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

They bought furniture that was virtually falling apart. Five children had to be able to play indoors too, not stuck sitting as good as gold on the cushions on which the slightest smudge or stain would spell humiliation. We converted the living room table into a galleon, and in the twilight area beneath the dining table made our own house, our own family. My sisters were mother, the youngest brothers the babies. Why did I always have to be the dog? With knitting yarn we wove intricate labyrinths, crazy spider’s webs from the chandeliers to the door handles to the feet of cupboards and chairs. She gave us our head, but she was ashamed if we, when there were posh visitors and she asked us to lay the coffee table, quite simply lifted the door of the cutlery cupboard off its hinges, because they had so often served, those doors, as a raft or a shield that they clattered onto the floor at the slightest touch. I am still amazed at the toughness of chairs, their dogged, creaking endurance. Even under the most ponderous bums they held out, much to our disappointment.

I remember her rust-coloured corduroy trousers with the orange back pockets. Her pancake trousers, the trousers she always wore when she was going to make pancakes in the evening. I remember we waited for those trousers like Druids waiting for the solstice.

Love is gravity.

I remember all of us in their bed, us five and our parents, on Saturday mornings. Making mountains with the blankets. Bedouin tents of linen. Pillow fights. My father lifts my youngest brother up by his shins. We cart books and pillows and toys along with us: a litter of five naked mice and their parents, on a Saturday morning long after ten.

When she was in the maternity clinic we were allowed to sleep with him in turn in the big bed, the bed where we must have trickled from him into her. Sometimes I stayed awake to experience the protective presence of his body for longer. The whole room was permeated with safety and warmth. We were jealous, the nights when it wasn’t our turn, but we felt safe just the same.

For me love needn’t be more than a hospitable kind of indifference, a spot, a house, a garden, his belly when he sleeps or lies reading, where behind hedges or walls, or in the soft hollow between his ribcage and pelvis, I find shelter from the simultaneity of everything and everyone. Places, in short, where I can dispense with the imposed pride of constantly being myself.

I remember her telling us about her boarding school days in Wallonia, where her parents sent her because she was a hopeless case. She had to go to a boarding school in Le Roeulx, with an order of nuns in a convent endowed by the family of the Princes de Croy, whose scions lived an invisible life in their château full of peeling gold leaf and commodes with turned legs, right next to the boarding school.

I remember her telling us about one particular nun who passed through the cloister every morning in her nightdress and each time bowed humbly to the life-sized crucified Christ on one of the walls — while each time her pee spilled over the edge of her chamber pot. And I remember the stories about that other nun with whom she regularly had to share a bed, especially in the winter months, against the cold. At home, she also told us, her sister always got angry because in the winter months she would press her icicle-like feet into her sister’s warm back.

She only held out for one school year. In the holidays she hitch-hiked home. She got lifts from the lorries laden with coal from the mines around Charleroi. She would throw her case in the back with the shiny anthracite and chat with the drivers in the cab.

Freedom.

We are not sovereign beings. We are like fragments of the earth’s crust, the thin, grinding shell around the world, dented under the pressure of the other lives around us. For large distances serrated. Here and there as flat as a pancake. Sometimes rounded and slippery.

She is now a glacial valley — an ice field has scraped over her, and the earth has been scoured away by the masses of ice. In the bare stone, wide furrows are legible. Every relief has been smoothed flat.

If we hold up her coat for her to put on, she immediately walks the other way.

If we hold the left slipper ready to put on, she lifts her right foot.

Still our mother, says An.

Still just as stubborn.

We give her a send-off like parents do when their child goes to their first summer camp. Handkerchiefs are never far away. In her case are the things we have chosen. Material that we hope will extend like an umbilical cord between the place where she will be staying and the house where she spent her childhood and has seen her own children grow up. We know she’ll never return, and that we mustn’t expect postcards.

In time the years when she was ill, the years of drudgery, misery, will not so much fade away as, finally, become simply one particular period in her and our existence. Then she won’t be just this grinding, trembling, collapsing body that is dying at a snail’s pace. Memory, elastic and creative, will stretch over the gaping wound, the silent toothless mouth of her suffering, a stretchable membrane of stories, a safety net. I know there will be holes in it. For years there will always be one moment every day when we push through that protective skin and are temporarily helpless — my father at least. That’s how it goes, I know. I am frightened of that loss, or rather I accept it just as toothache goes with having teeth — very reluctantly.

She won’t fade, but will crystallize further into a host of facets. We will understand her better as we ourselves experience the stages of life that she has also experienced, and we will, too late, draw resigned conclusions and grant her forgiveness. That’s how it goes, I know.

Finally we shall enter the phase of life when she no longer grows along with us — unless we undergo the same fate.

Soon there will be grandchildren who will absorb her into their story universe in the form of snatches of narrative and snaps and a gravestone — like me, who just under fifty years ago bathed ignorantly in the murky amniotic fluid of so many ancestors. For the other grandchildren, who are older, life will fill the empty space she leaves behind with other treetops in the great human wood.

After us she will become static as an ancestral statue and slowly dissolve in the rush of time. When all’s said and done, what do I know about, say, my great-grandfather, who died when I wasn’t yet four? His voice, rasping, but no words. His weathered hands, which he always held on his back whenever he took always the same walk with An and me down the same country road. His bald pate sticking out above the sheets on his deathbed. His shadowed profile, in the permanently darkened half of the house where he lived with his wife, and, after her death, alone. Every quarter of an hour a Big Ben clock sent a touch of Albion chasing round the dark living room. Their wedding photo hung on the wall in an oval frame with plaster wreaths of flowers.