I thought of my father and my mother. His creations: man and woman. He read the paper, she did the dishes. She complained, he soothed. The sexes are complementary, but different, Mr Vaneenooghe had explained in class, and he had written the word on the blackboard: com-ple-men-tary. The story of the Creation revealed a profound truth, he had declared in conclusion, but I remained unconvinced.
His rusty-brown sweater and speckled jacket seemed to belie his words, for they hinted that his own better half vacuumed him twice a week along with the carpets, or laid him out on the wet grass to air. His tone turned melancholy when he alluded to the blessings of the family or to his own fatherhood and offspring. He had a boy and girl, whose names were Bjorn and Tineke. His own Christian name was Didier, which was bad enough.
With a view to adding what he liked to think of as a “personal note” to his lesson, he had come to class equipped with a wedding photograph of his own. His bride wore a beribboned cartwheel hat which hid most of her face. They posed side by side in front of a Japanese cherry tree, his arm round her waist, and he reminded me of a diminutive male spider mounting its gigantic mate. It was a colour photograph, but the colours were blighted with a purply sheen. No doubt it was kept on a window sill, where it would be taken up and contemplated routinely, until it was time to mow the lawn or wash the car.
“The wedding will take place on October 4th,” it said on the card stuck in my parents’ leather-bound wedding album with silk tassels. Wedlock. A parcel of land enclosed by white picket fencing. No grass, just earth neatly divided into beds with leeks or haricot beans. Husband and wife having breakfast in the gazebo with its slender pillars and climbing roses. There’s toast and jam, a brand-new tea cosy, Boch porcelain and Aunt Françoise’s not very nice but very expensive tablecloth. When the sun has set and the screens are placed before the windows to keep the mosquitoes out, they’ll enact the candlelight shadow-play which Mr Vaneenooghe said was at the heart of the bond between man and his helpmate, they’ll find fulfilment in one another as creatures of flesh and blood, as the divine confirmation of love in life and death, which, he assured us — and I tried hard not to think of his whiskers — was as delicious as strawberries with whipped cream in a blizzard of caster sugar.
His lecture left us somewhat nonplussed. The rest of the lesson was devoted to studying Genesis Chapter Two, Verses eighteen to twenty-five. Mr Vaneenooghe sat down at his desk, reached a hand into his trousers and scratched his crotch at length.
At home it was raining bills that couldn’t be paid. They spent long hours every evening fretting over household expenses, adding and subtracting, deciding against repair of the gutters in favour of someone they knew who knew about fridges and didn’t charge too much, who poked around with screwdrivers and pliers and in the end got the thing going again, although it made such a racket you could hear it streets away.
I gritted my teeth. What did God care about love? He parted seas and burned cities to the ground, set armies upon each other like termites, laid wagers and cast lots for his own son’s robe. He held our souls up to the light as if they were holiday slides, thrilling to the multitudinous patterns of our sins. On Ash Wednesday he made the sign of the cross on my forehead with grimy thumbs, whispering that I was a little heap of ashes mixed with water, and at the end of the lesson, when the others trooped out into the yard and I was kept in to clean the blackboard, my nostrils would sting with a smell like bad breath. I gazed out over the deserted desks, the satchels resting against the legs, the rulers, pens and pencils in the trays. I heard the clamour in the yard and was glad I had to stay in, even if it meant not seeing Willem. I soaked sponges, wiped them across expanses of blackboard, rose up on my toes, opened windows and knocked the chalk-dust out of dusters.
When the wind blew in from the west, which it nearly always did, half the dust blew back into my face, powdering me as white as the walls with their pockmarks indicating where pictures had hung until they fell down or were removed or shot down with rubber bands.
I screwed up my eyes. It got under my fingernails, in the corners of my mouth, made me blink. It clogged up my nose, gave me an itchy feeling in my neck and made my hands dry. When I licked my fingers they no longer tasted of me. I am nothing, nobody, I thought. I belong nowhere, and everywhere. At last I was at one with the Holy Father.
CHAPTER 9
BY MID-DECEMBER the frost had set in. It came with the irresistible clarity of an illusion, transforming tussocks of grass into spun sugar, etching trails of seaweed on the window pane, bearding the rafters in the attic with white stubble.
The days, frozen solid, were filleted by razor-sharp sunbeams and tinkled like little slivers of crystal.
It was summer the other way round. August in December, so bitingly cold at night that the sheets stung all my pores, obliging me to lie absolutely still, almost without breathing, until my body warmed them up. The slightest movement of an arm or a foot meant exchanging Africa for the North Pole.
We ran short of blankets. There were three or four on each bed, and still we shivered. It was so bad that Roland didn’t protest when I gathered up my covers and slipped into bed beside him without even asking permission.
He turned over on his side to make room for me. I snuggled up to him, absorbing his body-heat like a sponge, listening to him go back to sleep, staring at the window and the icy, liana-infested night beyond.
We rolled against each other in the dip of the mattress. He slipped an arm under his pillow, my head lolled against his shoulder and I reeled from the scent of him. He turned over. We lay back to back. His spine rubbed against mine. We turned over again, twisted away from each other and tumbled back like dice, each time in a different combination. Front to back. Back to front. Front to front. We pulled the sheet up over our heads. It slipped down, and our necks were nipped by the cold. We burrowed under again, into the warmth.
I listened to him making nibbling sounds in his sleep, smacking his lips, mumbling incomprehensibly, and I could feel his fingers twitching fitfully. A tremor passed through his legs from time to time, and his head jerked on his pillow. What he was dreaming of, I imagined, would be a fair reflection of his day-to-day world, complete with straight chalked lines and goalposts and him kicking in, heading the ball, scoring goals.
Sleep came over me in waves, surging and ebbing by turns until I was swept away at last into dreamy warm currents beneath a cover of pack-ice. Cloud formations in the water. White tunnels filled with diffuse grey light. The green of algae. An almost palpable silence.
My dreams were seldom about familiar things now. Mostly they featured vast plains scattered with boulders, or streets in anonymous cities, square windowless towers with machines throbbing inside, steel gates sliding open for me to step into galleries with display cases filled with mineral specimens or stuffed birds.
There were dreams in which I sat at the garden table under the beech tree reading fat books which made my head swim with words, images, and ideas of an awe-inspiring, glorious logic. Connections, explanations so lucid, so precise, that I kept telling myself, even as I was reading: I must remember this! But before I could do so the sentences seemed to dissolve. My voice wavered. The words slipped away faster and faster under my frantic gaze, blurring and sinking into the paper as I flipped through the pages.