Although she sadly took her own life before you were born and never even saw you, your Aunty Hilde is inescapable. Her story is tied to us all, including you. Her story is in that purple envelope, visible in the countless photos I have of her, the ones I’ve looked at so many times with tears in my eyes and then, disgusted with myself, put away again, cursing the envelope without ever being able to bring myself to throw it away. Maybe that’s why I’m writing all this down for you, because it’s taken me years to accept the idea of that bond. That’s something I think I’ve only realized now, after the fall and all that stupid pain. I’m writing to you to make it clear that everything is bound up together and that was also the cause of the pain that led Hilde to kill herself. When I think back on her (something I’ve done all too often these last few weeks) she loses her humanity and that makes me furious at her all over again. I try to summon up details of her life. The way she laughed… always with a sharp edge, it seemed to me. If a cat could laugh it would pull a face like Hilde’s. Her laughter always sounded like she was ridiculing the world, as if despite her youth she really could see through everything. She’d joke about politicians, about anyone with power and prestige, and the phrase she’d always use was ‘poor baby’. That was so killing, the way she said it. My wife couldn’t cope with her sarcasm. ‘She’s got an old soul,’ she would say after our granddaughter had come over for afternoon tea and gone home again, ‘and that’s never good. You shouldn’t know that much at her age.’
‘She thinks she knows things, Mother.’
‘You think that’s all it is, Father. You’re having yourself on.’
What Hilde managed to pierce most effortlessly was pretence. An ability that went back to when she was very little. When St Nicholas appeared at the door with his sack full of presents and her brother, your father, was trembling with fear even though he’d already stopped believing, Hilde greeting the wigged and bearded, fully costumed saint with a terse but fatal, ‘Hello, Uncle Lode.’ Lode was so bowled over, he used the expression for years afterwards to indicate that he was onto something and people shouldn’t try to mess him around. He’d say, ‘Bleeding heck. Hello, Uncle Lode.’ And every time we’d both burst out laughing and see little Hilde before us, me as a proud grandfather and him as an equally proud great-uncle. That must sound like a pleasant memory, but thinking back on it now I am furious with Lode. If he was anywhere nearby I’d ram his head through a fucking window. Not that anything like that’s possible any more. He’s been dead and buried at Schoonselhof for quite a while now.
Spring is almost over and I realize I’ve shut myself off from the world for months. I haven’t been reading the papers; I haven’t even held a book. Nicole and me, that was it. For months. Even you, dear boy, I’ve hardly given a second thought. But that’s over now. I can walk again without any pain. ‘It’s a medical miracle,’ says the doctor, suddenly relieved that his professional optimism turned out to be a prediction after all. What does someone like that know about being cursed? Even worse, what does someone like that know about freedom? People try to stay out of the clutches of the white coats as long as possible. It’s a kind of race against time, but on crutches, with your own body as both stakes and trophy. You mustn’t ever submit to those blokes, never let them look you over, unless it’s in circumstances beyond your control or because of a fall like mine. As soon as they get their claws into you, your body is theirs. They postpone your death without even taking you into consideration. Before you’ve realized what’s happening, they’ll have you on a drip with purgatory seeping into your veins and keep you there for months. One minute you’re at death’s door and begging admission, and the next thing you know, they’ve turned you into a kind of earthbound chemical vat. And that’s what makes me so furious, that you swallow the illusion of freedom all along and then, right at the end, give yourself over to unfreedom. In the end not even the prospect of death is a comfort, but the whispered hope of recovery is deployed like a little ball bouncing around a roulette table, your body turned into the outcome of a wager against the eternal bank, funded by a less than eternal savings account, betting against an inevitability that all the chemicals in the Port of Antwerp can’t prevent. And no matter how long it lasts, you end up going bankrupt at your and everyone else’s expense and a few white coats do well out of it, their hands in the till along with the pill peddlers’ and the chemical conglomerates’. Meanwhile the blessings of science are praised with delirious sentences like ‘It’s amazing what
