Marcel

by Erwin Mortier

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Written from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother, Marcel is a striking debut novel describing the vivid history of a family in a Flemish village. The mysterious death of Marcel, the family favourite, has always haunted the young boy. With the help of his schoolteacher, he starts to discover the secrets of Marcel’s ‘black’ past. The story of his death on the Eastern Front for the sake of Flanders, and the shame this brought upon his family gradually become clear. Erwin Mortier unravels this shameful family past in an unusually sensitive and evocative manner.

Release date: May 5, 2015

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Print pages: 128

Sample

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 grand- mother 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?"? Maurice snapped his fingers. Behind the racks the assistants separated and reappeared from all sides with mildly perturbed expressions on their pale faces, as if they had been hard at work. The manager’s hands flew this way and that. The assistants unhooked the shafts from the sides of the racks and released the catches. A plaintive creaking filled the air as lengths of fabric cascaded down, creating tapestried walls. The shop became a maze panelled with tweed, raw silk and velour.

Maurice escorted the grandmother down one passage and up the next, indicating the different materials with a long pointer as if they were maps of strange continents. Every few steps he motioned to his assistants to continue the display, whereupon they swung their shafts and released yet more walls of fabric. Whenever the grandmother slowed her pace he snatched up the material in both hands and held it under her nose.

She rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, sniffed it, and came very close to taking a bite.

"Samples?" she said.

He reached under the rack for the book of swatches. Turning the pages he escorted the grandmother across his emporium back to the window, where they inspected each sample in turn.

"Daylight cannot tell a lie," the grandmother said.

They moved closer together. Maurice’s head swung from left to right in time with his hands.

The grandmother muttered something.? Maurice shrugged and raised his eyebrows.? The grandmother shook her head, giving her hat a stern little shake in the process. ?"Bon, I’ve made up my mind," she said finally.? They crossed side by side to the long wooden counter.

Maurice noted down her order on a sheet of brown paper. Each item filled him with delight.

"And I need some more of those perlefine beads," the grandmother said. "I’ve run out again."

He grinned.

"You know what they’re like in the country," she said brightly. "Anything gaudy and glittery makes them feel rich." Maurice manoeuvred a stepladder between the counter and the wall fitment made up of countless little drawers. "Yes," he said, "there’s not much demand for such items around here. I always keep the country things somewhere at the top."? They exchanged grins.

"Perlefines, perlefines." He opened a drawer. "How many do you need?"

"A good supply."

He filled a paper bag with the tear-shaped beads strung on glistening thread and cautiously descended the ladder.

"Voila! Finery for country lasses. Can I offer you a glass of something?"


*
?

A long windowless passage led to a dimly lit sitting room, where Maurice poured himself a snifter of cognac. The grandmother opted for Elixir, a colourless liquid that clung to the sides of the small glass.? "Well now," she said, her cheeks flushing a deep pink, "that goes down a treat, I must say." ?They sat facing each other at a long table by the window.

Small flowerpots with Mother-in-law’s Tongues were lined up on the sill.

I was not listening to their conversation. I had been given a glass of grass-green lemonade and a magazine with pictures of Monte Carlo to keep me occupied.

"When?" I heard Maurice moan. "When, when, when?"

With each "when" he banged his fists on the table. "The answer is: never. The licence is still in my brother’s name, dammit!"

"There, there Maurice, no need to get all excited."?

"I’ve paid my dues, haven’t I?"? He stared out of the window. It was drizzling. Women in nylon raincoats moved past the sansevierias. He topped up their glasses.

"Not so full, not so full," the grandmother cried. "It goes down far too easily."

The rain drew slanting stripes across the window. The stripes merged. People opened their umbrellas. Others, ghost-like, hurried by holding shopping bags over their heads.

Maurice and the grandmother talked in whispers. Their voices blended with the pattering rain, rising now and then. "They’re the ones who took advantage," the grandmother sniffed. "You can guess who’s taken to driving a Mercedes, can’t you Maurice? A Mercedes, no less." A brief silence ensued.? Then Maurice said something odd.? It sounded like: "Hee."

Silence.? Again he said: "Hee."? When I dared raise my head I caught a glimpse of him stuffing his handkerchief into the pocket of his dust-coat. He threw the grandmother a red-eyed, helpless look, uncorked the bottle and poured himself another drink.

