LITMIR.BIZ

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child, Bopa told him he had got the harelip because he was damaged as a foetus when his mother tried to abort him, but sadly it hadn’t worked. When my father told me this, he was holding back tears. It was so obviously untrue – he knew it was a story his father had deliberately made up to hurt him – and yet part of him still believed it.

      Boma repeatedly failed to protect her child from her husband. Now she still appeared to look at Willy with that deadly combination that is pity and guilt. But Willy had gone off and made two boys of his own and they were noticeably brighter than anyone else in the family. They were also physically perfect. If he got the children early enough, Bopa thought they might even be good with money one day. Now, if Willy just divorced that stuck-up Churley person … At the very least, they told him, he should admit that his marriage was on the rocks.

      ‘For once in your life do something that pleases us!’ said Boma.

      Willy was turning forty soon, but he still couldn’t hit back at his father, who towered over him. My grandfather was a sinister man and a miser of legendary proportions. Bopa even kept the shells of mussels after he had eaten their squishy insides. ‘You can’t just throw all that away,’ he said. ‘It is most of the mussel!’ In Flemish he almost sounded convincing. He kept the empty shells in big black bags in the cellar next to other big black bags filled with old clothes and thousands of stamps torn off envelopes from all over the world ­– Belgisch Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Frankrijk – collected when he worked for the Belgian Customs. The myopic fools in the public service had let him have the used envelopes for free. If he hadn’t done anything about it, the shells would have been thrown away too! He was sure he would find a use for them one day. Someone would invent something that needed mollusc shells and everyone else in the world would deeply regret having thrown all those mussel shells away during a lifetime of recklessness. When the stench started to seep upstairs into the dining room, Boma quietly disposed of the bags. Bopa knew of this treachery, of course, but he said nothing. He would bide his time and use it as proof of her deceitfulness when it suited him.

      He was tired of Boma criticising him. He hadn’t forgotten how a year back she had dared to accuse him of coming home drunk and reversing their car into a ditch. He was adamant that he had in fact parked the Citroën on purpose in the ditch. He refused to tell her for what purpose. Only he knew. His bottom lip pouted. Bopa knew how to keep a secret and he had an especially long memory. He had been a leader in the Resistance during the war and in all those years his wife hadn’t even known what he was up to. He was a hero with medals. In World War I he had been a cavalry officer. He’d caught a bullet in one of the charges and since then always wore a black leather glove over his fist, which he would thump on the table for emphasis.

      ‘Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled,’ he said. Thump, thump, thump. It hurt.

      Who did Churley think she was, Bopa wondered aloud. Wanting avocado pears! Where did she think she came from – Brussels?

      ‘That woman is spoiling your children. Filling their heads with art. Is she mad? They don’t even play sport.’

      He had never spoiled his child like that, and his son had been an only child. No, he’d put Willy to work at age thirteen after the war, delivering furniture on his tricycle. He’d thought he might as well make little Willy useful since his schooling was interrupted in 1943. The schools closed after not-very-brave American pilots carelessly off-loaded two hundred tonnes of bombs that they were supposed to have dropped on a factory. They flew too high and most of the bombs landed instead in the crowded Antwerp neighbourhood of Oude God (Old God). The American bombs fell on four schools. Among the thousand dead were two hundred and nine Belgian children under the age of fifteen. After that, no more school. The German factory, however, resumed work a month later.

      Luckily, by the time the bombs fell Willy could already read and write and, most importantly, count, so when the war finally ended Bopa figured there was no good reason to send him back to school. He could earn his keep instead.

      Before anything left the store, Bopa always made customers pay up front and told them delivery was included. In fact it was free – he didn’t pay Willy. As one might expect of a failure, the kid broke or scratched the furniture during delivery and then usually blamed the cobblestones. He was also hiding his tips from Bopa, even if it was only nougat.

      But Bopa thought Paul-Henri and I ought to get a proper education. Secretly, he missed the war, but Belgium was in peacetime now and the grandchildren had a bright future, not like Willy. The sooner they started speaking Flemish the better. He’d even help pay for their education. But Churley had to be stopped. She was setting the children against him, filling their heads with poison, telling them their grandpa was some sort of ogre. How else could you explain the day little Paul-Henri pulled the chair out from under him just as he sat down? And everyone laughed at Bopa on the floor. Paul-Henri fled the room. Boma could not stop laughing.

      ‘He was just joking, a practical joke, Pa,’ said Willy.

      ‘What was so funny about it?’ asked Bopa, his lip bulging and his eyes moving closer together. ‘Pauli has a mean streak,’ said Bopa, something he could appreciate.

      ‘He’s only seven, Pa!’

      ‘Seven and a half,’ said Bopa.

      Willy was beginning to realise that he may have made a mistake moving back home, even though Belgium did have colour television and beer – hundreds of different beers. Maybe the taste of beer was the real reason he’d returned, and he had simply been lying to himself when he persuaded his wife to move to Belgium with promises of Delvaux, Magritte, Peter Paul Rubens and shopping in Paris. He had been homesick for a home that didn’t exist and parents who didn’t love him. Shirley didn’t even like Magritte. Too stiff, she told him. But she did like James Ensor, the Oostender. She saw Belgium through Ensor’s eyes – a macabre carnival of masked, hostile, grotesque relatives. Europe was supposed to have been her liberation. South Africa was backward – a country full of people who had never been to a proper museum, who thought Picasso was a type of cheese, who blushed when they saw Michelangelo’s statue of David. South Africans also made fun of Willy’s Roquefort sandwiches at work, didn’t understand how to treat a potato, and only served mussels in tins. Belgium just had to be better.

      Willy even had some fond memories of the war. He too had been heroic back then. As a ten-year-old, he and his school friends had committed acts of sabotage, jumping on the back of German army trucks and throwing out loaves of bread to his friends running behind. Until one day, when he leaped onto a Blitz truck and a huge Alsatian nearly bit his head off. He fell and skinned his knees on the cobblestones. The German had got wise and put a guard dog in the back to keep the bread away from hungry civilians. The Belgian children went back to starving. The German occupiers gave them only the peels from their potatoes, and the civilians put sawdust in soup to fill their tummies. Coffee was made from acorns.

      At home, Bopa hung a sausage above the table and Willy and his mother were allowed to rub a piece of bread on it for flavour. ‘Don’t rub so hard, that sausage has to last the war,’ said Bopa. But at night of course Bopa sneaked into the kitchen and cut a thick slice for himself and ate it in the dark. He had to eat; he was important; he was part of the national Resistance. Anyway, nobody at home would dare to ask why the sausage seemed to be getting shorter. ‘It’s shrinking in the air,’ Bopa volunteered.

      After the war, like many others, it seemed Bopa found it impossible to give up his thrifty ways. Nearly thirty years later, everything in Belgium was still calculated to the gram.

      My father berated himself. How could he have so easily forgotten why in the first place he had run away from his parents to the extreme southern tip of Africa? When he had left home, he hadn’t known a thing about Africa except what he had read in Tintin. He’d been prepared to cross crocodile-infested rivers, battle hostile pygmies and risk being cooked by cannibals – anything to get away from Bopa and Boma.

      The Gestapo were kinder than his parents. He remembered a soft-spoken young SS officer he was summoned to meet in the principal’s office when he was a schoolboy. This was shortly after the occupation had started in 1940. The Nazi was so much more tender than his father. There was something feline about his sharp,

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