Sleepless Night

by Margriet de Moor

  I looked at him candidly. Assiduously even. As a schoolgirl I would readily volunteer answers during class tests. And however tenuous my grasp of what we were supposed to have learned, as often as not I would hit the nail on the head. That willingness has never left me. I am happy to furnish information. Whether I’m accosted by a traffic cop, in a department store, on a train. What would you like to know? I have no secrets. As far as I’m concerned, the facts of my life are a matter of public record.

  He asked me if I had been alone a long time and I nodded.

  “Thirteen years and six months.”

  “Then your marriage can’t have lasted long.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Over fourteen months. From July 1970 till the following September.”

  The time had come to explain—this, too, had become second nature—that I was not a divorcée but a widow. As he listened, without making a show of his attentiveness, I drew back the curtain on the drama that had taken place one late summer evening. Shortly before eight o’clock, they later assured me, my twenty-five-year-old husband, wearing jeans, linen shoes, and a blue T-shirt—all perfectly ordinary, you see—walked to the greenhouse where he had set up an experimental installation for growing chicory under glass, where roots that came direct from the Northeast Polder were stacked in trays without so much as a grain of soil and stored for one month at 4 degrees Celsius in a semblance of winter before being ripened in a stream of oxygenated water—incredible when you think about it, a year and a half of natural growth reduced to just three months—and there, at the far end of the greenhouse, my husband took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a 9mm Luger. The weather, like every other day that September week, had been mild, windless. The villagers had been busy getting ready for the big annual livestock show, the “Stock Pile,” as they jokingly called it.

  The men I meet all respond differently, but they are seldom shocked or surprised. I think this is because I am a stranger to them. The things that happen to strangers have only a limited degree of reality. Vaguer than dreams or stories. Vaguer than a jumbled movie plotline. A friend once confided in me that a shared acquaintance, someone we hardly knew—you remember, the guy who played the organ so beautifully at that summer concert in the parish church—was about to be admitted to the hospital for open-heart surgery, and there was every chance he would not survive. Back in the solitude of my student digs, I must have sobbed out loud for a good thirty minutes before I looked at myself in the mirror. Yet now, as I relate what happened on the fringes of my own life, my face remains cold and I partake in the impassiveness of my listeners.

  Some want to know how he came by the Luger.

  “It was a family heirloom. The weapon his father used in the resistance. A sacred object, burnished by wartime heroism.”

  “But did he know how to handle it? And where did he get the ammunition?”

  “Yes, everyone wondered about that.”

  One man narrowed his eyes and inquired whether he had put the barrel in his mouth or—

  “No,” I cut him short. “The side of the head.” And pressed a finger to my temple. “A bullet fired at such close range comes out the other side. Took them a long time to find. It had rolled into the sorting machine.”

  “Why did he do it?” Quite a few ask that question, as you might expect.

  It is one to which I have no answer. And for this I am genuinely sorry. It’s a very unpleasant sensation, to be left speechless on that point. Every appeal to my knowledge, my intuition, my knack for inspired associations, has been in vain. I cannot tell a single soul what possessed my husband in the final moments of his life. And every now and then I find myself on the receiving end of the look that hit me hardest as the well-meaning schoolgirl I once was: reproach. I have messed up. The toughest word from the dictation is lost beneath an inkblot the size of a beetle. I did my best but memorized the wrong chapter. Feeling small, I lower my eyes.

  He looked at me earnestly but asked no questions. We sat silently a while. The crowds out on the platforms seemed to be thinning. A train slid soundlessly from view behind the lace curtain. The old lady had nodded off again over her newspaper, one hand outstretched in a fingerless glove, as if begging for alms. He stood up, plucked the empty cup from my hand, and took it over to the counter with his. I watched and felt a restlessness take hold.

