She raised her glass of port wine to my lips.
“There, have a sip,” she urged quietly when no-one was looking, and again, and again, until the world reeled and swayed as I slithered down her shins.
*
It was one of those summer days when flying ants swarmed up from their nests en masse to dance over the treetops, and swallows scissored through the swarms.
“Anton, d’you want a sandwich?” my mother cried, but I did not reply.
I wandered off towards the stone steps leading to the vegetable patch and the fence where the woodbine crept up to invade the boughs of the beech tree.
I wanted to play in the orchard or by the vegetable patch, or in the lee of the hedges, where at this time of year the windless afternoon air vibrated minutely as a peach dropped from a tree and bounced two or three times on the tufted grass. I wanted to see how the stoneweed growing in the cracks between the paving stones folded its halo of fleshy leaves against the sun, and to hear the leisurely flap-flap of hens unfurling their wings like fans.
I wanted to follow the sandy path to the end of the orchard and thread my arm carefully through the thorny sprays of bramble to pick the first blackberries, all the way at the back, where the unknown vastness began.
The plum tree had shed a few early, unripe fruit, which lay fermenting in the grass. Soon they would burst, and clouds of buzzing flies or wasps would settle on them to gobble them up. Afterwards, the leftover stones would bleach in the grass.
There was a weeping willow by the old ice-house next to the pond which had been dug long ago, before Belgium came into existence, but which had been filled in since. My father leaned against the trunk and said, “Look, that’s where we’d hide when the bombers came over, in that dark hole over there. We slept on straw, like rabbits. Remember, Roger?”
Uncle Roger nodded. “Our father used to say there’s no safer roof than the roots of a tree. They hold the stones in place. Still, he did cross himself when they bombed the bridge. The pieces flew right over the shed.”
“We were lucky,” my father said. “Damned lucky. You don’t realise when you’re young. I thought it was exciting. Better than fireworks.”
“And in the winter of forty-one,” Uncle Roger said, “we used to cross the frozen canal to get to school. Ma was furious. Yet the ice was at least half a metre thick.”
“She was always worrying. It’s not until you have kids of your own that you can see why.” My father took his hands out of his trouser pockets, took a deep breath, gave me a poke and cried, “Race you to the bottom!”
I charged down the slope, stumbling over the tussocky grass.
He gave me a head start. “Watch out. There’s an ugly monster chasing you,” he cried.
Over my shoulder I saw Uncle Roger crawling towards me on all fours, teeth bared and growling alarmingly.
“A great big dog,” my father chuckled. “He’s going to bite you in the bum.”
My foot shot into a hole and I fell flat on my face.
Two hands grabbed me under my arms and pulled me upright. Uncle Roger put his teeth against my neck, my tummy, and swung me round by my arms.
Air whooshing past my ears. Tingle in the stomach.
“Fatty, fatty, fatty, you’re a Swiss cheese patty.” He put me down.
I fell over backwards.
Treetops, roofs, clouds wheeled around me. I could hear the Aunts taking the dishes into the kitchen, chairs being folded with a clatter.
My father knelt on the grass beside me. It was summer. Branches drooping with foliage and a blue-and-white sky beyond.
I ran my hands over his bare forearms.
“Fatty, fatty, like a Swiss cheese patty.” He flung a handful of grass in my face.
I blew the blades away, groped for his neck, and the world broke into smithereens of sheer delight.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
GOING ON FOR TWELVE, and unfulfilled. I outgrew all my shirts in the twinkling of an eye. The world that had surrounded me so fondly up till then was beginning to resemble ancient wallpaper that might come unstuck any minute. The wardrobe mirrors still reflected robust beds with crucifixes beneath the light switch. All those Saviours fashioned out of copper or porcelain, or plated with pewter, all of them nailed and writhing. In the room that once belonged to Alice the palm frond still smelt faintly of the scent she had taken to sprinkling on it once she discovered that holy water was nothing but tap water that had been blessed by a priest.
The world had grown brittle, as friable as an Egyptian mummy or a desiccated chrysalis deep in the bark of a tree. A clap of thunder would be enough to pulverise it. In summer the stands of poplar trees managed to screen the chimney stacks of the new industrial estate, but in winter the stark factory halls edged the sunlight with the chill blink of aluminium. And although my father had planted a new hedge to hide where part of the garden and the fields beyond had been bulldozed away, the high green wall did not stop the rumble of trucks on the new elevated bridge from carrying right over the stables and pouring into the yard.
On the horizon cars raced over roads that hadn’t been there before.
The sodium lighting along the brand-new motorway cast an orange glow in the night. A few years back, on a grey day in late autumn, the mayors of the neighbouring communities had held a joint ceremony to open the new approach road. Standing shoulder to shoulder they had snipped the tricolour ribbon, eliciting a little burst of applause from the crowd. There was a picture in the local newspaper: in among the ladies’ hats and freshly sculpted hairdos were my father and Uncle Roger, both wearing expressions of mild scorn. They stood on either side of Roland’s mother, whose lips shaped the O of bravo, looking up as the reporter clicked the shutter.
Stuyvenberghe, our home town, was now linked to modernity for good. We were to reap the bittersweet harvest in time, but for now the brass band stood poised in readiness in the background and the church square became a temporary fairground.
*
“The Callewijn family’s like an old shrub,” my father used to say. “Plenty of young shoots in the old days, all but withered now.” He’d have liked ten children. Ten bedrocks in which to lay his sorrow to rest, without ever abandoning his unrealised hopes for me and my unborn brothers and sisters. He had dreamed of taking up a technical profession, of being a civil engineer. It would have been him running the construction site that was rising all around us, putting up new illusions and demolishing old ones. By the age of ten he was already making technical drawings of imaginary machines. Gears and cog wheels. Complicated engines. Infinitely complex pumping installations which transported his dreams and eventually, when he was seventeen, sent them up in smoke. His father fell ill. Six weeks after the tests one of his legs was amputated. Not long after that the other one followed. It was in his lungs, too. He died a year later. The fields were leased and most of the cattle sold off. Someone had to be the breadwinner, and as Uncle Roger had already been studying for rather a long time, my grandmother, with characteristic pre-war fatalism, must have decided that taking her youngest boy out of school would be less of a waste.
From then on my father came home every evening around six, covered in flour-dust from the silos at the milling plant. His job was to pour the grain into troughs and watch it rattling over the conveyor belt before it vanished into machines that had not been designed by him.
But I remained an only child, the youngest shoot on the crown of a tree that was steadily dying back. A puny eleven-year-old, my frame not strong enough to bear the full weight of the past and far from ready for the future that was gnawing at my bones. My joints swelled up, my legs grew long and spindly. During the night my muscles twanged like tight strings, sending stabs of pain through my sleep.