The grandmother declined a refill, covering her glass with her hand. Maurice emptied his cognac in one draught and sank into silence. He inhaled through gritted teeth. A last stifled sob sent a shudder through his body.

The grandmother stood up, adjusted her hat and shook the creases out of her skirt.

"Indeed, Maurice, indeed," she said at last. "There’s no turning the clock back, is there?"

"He still hasn’t got over it," she declared to no one in particular as we walked back to the railway station. "Whatever would Agnes say?"


*


Agnes wore black satin; she had a white face and large eyes behind thick glasses. She smiled wanly from the display cabinet, baring brown teeth. Her son Léon, in his early twenties, stared out at the world from the shop front, where he stood arm in arm with Marcel, the grandmother’s youngest brother. They were pals, their destinies as yet undecided. They shared the same shiny black frame, at the foot of the Yser Tower.

?"The war had already begun by then," the grandmother remarked. "Léon was an only child. Maurice certainly had his share of misfortune, poor soul."

They had wanted another son. Agnes was nearly forty at the time. Too old really, the grandmother thought, but what can you expect, she couldn’t get over her boy’s death. Things didn’t turn out well.

"It was like a donkey’s pregnancy. Thirteen, fourteen months and no contractions. Agnes said: ‘It’ll come in its own good time.’ She carried on for a year and a half, poor thing. In the end they cut her open, but it had gone rock-hard."

They cut her open, but it had gone rock-hard. I imagined doctors and nurses letting fly with hammers and chisels in an attempt to excavate a stone foetus from Agnes’ fleshy insides. I did not dare ask if they had installed it on Agnes’ tomb- stone. It would not have surprised me if they had.


*


?"Turned to rock indeed," chuckled Stella, a cousin several times removed and the maid of all work. On Saturdays she swung the chairs up on the table and herded the settees into a corner, on top of which she draped the carpet. From the cupboard under the stairs she extracted floor cloths and mops and scouring brushes with ginger, military moustaches. She doused the black tiles with buckets of white suds, and set about scrubbing hard.

"Don’t you go ruining my tiles now, Stella," the grand- mother admonished her.

They were like a comic double act. The grandmother, tall and angular and overbearing, with an air of worldly superiority over her distant relative, and Stella, a short, sharp-edged blade of grass. To make herself taller she fashioned a bun with a hairpiece and wadding on top of her head. Most of the time she wore owlish spectacles on her nose, giving her a cross look that belied her nature.


*


"Turned to rock indeed!"

It was morning. Her spectacles lay idle on the dressing table among her boxes of face powder. In a corner of the room a bare-headed, shadowy figure sat on a creaking sofa, shaking uncontrollably: her husband Lucien. He would wear out three more sofas after that – one every six months, until the springs fell out of the bottom and his heart gave up for good.

He was afflicted with a strange disease that later on, once his portrait had joined the queue for dusting, would give the grandmother cause to vent her morbid pride. She would remark that he was "related by marriage, of course." That made a difference, apparently.

"There’s nothing we can do for him," the neurologist told Stella. "Your husband suffers from Huntington’s Chorea."

"How do you mean, Korea?" Stella’s tears and bafflement lasted for months. "How can that be? My Lucien never, ever went to Korea."
?

*


"The little one just shrivelled up, understand?" Stella said. "Come along now, why don’t you give me a hand. Here, hold this." ?She fixed the hairnet over the false bun, bowed her head, reached for my hands and pressed my fingers down around the net, which she proceeded to secure with hairpins plucked from the corner of her mouth. She had arranged all the false curls around the wadding and pulled her own hair up tight to form a sort of pinnacle on top.

I longed to touch her head with the palm of my hand, especially in the early morning when her hair would be hanging loose, still smelling of the night.

In the mirror I glimpsed tufts of underarm hair protruding from the short sleeves of her green summer frock, and caught a pungent whiff of armpits.

She knitted her brow and clamped her lips tightly on the hairpins. On her knees, with both hands on her head, she might have been a supplicant, or a prisoner held at gunpoint.



*
?Stella contributed her own epitaphs to the grandmother’s weekly valedictions. ?"Poor lambs, it’s been such a long time . . . " she would sigh as the duster slid over a delicate gilt frame of acanthus leaves, out of which three angelic boys gazed earnestly into space.

