STAMMERED SONGBOOK Page 3

  Mourning: someone throws a clammy floorcloth over the sun. Someone draws tiny lines in your chest with a razor blade. And on a godforsaken street corner, for the first time in years, you bump into your own pale self. The shadow leers: reunited at last.

  She has become a mirror. If we look cheerful, she is too—more or less. If the worries and grief are written on our faces, she too is overcome by sadness. But recently, recently she is increasingly stuck in what seems to be a permanent state of disruption. I can only hope that there is very little awareness of time left, that there is no sense in her that it used to be different, better. That thought is never able to console for long. Having to live in an eternal now of fear is perhaps just as great a torture—nothing but present, nothing but panic.

  Sometimes, when she fixes me with her look, I think that some mechanism in her brain scans for all signs of emotion, in my face, in my whole body. If I act more cheerful than I feel, I can’t calm her down. Somewhere in her brain, some circuit or other picks up the fact that I am behaving differently than my mood dictates. Perhaps an instinct that is more or less intact and possibly comes more to the fore now that the complex functions of thinking and speaking have virtually collapsed.

  Whenever I wake her, he says, when I wake her, because I have to wake her, otherwise she may go on sleeping, she always laughs, happy as a child.

  Surely it must be, he says, that she still remembers me?

  She’s in hospital. While they were having breakfast, my father noticed that she suddenly went as white as a sheet. Her eyes rolled, her arms and legs started jerking. He lifted her up, her bony body that had become as light as a feather, laid her on the sofa and called the doctor. He rang us, but kept getting the voicemail. When I listened to the message I heard the panic in his voice: Mum’s had a kind of turn.

  I rang him at once, and he had already calmed down somewhat, but his voice broke when he said: I thought I’d lost her.

  So straight onto the train, to the most depressing provincial town imaginable, and the weather isn’t particularly helpful today. The doctors haven’t found anything, it may be connected with the medication, the mild sedative that she has to take in the evening, to which she is reacting badly. Very probably they will adjust the dose or try something else. It’s not exactly cheerful having to spend a day in a geriatric unit and I’d rather not imagine what it’s like to spend your last few days there. Whenever I have to go there I am overcome with rage and terror. This is the hidden monoculture of our welfare state, I think. Fields and fields of grizzled heads, sagging, half-depressed (lonely, probably) or anxious (also lonely, perhaps), and crammed with pills for want of human companionship. I think I’d rather string myself up if it ever gets to this point. As a neighbour of ours in this street did a few years ago, next door, on the landing from one of the rails of the banisters.

  I’m almost certain that our grandmother, when she was forced to go into a home after that heavy fall on her bike, reached the conclusion privately that enough was enough. When she arrived and saw the building, which looks like a hospital, which smells like a hospital, which constantly screams in your face from the neon light fittings on the ceiling and the white material worn by the nursing staff that old age is a disease—she probably decided: that’s enough for me.

  I’d bet my boots that when, in addition to the fractures she had sustained, she caught some mysterious intestinal infection, she gave nature a helping hand and said to her God, for whom in those last few months she said the rosary day in, day out: my husband dead. My oldest daughter dead. And now watching another of my children die. Out of the question. It’s my turn now. After which she started eating less and less.

  I fumed, not to say boiled with rage at the crassness of that nurse who, with her hand in that of a fully conscious dying woman, was moved to say: it won’t be much longer. When I did her toilet this morning there was already post-mortem lividity on her back.

  She died on the morning of Ascension Day. Beyond the open window the church tower shook out sackfuls of carillon music over the roofs and the zenith was brilliant blue. In my life the nineteenth century was over. She died a death from another age, surrounded by the few saints’ statues she had brought from home.

  And here I sit as I write this, in a corner of the hospital corridor, in which my mother is washed and is terrified: plastic everywhere, down to the indoor plants, above my head a neurotic neon tube.

  It happened again, while she was sleeping on the sofa in the afternoon. My father had gone to see family and I had promised to “mummy-sit”. She went pale in her sleep, her cheeks almost as white as this paper. Under her eyelids I saw the pupils gliding towards the top edge of her eye sockets and from her trunk and midriff a series of shocks passed through her limbs. I slid one hand under her neck, and laid the other on her belly, and meanwhile I kept my eyes on her face and her lips, to see whether there were any convulsions with which she could have hurt her tongue, but I saw that under the thin skin of her mouth she was simply biting down hard on her teeth.

  It lasted for a minute at most. I was worried sick, but at the same time I contemplated her and thought: go now, go on. If this is to be the moment, go then, let go, it doesn’t matter. But the convulsions ebbed away, and she came round and looked at me and smiled. My eyes filled with tears, to tell the truth, and I felt, as it were, my whole life, my whole idiotic, humdrum life, from the sandpit to the wheelchair in which I shall doubtless end up cursing or gaga, trembling in me.

