I refused to budge. The attic was mine, it belonged to no one but me. And Marcel.
“Come here, my lamb, come.”
I looked down and shook my head.
“You can have the letter. You can keep it. But come downstairs, there’s a good boy.”
She must have been crying. I had never seen her cry. Her voice was furry with emotion.
“It’s not healthy, sitting up here in this oven … Come down.”
She turned to go downstairs again, but changed her mind. She sat down on a step midway and patted the space beside her. “Come and sit here.”
I got up.
She wrapped her arms around her knees. “You mustn’t think everyone is as good as they make out,” she said.
“And you mustn’t be cross with me. I just wanted the bird. Miss told us to bring something to school for the nature class.”
“I’m not cross with you. Not with you … Not any more.”
She stared at her toes peeping out from the straps of her sandals. She pressed her lips together, making her chin pucker.
“She should have given it back to you. You shouldn’t have taken it, but nor should she.”
Her chin puckered again, her sandals creaked.
“Grandma?”
“Yes …”
“I’ll look after it …”
“I should say so.”
“And when I grow up I’ll go and visit Marcel’s grave. You can come with me if you like.”
She laughed bitterly, sending a ripple across her stomach.
“We’ll have to search long and hard.”
“Not if I ask the way.”
“What, you ask the way? In Russian I suppose?”
“I can learn Russian, can’t I? Miss Veegaete says it’s the hardest language of all, but I’ll manage, she says I’m clever enough …”
“How would she know? Russian?”
“Miss Veegaete speaks French, doesn’t she? I expect she’s got a gift for languages, she said so herself …”
Somewhere between her legs, I thought to myself — between those enormous thighs of hers.
“She’s not perfect, you know,” the grandmother said. “You mustn’t go by appearances, lad. You’re too young, you wouldn’t know. There are things one cannot forget. Forgive — yes, but not forget.”
“The Reverend Father says so too: ‘If you are smitten on one cheek, you shall turn the other cheek’ or something like that, anyway. He’s hard to follow sometimes.”
“He’s not a bad sort, really” she said soothingly. “A bit old-fashioned maybe. But fair. Always has been. A mass is a mass, he said, and it’s not for me to discriminate among the dead. If you skip the flag-waving, then I’ll bury him. Well, it wasn’t a real burial, as there wasn’t a coffin.”
I felt her elbow nudging my hip. She inclined her head toward my ear.
“Your Miss,” she said, “didn’t dare show her face at the service. Was packing her bags, I shouldn’t wonder. Ran off to stay with her cousins in Brussels. Nobody knew her there, nobody had any idea that posh mam’selle used to organise German sing-songs and cultural events here in the village. Kulturabenden, they called them. A gift for languages, indeed! First she was more German than the Germans, then more French than Louis the Fourteenth. Just goes to show. As for Norbert, he did come to church. He knew it might get him into trouble, but he insisted on coming, seeing as they sent the poor lad for slaughter just like that. He was ashamed of his sister. Embarrassed. She apologised later, when it was all over. Kept writing letters, too, from her boarding school, going on about our Marcel having died a hero and telling me to take comfort in the knowledge that the Lord Jesus sows wild flowers on his grave every spring, for He knows where each and every one of them fell, like so many seeds in the ground. With or without a cross to mark their resting place … She’s a smooth talker, is our Mademoiselle Veekàt.”
“Well, she can make her own clothes from now on,” I burst out, overconfident now that I knew I would be let off the hook.
The grandmother tapped me on the knee.
“Stand up now, so you can help get me to my feet. And don’t you breathe a word to Miss Veegaete, nor to any of my clients. I have a living to make. Off you go. Ask Stella if you can help in the kitchen. My foot has gone to sleep. I’ll be down in a minute.”
When I reached the bottom of the stairs she called my name.
“About that letter. You keep it to yourself, mind. It’s not for anyone else’s eyes. Do you hear?”
*
The afternoon capsized over the orchard when the table was cleared and the discussions abated. The grandfather was exhausted from stabbing the air and shaking his fist at the fatherland. He had had too much to drink.
The grandmother bravely went on doing the honours at the head of the table, dispensing sympathetic nods left and right, pats on the arm, and kind words to salve hurt feelings. Now and then a vacant look crossed her face as she twisted her gold necklace round her index finger.
I was at the other end of the table, and Marcel was everywhere. His presence drifted idly on the flotsam of words and kept changing shape in the whorls of cigarette smoke. The grandmother sent me a wink over the array of glasses. Stella, whose nose was still red, gave me a friendly kick against my shins — friendly, but hard enough to hurt.
The uncles and the grandfather downed their digestifs, lapsing into silence as they headed towards the parlour. The aunts withdrew to the kitchen. I stole into the hall and grabbed the trowel from the handbag on my way to Marcel’s trunk in the attic. Then I came downstairs again and slipped into the sewing room, where I thrust my hand under the fabrics and half-finished garments at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled out an old biscuit tin. On the lid was a picture of the Queen of Belgium in her wedding dress, smiling vaguely. Her eyes were veiled by a cloud of rust, which struck me as fitting.
*
The day was over-ripe. It bathed the treetops in liquid copper, set the roses ablaze against the west-facing wall and tinged the hydrangeas with a deep blue, like the sea.
I followed the winding paths lined with ground ivy and angelica, past the bed of Cape hyacinths tinkling soundlessly in the wind, all the way to the rowan tree at the bottom of the garden, where my own private wilderness was so overgrown by now that it seemed set upon invading the outermost row of potato plants. I pried the lid off the tin, releasing a faint smell of mouldy almond biscuits. There were crumbs on the bottom. From the kitchen came the muffled clatter of cutlery in the sink. The uncles straggled towards the conservatory at the front of the house.
I took the letter from my breast pocket and unfolded it.
“Molowitz, 28th August 1943,” it said at the top.
A pair of sparrows flew up from the leafy rowan and perched on a branch of a cherry tree. The geese craned their necks, then thought better of it and subsided into the grass.
Dearest Anna and Cyriel,
Your kind letter has reached me at last. It took more than one month to get here. Russia is a long way away, and the post is not always reliable. This time I received seven letters all at once.
We are quartered in the best building in the village. It’s an old school. The people live in cottages with mud walls, not much bigger than kennels. They are very poor. That just goes to show: not all the stories you hear are propaganda, some of them are the bitter truth.
We spend most of the day lazing in the hot sunshine. We also have to guard the workers to make sure they reap the harvest on time. They don’t know much about farming. The Ruskies sow their wheat any which way, but the tomatoes are wonderful here. Four, five kilograms per plant, and as sweet as apples.