“I’ll put some aftershave on it later,” I said.
He knocked the foam off the razor, held it under the tap, resumed shaving. I could see his eyes narrowly following his fingers.
One day I would tell him things that would pain him as superficially as cuts from a razor blade, although the wounds would sting for longer. He would be left with questions that would itch like old mosquito bites every time he saw me arriving alone in my car, no kids to be scooped up from the back seat and hung around his shoulders like a garland of flowers. From that day on, too, he would suffer from niggling insecurities in his chest about having said too little to me or too much, while his silences spoke more volumes than entire libraries, enough for me to read for the rest of my life.
I watched him put the razor away and hold his hands under the tap. His stomach sagged over his trouser belt. The hair on his chest seemed to be thinning. He was a smooth, marbled pebble, all the sharpness worn down, gleaming in the sunlight. A safe place for him would be in the palm of my hand. I’d take good care of him.
He shook the drops off his fingers.
“At least you look respectable now,” he said. “You’d better rinse that foam off your ears.”
I stepped past him to the washbasin. Leaned over. He laid his hand on my back.
When I looked up he had gone.
*
The grey suit lay at the foot of my bed. It evoked a sense of expectation, the buzz of weddings or garden parties, which I found disturbing as I slipped my arms into the sleeves of the jacket with the shoulder pads that made me look twice as broad.
I put my shoes on. Double the lace to make a loop, tie the other end around it and pull it through to make a bow-knot. I could see myself in the changing room at school with Willem at my side, making fun of my embarrassment, showing me how.
I passed my mother in the corridor.
“I’ve taken your Pa’s blue tie.”
She turned up my shirt collar and laid the tie around my neck.
I felt myself turning into my father. As slim as he was on that day in October almost thirty years ago, when he strolled arm in arm with my mother in the gardens of the castle and stared at her veil melding with the mist rising from the grass by the lake. She was never younger than in that photograph.
I shivered, worried sick that my knees would buckle, later on, when the coffin slid away between the curtains into the furnace.
“Ma, why don’t you come with me?” I asked, and regretted it instantly.
I saw her chewing her lower lip as she straightened my collar and tucked the end of the tie into my waistcoat.
“I don’t think we’d want to go there, Anton. Anyway, we don’t really know them very well, do we?”
I noted her shame. His father was an architect. Whenever my father found himself in the company of “posh folk”, he would fold himself up like a newspaper left lying on a sofa.
“Forget it,” I said.
She stood behind me, buffing the back of my jacket with a clothes brush.
“Spic and span.”
I went downstairs.
“Here you are,” my father said, handing me the car keys.
I stepped outside. Got behind the wheel. Switched on the ignition, reversed under the beech tree and rolled out of the yard.
By the gate stood my mother, signalling me to stop.
I wound the window down.
She leaned over and tucked a condolence card in my breast pocket.
“Don’t forget to give this.”
She patted the hair on my forehead.
“When will you be back? I’ll keep some supper for you.”
“That’s fine, Ma.”
“It’ll be the other place.” She was referring to the new house. “Mind you don’t forget to go there, you don’t want to be coming here by mistake. I know what you’re like.”
“All right.”
I wound up the window. Waved. Drove out through the gate and up the road on the dyke. Sped away.
In the rear-view mirror I saw them both standing in the verge. My father had his arm around her waist.
He raised his hand. Shouted something.
I saw the pair of them receding gradually in the oblong mirror, the crown of the beech tree dwarfing the stables, and then, in a final glance before turning on to the motorway, it was all gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ERWIN MORTIER (born 1965) made his mark in 1999 with his debut novel Marcel, which was awarded several prizes in Belgium and the Netherlands, and received acclaim throughout Europe. In the following years he quickly built up a reputation as one of the leading authors of his generation. His novel While the Gods Were Sleeping received the AKO Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the Netherlands. His latest work, Stammered Songbook, a raw yet tender elegy about illness and loss, was met with unanimous praise. Mortier’s evocative descriptions bring past worlds brilliantly to life.