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MIEKE 2003

Mieke pushes against the wooden gate that symbolically encloses the country manor and its grounds. The rest of the fence—wooden stakes reaching out to each other by means of barbed wire—is lying flat, as if a herd of buffalo had broken out. At the airport in Faro she rented a car at the Avis stand. Their company motto is ‘we try harder’.

She’s driven here over twisting roads, a bundle of nerves, thinking she was lost at every hairpin turn, her tongue as dry as dust after thirty excruciating miles. Sometime after twelve noon she had stopped at a shabby, improvised snack bar along the side of the narrow asphalt road, where all she could get was a free breadbasket but nothing to eat. The fish still had to be caught. So she ordered a glass of wine, just to be polite. She was given an entire carafe. Continuing on her way, she cursed herself because she was only doing this to prove to herself and her brother Jempy that she was strong and independent.

It’s been pretty a wild ride, driving to the heart of the Algarve in that rented car, finally to end up at the remote and dilapidated farm of her brother Jempy.

‘You’re going to love Portugal,’ he had told her over the phone in an attempt to entice her. ‘You have to come, because I’m never leaving here and I want to see you. It’s already been way too long.’

She shuts the gate behind her and does her exercise. Inhaling and exhaling three times and slapping her chest with every exhale. There’s no reason for stress. She’s doing this of her own free will. She wants to see how Jempy is living now. He’s always said that the course of every life is written down beforehand in a big book, so he doesn’t have to restrain himself. He bounces back from every blow, he prospers everywhere. She’s looking forward to being in his company. The first hours will involve sniffing each other out in order to rediscover what they have in common, certainly now that they’ve grown so far apart. He claims to have found happiness in the great outdoors, and she carries on a daily battle just to enjoy her cut flowers.

It’s the first time since Stefaan’s death that she’s left the country on her own. Elvira has often tried to tempt her to take a trip overseas, but she never felt ready. They’ve gone on several city trips together, though: Valencia, Vienna, Rome. But she’s immediately blocked every one of Ron’s invitations to visit Boston.

You can’t control everything.

Tomorrow she’s going to be fifty-three, and she wants to give herself something: a bit of freedom. It’s as if she’s let herself out of prison and has stepped up to the gate, timidly peeping. A murder was committed years ago, of her husband, by her husband. That’s how she sees it now, after endless self-medication and disciplined therapy, after hundreds of entries in her diary and scrapbook aimed at reining in her despair. Stefaan murdered himself. It’s unnatural, it flies in the face of all logic and all instinct, but she’s doing all she can to live with this fact. At first she wanted to wring his neck. At half past six in the evening she’d sit down in the armchair with trembling hands, waiting, sliding back into a hole in time, straining her ears for sounds of his return: the click of the garage door sliding open, the car slowly riding in, the removal of shoes. She wanted to hear it so she could storm into the garage and attack him. She hadn’t yet confronted him for the insipid message he left on the voicemail, which she didn’t listen to until a week after the funeral, a stupid ‘I’m sorry, Mieke.’ She still can’t wrap her head around it. It’s a wall of reinforced concrete that she keeps crashing into, over and over again. She’s long passed the stage of trying to disguise the suicide as an accident. She’ll let the others believe it, though. An automobile accident. They must never know that her husband ended his own life. It’s their last shred of dignity as a couple, and she’d do anything to preserve it, at all costs.

Mourning has been an agonizing process. For the first few months the only feelings she could muster for him were negative thoughts and accusations. After a while the whole experience literally brought her to a boil. Then one night, sweating and kicking in her tangled sheets, she made a decision to turn the tide. She went to one of the seven bedrooms, the one that serves as her writing room, and opened a new notebook.

Write down your positive memories of Stefaan, not the bitter eruptions and barbs you fling at him.

The page remained blank. She stared and stared. The whiteness stared back, indifferent, just like the rest of the happy, bouncy world that had nothing for her but a few pats on the shoulder.

Stop with the accusations. Think positively.

She got that from one of those idiotic self-help books Ulrike gave her. With the help of photographs she was able to recall a number of nice memories, but they all seemed tarnished. If she looked at a photo of him holding a spade, back when they were working on the new flower beds, all she could see was a man digging his own grave. A photo of Stefaan with the bashful toddler Sarah on his lap, his gaze fixed on a bowl of fruit porridge, filled her with emotion. What was he thinking about, that he didn’t dare look into the lens? Everywhere she looked for foreshadowings of his cruel deed. Gradually something shifted. Stefaan was not a murderer who had felt bad and had taken the easy way out. This was where the real tangle lay: in his past, and in the material from which he was made. At the bookstore she walked past the self-help department, because what she wanted were scientific books with facts. The salesperson had to order them. They had been suggested by Lydia’s husband Christopher, recent and older books suitable for laymen. From Darwin she learned that genes persistently soldier on, despite everything. For instance, giraffes developed because deformed deer with overgrown necks could reach the leaves in the trees more easily and were more likely to survive. The first half-deer/half-giraffe probably found it painful to have such a ridiculously long, meandering neck, but thanks to her a new species was created. That’s how ingenious nature is. Genes want to survive.

