ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
.
Читать онлайн.
They brush past that significant gable, failing by a whisker to pull off the gutter, plus some tiles from the year dot. Then they finally make for the open sky, the boundless heavens, majestic and silent, high above our roofs and courtyards and yet floating away precisely over the great access road on the ground floor, our Parklaan, which, surprise surprise, passes a park and is already jam-packed with hooting pursuit cars whose passengers wish to follow with their own eyes the Calvary of their favourite, secretly hoping for a cautious accident—the year before one landed in a castle moat, three got caught in barbed wire, and two crashed in the Westakkers military zone, almost resulting in an international emergency, since we are talking about the heyday of the Cold War.
At the end of this Parklaan, right above the busy junction with the secondary motorway from Antwerp to Ghent, the aerial flotilla seems becalmed for a moment. Just for a second the inverted pears and figs and plump women’s buttocks just hang there hesitantly in the air, dangling like Christmas baubles without a tree. Then they resolutely choose a course. Not toward Ghent or Antwerp. Not to Hulst in Holland, but to Temse on the Scheldt. In so doing they first float past the local shopping mall, the Waasland Retail Centre, which when it was created seemed like a good idea with its ample parking facilities and covered shopping arcades, but which for years has been sucking the life out of the town centre like a tapeworm sucks the libido out of a prize pig that was nevertheless intended to provide semen for the whole region during its lifetime. And then at last, and with my apologies again for the long digression this time, but that’s how I’m made, that’s how people tell stories and commemorate in my area and in my family, that’s what our language is like, what our flesh is like, expansive. We’ll have to learn to live with it, you and I, at least for the duration of this saga, but so be it—after that Retail Centre, the balloons float above a section of green suburbia where, according to tradition and semantics, a patch of bog once lay that was noted for its population of frogs. It is still called the Puytvoet, but it must have been drained over the course of time, although the meadows and fields and football pitches of The White Boys FC are still convex in shape in order to facilitate the run-off of the generous precipitation for which our Low Countries are so renowned.
The streams of the Puytvoet are deeper and more numerous and every few metres boast a specimen of our beloved moisture absorber, our drainage soldier: the pollard willow, from which in earlier times we carved our clogs. The dirt paths too, the potholes and edges of which we have tried for years to repair with rubble and ashes from our stoves—a week later they have disappeared, like every kind of hard core, from half-sleepers to sections of wall, you name it, everything is swallowed up by our insatiable earth, which with its restless jaws can grind up a cosmos, from cat litters to skeletons, from coachwork to clapped-out pianos—those earth paths too then are lined, on both sides indeed, with water vacuum cleaners.
But these are slender sisters of the pollard willows which we call Canada willows and which, elegantly and supply and lithely rustling, wave their crowns and their silver leaves at the fleet of balloons high above them.
And there, finally, on the ground among the pollard willows and those Canada willows, in a plot carved out by streams and dirt paths, yes there, over there in her vegetable garden in her favourite swimsuit, black with a white pattern, looking up with one hand over her eyes, in her bare feet by a modest bonfire of dried potato tops—there she is. With that band in her hair.
She looks reflective or admiring, it is not clear which. Perhaps she is listening to the roaring song of the burners, a jubilant choir up above. Or perhaps she is just following the coiling veil of smoke twirling from her own fire to where it dissipates into nothing.
Or perhaps she is measuring one of the balloons with the naked eye, wondering how many evening dresses a skilful seamstress could conjure up out of it if there were yet another costume piece in the programme, Le Malade imaginaire or L’Avare—‘there’s always a demand for Molière, at the box office at least’.
A reflective woman in a vegetable garden, beneath a firmament of fabulous beasts, on a Sunday in September. A multicoloured and strangely soothing spectacle.
At least if there isn’t a storm and it doesn’t rain cats and dogs and the whole thing doesn’t have to be postponed until next year’s Liberation celebrations.
But a promise is a promise: this must not and will not be about balloons in the shape of figs or a crate of beer, but about my mother and her unacceptably cruel end. I have run away from this book for long enough, novel or no novel. It should have been written much earlier. Allow me a timeout to explain that to you. It will not, I promise you, be a delay. On the contrary, it forms part of the mourning process, at a time and in a community that has lost the ability to mourn. The lament no longer has a raison d’être. Sorrow must either be suppressed or lead to something productive.
And I am an obedient bastard of those two possibilities.
I have dragged my feet and bickered like never before, hiding out of cowardice from a pain that I had swallowed down without digesting it, but also without wanting to digest it. Because before I could abandon them to the great forgetting, my dismay and my pent-up concern, before I could submerge and dissolve in the Lethe of everyday life, I just had to do something with them. I had to convert them, with a click of the fingers pouring gold from lead, mindful of King Midas, because I can do that now, I told myself, ‘make something out of nothing’, capture something for ever, although only on patient paper. It’s all I’m good for. From mud to marble in no time at all.
Yet I still couldn’t start. A prey to continuing grief as if to a lung disease—I stood feeling dizzy in department stores and gyms, in bookshops and on literary platforms—I began to feel increasingly ashamed of my creative indecision, resulting in still more indecision. King Midas? Jonah, biting his nails in the innards of his whale. Job, idly fretting on his glorious rubbish dump. The urge to act paralysed by a thousand questions. I have to restrain myself, with the catalogue of Western art history in my hand, not also to resort to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. That would be, apart from ridiculous, another flight, yet another postponement. Whoever hunts for comparisons is detaching themselves from reality, from the awareness of how overwhelmingly ordinary it is, but also how unknowable and devastatingly unique. No greater swindle than the knowledge of art. Job and Jonah have no place here, let alone Hamlet and the rest of the sluttish international crew of the good ship Culture, that international floating escort bureau which provides a value-adding strumpet for every aspiration and every swoon. Stop the make-up and hair-curling, stop posing, as King Oedipus or the Good Soldier Schweik, Sancho Panza or his boss. It’s about you and you alone. I mean: about me. That is precisely the point. Why should I suddenly have to write this book? There are enough people with deceased mothers, most of whom have had more spectacular careers than that of a butcher’s wife from Waasland. No shortage of heavyweight women, with brilliant children and a life set in Mumbai or New York, Rome or Rio, instead of a Flemish hellhole. Let such fortunate orphans get to work. Let them grieve and honour and fête memories, in a geographical and historical framework that the reader does not first have to look up in the tiniest corner of his encyclopedia.
Let them glory. Not me.
The greatest pressure did not even come bubbling up from myself. From beyond the grave I could feel her pressure. Mothers never become human beings again, mothers remain mothers.
I saw the corner of her mouth and her eyebrow once more curling in disdain, her burning filter cigarette was again balancing between two fingers, and she herself was looking away—silent for a change, absolutely silent, ear-shatteringly silent, speechless with feigned indignation, as a grand tragédienne scarcely one metre sixty tall, acting her fathomless disappointment, displaying her displeasure at her youngest child every day that he did not write her story.
‘If I feel contempt for any kind of person, it’s those who speak ill of their parents.’ How many times she said that to me! True, after she had come to terms with the fact that I was becoming a writer, counter to her express wish and preference. [she, the first time she heard of my plans] ‘Writing is something for lazy people, drunkards and paupers.’ A few years later she sat in the pitch darkness, glowing with pride that