  This was supposed to be another of those days when I dish up the facts without a flicker of surprise. As I had done for years. The fulfillment, the soothing of my “elemental needs” was now accompanied by a phenomenon to which I had grown attached: saying my piece. I watched as my companion ordered fresh coffee and bargained for a jug of hot milk instead of a packet. I must have already told him how much I preferred the real thing to powder. The heat from the stove was intense. My hands lay pale and damp in my lap. Hands that in no time had turned soft and supple again, once the protocol initiated by Lucia and me had begun to work its magic. Not a trace of the grappling hooks they had once been. The cure had been all but instant. My face had slimmed, my body, too, and both seemed to hold a certain appeal.

  On one side, the hem of his coat was hanging lower than the other. I was unable to take my eyes off it, but why? It was a thick brown coat like countless others; I pictured him stowing it away for the summer and retrieving it with a contented smile as autumn set in. What was so riveting about that?

  A special calm is needed to make this dough. It’s wise to have everything on hand before you start. Flour. Salt. Sugar. I take the big bowl, dissolve the yeast in milk. You knead the mixture for five minutes first, and only then do you add the eggs. From that moment on, you have to be careful. Yeast and eggs are extremely volatile ingredients. They make the mixture swell. They give off gases. And, a process which never fails to astound me, they double the original volume. I start by raking my fingers firmly through the ingredients.

  It’s nonsense, of course, to suppose that I do not remember Ton. Every woman remembers her husband. Things happened. Pleasant things, most likely, natural, too—so natural they seemed to happen of their own accord and left no impression. On Sundays, we were in the habit of having breakfast under the pear trees. We sat on rickety antique chairs. Ton boiled the eggs and served them up in an oven glove to keep them warm. How often would it have been? A summer long, a handful of times? I laid a garland of nasturtium around his plate, trickled honey into the calyxes of the edible flowers. Why? Out of love? Some sentimental notion? Because that morning my hair had fallen into a fetching wave?

  I press the base of my thumb into the dough. The surface still crumbles slightly. With slow, steady movements, I squeeze the mass together. I work in silence. It’s unthinkable that the mixer might shred the intense stillness of the night. The machine stands next to the stove, gathering grease and dust. I might as well toss it out altogether, for even during the day, when there could be no objection to using it, the notion never enters my head. Its nerve-jangling din is superfluous in any case. My fingers do the job as well as any pulsating dough hook, if not better. It’s simply a matter of making sure your hands don’t get too warm and turn the mixture gummy.

  Ton. His name was Ton. Not a name that struck a chord with me, it was just a good fit. It matched the way he walked and talked, the blue sweater he draped around my shoulders that day we went sailing. Oh, when I think of the ease with which he turned the boat into the howling wind and brought us to a clean halt six inches from the pier. By that time my lips were chewed raw; I tasted blood for hours.

  I turn on the faucet and rinse my hands with cold water. Then I dust the counter with flour. It is an old-fashioned granite surface. The stone was still free of cracks, and Ton and I saw no need to replace it with stainless steel. It is a source of pleasure to me now. It’s true what they say, the coolness held in a slab of nature never disappears entirely.

  This is where things get ugly. I plant my feet wider apart and take a deep breath. In the dead of night, I begin to pound away, slamming my fists into the
pale, pliant lump in front of me. Just as well there’s not another living soul around to witness this. It’s like a scene from a nightmare, one of those silent terrors that leave you swallowed up by some unreal entity, clingy and elastic. Of course I remember my husband. All I have to do is start at the beginning, with an image I can call to mind effortlessly, at any given moment.

  Almost everyone advised me not to go and see him.

  “It’s better to remember him the way he was.” My mother was the first to say these words.

  I nodded. She was right, that would be best. Probably. The inhuman weight of this viewpoint did not press upon me till much later.

  It was the day after what everyone had quickly started to refer to as the accident. My mother and I were sitting opposite each other, slightly ill at ease in the cold leather armchairs by the windows. I felt ashamed of not having dressed. It was almost noon and the hem of my nightgown lay crumpled across my knees.

