'The time will come for each and every one of us,' she would say, turning back the covers. She had folded their spectacles and laid them in a drawer, where they joined the tangle of all the other pairs with their long, grasshopper legs.Īfter each funeral she would open the curtains in the back room, raise the roller blind and put fresh sheets on the bed. Wedding rings had been transferred from the cold fingers of the dead to those of the warm-blooded living. She raked partings in their hair and clipped the bushes by their headstones as if they were fingernails. Once they were buried their bodies became earth. She would not allow her dead to vanish unattended. She was the unbending midwife of her tribe. She had epitaphs of her own carved in the granite of her soul. Tombstone plaques decorated with porcelain roses filled her with scorn. There were always daisies pushing up from the graves. She did not hold with buying flowers for All Souls’ Day. It was less than five turnings between the garden gate and the place where her dead lay sleeping.

I was taken there once a year by the grandmother, but she herself was a daily visitor. The garden shrugged off its last lingering touches of colour and assumed the same grey shade as the gravestones in the churchyard nearby. The grass in the orchard sparkled until well after midday. Sometimes, before a downpour, the clouds skimmed so low over the roof that they seemed to be torn asunder by the finial. At night there was a smell of frost in the air. The cellar stored, the attic forgot.īy the end of August the cold began to rise from the floors.

In some, the walls had absorbed the smell of generations of cooked dinners, as in the kitchen, where grease clung to the rafters. Most of the rooms harboured a limbo of darkness, cool in summer, chilly in winter. The windows sat a little tipsily in the walls wooden clogs potted with petunias hung by the door. Behind the hedge a spine of roof tiles slumped between two gables. The house looked like all the others on the road: sagging slightly after two centuries of habitation, driving winds and war.

Marcel by Erwin Mortier