It’s hard to detect a useful system in fathers who commit suicide and contaminate the rest of their family. At the very most, serial suicide is a kind of preventive means of self-protection, should life on the planet earth become truly unliveable. She felt herself being dragged into a downward spiral: his whole life had been shaped by a powerless sense of guilt after the death of his father and his brother. Just as her life now has been affected forever and she wonders where she had made a mistake. And Sarah feels guilty, too. And her children will … It was the cycle that was the cruellest thing of all.

Grandchildren. Something else to think about. Her fear and her hope. As Elvira always says: the world would be so much better off with just women. That’s not entirely true, of course, but it is to a certain extent. Definitely in the case of the Vandersandens. She’s now inextricably linked to them through Sarah. Her flesh and blood mixed with depressive genes, although Lydia would like to disabuse her of that idea. We do have free will, says Lydia, and it’s very strong. Thanks to her free will she sent Sarah away, difficult as it was. They got along so badly that the only thing they could agree on was that one point: living together in one house was out of the question. If they did, neither one of them would find peace of mind. The house was so big that two people living in it produced more echoes than one person living there alone.

Focus.

For their tenth wedding anniversary Stefaan and Mieke had taken a trip to Paris. They were absent-mindedly drinking a thé au lait, totally worn out after having seen about half of Paris in a single morning, when he suddenly disappeared and returned within the minute with a sad, withered rose in a plastic tube. ‘I know you hate this, but I’m doing it anyway so everyone can see that you are my conquest,’ he had said, and he had kissed her. They had had a good laugh over that silly rose and had thrown it away in the languidly flowing Seine.

Just as she had driven the twisting roads of the Algarve to the exclusion of every other distraction, so she taught herself to focus on one thing at a time. What if an oncoming car were to jump the lane? Whose fault would it be if you collided head-on? These were the kinds of things she shouldn’t think about. Stefaan was dead. That was a fact. But her fault or his fault, that was not a constructive way to think.

When his suitcases were sent back, and his office coffee mug along with a few other things were delivered to her door with a card from the office staff, she was relieved. She made a place in his hobby shed for all such artefacts because they allowed her to focus her attention on him a little longer. Utter foolishness, because he wasn’t coming back. What she really should have done was turn away from him and spend as little time on him as possible, but that didn’t work.

Everyone tried, in a subtle way, to make it clear to her that he was gone for good. And to ask whether she wanted to keep on living in that barn of a villa. She understood that she had to let him go. Elvira said she ought to create a place of commemoration for him, but that wouldn’t bring him back. She listened to it all many times with a great deal of patience while her thoughts wandered. Elvira also said she should be strict with herself, not deny herself everything but take care of herself, eat well, make little forays into the world. Evi brought groceries, everything ready-made and unhealthy. Sweet people who made her feel lonely.

She was strict with herself: absolutely no contact with the outside world that would make her feel guilty. Only a discussion of the weather with the greengrocer from a village twenty-five miles farther on where no one knew her, and a bit of banter about Europe with the shoemaker from the same village. That gave her peace.

Slap your chest three times and exhale.

Then it happened. It was fall, mid-November, a Thursday evening, when families were slowly beginning to get ready for the weekend and she had already begun to look forward to the weekly phone call on Saturday with Sarah. The days were dismally short and the evening TV shows were sleep-inducing. She had been to the greengrocer and had bought a whole supply of autumn vegetables: cauliflower, beets, carrots, and onions. She arranged her purchased wares on the counter and put on her apron. Outdoors a couple of birds wished each other good night. Mieke looked forward to cleaning the soil off all those vegetables under the tap and to making them completely perfect. When Sarah was little, an inquisitive child who wanted nothing more than to attach herself to her leg and ask questions about the whole world, Mieke involved her daughter in her kitchen activities. She already was in the habit of providing a running commentary of what she was doing, something all housewives do. For her daughter she raised the volume a notch so Sarah wouldn’t miss anything.

As she, the widow, was standing in the kitchen and focusing all her attention on pulling the cauliflower into florets, she had what she thought was a déjà vu. For a brief moment, time seemed to be twisted into a knot. She noticed that once again she was announcing what she was doing out loud. She also noticed that he was standing behind her, casting a glimpse over her shoulder. She looked up at the clock in front of her on the windowsill, terrified, and didn’t dare turn around. It was twenty minutes to seven, a normal time for him to come home. And a normal thing for him to do, too: look over her shoulder to see what they were having for supper tonight. She thought she was going crazy. She did the exercise. Slap your chest three times and exhale. Just breathe, that’s all.

