Free Marcel by Erwin Mortier

shot up intermittently, and I could hear the grandfather’s little grunt at the end of each sentence, indicating that she could proceed. When she faltered I knew it was because he was interrupting her. I saw him clench and unclench his fist.
    The grandmother shook her head vigorously, paused a while and then went on nodding. The grandfather’s hand rose up above the tabletop, as if he were addressing an invisible third party occupying the chair opposite him. His hand reached out two or three times, at which the grandmother shook her head with mounting agitation.
    “That’s not true, and you know it …”
    Her voice faded.
    “What does it matter,” I heard him say. His hand stopped moving.
    They fell silent.
    Then the grandmother resumed her reading, only to raise her eyes from the letter almost immediately.
    “A lot,” she blurted, in a surprisingly loud voice, which evidently shocked her, too. “It matters a lot,” she continued, sinking to a whisper, “to me.” She patted her chest with her left hand. “A lot.”
    She replaced the letter in its envelope, which she laid down on her right before taking a new one from the pile.
    She read aloud for the next hour or so, working her way steadily through the pile of letters, spreading them out flat, folding them again and adding them to the slowly growing pile to her right. Now and then a fresh disagreement flared up, which soon subsided.
    Finally all the letters were in the pile on her right. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. I heard the scrape of a chair as the grandfather rose to his feet. I strained to hear whether he was heading for the door, my mind racing with calculations as to how long it would take me to hide on the stairs to the attic.
    *
    The attic – where the raincoats of the dead in their mahogany wardrobe would have melted into the inky blackness by now. So would the great-grandmother’s astrakhan coat, which Stella slipped off its hanger when she thoughtshe was alone. It reached almost to her ankles, and the sleeves were far too long for her short arms. She wrapped it tightly around her body, turned her back to the wardrobe mirror and twisted round to see how it looked, gauging how much she would have to take it in at the waist for it to fit snugly around the hips. She studied the angle of the collar on her chest, shook the lapels, did up buttons and undid them again, judging the effect all the while with darting, beady eyes.
    “Stella puts Oda’s coat on sometimes,” I tittle-tattled one day, when she and the grandmother were standing at the kitchen table sifting flour. I felt guilty immediately.
    Stella blushed bright red and shot me a searing look. For a time the only sound was the soft slap of her hands on the dough.
    The grandmother stood with her back to us rinsing a saucer under the tap.
    She was taking her time. She placed the saucer in the rack, dried her hands on her apron, sat down, rolled up a sheet of kitchen foil with a nonchalant air and then said sharply: “She’s not the only one …”
    Her words plunged a dagger in my ribs. I cringed.
    “What grown-ups do is their own business,” she went on. “If they want to act the
madame
, it’s entirely up to them.”
    Stella stopped kneading abruptly, her hands lay still in the bowl with dough as though she had suddenly decided to become a house plant.
    “But every self-respecting housewife knows she ought to dust her paws with flour first. Stops the dough from sticking.”
    All three of us seemed to freeze into a
tableau vivant
, until a moment later the grandmother turned to the sink again and Stella went back to slapping her dough. I was reminded of a herd of elephants sloshing across a muddy pool.
    *
    It was only by magic that she could have found me out. I had put everything back in the old travelling trunk exactly as I had found it. Socks on top, in bundled pairs. Underneath were the trousers with their sickly-sweet smell of camphor and dust. Under the trousers