LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

had thought and known from the start—to ring me up, at high noon or the middle of the night, whether I was in Cape Town, in Hong Kong or in Zwolle, he would call: ‘Quick, quick! Turn your TV on! She’s going to win! She’s going to win!’ After which he threw the phone down, so as not to miss any of the glories of his Petite Justine. The day that she announced she was leaving the professional tennis circuit was a black day; he rang me again, fighting back his tears now: ‘She’s packing it in, she can’t take it any more, all that competition, that stress, just like Eddy Merckx back then, she’s perfectly right, poor thing, but it’s a shame anyway’—a year before his death then, he discovered in his paper the report that I wanted to keep hidden from him.

      My mobile rang.

      ‘What do I read? You’re going to write a book about your mother?’

      ‘Who says so?’

      ‘It says so in my paper.’

      ‘You mustn’t believe everything that’s in the newspapers.’

      ‘If it’s not going to happen, then why is it in my paper?’

      ‘That’s how these things work. It all has to be announced a long way in advance.’

      ‘But that means it’s true?’

      ‘It’s a plan, Dad. A plan can take years.’

      ‘It doesn’t say that, in my paper.’

      ‘Who can tell? I’ve got to write it.’

      ‘I think it will be very nice, a book about your mother.’

      ‘How can you know that? I’ve still got to write it.’

      ‘The very thought! A thick book about your mother.’

      ‘I’ve still got to write it!’

      ‘When will you finish it?’

      From then on, and we are talking about long before the Hellish Season of the Great Cape Fires, his first sentence as soon as I entered his room in the old people’s home, or in my cousin’s bar-cum-restaurant where he was waiting for me—everywhere he caught sight of me: ‘How’s your book going?’ It was also his first sentence on the telephone, whether I was I in Cape Town, in Hong Kong or in Zwolle.

      The first time I was moved. The next five times I burst out laughing. After that I got more and more irritated, more and more desperate, more and more apprehensive about his question, which increasingly assumed the tone of an indictment. ‘How’s your book going?’ The accusation gradually became a serial sentence. The charge was culpable dereliction, the judgment came in four words, fast-track justice: ‘How’s your book going?’

      I knew in advance that sentence would be passed again, as inexorably as before, as soon as I was face to face with my mild, temporarily sad torturer, with whom I could not even get angry. Is there such a thing as stage fright in a family context? Before each visit, before each phone call, I was seized by family vertigo, provoked by the rift between his expectations and my nerves, both equally tautly strung. Again all kinds of gnawings began on the inside of my stomach. And when I managed to persuade him, after much begging and beseeching and promising, to stop beginning our conversations with ‘How’s the book going?’, he began them with: ‘I know I mustn’t ask, lad, but how’s the book going?’ Not out of malice or to tease me, it was stronger than he was. And he suffered from it more than I did.

      The expression, generally so crafty, with which he tried to assure the outside world that, all in all, things weren’t too bad with him—‘life goes on, you’re confronted with it and you’ve got to get on with it’—and that wink, so confidential, with which he informed God and Everyman that, bearing in mind the sad circumstances, he could not be in a better place than here, in this home with the best reputation in town, with its generous car park, with its excellent nurses and young interns, ‘and as regards food it’s incredible here: if the mussel season begins we have mussels that week; if there are new herring, we eat new herring’—that waggish look, that reassuring wink, they disappeared as soon as he sensed I was there. The memory of a tiny article in a corner shot out unstoppably, an arrow through a tank, and the torturer looked at the accused painfully again, yearning, for a moment broken, with watery eyes even: ‘I know I mustn’t ask, lad, but how’s that book of yours going?’

      He was counting on me for nothing less than a minor reincarnation. The resurrection of Josée as she had been, through the years, on and off the boards. She had given birth to me? I must do the same for her. At least for him, and preferably for the whole world. Just as she had gradually broken down before his eyes, fragmented, unravelled, had little by little slid away, escaped him word by word—I had to rebuild her, sentence by sentence, page by page. Loss of language restored by language. That was all an undertone in his language, in his condemnation of just a few syllables, spoken with a look in which all the possible loss of the whole human species fleetingly gathered.

      Immediately afterwards, in the twinkling of an eye, his face cleared up and there followed another stream of contented personal declarations. Cheerful, monomaniacal, passionate—as if he had to convince other people, but mainly himself. Mantra for a man alone: that he could ‘really’ not be anywhere better than here, in this oversized room ‘actually meant for two people’, with a view of greenery and even of a fountain, and with all those attractive staff around him, and nowadays he even had massages, for his sore back and painful hip, albeit from a male physiotherapist, ‘a good lad who knows his job, and you can have the occasional laugh with him—but well, a woman’s hand? That is and remains something completely different.’

      After which he concluded with an iron train of thought of his own manufacture, butcher’s logic which linked those therapist’s hands with flesh and back massages and food: ‘When the hunting season begins, we eat partridge or rabbit, accompanied by a baked apple full of blueberries, with a head of chicory, caramelized by the country butter, and with real potato croquettes.’ He said that dreamily. Licking his chops. Already pouring himself a Wortegem gin, as his first aperitif of the day. Before drinking and clinking glasses in thin air, toasting one of the photos. ‘Your health, my girl.’ Without yet mentioning that book of mine.

      Until his next greeting.

      -

      HE NEVER READ a word of what you are reading at this moment. He died and what I had written up to then I threw away, shortly after his cremation, shortly after his ashes were shaken out of the urn onto the same meadow, on more or less the same square metre, as her ashes, only a few years before.

      United at last.

      I erased what I had written radically and ritually, deleted it charitably, during a night that brought insight and austere melancholy, after I had stared for hours at the screen of my laptop as if into a mirror and could scarcely stand the sight any longer. Delete. Delete. Consign to the Lethe.

      That same day I started again, on this, this novel that must not become a novel, not belles-lettres but not rubbish either, an improved Bible and an anti-book in one and the same cover. Starting again, in anger, looking straight into the digital mirror in which these words obediently appear as my fingers type them, and these too and these too. I type them manfully but am ashamed at so many lost hours, so much faint-heartedness. Embarrassed by my flight into other projects, to other places, into words other than the necessary ones. And look, even now, even after beginning again, I still had to go on for pages and pages—and hence still in flight—about so much other than the essence. So be it. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Even in the case of this renewed writing I first need flanking manoeuvres, epic feints to the square millimetre, encircling processions of monsters and trolls, from Gilt Mary to Napoleon, from hot-air balloons to Cape firefighting helicopters. A caravan of swaying anecdotes and barking woes. A parade of old acquaintances, veiled in couleur locale and perfumed with sweet memories. A force of manly facts and consoling market-stall holders rushing to my aid—Mie Wust, a pious nun, Justine Henin—in the hope that they will provide me, who have recently become a full orphan, with surrogate support, inspiration and help, I who never thought I would have to deal with inspiration and help, certainly not from

Скачать книгу