From elsewhere in the house came the sound of low lamentations. Curtains were drawn. Shutters creaked on their hinges. Our house, Callewijns Hof, at the foot of the dyke along the canal to Bruges, inhabited by us for generations, altered and extended and renovated, had preserved all manner of latches and locks from the past, and now proceeded to shut itself off from the outside world with every one of them.
My mother rose, ran my sticky fingers under the pump and dried them.
“Say night night, sleep tight.” And she scooped me up on to her arm.
*
In the parlour the Aunts were settled on the sofa like huge black flies, dabbing at their eyes with fluttery lace-edged handkerchiefs as flimsy as the grief choking their muted voices.
My father was hunched in a corner, half-hidden by the heavy blinds, clutching a huge square of checked cloth in his fists. Compared to the trickle of sorrow shown by his sisters and cousins, the grief deep inside my father was a vast reservoir, swelling and swelling until the dam burst and it all poured forth.
My mother carried me around the room, pausing in front of each mourner. Some were strangers, spectral figures holding their caps on their knees and keeping an unaccustomed silence, fumbling with trouser legs or whispering uneasy my-oh-mys. Oh my.
My father smiled bravely when I pressed my lips to his, and thumbed a sign of the cross on my forehead. The Aunts quickly tucked their hankies in their sleeves, took my face in both hands and offered me their cheeks. There was another ring at the door, and my mother said, “Come, time for bed. Upstairs with you.”
She chivvied me up the stairs more hurriedly than usual, wormed my arms into the sleeves of my night shirt as if she were dressing a rag doll, and then tucked me up without giving me a chance to say goodnight to my bears.
The whole regiment of bears sat on the shelf fixed to the wall facing my cot, motionless and adoring, their glass eyes staring and glinting in the glow coming up from a street light.
I was given a hasty goodnight kiss. Left and right of me my mother raised the collapsible sides of the cot. I was in a cage. The net curtains swayed to and fro in front of the screened window, and in the dying light a lost butterfly whirred helplessly against the pane.
*
Until now the days had billowed around me beatifically, and I would seize upon what they had to offer as if I were ferreting for hidden goodies in the Aunts’ skirts on birthdays. The hours were puppet shows. They would open on demand to reveal the same familiar scenes again and again. Things waited patiently for me to notice them and acknowledge their existence by giving them names.
But now all sorts of things were going on behind my back. The usual sounds of the night unfurling its landscape, like the lowing of cows on heat, the barking of dogs, the fatherly throb of a barge on the canal beyond the garden wall, were drowned out by footsteps on the cobbles in the front yard.
The wrought iron gate in the archway was given a cautious push, which made it squeal even louder than usual. I could hear wheels rumbling over the cobbles and then the soft purr of an engine, at which moment a beam of surprisingly brilliant light swept across my room, covering my walls with a shifting trellis of leaves and branches.
Car doors were wrenched open, then slammed shut. The beam of light went out. Lips smacked against cheeks. More footsteps, this time on the front doorstep with its little pitched roof. I recognised my father’s bass voice, and the high, plaintive tones of my mother. I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying.
She was sure to be standing in the doorway, rubbing her hands over her arms, even though it was summer and not at all chilly.
The boot of a car was opened and then closed with a dull thud. Meanwhile someone was hopping lightly down the corridor, singing jauntily, “Down in the hole… down in the hole.” The singing stopped suddenly when the umbrella stand fell over with a deafening clatter.
A woman’s voice, which I did not recognise, called out in suppressed anger, “Shsh, Anton’s already asleep.”
The stairwell filled with the hollow echo of all the voices at once. My father shut the front door, I could tell by the scrape of wood across the tiled floor. Once the tumult subsided the voices coming up through the floorboards sounded muffled.
I was wide awake. The idea that things could go on being exactly the same as they were in the dark, despite having their distinctive shapes and features blotted out, gave me a strange sense of restlessness.
When I turned over on my side or on my back, making my sheets rustle and the bars of my cot rattle, I could hear the sound hitting the walls and bouncing back to me.
Later, when my father slipped into my bedroom to see if I was all right, it was as though the room and everything in it, including myself, took a deep breath. He was surprised to find me wide awake, crawling out from the covers to greet him.
He lowered the side of the cot, sat down on the edge of the mattress and enfolded me in his arms.
I put my hands on his wrists and looked up. The stubble on the underside of his chin felt prickly through my hair.
It must have been very late, later than ever before. It was the dead of night, and I’d have been unconsciously floating towards morning had not the natural order of things been disturbed, leaving us stranded. He did not tell me a story. He did not wind up the music box on the bedside table and talk to me until the tune started. He did not speak at all, just held me close to his chest.
Outside, on the landing, the stairs groaned under the weight of some bulky object being hauled up, tread by tread.
“Over here,” I heard my mother say in a low voice, and again I could make out the sound of someone hopping lightly down the corridor. The hopping came to a stop outside my bedroom, and the slit of light under the door was interrupted by a patch of dark, which cast a long shadow across my floor. The same song was being sung, in the same nasal voice as before, but softer now, “Down in the hole, down in the hole.” Then it tailed off.
“Night night,” my father said, lifting me up on his arm so that I might stroke each of my bears in turn. Furry ears, dry snouts against the palm of my hand, and the cool glass of their staring eyes.
“Night night,” I said imperiously, as though everything were still at my command.
My father pulled up the covers and tucked the blanket loosely under the mattress. He gave my fingers a joky nibble when I touched his lips in the dark. I laughed out loud. He shut the door gently behind him.
I gripped the sheet with both fists and drew it up around my chin. I stretched out comfortably. Calm had been restored at last. Even the bears, content now they had received their due, would be smiling down at me from their shelf.
If I lay there long enough without moving a muscle or blinking an eye, they’d think I was asleep and start talking to each other in the dark. They’d be shy at first, but soon they’d be chattering happily.
I slipped my hands under my pillow. The world fell silent. My eyelids grew heavy. The only sound was the wind riffling the leafy crown of the beech tree. The night filled up with all the words I didn’t yet know, with all the things that had yet to be touched and realised.
I turned over and shut my eyes.
“Night, night,” I repeated, “night, night.”
CHAPTER 2
THE TWITTER OF BIRDS roused me from sleep. Bees buzzed around the creeper outside. In the afternoon warmth, shafts of the brightest light jutted in through the window, flooding the floor and making the dust float in the heat. Inside the room the floorboards began to expand around the nails securing them to the beams below. Soon they would emit a persistent ticking or tapping, sometimes so vehemently that the filler burst out of the cracks with a loud pop and the falling fragments danced over the floor.