  Should I get dementia, it will be evident from my handwriting. It will become more legible, for other eyes too. Years of writing at night and in the quiet hours have distorted my private handwriting till it has become a sort of intimate stenography—a series of dots and curls and other score marks which have become a highly personal memory aid for me. If I, as we say in these parts, start misfiring, my writing will undoubtedly become slower, and automatically neater—if there is anything left to write about.

  Even now it regularly happens that I need half an hour to decipher passages that I have written the night before in handwriting that hobbles along in clogs after the ecstasy of inspiration. And yet it doesn’t annoy me. Indeed, I find it reassuring to be able to sit and stare at my notes as if they were a millennia-old clay tablet, which may preserve a forgotten epic or the inventory of the temple storerooms round the altar of the earth goddess.

  She always said that my handwriting was like her sister’s: just as illegible or anyway difficult to decipher. Her own handwriting bore the mark of school all her life, rather more angular than the calligraphy she had been taught in the 1950s. Letters to the head teacher, when we were ill or absent for some other reason, invariably contained references to “my son” or “my daughter”, which surprised us.

  She never talked about us like that.

  I would like to read the letters, the masses of letters she wrote to her sister the nun, usually sitting on the edge of her bed.

  She wrote with a blue biro on squared paper.

  Her signature was easy to forge. We all regularly signed school reports and suchlike—to which she more or less turned a blind eye. She was not very keen on the growing paper mountain generated by an education system obsessed with forms.

  She wrote to her sister often when her sister got cancer. I should like to know how her consolation sounded, her concern, perhaps her own fear too.

  Every day I repeat the miracle—or better the triumph—of the moment when our species invented writing. Reading and writing are things that we eventually do without thinking. Again and again the nimble-fingered miracle of our memory that, word by word, syllable by syllable, recalls the totally arbitrary link between a letter and a sound and what that association means. Again and again the creation of meaning from a dreadful background interference which without the other person’s ear would not convey any message… And that miracle, that everyday explosion into meaning, crackles and sparks back in time, to the ports of the Phoenicians, to the kings of Sumer, to the glazed tiles of the tower of Babel, scattered in the sand.

  Shortly after she became ill, when she was here in my house and could not think of the word “book”, my father showed her a newspaper report, something about a book of mine that was about to come out. It took her a quarter of an hour to read the article. And when I asked her if she understood what was in it, she nodded, but I could tell she was lying from the uncertain way she looked at my father.

  Hickory. Dickory. Dock. The words are deserting her again. She is de-wording and de-languaging and de-remembering.

  We learned to read through books about a boy and girl called Jan and Fien. They had a dog called Pim. I can remember being moved and astonished when they introduced me to the word “home”. The fact that, by replacing two letters with one the magic constitution of the word “house” changed, I found miraculous.

  So I learn to read and write anew every day—this miracle moves me every day afresh, more strongly, more intensely than before. Our home no longer exists, but I distribute, as it were, the family affection we knew, which was given to us, my brothers and sisters and me, in generous helpings, over a dozen braziers to store it elsewhere. You. Sweet. Warm. Kiss.

  Present for Mother’s Day?

  Buy her a good book!

  Read our checklist of the best gift books!

  Top sellers for Mother’s Day,

  sure to please!

  She gets up from the table, goes to the kitchen. When she comes back into the room she catches sight of herself in the big mirror against the wall next to the table. For minutes on end she tries to avoid her own reflection, in order to sit with that of my father and me at the reflected table. She is like the robin that pecks at its own reflection in the window pane. She no longer knows that the woman whose face i
s contorted with pain and fear is herself.

  When she comes to us, I have to close the curtain quickly, says Veerle. Otherwise she walks from the hall slap bang into the French windows.

  Where does that behaviour come from that she sometimes exhibits? That wells up out of her and ebbs away again? Why does she suddenly start taking her skirt in one hand when she gets up from the sofa, so that in a caricature of coquettishness she wobbles through the living room with one bare knee?

  It disappears, after a while. But then she is suddenly fixated on shoes. She takes a pair of slippers from under the radiator in the kitchen and goes upstairs with them (with me behind her, terrified she will fall), and traipses round from room to room with them, crying. Until I sit down and she flops down on the sofa beside me half an hour later and allows me to stroke her back, too exhausted to ward me off.

  I imagine I can hear it, the silent havoc spreading through that body: strings that break, wires that snap, high-tension cable singing as it gives out—the soft moan of collapsing beams. My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor. Sometimes she falls asleep even before her shoulders reach the back of the sofa. She remains hanging there asleep, hands in front of her. Short spasms run continually through her wrists and fingers. The last pylons are still standing, but they are rocking.

  We’re terrified. We don’t say much about it, but we’re terrified. Terrified of what is to come, however inevitable it may be. Terrified of mourning, which we would like to start today, in order not to have to stay in this twilight zone between life and death. It is neither fish nor fowl, day nor night, death nor life. The disease is kicking her out of time and booting us out of language. Words seem to me a kind of breakfast cereal at the moment: undoubtedly healthy, but rather tasteless.

