by lize Spit
She made sure I lost every time.
Clutching the notebook, I walked into the house. Inside it was quiet, dark. Mom was still sleeping in the armchair. Through the ceiling, I could hear Jolan up in his room. The wheels of his desk chair were sliding back and forth across the wooden floor. I’d recognize the sound anywhere—he was tinkering with his microscope, examining his latest acquisition.
“Tessie, I’m still here. You want to know why I’m calling? I wanted to tell you I went by the house today. Nanook’s basket was still there, but all they have is a cat now. I didn’t talk to Mom and Dad, but I think they were doing okay, or at least no worse than usual. I left them a note.”
It’s not a lie. That’s what happened. The noise I thought I heard turned out to be a false alarm, a cat or something. For hours, I just sat there on that kitchen chair, until I heard the sound of my own thighs peeling off the fake leather. Quietly, cautiously, like a cop patrolling outside his district, I crept up the stairs. In the master bedroom, I found Mom and Dad. They were both lying face down under the covers, with only their heads sticking out.
Their faces were turned towards each other, half hidden in their pillows. The room smelled like fermenting dough. For a moment, I thought they were dead, that they’d passed away peacefully in their sleep, but then I saw them slowly breathing. The fact that they were lying so close together made it easier to leave them behind.
I hurried downstairs to the back door. The clock on the microwave was blinking, winking at me.
Before leaving the house and heading out into the snow, I walked back into the kitchen and pulled my drawing off the wall, my detailed sketch of our house, with light blue clouds and a bright yellow sun and nine little birds on the electricity wire. I left Tessie’s failed attempt up on the wall. In retrospect, hers had been more accurate all along.
Mom would immediately notice the drawing was gone. In the end, that was the battle cry we’d been raised with: it’s better to be present somewhere than to be nowhere at all.
I better not lose track of time.
Dad used to leave me long voicemails. Usually, time would run out before he was finished. After exactly two minutes, his voice would be mercilessly cut off mid-sentence. Sometimes I didn’t listen all the way to the end, not because the message was irrelevant, or because Mom was shouting in the background that he should leave me alone, but because I didn’t want to hear him get cut off, the click of the switchboard giving up on him.
“You know, Tessie, it’s okay you always made me lose. Then somebody else could win. It isn’t good to always win. It’s kind of like living in a beautiful house that looks out at a run-down facade.”
It feels strange not to be able to hang up, to swipe away the call. The three minutes are almost up.
“No, wait Tessie, one last thing. I’ve got some money saved. I think it’s enough for a new bathroom for Mom and Dad. What do you think? It’s just sitting there in a shoebox under my bed. Don’t let them go for the cheapest faucets, they’ll start leaking again after a few months. Sound good? Goodbye, Tessie.”
All I have to do now is wait. The rest will come.
This day will eventually turn out like the day Jan died. First, my parents and Tessie and everybody else will try to figure out the practical details, to understand my motives. But over time, none of that will matter anymore. It won’t matter whether it was eleven or twelve o’clock when I walked out of the house I grew up in, what time I stepped up onto this block, how long I waited here, what I was wearing, how I spread the slurry on the meat, why I had the drawing of our house in my pocket, exactly how patient I must have been, or whether I wanted to be found. All that will matter is that I was here, on this first snowy day of an otherwise mild winter.
Love & thanks to Marscha, Daniel, Toine, Bregje, Lotte, Saskia, Ellen, Suus, Jeanette, Linde, Mariska, Maartje, Walter, Samuel, Mama, Papa, Thomas, Marieke and Ruth.
Translator’s note
When Lize Spit’s Het smelt was first published in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2016 by the young Amsterdam publishing house Das Mag, it was a near-instant sensation. The book received glowing reviews, won prestigious prizes and has sold more than 200,000 copies—no small feat for a debut novel from an independent publisher in such a small language area. The then twenty-seven-year-old Lize Spit was pushed into the spotlight as both a Flemish literary talent and a voice of her generation, a role that she continues to occupy today.
There is a refreshing peculiarity to Spit’s writing style, a certain uncanniness that grabs you as a reader and pulls you along. She writes vividly, cinematically, with tremendous attention to detail. She uses mundane objects and occurrences to create multi-layered metaphors. She likes to turn sentences and idioms inside out, creating new, surprising—and sometimes jarring—images: two toothbrushes “standing like soldiers” in the brick holes of an unfinished bathroom wall; storm clouds that “merge like a bruise forming in reverse”; Miss Emma floating behind Eva “like a helium balloon attached to my wrist by a string”; and Mickey Mouse’s clock hands on eleven and two “cheering unconvincingly” in the milk house. In these calculated descriptions of Eva’s thoughts and emotions, Spit creates a complex, tragic narrator who is as believable as she is unreliable.
