The Melting Read online

  LIZE SPIT

  THE MELTING

  Translated from the Dutch by Kristen Gehrman

  Contents

  9:00 a.m.

  July 4, 2002

  Four Shadows

  9:30 a.m.

  July 6, 2002

  Three Musketeers

  10:00 a.m.

  July 8, 2002

  Windows 95

  10:15 a.m.

  July 11, 2002

  Clam

  10:30 a.m.

  July 12, 2002

  Elisa

  11:00 a.m.

  July 15, 2002

  The Air Salesmen

  11:15 a.m.

  July 17, 2002

  Conscience

  12:30 p.m.

  July 18, 2002

  Camping

  12:45 p.m.

  July 19, 2002

  Millennium Bug

  1:00 p.m.

  July 21, 2002

  Swallow

  1:45 p.m.

  July 22, 2002

  The Treatment

  2:00 p.m.

  July 24, 2002

  Encarta 97

  2:15 p.m.

  July 31, 2002

  Confirmed

  3:00 p.m.

  August 1, 2002

  The Club Quiz

  4:30 p.m.

  August 2, 2002

  Two-Chair Restaurant

  5:00 p.m.

  August 5, 2002

  Lying Fallow

  5:45 p.m.

  August 7, 2002

  The Gnawed-off Foot

  6:30 p.m.

  August 10, 2002

  Slurry Pit

  7:00 p.m.

  August 10, 2002 (2)

  Pasta Tongs

  7:30 p.m.

  August 10, 2002 (3)

  Damages

  8:00 p.m.

  Translator’s note

  For Tilde, Jornt & Saar

  9:00 a.m.

  THE INVITATION ARRIVED three weeks ago with way too many stamps on it. The weight of the stamps must have required even more postage, which made me hopeful at first: apparently there are still things that perpetuate their own existence.

  I found the envelope lying on top of the rest of the mail, which consisted of a dozen or so letters and flyers stacked in two equal piles in front of my door. Clearly my neighbor’s work; one stack for each favor that would have to be returned. Under the overly stamped envelope was a special offer for a French psychic and a toy-store ad intended for the upstairs neighbors—my mailbox often serves as a vanishing pit for the kind of mail that makes children whine. Other than that, there were bills and four brochures from a discount supermarket advertising skimpily stuffed turkeys, mocha logs, cheap wine. Come to think of it, I still didn’t have any plans for New Year’s Eve.

  I gathered up the attempted barricade and went inside. I made the usual rounds, mail in hand, opening every door in the apartment, not knowing which was worse: actually catching an intruder one day or always finding empty rooms.

  I hung up my coat and mittens and started making dinner. I peeled a potato and snipped off the long antlers that had sprouted in the sun. I filled the electric kettle to the brim and lit the gas under an empty pan on the stove so the kettle would know it needed to hurry.

  While waiting, I examined the letter.

  My name and address were written in black pen in a handwriting that I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I tore it open along the edge with the tip of the potato peeler. Inside was a white card, a baby photo and a name. I didn’t have to look at the face, name or date to know that it was a picture of Jan and that this was not a birth announcement. This year, on December 30th, he would have been thirty years old.

  I looked at my address again, the street name. The scribbles had been pressed deep into the paper; the loops sprang just out of the lines. It was Pim’s handwriting all right. I sat next to him in school for years and saw how he filled in the answers on tests. I never understood why he pressed down so hard with his pen. It wasn’t going to make his answers any more right.

  Pim must have looked up my address. He had written it perfectly, letter by letter. The invitation itself was pre-printed. On the inside was a bit of text.

  “Dear . . .” My name had been written in on the dotted line.

  “As you know, Jan would have been thirty this month, and we’re also celebrating the inauguration of our almost fully automatic dairy farm. Let’s get together and raise a glass in honor of this special occasion.”

  I took off my shoes so I could feel the smooth parquet floor under my feet. Jan’s posthumous party was being used as a marketing stunt, an attempt to get as many people together as possible to launch a new business.

  I didn’t read any further. I threw the card into the trash along with the potato peels and the rest of the mail. I turned on the tap, thrust my wrists under the cold water and splashed some in my face.

  The empty cast-iron pot crackled, begging for water. Even though the kettle had just started to boil, I turned off the gas. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  Of course, even before I was drying my cheeks on the kitchen towel, I knew I couldn’t just leave it at that.

  I pulled the card out of the trash.

  Jan’s photo had been smeared by the potato starch. There was a black smudge that started at his mouth, stretching his lips out past his forehead. I tried to dab the smile back into place with the corner of the towel.

  “3:00: stall doors open. 3:15: short milking machine demonstration and party to follow. P.S. Be sure to wear warm clothes. Please no flowers, but feel free to share a photo or a good memory of my brother. These can be emailed to [email protected] or posted on Jan’s Facebook page. See opposite side for directions.”

  On the other side of the card, under a rudimentary road map, was a sappy quote. I read it aloud a few times, as Pim would’ve intended. But no matter how I read the sentences, they were still trying too hard.