She kept on speaking calmly to herself until she felt able to return to the cauliflower and go on dividing it into florets. She kept on talking quietly. She told him what she was doing, as if she were speaking to a little boy. The gentleness of her own voice surprised her.

She passed through that night in a haze. At ten o’clock, after all the vegetables had been preserved and neatly stacked in the freezer in the basement, she climbed up the stairs. She went to her writing room and turned the heat up. Then she sat down at her table and wrote for a long time before crawling into bed.

Ever since that November evening she has been walking two paths, one as widow and another parallel path, a life she shares with Stefaan and to which she regularly switches over. She tells him what she’s going to do that day. She confesses her minor irritations to him. He looks on when she stubs her little toe on the bidet, or when a pot of yogurt slips from her hands. But she can just as easily let him go and walk by himself, like letting a small child go out and play.

Nor did she keep her commentary to herself during the trip to Jempy’s farmhouse in Portugal. It’s got to be around this curve. All that turning is making me dizzy. What a dump, but it’s just what I expected. All the way at the back of the property is a small structure filled with rough, grey stones, flanked left and right by non-hurricane-proof lean-tos. She calls her brother and makes up her mind not to spend more than one night here. Sleeping in a car does not appeal to her, but there’s no other choice; there’s no room for beds in this cave.

Jempy picks her up and squeezes her so hard that she almost faints in his arms. Ten minutes later she’s sitting with her exuberant, ever-charming brother at his rusty patio table, her face turned toward the sun. She’s less and less surprised by the fact that there are moments when she enjoys being alive, when she’s happy. It’s an instinctive, ingrained reaction to sunlight and oxygen. She wallows in the nice things he says about her hair and her straight posture, although she doesn’t believe a word.

She listens to Jempy’s exciting story about a journey through Russia. Switching from a broken-down train to steppe horses, stuck in the middle of nowhere, taking shelter with a circus. The winter was so severe that the elephant had a heart attack. They feasted on its flesh for a long time. Jempy made his way across the entire East Bloc, and when he got back to the civilized world of Prague he sold his whole wine business to a big wine factory with a single phone call and made out surprisingly well on the deal. In the meantime he met the very babe who’s now topping up their glasses with watery, refreshing wine. Angelina, the bleach-blond sphinx, smiles amiably. This is their country house. In Lisbon they have an apartment, but her family is living there for the time being. It’s all fine with Jempy. He’s had his belly full of cities. Soon there will be wild horses walking around here, he says with a broad sweep of his arm, and a whole flock of sheep.

‘Ah, little sister, I’m back on my feet. I’m starting all over again. Just you wait.’ His enthusiasm would be infectious if it wasn’t so ridiculous, pathetic, and implausible. He still has his coal-black eyes and towering plans. She admires the unrestrained, euphoric faith her brother has in himself, but the contrast with Stefaan is too acute. He hasn’t even asked about Stefaan yet. To quell her irritation she takes several deep draughts of cooled wine.

A toddler, ‘Roberto, Angelina’s son’, is taunting a mangy peacock with a drooping tail by throwing pebbles at it. When they get to the second bottle of wine and a basket of bread—apparently the national dish—Jempy begins pontificating about how beautiful life is and how glad he is to see her. He takes her hand across the table, which is covered with crumbs and minuscule fish bones: ‘stay as long as you want’.

Angelina follows their whole conversation as if she were watching a tennis match, her blonde head turning from side to side, although she doesn’t understand a word of Dutch. Her adorable little son calls her back to earth with the universal word for excrement. She vanishes into the house with the mite and doesn’t reappear for a long time.

‘Jempy, can’t you see how rude you are? How can you sit there shooting off your mouth and making speeches about life when you haven’t even asked me how I’m doing?’

‘How are you doing?’

‘Reasonably well. It hasn’t been easy for me these last few years.’

‘I know. So do I have to ask you about it every time I see you? Does that make you feel better?’

‘No, you don’t have to ask me all the time, but you just didn’t ask at all. I understand it from your point of view. You don’t attach yourself to anyone so you don’t feel any grief. Like this woman here, the umpteenth frump from a whole line of frumps, she doesn’t mean anything to you. You can barely hold a conversation.’

Inhale and exhale three times while slapping yourself on your chest. Let yourself relax, comfort yourself.

‘I have a lot of love in me,’ Jempy says, ‘and I like to give it away. That’s true.’