As a translator, my goal was to preserve Spit’s idiosyncratic style—which alternates between short and long sentences, fragmented and flowing thoughts, subtle details and sweeping reflections—and to create a translation that reads fluidly, rhythmically, that draws the reader toward the shocking climax in the same way the original does.
I found myself fascinated by the way Spit uses Eva’s perception of small details in her environment—the aerial house photographs, the untouched bag of NicNacs, the unraveling of meat—to construct an eerie setting in which the horrific events at the end of the book can conceivably take place. When I first read the book, I was struck by how—as someone the same age as Spit who grew up in the United States—so many details seemed familiar to me: Windows 95, Minesweeper, the styling of shoelaces, the boredom of sitting on a swing set on a hot summer’s day. That said, the book is full of specific cultural references and realia whose significance may not be obvious to English readers.
One such example is the way “the three musketeers” are separated at the end of primary school: Laurens and Eva attend a pre-university high school where they study subjects like German and biology, and Pim goes to a vocational high school where he learns things like how to fix a moped and build a swimming pool. In Belgium and the Netherlands, children’s educational trajectories are largely determined around the age of thirteen when, based on test scores, they are put on an academic or a non-academic track. This tracking can have a major impact on their social circles and future prospects. One of the reasons that Laurens and Eva cling to Pim in desperate (and often inexplicable) ways is that, partly due to this educational system, they know their paths are diverging, most likely forever. After their first year at their respective schools, they are becoming more aware of their place in society, and there’s more pressure than ever to prove something to each other, and to themselves.
Another interesting and recurring detail is the symbolic role of meat. Throughout the story, Eva observes Laurens’s mom handling different kinds of meat. She contrasts the fancy steaks that Laurens eats every night with the cheap Aldi products she gets at home; she marvels at the meticulous way Laurens’s mom prepares her holiday meat platters and notices a level of care that she’d never expect from her own mother. These different meat products—pâté, meat salad, ringwurst, teddy bear sausage—are all staples in Belgium and, in addition to the carnal images they conjure up in the story, they carry socioeconomic connotations. At times, I had to rely on other ways of conveying those connotations in the translation. One of the most significant meat scenes in the book is centered around the holiday tradition of gourmetten, which involves grilling small pieces of meat on an electric table griddle, kind of like fondue. It’s a ritual that needs no
explanation for Dutch-language readers and one that conjures up cozy feelings of gezelligheid, or the pleasure of being together. This makes the pivotal scene at Eva’s house during their last family Christmas in 2001 all the more tragic, a failed attempt at togetherness by a family in crisis. The image of greasy chunks of meat simmering on an electric griddle intended for festive purposes renders the scene even more heart-breaking: three neglected children who dared to hope for a special Christmas dinner and instead get an angry, drunk father and a mother who has to eat with the dog.
While working on the translation, I was fortunate enough to receive valuable input from the author, who was always available to answer questions and think in solutions. The few changes to character and place names, such as replacing the name “Tesje” with “Tessie”, were done with her approval and only where necessary. In the case of Tessie, it was important that the English reader understand that her name was a diminutive form of Tes, her deceased sibling’s name. Fortunately, like Tesje, Tessie is not an uncommon name in Belgium. The author and I also discussed images of certain objects, such as the American shovel and the hole poker, which allowed me to accurately render the horrifying images of Eva’s rape.
Throughout the process, I was also mentored by two esteemed colleagues: first by Jonathan Reeder, who guided me, years ago, in the translation of the first chapters, which ultimately led to the commission of the book; and later by David McKay, who provided me with extensive feedback on my work and contributed to several solutions for difficult sentences. These mentorships were funded by Flanders Literature, which was also kind enough to support my stay at the Translator’s House in Antwerp to work on this project. This experience proved immensely valuable to my overall sense of the book, its language and its setting. I am so grateful for their support and delighted to see this book published by Picador for an English-speaking audience.
Kristen Gehrman
The Hague, The Netherlands
March 2021
LIZE SPIT grew up in the De Kempen region of Belgium. She studied in Brussels at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound, where she was awarded a master’s degree in scriptwriting. Her first novel, The Melting (Het smelt), published in the Netherlands in 2016, won the De Bronzen Uil award for the best debut of the year as well as the Dutch Bookseller’s Award for Novel of the Year.
First published 2021 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2021 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR
EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Limited,
Mallard Lodge, Lansdowne Village, Dublin 4
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-3871-4
Copyright © Lize Spit 2016
Translation copyright © Kristen Gehrman 2021
Cover images © Shutterstock
Author photograph © Roos Pierson Portret
Design: Neil Lang, Picador Art Department
The right of Lize Spit to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Originally published in Dutch 2016 as Het smelt by Das Mag Uitgevers.
This book was published with the support of Flanders Literature (flandersliterature.be).
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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