  Now it’s a little after nine. I’ve just driven past Vilvoorde. The clock in my car flickers every few seconds and runs a few minutes ahead of my cell phone. Maybe it’s because of the cold. As I drive down the highway, Jan’s expressionless face gazes up at me from the passenger seat.

  I didn’t bring the card with me for the photo. Nor do I need to it to check the exact times or directions again.

  All I need is the thick layer of postage stamps on the envelope. Those stamps are proof that Pim really wanted this invitation to reach me. I realize that it’s not addressed to the person I am now, but to who I was back when we were still speaking, to the Eva from before the summer of 2002. Which is why I am going to do exactly what I would have done back then: show up even though I don’t want to.

  July 4, 2002

  THE NEWSCASTER’S VOICE is coming from the yard. It’s Thursday. There are so many traffic jams they’d be better off giving a summary of where the traffic is moving. The next few days are going to be hot, the voice warns. After the weather, “The Ketchup Song” comes on. The music is drowned out by the sound of flapping birds taking flight.

  Maybe it’s because I’ve finally got a good night’s sleep or because the hand movements go so well with the song, but for the first time since winter, it feels like I’ve woken up in the right place. There’s still an untouched summer before me. The church bells will guard the duration of each hour. No one can speed up or slow down the hands of the clock, not even Laurens and Pim. For the first time since Jan’s funeral, the thought of it is calming. All I have to do is keep the set pace, and everything will be fine.

  I sit up in my lofted bed. Only now do I notice Tessie standing beside hers. Her short, spiky hair is plastered against her sweaty head. She’s inspecting her bedsheet, checking to make sure the flaps are exactly the same
length on either side.

  “Did you sleep okay?” I ask.

  She nods.

  It’s a perfect day for jawbreakers.

  On my way out to my bike, I run into Dad. He smokes a cigarette as he listens with pride to the eleven o’clock news blasting loud and clear from the radio he’s just hung in the top of the cherry tree to scare away the crows. He leans against the shed, which we all call “the workshop”, though no one ever does any work in there.

  The traffic towards the coast is still backed up due to two major accidents on the E40; in the meantime, I shove a 50-cent coin into each of my socks. With every step, they slide down a little bit further.

  Dad smokes the cigarette down to the filter, takes the butt from his lips, stomps it out with his slipper and picks it back up again.

  He’s got his black jeans on. There was a time when these were the pants he wore to work, but they’ve long since lost their shape. There are two bulges in the fabric just above the knees, an impression left behind by all his squatting next to the beer crate.

  “Eva,” he says.

  He turns around and motions for me to follow him. When he says my name, it sometimes sounds like a command, sometimes like a question, but rarely like anything that’s mine.

  I follow him into the workshop. The coins slip down my ankles and under my feet.

  It was Mom who came up with the term “workshop”, back when they first bought this house, when every empty room could be anything if they repeated it enough. Dad had big plans for the place. He was going to fix up the garden, trim the hedges, make a compost pile, renovate the bathroom. The latter was used by the previous owners as a children’s bedroom and came covered in teddy bear wallpaper. In the middle of the room, Dad had built a half wall out of hollow bricks and planned to install a sink. The sides would be tiled as soon as there was enough money for it. Jolan discovered that the holes in the bricks made excellent toothbrush holders.

  “So handy in the meantime,” Mom declared. But Jolan had already figured it out—there’s no time in meantime.

  The workshop is littered with empty beer cans and other junk. The interior walls are sprouting with mushrooms. Most of them grow sideways on their stems so they can peek out from under their little caps and see for themselves what actually goes on in here all those hours.

  Dad drops his cigarette butt into a can with a slosh left in the bottom.

  “Otherwise, that woman’ll complain.” He motions towards the door leading into the kitchen.

  His shoulders have a dent in the top as if his armpits are too heavy. We stand there for a moment looking at each other, in the middle of the workshop, surrounded by all kinds of freebies that Peter’s Liquor Store gives away with crates of Maes Pils—blue hats, blue inflatable beer trays, blue beach balls.

  Does Dad see what I see? That this place has become a warehouse full of potential raffle prizes?

  My eyes land on the drill. It isn’t hanging from the ceiling with the other tools but lying on a rack that has been recently screwed together and anchored into the wall. It’s the only time the machine has ever been used, and it’s hard to say which enabled which: the drill the rack or the rack the drill.

  All these tools didn’t end up here by chance. We live close to Aldi—it’s just a little too far away to walk to, but well within biking distance. Every year, they’ve got some new gadget that fathers don’t have yet. On the bridge over the highway separating our village from the next, it’s not unusual to see mothers trying to balance jigsaws, Medion massagers, hedge clippers and barbecue tongs on their handlebars.

  We gave Dad this drill a year ago as a present. He seemed to like it best when it was still in the box sitting on the sideboard. After he unwrapped it, he left it on top of a pile of ironed dishtowels, where it remained until the preparations for his next birthday couldn’t be put off any longer.

  “The average drill will be only used for about eleven minutes in its entire lifetime,” Dad says.

  “That’s not very long,” I say.

  I check whether there’s still a price tag on the box so I can calculate the price per second. This is something I can tell Pim and Laurens later. They might find it interesting.

