His sister ogled me over her plate.
“Katrien, don’t forget to eat,” her mother said, with a smile. “Just let our friend here get on with it, will you.”
They were kind to me, wanted me to feel at home. My unease was palpable, it was in my clothes, my checked shirt, my V-neck jumper, my knee socks. Nothing seemed to match, especially in comparison with the sleek, dark colours they all wore. They talked about travelling and the countryside of Spain. The names of towns flowed from their lips like magical formulas. When the subject of school came up, Willem’s father raised his index finger and gave an imitation of the principal, “Mr Bouillie is a good man, Willem. A good man.”
I joined in their laughter but didn’t dare say very much, for fear that my attempts at polite conversation would remind them of the dank smell of bricks, moss and the walls of our cellar.
At home we did not talk much during meals. There were a few times when Roland rambled on about what he and his mates had been up to in class, making him choke with laughter, but mostly we all kept quiet.
We were Callewijns. We huddled together, we kept to ourselves behind the walls of the old farmhouse which in turn huddled against the dyke. At the sound of a strange car rumbling over the cobbles or reversing by the gate, or when unexpected visitors came to the door, we would all jump up and look out the window.
“I’ll draw a picture of someone on the wall, shall I, then I’ll have someone who’ll listen to me,” my mother often complained when there was no response to her list of chores that needed doing. We went through life with our fists clenched, for fear of being whisked away or robbed.
*
“I see you’ve made your bed for once,” Willem’s mother remarked.
He bent his head, pressing his chin on to his breast. His face reddened, and I could tell he was angry, not ashamed. When he got really wound up he would jiggle his knees. He did it in class, too, for no apparent reason, when we were given mathematical problems to solve and had to concentrate in stuffy silence. I could sense his anger in the air, which seemed to thicken around him.
It happened when he noted that Mr Bruane had found another victim to humiliate and at the sight of Mr Bouillie patrolling the yard, but it was most likely to happen during Mr Vaneenooghe’s lessons, when he droned on and on about God, the Most High, in whose almighty machinery we were like grains of sand being ground to dust by sheer tedium.
They made fun of things at his house. My father wasn’t good at that. The only mockery we had was my mother’s. It propped her up, whereas my father was forever buckling. He would buckle under loads of grain or divine blessing, in the eyes of his foreman or those of Christ the King, who sat above the altar in church holding the globe of his creation amid the seraphim.
In the café he was eyed with the same sense of mild misgiving as I was beginning to feel more and more strongly when I looked at him, although I felt sadness as well. My father, a traitor to his farming stock. He didn’t own any cattle, he had taken a job, he was just an ant in an army of workers. He drew up his shoulders and carried on in the countenance of the Lord.
I sensed condescension in the principal’s attitude to me. Behind his dainty gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes told me that I was an ant like my father, not without talent, not a bad student, but still an ant with a father who had no money. Ant-hood was all I was good for. I would slave like an ant at maths and grammar, I would study the geographical distribution of industries in Belgium and also its natural resources, the products of which I would find myself carting about in later life, pouring into troughs, watching as they vanished into mills, just like my father.
*
I left the table before the pudding to go to the lavatory. Willem and his sister were having an argument and their father made a joke to stop them. I lowered the lid on the toilet and sat down with my elbows on my knees, trembling, and stayed there, staring at the door, until my breathing returned to normal.
At about three the weather cleared up. Willem’s mother went off to drive his sister to her music lesson. His father vanished upstairs to his office.
We slouched in front of the television, watching a film in which knights in armour jousted. When the children’s programme began I said I ought to be getting home. My trousers were dry. I took off the pair Willem had lent me and put mine on again. He grabbed me by my hips, hoisted me up and spun round until we both collapsed on his bed.
Next thing I knew we were wrestling, although it wasn’t really wrestling. His fingers sought out places that I preferred to ignore, unless it was the dead of night and I was safely under the covers, for only then did I dare to read them like Braille.
I pushed him away, but not very forcefully. I could smell his hair as he lay back on top of my chest, and then, suddenly, I swore and threw him off me.
He did not get up from the bed, just said, “See you tomorrow,” in an offhand way.
*
As usual I stopped in the middle of the bridge over the railway. The sky was still leaden. The church spire pierced the overhanging clouds, gauging their thickness. The bridge shook when the express train to Bruges thundered past beneath me.
I had the feeling I was somehow born to observe other people wallowing in riches of which they were quite unaware, and which would remain hidden from me in dark closets, on shelves that were far too high. I would only catch crumbs, coffee beans, alms, collecting them in tins, counting the times something struck the bottom, before sealing them up.
It was drizzling again. Great scrims of rain slid across the horizon.
Back home it would smell of cold and damp. Of my father’s feet. Of the savoury steam curling up from the pans on the range and condensing on the ceiling. I would kick off my shoes, hang my dripping coat on the peg and go straight up to my room without saying a word, so I could pull the drawstring of our safe, stifling nest around me nice and tight.
I swallowed my cares, took a running jump and gave a shout as I sailed down the slope towards home.
CHAPTER 8
MY BIRTHDAY CAME and went without a fuss. Coffee for three, cake, no candles. We celebrated in silence: my father, my mother and me. They had bought me a book: Iceland, Child of Fire. They must have found it difficult to make a choice from the shelves in the shop at Ruizele, or perhaps elsewhere. Books with only words from beginning to end made them wary — you never knew what might be in there — but they knew I wasn’t keen on picture books. Pictures belonged in comics, and I had stacks of those.
I dare say they’d had some assistance from the bookseller, who would have seized this opportunity to flog some leftover stock while making a show of being polite and helpful. The book he recommended had a few photographs in it, so at least they had some idea of the contents, and I could imagine his satisfaction as he showed them out and watched them head across the square to their car, relieved and happy with their purchase.
It was wrapped in brown paper. To brighten up the parcel my mother had written “Happy Birthday” on it in her old-fashioned florid script, followed by “many happy returns of the day. Ma & Pa.”
Many happy returns. I had taken the book upstairs to my room to look at. The taste of the kisses I had given to express my gratitude was still on my lips, and my chest felt tight with the gloom that filled me as I climbed the stairs.
The book did not grab me. Not many things grabbed me nowadays. I had left it open on the table where I did my homework, so it looked as if I couldn’t get enough of it, they’d ask how I liked it and I’d nod and say “it’s great”, but what I really wanted to do was stick it on the shelf along with the other books, which seemed to be closing ranks on me, keeping their stories from me and making my head swim with letters and punctuation marks instead.