mistakes is not at all herself. Something has happened beyond her control. If you hear a woman moaning with agony you tend to double up yourself. Ulrike and Evi are overcome by a rapidly bifurcating pain.

‘Mieke, please answer me.’

Mieke is hiding behind the boxwood. Ulrike and Evi worm their way into the narrow passage between the front of the house and the boxwood plant, the trench where Mieke is squatting down.

Mieke becomes aware of a presence. Evi’s voice pricks through a little hole in the black surface of her perception. Suddenly she comes to. Mieke holds up her nose and sniffles. Because not a single weed is growing around the plant, she begins rooting around in the soil.

She didn’t know it would be like this. In every human life the days are strung together, forming a cord you never would have designed yourself. But this is something she had not allowed for. All at once Mieke begins producing sounds, the words of a talking doll. She tells the whole battered story in snatches.

Stefaan was in Sri Lanka where he drove the wrong way onto a highway exit. They drive on the left side of the road there. Almost immediately he collided head-on with a large truck. The truck driver was cut out of his tall cab in a state of shock. As a wrong-way driver you don’t stand a chance of surviving something like this. Stefaan was killed on the spot.

It’s as if a bag full of water had burst open. The grief wells up. So fresh and new, bubbling up from the darkest core of existence. She drinks from it, slaking her thirst. Ulrike and Evi wrap their arms around Mieke. She allows it for a moment, then stiffens.

‘Well, I think the weeds here are really gone.’ Mieke frees her shoulders with a shake and apologizes. ‘The front door is going to slam shut in the wind. Then I’ll be locked out of my own house.’ The boxwood pricks her face. One by one, Mieke, Ulrike, and Evi leave the flower bed where the boxwood is located. They’re standing in the daylight again at the front door. Mieke steps inside and is about to pull the door closed.

‘Mieke, let us help you.’

‘You’ve already helped me,’ says Mieke, her eyes lowered. ‘Thank you.’

‘We don’t want to leave you behind like this.’

‘I want to be alone.’ The door is almost completely shut.

‘Mieke, please. Are you sure?’ The tears are flowing down their cheeks.

‘Please go. Emily is coming home soon. She’ll wonder where you are.’

Ulrike and Evi pick up on the signals. She wants to be left in peace. The front door closes.

Lying on their bed in the dark bedroom with a damp washcloth on her forehead, Mieke doesn’t think about Stefaan. It still hasn’t gotten through to her that he will never lie here again. And yet somewhere there’s the realization that she cannot allow this. The insight is there, clear as crystal, and it brings with it a spasm of pain. Her heart tightens like a mop being wrung out. She’ll have to fall back on her own resources. She’ll have to mobilize everything she’s ever learned in life to stand up to this. Her only goal is get her daughter through unscathed.

She goes downstairs to sit in the armchair and wait for her daughter. She’s waited for Sarah hundreds of times, but never like this. As soon as Sarah opens the back door Mieke throws her arms around her, to keep her close forever and to protect her from the outside world with her own life.

‘Papa,’ Mieke sobs. She gasps for air and, with a superhuman effort, is just able to utter the words ‘killed in an accident.’ It’s as if Sarah were astonished and resigned at the same time, so softly and intensely does she weep, like a small animal whose leg has been caught in a trap and who doesn’t stand a chance of getting free. Animals are strong, but humans are not. Just one tap between two cars and it’s all over. What’s left is a family that disintegrates. No matter how impossible and abysmally deep the pain is, Mieke finds it reassuring to hurtle down into the blackness with her daughter. It’s unclear how long they stand there entwined, but it’s a moment that will never return in all this intensity and sorrow.

All at once Sarah pulls herself away and utters one word, endlessly, until it’s lost all its meaning and completely erased itself: no.