  “Look, Evie. I wanted to show you this.”

  He points up to a loop hanging from the center beam at the peak of the roof, next to the hedge clippers.

  “You can’t tell by looking at it how hard it is to hang something like that, now can you?”

  I reply with a shrug. People shrug their shoulders when they don’t care, but also when they care a lot but can’t find the words. Surely another body part could be chosen, or even another gesture. The anatomy of the shoulders, unlike the eyebrows, offers little room for nuance.

  “Not just anybody can tie a knot like this,” he said, “it’s got to hang at just the right height.”

  “I can see that,” I say. “So, what’s the right height then?”

  But my question goes unheard.

  “With the wrong knot, you’d suffer. You don’t want me to suffer, do you?”

  I look at the noose again and shake my head.

  “If you don’t fall from high enough, your neck won’t break. Then it takes a long time. But if you fall from too high, your neck will snap. And you wouldn’t want to do that to the people who are going to find you, now would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I say.

  Dad is wearing a baseball cap on his head. The sweat of the past few days has soaked up into the fabric and dried, leaving behind white, wavy lines of salt across his forehead. The hotter the day, the higher the streak.

  He looks at me in silence, takes off the cap and checks to see if there is anything unusual about it. He doesn’t see it. It lands back on top of his head, backwards this time.

  I can’t help but think: this man is my father. He is older than most dads because it took him so long to find someone who wanted to have children with him. He works for a bank, where he does things that he never goes into detail about, and no one ever asks questions because they just assume that as long as no one brings it up, there’s nothing to tell. To get to his job, he has to bike—rain or shine—to a bus stop and then sit on a bus for half an hour. During the week, he earns just enough to feed his family, no questions asked, and to pay for the roof over their heads from which he can hang the presents they buy for him with his money that he didn’t want in the first place.

  I am this man’s oldest daughter, so really, I shouldn’t just nod or reply without knowing exactly what he’s up to.

  I force a look onto my face. Not a smile. Not pity. Understanding perhaps, although I don’t really know how that looks in grimace-form.

  “You think—just like your mother—that this old prick doesn’t mean a word he says. That this old prick doesn’t have the guts to go through with it?”

  Dad always says “your mother”, and Mom does the same when she talks about him, “your father”. This isn’t really fair. It’s a way of letting themselves off the hook by acting like I’m the one who chose them.

  “You want me to show you how it works?”

  He unfolds a rickety ladder right under the noose and climbs up. On the third step, the ladder starts to wobble dangerously. I come closer to it and position myself on the side for support. The coins sink down even lower until they are under the soles of my feet. The eleven o’clock news is over, and the radio switches to commercials.

  “Why pay more? If you find the same appliance for less, we’ll refund the difference!”

  Dad reaches the top of the ladder. He balances both feet on the top step so he’s standing right below the loop. He bumps the rope to the side, and it swings around and hits him in the back of the head, almost knocking him off balance. I grip the ladder and hold it steady. All I can do is keep him from falling. There’s nothing I can do to stop him from jumping. I feel the coins burning under my feet. King Albert II’s head will be engraved into my soles for the rest of my life.

  Dad
gives the noose a little tug—it’s strong enough. He slips it around his neck and gazes out over his blue empire. He nods, looking satisfied.

  “People who hang themselves often end up clawing the skin off their neck. That’s regret. You should have no regrets,” he says.

  I nod.

  “Did you hear me, Eva?”

  I nod again.

  “What did I say?”

  “You should have no regrets,” I say.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “No regrets,” I repeat, louder.

  Only now does he look down and see me standing there holding the ladder.

  For a moment, he falls silent.

  Then he says, “You’ve got to do something about your hair, Eva. It doesn’t do anything for you.”

  If you ask me my hair is just the right length: short enough to wear down when it’s cold and long enough to pull back into a ponytail when it’s hot. Dad will just have to get used to it. Last week, I trimmed off a few centimeters myself because the ends were splitting. I did it in our moldy bathroom in front of the mirror, over the old-fashioned washstand, with a pair of scissors my mom sometimes uses to cut fabric.

  “Thanks for holding the ladder, Eva,” Dad says. He’s removed the noose and already taken two steps down. “You’re the only one who knows about this. Not even your mother knows. Let’s keep it that way.”

  He reaches into his pocket, leans his lower back against the middle of the ladder and lights up another cigarette. “The fact that I even let you see it is probably a good sign.”

  He sucks his cheeks into his jaws and carefully climbs down the remaining steps. Back on the ground, he punches me so hard against the shoulder that I lose my balance, the kind of punch that fathers are supposed to give their sons.

  “Smoking’s bad for you,” I say.

  In the window of the Corner Store are a few Raider bars displayed on plastic grass. Actually, they’re not called Raiders anymore—now they’re Twixes—but no one dares to tell Agnes. She’s been running the place for longer than anyone can remember.

  The deep, narrow house has pretty much anything that you’d find in a grocery store. Though most people only come here for products that can’t expire, shrivel or dry out. Once, Laurens’s cousin had the nerve to bring back a pack of noodles that were past their sell-by date.