"Our Noel, our Antoine and our Valère. My brothers," the grandmother said.

I could see the resemblance in her jutting cheekbones, her strong chin. Their eyes in a haze of curly blonde hair glowed with an unnatural brightness.

"If they’d known about penicillin in those days," Stella said, "they’d still be with us, poor things. The croup, ooh it was dreadful. Lucien had it too. The doctor told his mother to hold him upside down over a tub of boiling water. Did he scream!"

"Boiling water with a few drops of eucalyptus, oh yes, my mother used to do that too. Still . . . My father buried them at the bottom of the garden. All three of them, side by side under a white gravestone. By the beech tree. That was still allowed in those days."

She would have turned her garden into a graveyard given the chance, so that she might sail from grave to grave among the rose-beds, day in day out, armed with scouring powder and bleach to kill the moss. Flanking the picture of the three boys were the grandmother’s father and mother – railway accident and cancer of the bone – one under each of the Virgin’s hands. The grandmother’s mother wore her hair swept into a bun on the top of her head. Her father wore a shiny pin on his necktie.


*


Sometimes, when Stella took my place handing over the pictures one by one, I would crawl under the table and lie back on the bare tiled floor, breathing the fresh smell of a just-cleaned house. When boredom crept over me the floor would reveal its secret geography, complete with all the tiny ridges and ravines where the soapy water collected into miniature lakes. It was then that I discovered that every movement in the house followed a fixed pattern. Everyone traced habitual paths, skirts billowing round calves, shoes creaking with every step. I would lie there flat on my back until my muscles became rigid with cold and the space between the table legs turned into an Egyptian tomb, monumental and forbidding.
?

*


"Our Cécile, she’s so earnest-looking," Stella said.

Cécile, Sister Marie-Cécile, was the only living person to be granted admission to the display cabinet. She wore a crown of white lilies. It was the day of her investiture as a nun. She struck a solemn pose in the convent garden, a sickly Bride of Jesus, about to be entered in the dry annals of eternity.

"A stick with a wimple," my father grumbled sometimes. He was not much taken with her.

"Our Cécile inhabits saintly spheres," the grandmother said, feigning reverence.

Once a year Sister Cécile received a visit from her family. The grandmother loaded the boot of my father’s Ford Anglia with jars of preserves. My mother buckled her safety belt with undisguised reluctance and whispered: "Right, let’s be off."

The convent was a sprawling brick building on a hill. The car chugged noisily up the incline. A pull on the bell handle sent a tinkling ring down long corridors. It was several minutes before the heavy wooden door was opened by a nun bent double with age.

There was a long walled garden with cedars and benches in the shade, occupied by a number of old biddies chewing their lips. Now and then one of them got up and did a little waltz on the flagstones, while her sisters moved their swaddled legs in three-quarter time.

Sister Cécile’s quarters were at the top of the building, right under the eaves. Tortuous flights and a succession of ever narrower corridors took us upstairs, past crowded dormitories smelling of urine. At the end of the last corridor a few steps led up to a door. The nun had heard us coming, for she came out to greet her visitors.

"Ah, there you are."

She placed her hands devoutly on her chest. A stick with a wimple, mummified already. A sallow face, drained of expression by a life of every conceivable abstention.

"Come in, come in," she murmured.

She had toned her voice down to a permanent whisper, mouse-grey mutterings from an anaemic rodent of the Lord. Her narrow room was furnished with hard cane chairs. On a table stood a thermos containing watery coffee. Little hisses escaped from the lid. In the heat the tiles on the roof made a ticking sound behind the insulation panels.?The nun poured coffee. She plied me with Sacred Heart memorial cards, stale ginger biscuits and mildewed chocolates. She took a biscuit herself, which she dipped in her coffee, and I had a strong sensation in my own mouth of her tongue flattening the sugary mush against her palate.

The nun chuckled and then announced gravely: "I can’t open my mouth very wide. I’ve just had an operation on my jaw."

My father rolled his eyes. I could see him thinking: she’ll have us operated on for our faith next, the witch, but he saved his remark for later, in the car.

"If only she’ll spare us her communion with the Holy Ghost," he had said on the way there. "And I hope to God she shuts up about her miracles."