  Another Christmas Eve, with and without her. Another Christmas Eve, with grandchildren who can’t understand why their granny is so sad and acts so strangely. I bend down to her, in her wheelchair, where she is sitting calmly, with a glass of alcohol-free bubbly in her hand and a bowl of nibbles. The edge of the table must more or less mark the boundary between the space, the narrow space around her, where the world is still familiar and reassuring, and the world outside, which confuses her and frightens her.

  We do our best to have her at table with us, but the outside world that frightens her, us that is, is obviously coming too close. She wants to get up and walk away.

  We roll her back to her corner of the room, some distance away, where she calms down. At ten o’clock Father takes her to bed.

  We say nothing about it for the rest of the evening, but everyone thinks what I’m thinking: for the first time in thirty or forty years midnight strikes and Christmas arrives without her being there.

  I don’t want to see her wasting away (and somehow I do, somehow I want to confront the proof of her disappearance). I don’t want to see her all skin and bone twitching and trembling in her final bed (and I do want to see it), I don’t want to have to think: this body that is shot through with attacks and spasms is no longer my mother (I’m prepared to think it if I have to). And I don’t want to have to think too often: this trembling skeleton, this wreck, is still my mother (and I’m prepared to do that too). Why can’t I say: she’s no longer with us, without feeling a stab of pain in my ribcage? Why can’t I say either: there is still something of her in her, without feeling pain too? And apart from that, if we decide that it’s worthwhile to go on treating her for all kinds of things, for whom is it worthwhile? And if we were to decide that it’s gradually become enough, for whom are we deciding that: for her or for us?

  There are moments when I just chatter and chatter and chatter. I’ve never been a babbler and will never be one, and yet on some days I just chatter and chatter and chatter.

  I chatter till I burst, chatter till I’m blue in the face and interrupt other people. I just rattle and gabble on, spew out language, teeth chattering, with a mouth full of dry oats. Where can I come ashore? And if I’m not chattering, I’m crying.

  Last week my brothers-in-law brought our parents’ bed downstairs. It seems trivial, but it’s another of those apparently insignificant steps that mean the umpteenth concession to the disease. It will do him good, he’ll no longer have to sleep with one eye open and jump up the moment she wakes in the middle of the night and stumbles towards the landing.

  And yet everything is now empty upstairs. The house is growing prematurely old, like her.

  Together at the window again, the two of us. He has popped out to the baker’s, the post office or the chemist’s.

  Where is he, where is he now, you know, him, him, him…

  Dad.

  Yes, Dad.

  Where is he, has he gone, where’s he got to?

  She’s crying.

  You mustn’t be afraid. He’ll be right back. Don’t be afraid.

  With her fingertips she fiddles with the hem of my shirt.

  I’mafraidI’mafraid, she whispers.

  At the same time I hear something dripping.

  Between her feet the carpet darkens with her pee.

  She hasn’t noticed a thing.

  I bend down, dry the carpet with a cloth, and wonder:

  Does he always carry extra panties with him?

  Did he also bend down, forty years ago, when her waters broke?

  She didn’t like babies, she liked being pregnant. One evening, when she was heavily pregnant with my youngest brother, she pulled her blouse up and stood in the light of the reading lamp looking at her belly. It seemed as big as the moon, that belly of hers, and she embraced it with both hands, blissfully. I never saw her cherish anything or anyone like that belly. Cherishing was something my father did, the man whom she bore children.

  The whole family had gone to the Ardennes for the weekend (all my brothers and sisters and other halves and children, nineteen of us in all). A few days constantly around her showed us how far the illness has already progressed.

  When we left on Sunday and wanted to say our goodbyes, she walked past me in order to take a red child’s bike that was lying on the lawn to the shed. Leave her, said Lieven. But as I saw her disappearing across the lawn holding that bike a chasm of unattainability opened up. I was shattered by her isolation, because she herself is not aware of it.

  It’s good he’s there, slightly at a distance from the emotions that the illness evokes in my father, and in my brothers and sisters and me.

  That he’s there, as it were on the bank, while we navigate a course round the cliffs in open water.

  That he’s there to make soup for, mash potatoes. Things become very concrete, like for example chopping a chicken into pieces to make a meal for us.

  Having a good cry now and then is also part of it, of course, but also immersing myself in the day’s routine. The fact that he has to get up for work, that he’s ravenous when he gets home.

  We’ve known each other since we were children, basically, and so as old fogeys we’d better make the best of it.

  Sometimes I worry about later. Who will go first, who will have to bear the dull misery of being left behind? And the raging fear.

  He will tough it out, I think. Draw in his neck, head thrust forward, and charge on. He is more inured to the hard aspects of life because life has been a lot tougher for him. I, I’m a pampered thoroughbred in that respect. I haven’t been through anything.

  There’s no point in going on about it.

  I’m going to make courgette soup tonight, with a handful of coriander.