  My mother is a formidable woman who has raised three children. I have never known her to wear anything other than voluminous floral dresses. She came over as soon as she heard. Her red station wagon had pulled up in front of the house before nine. I asked her how she remembered my father. This was a moment for the truth and she answered truthfully: the first time she had seen him naked. It had been the morning after, at the hotel. As she lay in bed, he had gotten up and opened the curtains. The sunlight of a foreign land cascaded over him.

  “Pale and sturdy he was, as he strode across the floor.”

  She looked at me with a tinge of melancholy and hastened to assure me that she often pictured him at his desk, too, tallying up the figures he had just jotted down in a twenty-year-old cash ledger with an unsteady, freckled hand.

  Lucia arrived that afternoon. Absorbed in the solemn task of the obituary notice, I was sitting at the table with my eldest brother when I saw her pass the front window. At that exact moment, elusive fragments of mourning, regret, and fondness formed phrases that rose up inside me, and my brother nodded and began scribbling furiously. I had only caught a glimpse of her, but I knew right away. She had seen him. She had driven to the funeral home in the next village and looked down at the corpse of her brother. I knew what she had come to propose. And in my mind, I had already agreed. Soon I’ll be sitting next to her in the car, and perhaps she’ll drive more calmly than usual, but in no time, we’ll have left behind this sunny village, strung with bunting. We will have to take a detour. The Brink is closed off for the livestock show.

  Lucia walked into the room and, in that matter-of-fact way of hers, chimed in where my thoughts had left off.

  “Unless you see him, you’ll spend your whole life not wanting to believe it.”

  My mother handed her a cup of coffee, which she drank standing up. Every now and then she took a step toward the table to tap her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. Her eyelids were a little swollen, but there was nothing special in that. September always seemed to land her with some allergy or other. She looked at me and said in her usual offhand way, “It really isn’t that bad, you know.”

  We were just about to drive off when two men, total strangers to me, came walking up the path. Feeling dazed, I got back out of the car. They took hold of my hands and began to intone guttural condolences. They had tears in their eyes and so I did my best to look as sympathetic and heartening as possible. Please, you’re welcome, go right in, I gestured, in the vague hope that my brother might offer them a cigar.

  Sure enough, we were there in no time.

  Looking back, it’s the fullness of the days that surprises me most. I was never alone. After an opening salvo of tears and questions, everyone who stopped by was determined to stick around and help out. I came up with all kinds of chores. Copying out addresses, feeding the rabbits. An insane amount of coffee was made.

  People thought I looked pale, that my eyes shone unnaturally. Above all, they agreed that I was being far too brave. Shortly after midday, I was persuaded to take a nap. Someone slipped off my shoes. The dark-red curtains were drawn. I promptly fell asleep and dreamed, as I often did when I slept during the day, that I was being made love to expertly by a total stranger. Without feeling the least surprise, I let myself be woken by the rather dour woman who drove the mobile library through the village on Wednesdays, and one minute later I was talking to a policeman, explaining unasked that my marriage had been a happy one.

  My mother offered to stay for a day or two, and got settled up in the attic. Even so, a young cousin of Ton’s decided on the second evening, when things were still very chaotic, that she would share my bed to spare me the pain of waking in the dark to an empty space under the covers. I raised no objection.

  The girl had an endearing way of sleeping. For minutes on end she rolled from one side to the other until her fine-boned body found just the right curve. By this time, her blond hair, which I admired greatly, had fanned out over my face and every stitch of bedclothes had slid to the floor on her side of the bed. Not that it mattered. The sultry afternoon had brewed up a rainstorm that showed little sign of letting up. The air that flowed into the house steeped everything—towels, sheets, pillowcases—in a sticky kind of sweat, and it was no hardship to lie in bed uncovered. The girl was fast asleep and I listened in wonder to the gentle quivering in her nose and throat. It did not seem to disturb her. Ton always lay close to me, on his side, one arm crooked under my pillow. While obviously not as motionless as I had found him that afternoon, he was always peaceful and still when he slept. You barely even noticed he was there.