That ‘no’ becomes Mieke’s new battle cry. This is not going to break her. She will not allow it to break Sarah. No. After a three-hour delay, Mieke succeeds in getting dinner on the table. Elvira has already been on the phone. The news is spreading like wildfire throughout the housing estate. Mieke is grateful that Elvira has dropped in, although she was also here last night, partaking of the hare and discussing a tax shelter system for the companies that are generously sponsoring the foundation. Everything then was fine and dandy.

Mieke tells Elvira what she knows. The words she uses are totally disconnected from their meaning. She cannot imagine what it’s like in Sri Lanka, let alone on the highways there. Stefaan will tell her when he gets back. She stacks one fallacy on top of another. After that half a glass of wine with the steak, of which only Elvira partakes, Mieke completely loses her bearings. In one half of her brain she’s telling Stefaan what happened today: that he is gone forever. In the other half she’s worried sick about how to go on living without him. It’s as if you’ve spilled paint on a porous floor and then tried to remove it. It doesn’t work. It will never work. The thing that connects her two thought furrows is Stefaan himself. She can’t excise him or she herself will stop existing. Elvira helps her upstairs. Then she secures the locks on the front door and lets herself out through the utility room.

Wreaths and flowers come pouring in. The flowers have wilted before they arrive, and beautiful floral wreathes are simply non-existent. She returns the white orchid from Ron Hoffman to the flower deliveryman. Tupperware containers stack up in the kitchen. Five different kinds of soup, vol-au-vent with free-range chicken, lemon cookies. Ulrike also gives her a pack of books about bereavement. They’re strange books, written by grey-haired sages. Mieke sets them by the front door, ready to give back after a period of two weeks.

There are far more roles to play than she ever thought possible: letter recipient, coffee maker, father, mother, treasurer, landlady, suspect, taxpayer, central figure, starving person, Kleenex consumer, communications director, shopper of black clothing. Something is draining her and tossing her aside like a rag against the ropes of the world’s boxing ring. As long as she hasn’t been knocked out she keeps on scrambling to her feet. It’s more than a full-time job, and that’s just what she needs right now. She dreads the day when she’ll be sitting alone at the kitchen table and sliding Stefaan’s ring onto her finger.

Mieke tenders her resignation as treasurer of the foundation because she is unable to do her job properly under the present circumstances. Elvira declines her resignation. They won’t be able to count on her, Mieke protests. Elvira keeps declining. First Mieke has to take whatever time she needs, then they’ll see how things are. For Mieke this just means a millstone around her neck. She’s being tortured by guilt because she’s working indirectly for Ron and is thereby being unfaithful to her dear departed husband.

Her sister Lydia has flown over from the East Coast of the United States. She tried to contact Jempy, but when she called his most recent phone number in Stellenbosch, South Africa, a woman answered who didn’t react well to the name Jean-Pierre. Lydia takes a supply of strengthening protein drinks from her suitcase. Lydia is staying in a hotel in the city and comes to see her every day. They don’t do a lot of talking. Mieke asks her sister to do her a favour and clear out the hobby shed.

‘Don’t you want to do that together?’ Lydia asks. She doesn’t want to encroach on Mieke’s memories of Stefaan and get rid of everything without her approval. Mieke agrees to removing most of the clutter together. She wants to leave his tools and the rest of his things undisturbed for the time being.

‘Did you know that Stefaan’s father committed suicide?’ Mieke asks her sister. She doesn’t look up from her work, but keeps on stowing open cans of solidified paint in a cardboard box.

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Lydia has stopped sweeping. She leans heavily on her broom, as if she were in need of support. ‘Don’t you go getting strange ideas.’

‘I want to know.’

‘People exaggerate the value of science, Mieke. Science isn’t God, Christopher always says. You can analyse all you want to, but the here and now plays a big role that science can never determine. Never. I’m terribly sorry, Mieke.’

Mieke goes to the police morgue to view her husband’s mortal remains, which have been flown over from Sri Lanka. She goes through the most horrible moment of her life entirely alone, in the stony chill of the morgue. She will never be able to eradicate that image from her mind. She puts the police report in Stefaan’s hobby shed, where her breathing is interrupted by the thought of his scribbles and sketches, which must be lying around there somewhere.

