Erwin Mortier: Marcel

THE HOUSE LOOKED LIKE ALL THE OTHERS ON THE ROAD: sagging slightly after two centuries of habitation, driving winds and war. Behind the hedge a spine of roof tiles slumped between two gables. The windows sat a little tipsily in the walls; wooden clogs potted with petunias hung by the door.

Most of the rooms harboured a limbo of darkness, cool in summer, chilly in winter. In some, the walls had absorbed the smell of generations of cooked dinners, as in the kitchen, where grease clung to the rafters. The cellar stored, the attic forgot.

By the end of August the cold began to rise from the floors. At night there was a smell of frost in the air. Sometimes, before a downpour, the clouds skimmed so low over the roof that they seemed to be torn asunder by the finial. The light grew thin. The grass in the orchard sparkled until well after midday. The garden shrugged off its last lingering touches of colour and assumed the same grey shade as the gravestones in the churchyard nearby.

I was taken there once a year by the grandmother, but she herself was a daily visitor. It was less than five turnings between the garden gate and the place where her dead lay sleeping. She did not hold with buying flowers for All Souls’ Day. There were always daisies pushing up from the graves. They would do well enough, she thought. Tombstone plaques decorated with porcelain roses filled her with scorn. She had epitaphs of her own carved in the granite of her soul.

She was the unbending midwife of her tribe. She would not allow her dead to vanish unattended. Once they were buried their bodies became earth. She raked partings in their hair and clipped the bushes by their headstones as if they were fingernails. Wedding rings had been transferred from the cold fingers of the dead to those of the warm-blooded living. She had folded their spectacles and laid them in a drawer, where they joined the tangle of all the other pairs with their long, grasshopper legs.

After each funeral she would open the curtains in the back room, raise the roller blind and put fresh sheets on the bed.

“The time will come for each and every one of us,” she would say, turning back the covers. “Into bed with you, no dawdling now.”

The chapel of rest had become a guest room again.

The alarm clock on the bedside table ground the seconds away. The fluorescent green face glowed spectrally in the dark. I hardly dared move between the sheets for fear of rousing the lost souls in the bedsprings, which jangled accusingly at the slightest movement of my limbs.

*

The house was a temporary annexe to heaven, due to a shortage of space. Within the confines of the glass-fronted cabinet the dead faded less rapidly than the living, whose austerely framed portraits hung unprotected on the walls of the parlour. They were not swathed in garlands of gilt or ribbons of silver, nor were they as conscientiously cherished.

All Souls’ Day came four times a month at the grandmother’s house. First she whisked her duster over the statue of the Virgin Mary and the miniature Yser Tower commemorating the Flemish soldiers killed in the Great War. Then she instructed me to hand her the photographs — one by one, not randomly, but in the order in which they had left their realm. They piled up. A young generation had arisen, the old one was gently falling away. In the end there were more photographs than I could hold. I laid them on the table, in the proper sequence, and patiently slid them over one at a time to be put back in the cabinet. In their ornate frames they looked like fragile carriages lining up to go through customs.

The grandmother blessed them with her duster and told me all their names. Clutches of aunts, nephews, distant cousins, nieces came up for review. Most of them were unknown to me, aside from a picture and a terminal disease. Four times a month I would listen to her reel off the same causes of death, pausing now and then to give a little sniff of resignation.

*

Bertrand was one of the few I had actually met. My first dead body. Someone had to be the first, and I could have done worse. One sunny Friday afternoon I came upon him quite rigid, hunched over the table in the low-ceilinged back kitchen of his tumbledown home. His hand was reaching for his inhaler.

“Asthma,” the grandmother declared. “His lungs wheezed so loud you could hear it out in the street.”

His daughter could barely wait to flog his antiques, tear the old house down and build a villa with a swimming pool.

The grandmother took a dim view of this.

“She never even lifted a finger for him.” A hint of malice entered her voice, for the daughter’s gleeful anticipation of her riches had been short-lived.

“Popped her clogs before the week was out. A burst appendix, it seems, after eating a boiled egg with a piece of eggshell on it. She was bent double with pain. Too mean to call a doctor, though.”

Bertrand’s daughter was relegated to the darkest corner of the shelf. No one was given any old place in the cramped afterlife of the cabinet, which was shared with the wine glasses and a coffee service. There was hell, paradise and purgatory. Aside from a few blessed souls who had special claims to proximity to the Virgin, no one could count on a fixed ranking. Posthumous promotion could happen, but being taken down a peg or two was more likely.

One day Bertrand too found himself in purgatory: second row, behind the Virgin’s back. News had reached the grandmother of some sin he had committed.

“It seems he beat his wife.”

When I asked her why, she went quiet.

“Indeed lad,” she sighed at last, “why would anyone do such a thing?”

She was given to remarks like that.

“Well my dear Maurice, they won’t be back, that’s for sure,” she would sigh.

Maurice ran a draper’s shop in town, which she visited every few weeks. She always phoned first, saying: “Maurice, I need some marchandise . I’m coming to see you.”

He would be waiting in the doorway for her to arrive. A short man, bald but for a few tufts around the ears, with a lumpy red nose over a pencil moustache. The shop window bore the name “Beernaerts Textiles” elegantly scripted in white paint.

“Getting himself worked up for one of his Italian welcomes, no doubt,” the grandmother would hiss between her teeth as we rounded the corner.

She was seldom mistaken. As soon as he spotted us Maurice rushed forward, flapping his arms and rubbing his hands together. He seized the grandmother’s shoulders and kissed her loudly three times.

“Whenever Andrea calls,” he rejoiced, “it makes my day.”

“That will do, Maurice.” She glanced round to make sure there weren’t too many people watching. “I’m not the Queen you know.”

*

The air in the shop smelled dry. Rolls of cloth were suspended row upon row from tall racks. The floor was strewn with multicoloured pieces of thread, and the strip-lights humming on the ceiling cast a cold white glow over the fabrics.

“Come now, fellows,” Maurice cried, “this floor needs sweeping. It’s a right mess.”

At this, several pallid assistants in grey dust-coats emerged from behind the racks, pushing wide mops that trailed beards of fluff across the floor without a sound. Sometimes I noticed them huddling together behind the racks. I could hear them sniggering at “Mijnheer” Maurice’s affectations. They wore soft slippers. They padded about the shop like cats on velvet paws.

*

“I have received a bolt of serge,” Maurice crowed, “Andrea my dear, it is good enough to eat. Such quality!” His fingers fluttered, fan-like, around his ears.

“It’s not quite what I had in mind. I’m looking for something different. What else have you got?”