The Weeping Girl

2

July 1999

Helmut had been against it all from the very start.

Looking back, she had to give him that much. ‘Daft,’ he’d said. ‘Bloody silly.’

He’d lowered the newspaper and glowered at her for a few seconds with those pale eyes of his, slowly grinding his teeth and shaking his head.

‘I can’t see the point of it. It’s unnecessary.’

That was all. Helmut wasn’t one to waste words. As far as he was concerned, all in all, it wasn’t a case of from dust thou art — stone more like.

From stone thou art, and unto stone thou shalt return. It was a thought she’d had before.

There are two sides to every coin, of course. She knew when she decided on him that she was not choosing storm and fire — not love and passion — but solid rock. Grey, primary rock on which she could stand safely, without any risk of sinking down into the mire of despair once again.

Something like that.

That’s more or less what she’d thought fifteen years ago when he knocked on her door and explained that he had a bottle of Burgundy he’d bought while on holiday and wouldn’t be able to drink it all himself.

And if she hadn’t thought that as he stood there on the doorstep, she’d have done so shortly afterwards in any case. Once they’d started bumping into each other.

In the laundry room. In the street. In the shops.

Or when she was sitting on her balcony on warm summer evenings, trying to rock Mikaela to sleep, with him standing on his own balcony, leaning on the rail that separated them, smoking his pipe and gazing out into what remained of the sunset in the vast western sky over the polders.

Next-door neighbours. The thought came into her mind.

A godlike figure, solid and secure, holding out a hand of stone towards where she was drifting around in a floundering boat on a turbulent sea of emotions.

To her and Mikaela. Yes, that is in fact what the situation had been like: looking back, she could sometimes smile at the thought, sometimes not.

Anyway, that was fifteen years ago. Mikaela was three. Now she was eighteen. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday this summer.

Mark my words, he had declared from behind his newspaper. As I told you, this won’t make her any happier.

Why hadn’t she listened to him? She asked herself that over and over again. During these days of worry and despair. When she tried to get a grip on herself and look back over the links in the chain. To think back and try to find reasons for doing what she had done. . Or simply to let her thoughts wander freely; she didn’t have much strength to speak of just now. These hellish summer days.

But she’d done the right thing, as she saw it. All I’ve done is what is right and proper. I haven’t betrayed the decision I made all those years ago, then let it lie. In a way that’s another stone — a murky boulder sunk down at the muddy bottom of the well of memory, but one that she’d promised herself she would fish up again when the time was right.

Carefully and respectfully, of course, but bring it up into the light of day even so. So that Mikaela could see it. No matter how you looked at it, that was necessary. Something that had remained in abeyance for many years, but now needed to happen to put things into perspective.

Her eighteenth birthday. Even if they hadn’t discussed it, Helmut had known about it as well. Been aware of the situation all the time, but had preferred not to confront it. . The day would have to dawn when Mikaela was told the truth, one had no right to deny a child knowledge of its origins. One couldn’t hide away her roots under mundane everyday happenings and the detritus of time. One couldn’t send her out into life on false pretences.

Right? Life? Truth? Afterwards, she couldn’t understand how she had been able to fit such grandiose concepts into her thoughts. Wasn’t it this very pretentiousness that was hitting back and turning upon her? Wasn’t that what was happening?

Who was she to go on about right and wrong? Who was she to make such hasty judgements and shake off Helmut’s morose objections without giving them more than three-quarters of a second’s consideration?

Until later. When it seemed to be too late. These days and nights when everything seemed to lose every ounce of significance and value, when she had become a robot and didn’t so much as glance at these old thoughts which were drifting past her consciousness like tattered remnants of cloud over the blue-grey night sky of death. She simply let them sail past, on their disconsolate journey from horizon to horizon.

From oblivion to oblivion. Night to night and darkness to darkness.

From stone thou art.

From your gaping wounds your silent fury seethes up to a dead sky.

The pain of stone. Harder than anything else.

And madness, insanity itself was lying in wait round the corner.

Her eighteenth birthday. A Friday. In July, as hot as hell.

‘I’ll tell her when she comes back from the gym,’ she had said. ‘So you don’t need to be present. Then we can have dinner afterwards in peace and quiet. She’ll take it well, I can feel it in my bones.’

At first merely a sullen silence.

‘If it’s really necessary,’ he’d said eventually. When she was already at the sink, washing the cups. ‘It’s your responsibility, not mine.’

‘I have to,’ she said. ‘Remember that I promised her this when she was fifteen. Remember that it’s a gap that needs to be filled. She’s expecting it.’

‘She’s never said a word about it,’ he said. From the side of his mouth. With his back to her.

That was true. She had to grant him that as well.

‘Daft, but do whatever you like. What’s the point?’

That’s all. Nothing more. Then he left.

Daft?

Am I doing it for her sake, or for mine? she asked herself.

Reasons? Motives?

As blurred as the borderline between dreams and consciousness.

Unfathomable as stone itself.

Nonsense. Verbal sticking plaster. She probably knows anyway.