‘Oh,’ Uncle Gerard says.
He shrugs. I don’t receive an answer. In me that day rise up the first words that have to do with the great parting. The choral response to the requiems I will write for her down through the years. Oh beautiful mother, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. . the wreckage of prayers from the Alexandria Community Church becomes part of the lesser Office for the Dead. While I scoot furiously along the canal, the words well up, farewell Mother, don’t leave me alone, Aunt Edith is a bitch, come back, come back. .
One evening a taxi pulled up in front of the house, I had already put on my pajamas. The door flew open, I ran barefoot down the garden path, through the gate, and rushed into her arms.
‘Ludwig! You’ve gotten so much heavier!’
At that moment I’m suddenly filled with poison and rage, it had all lay hidden behind the missing and the fear — she left me alone. She’ll do it again. Again and again. My embrace weakens. The kiss dies on my lips.
‘How was it, sweetheart? Did everything go well? Did you have a nice time?’
She didn’t even call me once. If she had, she could have asked me all those things. Not once. Shivering, I sink into a pool of accusations. Later, at the table, my aunt says, ‘The way cats are too. Until they remember who puts the dish out for ’em.’
She had traveled all over northwestern Europe. She was enthusiastic about darling little coastal towns in northern France but found Picardy depressing and decrepit. The Danes were friendly but so bourgeois, it was only in England that she thought there might be possibilities for us. She hadn’t found a house yet, she wanted to go looking along the east coast. In Alexandria she had known lots of English people with whom she got along well.
‘The English understand eccentricity,’ she said.
The next day I pack my red suitcase and descend the noiseless stairs. I walk into the front room.
‘That’s the way we see it,’ my aunt was saying.
My mother’s voice.
‘The beam in your own eye, Edith. You’ve overlooked that one again.’
They catch sight of me too late to cover up the hardness in their voices. My mother says, ‘Then I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other again.’
She grabs me by the arm and pushes me forward.
‘Say thank you to your uncle and aunt, Ludwig.’
I stand on tiptoes to kiss Aunt Edith; she doesn’t bend over far enough and so the kiss lands on the wattles under her chin. I kiss Uncle Gerard too, the uneasiness growling in his throat.
‘Goodbye, fella, it was fun.’
We leave the room; in the hallway she seizes her suitcase, we walk out of the garden, onto the brick-paved road. The open sky, the raging sun overhead. She clamps my hand in hers, in the other she’s clenching the suitcase, its wheels rolling half over the bricks and half over the dusty verge. We’re heading towards the locks.
‘Hurry up a little, damn it.’
My arm holding the suitcase is on fire. At the locks in the distance there are no children to be seen. Breaths of wind rustle in the poplars’ crowns, the world is keeping its head down in the motionless afternoon heat. Only when we get to the locks does she let go of my hand. We stop. There are plucks of sweaty hair at the back of her neck, transparent spots of perspiration shine through the body of her dress. There is little left of the stately rage with which she stamped out of the farmhouse. Melted. Now she is hopping on one foot, taking off a slip-on pump. Then the other one. She reaches around behind her and gropes until she finds the zipper. In one fluid motion she bares her back. It’s impossible to imagine deep red blood pulsing beneath that smooth, marble-white skin, to imagine her consisting of anything but gleaming skin. She gives a little shrug, the dress slips off. It’s as though she’s stepped out of the shadow. Snowy white underthings. She unhooks her bra. Across the skin on her back and shoulders a pattern of stripes. Crouching down a little she descends the sandy bank step by step, until the slope becomes too steep, then she straightens up and dives into the water. She re-emerges, she laughs, pushes the hair back out of her eyes.
‘It’s lovely! Come on in, Ludwig!’
Not me. What if the children show up? She rolls onto her stomach and swims to the far side in a few strokes. A car is approaching in the distance, Uncle Gerard’s orange Opel. He stops at the locks. She swims back over and climbs up the bank. Uncle Gerard stands nailed to the spot, he forgets to reach out and give her a hand.
‘Hello, Gerard,’ she says.
She stands in the road, tilts her head to one side and wrings the water out of her hair. His eyes follow the lines of her body like a hand that caresses. (Only much later, in the Uffizi, did I see what Uncle Gerard saw that day at the locks: Botticelli’s Venus, born of sea and foam, never in his life has he seen anything lovelier along that canal. I look at the poor man, his reddened face, his eyes flashing hunger and shame — so much and all at the same time, for the first time I catch sight of how complicated these things are.) She asks why he’s come. He tears his eyes off of her and looks back in the direction he came from.
‘Wanted to give you two a lift to the station.’
My mother slips her arms through the straps of her bra and fastens it. She steps into her dress and turns her back on Uncle Gerard. Looking back over her shoulder she asks, ‘Would you?’
He holds his arms out as though to keep her at a distance. His rough fingers pull up the zipper.
‘Thank you.’
She takes off her wet panties and stuffs them into the suitcase. Uncle Gerard puts our suitcases in the trunk, we drive to Groningen in silence.
‘Where are you two headed?’ he asks before we get to the station.
‘To England,’ I say quickly from the backseat.
My mother nods.
‘Too bad,’ she says, ‘it had to go like this.’
‘Yup,’ he says.
She climbs out, he takes the suitcases from the trunk. He waves to us as we walk away. My mother doesn’t look back. But I do.
It was winter and we were standing in a low-ceilinged living room. The living-room window looked out on the sea. On the horizon were ships that seemed to be standing still, but had advanced undeniably whenever you took another look.
‘The view, that’s the great plus,’ the owner was saying. ‘You live here, as it were, in your view.’
Rabbits darted out from beneath the gorse, there was a whole maze of holes in there.
‘And of course it’s not winter all the time,’ he said.
Hanging beside my ear was a mummified spider on a thread; whenever I moved it spun in the current of air. The man hadn’t done much to make the house presentable. We heard the murmur of the waves and something else, above our heads, quiet and persistent. An endless gnawing. My mother peered up at the dark beams.
‘Little holes,’ she said after a moment.
The man looked as well, and said, ‘Woodworm.’
He ran the flat of his hand over a sideboard.
‘They eat everything,’ he said. ‘Little bastards.’
He dusted off his hands. Thousands of tiny jaws, grinding the woodwork to fine powder.
‘I’ll have to get around to treating the whole thing.’
‘It seems like a lovely house, for the two of us,’ my mother said.
The man shook his head.
‘One problem,’ he said.
We looked at him.
‘Erosion.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘The whole thing’s slowly sinking away.’
He pointed outside, at the edge of the cliff.
‘With every storm we lose a little bit more. The politicians aren’t doing a thing, neither is the district council.’