Erwin Mortier - Stammered Songbook - A Mother's Book of Hours

I have at home a medallion of Napoleon III, which supposedly once belonged to her great-grandmother, and which when I was small was kept on “their side” of the house, the side where my great-grandfather, her grandfather, lived.

With the children of my brothers and sisters the house has reached its fifth generation, probably the last.

My grandfather was laid out on the bed in which he was conceived.

There were ghosts in the attic, ghosts with boots on.

The war is over.

They smell empty, the rooms upstairs. Of my childhood when the forefathers had left the house and this world. It suddenly smells of their clothes again and their breath and their chewing tobacco, of the linoleum that used to cover the floorboards. Of the dust in the dull yellow curtains. They stayed away for years, those olfactory ghosts. Now they are freeing themselves from the pores in the walls, and moving outwards with great intensity.

The smell of autumn decay, when out the bedroom window the light of the street lamp, a bulb under a porcelain cap, jangled to and fro in the wind. Farmer De Poorter collected the household rubbish with his horse and cart in the middle of the night. In stormy weather he sheltered under his cart, by the horse, which stood stoically on the verge while the lightning flashed.

Awakened by the wind, the jangling street lamp, by horse’s hooves on the asphalt, by the cosmic thundering. One night lightning struck nearby. All the fuses blew, and the sockets spewed little blue flames. Farmer De Poorter called “Gee up! Gee up!” to his horse, which had sparks flying out of its hooves. In the sand of the garden path there was a gaping crater with glass walls where the lightning had struck.

These are images that are more bat-like than memories. They detach themselves from the beams from which they were hanging upside down asleep and flutter through the night. And the ancient dead in their shrouds of rain and autumn air, wood and plaster ooze from the walls.

One day they will absorb her too, and later emit her again: as the sour smell that hides in her clothes, the body odour of her bitter fears.

I can remember her voice, but not her words. Sometimes her laugh echoes through my dreams or my semi-waking slumber. That animal pleasure of hers in the past when the house or the garden was full of people and the delight with which, as soon as the first warm spring sun shone, she stretched out naked in the deckchair, behind the cherry laurel.

In the past, I say.

It’s good to have friends on your sofa now and then and to watch them leafing through albums. Then I can look through their eyes at photos which otherwise cut me too deeply with their sharp edges.

I remember, years ago, sitting with Lieven on the old railway embankment looking out over the marshes near the River Lys in the evening sun. We were sitting on the embankment, in the tall grass. In front of us the soggy meadows, the rows of trees. Behind us the town and its hum. It must have been July. I remember that the hemlock had finished blooming.

Lieven said: look, there go your parents.

They were walking on the far bank of a wide canal, at the foot of the dyke, behind the reeds and the bulrushes, under the lancet-shaped leaves of the silver willows. He a little behind her, she looking around her with pleasure in the calm evening light. She was wearing a wide white dress that swayed in folds around her knees. They did not see us.

I wanted to call out something, but Lieven said: leave them be. Look how happy they are. And I felt a great sadness as I saw them vanish among the leaves.

I remember.

I remember the blue plastic child’s bathtub on the table in the front room. I remember the texture of the blue-and-white check flannel, on my tongue and my lips, while I am sitting in the bath — the assault on my taste buds, the sour flavour of soap.

I remember, she and her sister have wrapped me in the towel, I remember the cold of the floor under my feet.

I remember her saying later: fancy you remembering that. You’d only just learned to walk.

I remember the house, still empty without brothers and sisters, and me crawling towards her between the blocks and toy cars across the black-and-white tiled floor. She is wearing a black leotard because in the afternoons she does gymnastics on a rush mat. I crawl towards her, and she looks down at me with amusement. I sit down on her feet, which she moves up and down under my bottom. I bob and rock and laugh out loud.

I don’t remember any other expressions of tenderness from her, except much later.

I remember the small scullery where one afternoon the first washing machine she bought, no more than a drum in white enamel, alarmed me when the centrifuge started up, as if the appliance were irritated by my presence. I remember her banjo which hung vibrating on a hook above it.

I can’t remember ever hearing her play on that banjo.

I remember her crying, one afternoon on the sofa in the empty house, and not knowing why.

I remember my younger sister in a purple bikini riding circuits on her tricycle round the paving stones of the back garden. And also the intense green of the lawn, and the grey ribbon of the dead-straight garden path.

I remember the faint jangling of the springs on the pram in which my youngest sister is sleeping, over the gravel of the country road under the poplars while we are on our way somewhere; perhaps we are just going for a walk, perhaps we are on our way to one of her friends. I remember that she has put white socks and sandals on my other sister and me, and that the socks go grey from the dust on the country road. She has placed a couple of locks of hair over her cheekbones and is wearing that summer dress with stylized poppies and buttercups.

Sometimes I remember the wind which blew in gusts through the tops of the trembling poplars and wrapped the house in the soft rush of leaves. Safety.

But I also remember nights so quiet that the silence seemed to congeal into whispering in the darkest darkness imaginable. And sometimes it was her voice, sometimes his, when they talked in bed, softly, so as not to wake us. If they were quarrelling her voice sounded more abrupt, cutting, his more plaintive, deeper. From her I imbibed the poison of reproach, from him I inherited fatalism. During the day she soon started shouting when they quarrelled. And he shouted back. They were sometimes frightening, for a child, those moments of verbal thunder. Only later did we understand why it often got so loud: they didn’t know how to quarrel. They shouted in frustration at not being able not to love each other.

I remember her having words with my sisters during their adolescence. Mothers and daughters. Could she do anything but repeat the difficult love of her parents with us? I remember the argument in the conservatory, the broken glass when she and my younger sister stood shouting and pushing each other on one side of the door. They both cut themselves, not only literally, and afterwards licked their wounds, not only figuratively. How many legacies do we bequeath to the innocent creatures who merely want to love us, weighed down with rucksacks of their own, with their load of bread and cobblestones?

I remember the embarrassment and later the amused mockery when we could hear them making love. The bang when the leg of their bed gave way. And how afterwards, I don’t know for how long, it was propped up by my father’s thick crossword dictionaries, before a new one arrived.