Sarah has turned off her infuriating music for the first time and has come out of her room to address envelopes for the death announcements with her Aunt Lydia. In order to keep her distance and yet to help out, Mieke has baked an apple cake. The ticking oven timer has given her thirty minutes to sit at the kitchen table and watch the grass grow. All sorts of snakes are worming their way through her thoughts.

Completely exposed, she stands in the doorway with an apple cake in her hands. She can’t go a step further. She feels an axe in her midriff paralyzing her legs and draining her heart of blood. You should have seen this coming. She had a front row seat, watching Stefaan slip further away day after day. She discovered his papers in his hobby shed and did nothing about it. She saw how apathetic he was at the Easter party, but she let it happen because Ron had taken over her thoughts. She knew that Stefaan’s father had hung himself. Stefaan committed suicide, too, and if he didn’t, then what was he doing on the wrong side of the road? Why did he go gallivanting all over the globe, and why was it impossible to reason with him?

After the funeral and the light snack, which Mieke would prefer to erase from her memory as soon as possible, she returns to number 7 Nightingale Lane. People came up to her with moist eyes to tell her how beautiful the church service was, so dignified. Some of them flew into her arms. It was her job to comfort them, so that the people could go home reassured and she could be alone with her grief. The grief is so great that the whole house is creaking and groaning and coming apart at the seams.

The evening of the funeral Mieke is standing over the kitchen sink, where so many cups have gone through her increasingly wrinkled hands over the years. She rinses the plates off thoroughly before stowing them in the massive dishwasher. He who plucks the towel from her shoulder, where it’s been folded into a triangle, and dries a dish with it. She who says it’s not necessary, it’s really not, she’s going to make it easy for herself and use the dishwasher anyway. He who pretends he’s a simple-minded little boy who’s never heard of a dishwasher before. Were they playing a game all those years, and has he fallen out of his role?

Sarah slips her plate into the cooling dishwater and goes upstairs. They consistently avoid each other. When one is in the bathroom, the other has just enough time to get the water boiling for tea and crawl away unseen. With enormous ingenuity they devise secret routes to keep from having to confront each other. This is how they show their respect. Mieke washes the cups and the plate. Using a scouring sponge, she thoroughly cleans the white inside, the painted outside, and the Wedgwood stamp on the bottom. Outdoors the little yellow heads of the forsythia bushes have come to watch in great numbers. The grass has gotten its second wind after re-emerging from the blanket of leaves and sheet of snow. The sight of their garden hits her like a leaden slap.

You weren’t able to stop him.

She opens the drawer with the small tools and takes out a pair of pruning shears. Then she strolls around the garden. Her black heels sink into the earth. She doesn’t immediately know which flower to snip off to put in a vase, and finally decides on a thoroughly respectable, thoroughly innocent prunus triloba. Flowers know the great disappearing act of wintering in the dark subterranean soil and reappearing as soon as there’s enough sun and warmth. She leaves the flower undisturbed but pulls a petal from one of the roses. She places it on her tongue to see how it tastes. Then she swallows it. Gone. Gone forever.

Stefaan’s suitcase has vanished. They have assured her that it will be sent back, but Lydia has gently tried to tell her that there’s little chance of them doing so. She wants to have the last thing he touched. She takes the piece of soap he used to wash himself for the last time. As the bathtub fills up, she holds it in her hands. She sits on the edge of the tub and watches it fill to the brim. Then she gets into the tub, in her black suit, with her jewellery still on. She thinks of Jackie O and breaks down completely. She turns on the tap as far as it will go. Under the roaring of the gushing water she can let herself weep. She pulls her head underwater until it occurs to her that she doesn’t know whether she wants to come back up.

A persistent pounding on the bathroom door brings her to her senses. ‘Mama, turn off the tap,’ she hears Sarah cry out. ‘Mama, please.’