  “What a hulking great thing!” I said to Lucia, as soon as we entered.

  The coffin lay in a spotless, air-conditioned room, all filtered light and flickering candles.

  “Well, they measured him exactly,” Lucia said. “Six feet four and a half. I’m sure they know their stuff.”

  I walked over without looking, let my hand glide over the wood. Young birch, I reckoned. A high-gloss varnish always gives that speckled effect. But then I saw that Lucia was right. Ton lay practically wedged in cream-white satin. Stupid of me, I thought, to give the undertakers those navy-blue pants for him this morning. He had never worn them, and besides, they were much too warm for this time of year. Hardly the burial clothes of a young farmer. Seeing that the jacket had ridden up a little at the shoulders, I took hold of the seams on either side and gave a careful tug with both hands. To no avail; there was barely any slack. I leaned closer.

  The face consisted of a large, round jaw, two expanses of cheek shaved smooth as can be, and a mouth that had been colored in. The eyes were closed, expressionless, of course, but at an odd angle to one another. The right eye seemed to have sunk slightly.

  Looking up, my gaze met Lucia’s and I smiled as if to say, You were right, it’s not that bad.

  Then I looked again. This was not a face anyone would want to capture in a portrait. A few days earlier it might have been an option. Someone could have snapped a handsome likeness of a man who had yet to reach his prime. I could have had it enlarged. The lines, the shadows, the slight asymmetry would have hinted at the things that had occurred through the years, and most definitely at everything still to come. All pointless now. The ripples of a life story had disappeared completely from this face. Run aground on one absurd detail: the moment when that little dent had appeared in the right side of his head.

  After eight in the evening.

  I nudged open the side door of the school with my elbow and carried the tray bearing cups and a thermos jug out onto the square. As the youngest teacher, I had offered to fix coffee. An open house at the school was part of the festivities for the livestock show, and we were busy putting together an exhibition of the children’s drawings. The village was buzzing. Elderly women held court at the school entrance, watching their children and grandchildren string streamers from one tree to another, fence off the Brink, and line up straw bales to mark the course for the tilt-at-the-ring contest that was to run from the milk plant all the way
to the village pub. They were wondering why on earth it was taking their daughters so long to brew a pot of coffee. And there I came, bustling to the rescue across the playground, the evening air still heavy with heat. And as I put the tray on the table, in the shade of the three poplar trees whose intertwined trunks always reminded me of a dromedary’s legs, Ton must have been heading down to the greenhouse.

  The big chicory greenhouse is quite a distance from the house. Head straight across the land where, at that time of year, the corn would have been five feet tall. Turn right at the end and there’s the greenhouse, over by the potato field that belongs to Braams, who at that hour can always be found sitting against the wall of his outbuilding, having a smoke. Chicory grows in the soil. That’s why the greenhouse has to be warm and muggy. That’s why it has to be dark. A heavy rubber curtain hangs by the door and lets in no light. I always found it a pleasant place to be. The sound of the water being continually pumped past the roots through a network of PVC pipes was especially pleasing. A clattering, cheerful sound.

  I walked back into the school building to round up my colleagues for coffee. In passing, my eyes lingered on the drawings and it struck me that, as the children grew older, what they drew seemed more cautious and restrained, emptier somehow. The children from my class drew thin tables, thin chairs, a flat cat. Never a dog. I picked up a sheet of paper on which a six-year-old had conjured up a magnificent monster in blotches of red and black. “All head and legs,” said one of the other teachers, coming up behind me. “He’s still at the schematic stage.” I walked over and pinned it up on the board. There! And meanwhile Ton must have been regulating the oxygen, salt, and minerals in the water, as young Martens and his brother discovered the next morning when they came to help out in the greenhouse as usual—I could not believe it, but they were adamant: he must have taken care of the nutrient levels that evening. And having done this, he drew the heavy curtain between him and the pitch darkness a little to one side.