We and Me - Saskia de Coster

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      ‘To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face.’

      – Virginia Woolf

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      WE 1980

      No one comes to the mountain unannounced. Friends always arrange their visits well beforehand. Always, without exception. It’s one of the many unwritten rules of the housing estate on the mountain. Unexpected visitors may very well find themselves staring at a locked door, as we say, forcing them to turn away, their goal unaccomplished. Too bad. The residents of the housing estate all lead busy lives. It is in their spacious villas amidst lakes of green grass, protected by trees and six-foot fences, that they are able to unwind. Normal visits are made by appointment. The appointments are written down weeks in advance in a large ledger with sewn signatures issued by a bank—the deluxe edition for good investors—made in the year 1980. Clandestine meetings are moved to highway motels, distant vacation resorts, or private clubs with passwords.

      The very idea of casually dropping in at one of the villas in the richly wooded housing estate, just for fun, is out of the question. Friends would never do such a thing, because friends respect each other. There’s no reason for that kind of impertinence, say the housing estate residents. No such thing as a neighbourhood committee here, or a charter with guidelines. The men are busy senior executives who already spend too much time at meetings during the day to fill their free hours with more of the same. These are not common labourers who chair their local bridge club, or petty officials whose idea of a good time is to stand in front of a mirror and practise their monthly treasurer’s report for the local marching band. Nor do the women of the housing estate see the point of such committees. They have quite enough to discuss with their own families, and they prefer to spend their free time on themselves. Although there’s no formal consultation of any kind among the residents, they’re in complete agreement on most matters, remarkably enough. Tacit agreement.

      The working people who come to the mountain know exactly when they are expected. Gardeners, cleaning women, and manicurists all have fixed hours. Even the procession of Sunday mendicants—black men from Zaire alternating with Jehovah’s Witnesses—abide by the resting community’s unshakeable schedules and only come on Sundays between the hours of eleven and twelve. The blacks begin their pitch with a broad smile and milk-white teeth, immediately followed by the friendly warning not to be frightened, and in one breath they sing the praises of their little hand-stencilled books containing ancient stories about the genesis of their African tribes, which they are peddling to finance their university education in theology at some unknown or non-existent university in the south of France. Whether it’s due to the people’s feelings of colonial guilt or to the black men’s babbling in a childish kind of French, quite a few books end up being sold. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, find themselves staring at a closed door before they’ve even reached the end of their opening sentence. In the year 1974, when the first villas in the housing estate were erected, a university professor accepted a copy of The Watchtower from a Jehovah’s Witness. It wasn’t long before he and his entire family were conscripted into the sect. Since then, not a single resident has been able to put up with even the opening spiel of a Jehovah’s Witness. The door is closed with a vague word of thanks and a resolute nod. No, the front doors here are certainly not flung open wide for every stranger who happens to turn up. What are front door peepholes for, after all?

      So it comes as a total surprise to the residents when we make our way along the sunken road to the housing estate on a Tuesday afternoon in April 1980 without anyone on the mountain expecting visitors. We climb the mountain slowly. The road is so narrow here that two oncoming cars cannot pass each other. But there are no cars. Not at this hour of the day. At half past two on a Tuesday afternoon there’s no traffic from the housing estate to the real world, or vice versa.

      There are only two roads leading to the estate. One of them sets out from the neighbouring backwater as a bumpy patchwork quilt of cobblestones and asphalt, patched countless times. At the end of this road the neighbourhood reveals itself, like the sea to a herd of water buffalo trotting across the Serengeti Plain: home, a final destination, a haven for quenching your thirst. The other way to get there is along the sunken road in the woods. The sunken road is an earthen trench that runs straight through the woods, a former riverbed in which an erratic asphalt road was laid. The road starts in the village and ends up in the paradise among the trees.

      Potential buyers of the properties are enticed by the vastness of the lots and the fragrance of pine needles. Building permits are rather lavishly granted here. There’s room for large villas with swimming pools and tennis courts at the far end of each back garden. Even horse stables can count on a friendly wink from the mayor.

      The families in the lower village still vividly remember how the count sold off the woods and grounds piecemeal to the occupiers up on the mountain. Their clans have been living in the village since time immemorial. Even before the village had an official name their ancestors were here. They were an industrious folk. They set up butcher shops, cafes, and liquor stores that they passed on to their children who in turn passed them on to their children, so the only things that had to be changed on the signs out front were the first names. The villagers speak a colourful local vernacular among themselves, with lush tones and heavy vowels that the people on the mountain can’t begin to fathom. There’s no direct communication between the two groups. Their only form of contact is gossip and backbiting.

      If a professor from the housing estate should come down to buy something he accidentally overlooked on his shopping list for the big supermarket, the villagers close ranks. When he’s just within earshot they tell each other what for him is unintelligible slander, distilled from stories from the cleaning women and gardeners who work on the mountain off the books, fertilizing lawns and hanging bird houses on tree trunks at precarious heights. The mountain resident quickly purchases a loaf of salt-free, four-grain bread or a grilled chicken, jumps into his car, and returns to his family on the mountain as fast as he can.

      Proceeding down the tongue of asphalt that rolls out of the sunken road, we turn onto the first street of the housing estate. All we see is one living soul, standing at the only bus stop in the entire housing estate, a pole with a minuscule timetable screwed onto it. A golden retriever lying in an impeccable front garden glances up for a moment. The smell of pine needles and horse manure hangs in the air. Somewhere in the belly of one of the villas a radio emits a news report on the death of the great master of film, Alfred Hitchcock.

      On this calm Tuesday afternoon the housewives creep even more deeply into their cocoons of calm, drowsy boredom. At number 6 Nightingale Lane, Evi Vanende-Boelens, in an advanced state of pregnancy, leafs through an interior design magazine. Ulrike Vanoverpelt-Schmidt, who lives a couple of houses farther on, takes the ironing board from the storeroom and tackles the enormous pile of laundry generated each week by her husband and three children. The men still have hours of work ahead of them. The children have a little more than one hour at their school desks before the bell rings. Most of the residents started producing children a couple of years ago. The oldest children from the housing estate are now in their first year of school. Their mothers are waiting at home for a report of their day. Evi hopes to give birth soon so she can go back to filling her afternoons with visits to the boutiques.

      All the residents of the housing estate are at about the same stage in their lives. They’re bringing a new generation into the world, in this paradise that they themselves discovered and developed. They live a respectable distance from each other because they respect each other’s privacy. No one can see into their neighbour’s bathroom, living room, or conservatory. Only the plentiful magpies see everything.

      The dog follows us with his eyes but doesn’t bother to jump to his feet. He just lies there in front of his kennel, chained up, his head resting on his front paws. The fresh spring air is dry and every sound carries. It hasn’t rained in weeks. A pair of woodland birds break off their song. This is where we come to a halt.

      We see the villa on the other side of the road, number 7 Nightingale Lane. There’s no avoiding it. The villa is a gigantic, rustic edifice in dark red brick with glazed,

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