Once a month it was Sister Cécile’s turn to help the elderly nuns in bath chairs into the chapel. She invoked the Holy Ghost so ecstatically that one of the old girls slid from her seat and crumpled into a dribbling heap on the floor.

"Speaking in tongues. Saw it with my own eyes." For once her voice shot up. "Glossolalia!"

Epilepsy, according to the local GP.

The nun had her own way of honouring the dead. She saw herself as the family prayer-wheel. From her hilltop she sent a never-ending stream of invocations to heaven. Her façade of humility displayed small cracks now and then, from which oozed unspoken reproof.

"That boy," she said, "has been lying there all alone for so many years now. I remember him in my prayers every day. He saved us from Bolshevism."

I thought she was referring to yet another mysterious disease.


*


In the display cabinet at home Cécile posed next to Brother Armand, who was wearing his black Benedictine habit for the occasion. When attending funerals he usually wore it over his civilian clothes, and more often than not he would raise a laugh.

"Someone ought to tell him to take off his bicycle clips," the grandmother remarked with a sigh each time he swanned up to the altar for an oblation, flashing white calves and ankles.

He never missed a mass for the dead. No one could snivel the way he did. It was a brief homage, no more. After the service there would be the meal with the mourners, and the wine. One day it was his turn to be mourned. The bells in the abbey tower tolled a sonorous knell. "He brought a spirit of generosity to our monastery," intoned the abbot, visibly relieved to be rid of the smell of alcohol.


*


When all the pictures had been properly dusted the grand- mother closed the glass wings of her cabinet. She had reflected, reassessed and rearranged. She had piled proof upon proof, for and against Death, who was both her enemy and her most loyal ally. Death robbed her of her relatives, but he also fixed them in still poses ensuring that they would meekly undergo her domestic ministrations.? When I saw my face reflected in the glass it was a fleeting glimpse, with far less substance than the images of the dear departed. Especially when, every few months, Stella and the grandmother, in a fit of nostalgia, ransacked drawers and cupboards for still more photographs. In no time the table would be thickly carpeted with pictures in which the past jostled indiscriminately with the present. One showed a coffin emerging from the green front door. In another, boys wearing clogs and girls with ribbons in their hair frolicked on the same doorstep. Here the season’s first asparagus was being harvested, there a trench in the war-torn orchard was being filled by a shadowy figure with a shovel.

The house, having detached itself from the world at large, became the repository of all those albums. In the midst of all the snapshots, I could easily imagine slipping out of that dark front door, down the well-worn path in the grass, past the blood-red garden fence into the orchard, where apples dropped like hand grenades from the branches, the same branches that were draped in blossomy parachutes in spring.

My own likeness cropped up regularly in that profusion of images. Me being lifted out of a baby bath by my mother. My mother holding my arms while I try to walk unsteadily across the floor – stark-naked, not yet a year old, three decades younger than the faded yellow curtains on the window over- looking the back yard. I began to read an obfuscated sadness into the palm-frond wallpaper, stained with time. Our first fridge must be humming somewhere out of the picture.

Those snapshots would have been taken by my father. Perhaps he had leaned back against the marble sill just visible under the dusty net curtains, waiting for me to look up at him and smile.

The flash used to startle me, Stella said, just as it had startled my great-grandparents. They lay at opposite ends of the table, their eyes not lowered like my mother’s, for they stared fixedly into the lens with unconcealed suspicion.

They wore their Sunday best for their respective portraits taken when they were aged about eighteen. They did so again on the day of their engagement, when they posed together for a studio photograph against a backdrop of cardboard columns and leafy boughs. Their peasant pride sat uncomfortably with the Arcadian setting – hazier now, after a century, and dull in places.

Sixty years later and on their last legs they face the camera again, as stiffly as ever, to bear witness to their eldest great- grandchild’s first steps. Just as vulnerable, just as bereft of the underpinnings of language, they strain to assume an appropriate expression, strike the right attitude, put on the proper airs. Their dignified stance reminds me of starched bedlinen and locked wardrobes.

At some point in their lives, between the Arcadian props and the crutches, my great-grandparents pose for a picture on either side of Marcel. He is about sixteen years old, an acne-ridden teenager in plus fours. One raised hand shades his eyes from the sun, which has half-obliterated him already.