‘If sweet-talking a cleaning lady and then giving her the boot is what works for you, then it is true.’ Her outburst leaves her speechless, but she’s faultlessly navigated herself to her intended destination: a fight. And so begins a futile exchange that runs into the wee hours and is doused in a great deal of wine, most of it consumed by Jempy. Jempy swears he’s concerned about her, but concern isn’t just a lot of polite talk. And anyway, it’s time she crept out of that shell of hers and discovered there’s more things in life than grief. And yes, that may sound heartless and crude, but it’s the unvarnished truth. And now how about throwing those sardines on the grill?

After the meagre evening meal, Angelina brings out more wine. When Jempy begins blubbering again about Mieke being his favourite, his greatest love in the whole world, she stands up and says she’s going to sleep. The alcohol has paralysed her, or she would have poured the wax from the anti-mosquito candles over his head hours ago. Without giving it any thought she crawls into the real bed on four legs that is offered her. Her head is ringing. After tossing and turning for fifteen minutes she gets up and goes outside. All that’s there are the moon and the stars. No lighting of any kind for miles around. It’s terrifying. She wants to go back to civilization. This is not for her. ‘Stefaan,’ she says. It’s so strange to pronounce his name. As if she were calling a forgotten patient in an empty waiting room.

She hasn’t said anything about her birthday the following day. Naturally Jempy, who has also renounced the calendar, knows nothing about it. She’s passing Stefaan in age. That’s impossible. He was older than she, which is as it should have been. A woman who is older than her husband, that’s not right. Now it’s happening and she’s just standing there without being able to do anything about it: she’s going to be older than he.

After a breakfast of milky coffee, rusks, and apricot jam, Jempy comes up with the idea of making cheese. He manages to mention in passing that he borrowed her car while she was still asleep to go to the village and stock up on food and drink. Now she sees how he manages here without any transportation of his own. She congratulates herself for not having brought him a gift; if she had, she’d only curse him again for his endless leeching.

‘There’s a sheep stuck in the barbed wire. Let’s go free it first before we make the cheese,’ says Jempy.

‘But I don’t want to make cheese,’ says Mieke, who imagines herself up to her waist in a big mess of sour milk, plodding away with the sphinx Angelina while Jempy ‘goes to pick up something’ and, six months later in Miami, thinks back on those two twerpettes standing in the Portuguese rennet.

‘Whatever you want, but first we have to take the car and free that sheep.’ He holds the car door open for her. ‘Otherwise it’ll die and that would be animal abuse.’

‘Who knows, maybe it’s a sheep with suicidal tendencies,’ says Mieke.

‘Ha ha, that’s a good one,’ Jempy laughs. ‘No such thing.’

Suddenly Mieke loses it, completely unexpectedly. She tells him everything, right in the midst of the flock of sheep in the untraceable heart of the desolate Algarve. She tells him how Stefaan had been so coldly calculating, what kind of logic he used. He went on a business trip. Just before committing his deed, he tried to call her. He left a message on their answering machine to say he was sorry, that he loved her. He gave up, just like his father. It’s information she hasn’t wanted to share with anyone, except for her brother who’s dropped off the face of the earth. Jempy nods and wipes his rough hands on his rough flannel shirt before lifting the severed barbed wire higher so the sheep can pass under it, to the freedom of the pasture.

‘Are you afraid the same thing will happen to Sarah?’ he asks, his red nose up in the air. ‘Afraid of the pattern?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid. But I can’t very well go up to Sarah and say she should be careful, that there’s a time bomb ticking in her genes. That she ought to try to defuse it.’

‘So you don’t say anything, just like you haven’t said anything about Stefaan’s suicide all these years?’

‘It’s not a question of wanting to be silent.’ Mieke knows why she’s decided to talk here with her brother on a windy pasture among the stinking sheep. Jempy is the only one who has a recipe for life that works: plough straight through it. He’s a survivor.

‘He couldn’t help it,’ says Jempy. ‘It’s more a deficiency of joie de vivre, like a vitamin deficiency.’

She’s had a deep need for words since Stefaan’s death. Words survive everything and everyone. Jempy is the only one she can talk to without formalities, irritating silences, and barriers. With Jempy she can confess her moments of lunacy, the slips she made after Stefaan’s death which only taught her that she’s just not strong enough to enter into casual relationships or to satisfy her sexual needs with every guy who comes along. No, she’s not going to suddenly become the hedonist she’s never been. People seem to think there’s a deep longing for hedonism and decadence in everyone. But they’re wrong. It fills her with disgust.

She makes Jempy swear never to divulge anything about her outpourings or about the suicide, and not to Sarah, either, with whom he occasionally has long transatlantic phone conversations (she’s just heard about this).

They don’t make cheese, but they pick peaches for peach jam. Sitting at the rough kitchen table in Portugal, with a bowl full of peaches between them that are bursting from their skins, Mieke thinks back to an innocent afternoon years ago when she was pitting sour cherries with Jempy and Sarah, when she still could get angry at Stefaan over what he had not done.