Stammered Songbook - an extract

It begins—but when does something like that begin, what signs are the first? It begins with the word “book”, the word she just can’t think of as she stands looking at my library one afternoon and asks when I’ll next be …ing, you know, one of those things, will I soon be …ing another—and she brings her hands side by side, fingers outstretched, and opens and shuts them. Was I going to do it again, that writing what do you call it, one of those things. She gives my father a nudge with her elbow: you say, you know.

…

And then those afternoons when we sit at table and do our best not to lose patience when for the umpteenth time she gets stuck in mid-sentence. I can almost see the sentences stumbling over her lips. Verbal rubble, grammatical ruins lie strewn around her over the tablecloth.
Yes, that’s it, she says each time we finish the sentence for
her—as one finishes off a lame horse.
My father looks at me and raises his eyebrows meaningfully.
It’s only the beginning, I say while she is in the bathroom. I have resolved never to give false hope, but it feels as if I am gouging a knife into myself and into him, into his melancholy father’s flesh.
Afternoons full of the pack ice of silence, ice floes of silence, when I think: if only I could hear her say everyday banalities just once more.
Would you like some coffee?
Are you hungry?
You will be staying for supper, won’t you?

…

I regularly think: let her die, let her go in her sleep, which is almost never a peaceful sleep any more, but irritable slumber, as if sleep eludes her even in her sleep—like everything else.
A year ago she sat on her chair all day long when the radio broadcast Bach, as if the divine order of his music disentangled the knots in her head.
She sat there the whole day, and even held her palm against the speaker. She motioned us to be quiet as she didn’t want to miss anything.
How jealous of Bach I was.
Sometimes I dream that you’re dead, that I’m standing by your body in which the devastation has taken place, and I don’t know if I’m relieved or sad. I just feel a searing pain in my chest, and I think: this is the price of my birthright, the settling of accounts for what was agreed when I fell from your pelvis forty-four years ago, without you or me being involved.

…

At the party in the garden, among all those people, in the shade and in the sun, you walked back and forth between the tables on the grass, abandoned, uncomprehending. If the hectic behaviour of the playing children and screaming on the trampoline became too much for you, you went into the house, where you stared out of the window. You used to be the life and soul of the party, now you’re a ghost wandering through the house. In the afternoon you slept in the deckchair, in the shade of the silver birch, while we ate at a table next to you.
We all looked over our shoulder now and then at your sleep,
which was peaceful.
Sometimes Veerle asked: is she still breathing? And An said: it would be a nice death, slipping away with all those children round her.

…

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.

This is an edited extract from Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours by Erwin Mortier, published by Pushkin Press (£8.99)