YD6-75(MVDH) From Shadows of Thatched to Clemenceau Street: In a Father’s Footsteps, the Codes of a Family
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.
CHAPTER preface: In the hush of thatched eaves and the coded tongue of Flemish thresholds, characters step into place like constellations flaring one by one. Antoinette appears with a vacuum pipe and Virgo eyes; Mariette spirals through gossip and antique addiction; and Martine—Victoria—swirls like a harlequin across the kitchen terrace. Through a surreal hiring ritual, the narrator crosses into Clemenceau's grid of ghosted townhouses, shadowed by language, memory, and a Citroën key that unlocks far more than just a car.
YD6-75(MVDH) From Shadows of Thatched to Clemenceau Street: In a Father’s Footsteps, the Codes of a Family
Aetheria in the mix—a mirage in the kitchen sunlight—welcomes Mariette waxing. She sneaks back in. Shadowing Tonton’s echo, that ludicrous remark still hanging in the mind: “After a whole day—blackout—Mariette reappeared, dawdling in her kitchen?”
By my walks these past few days since arrival, Tonton’s words replay as panoramic images— Mariette’s addiction tugging at the edges. She never says his name—Jephte—only “my Gardener,” spoke a title, her concierge. She slips out in secrecy, like a piece gone missing from the puzzle. I see her walk to the driveway, disappearing behind the fir’s wide-spread branches, her 1930s bicycle wheeled alongside. Later, she reappears—wobbling through the gateway—vanishing behind the neighbor’s wild-grown hedge, drifting up the asphalt street.
My mind folds into symphony—cosmic chirps, fluttering leaves, the nestling breath of the zodiac forest. Her unconscious sillage trails through the branches. ’I’m a lady. . . not one of those sluts,’ her mind resonates, pedaling toward the derelict brasserie. imagining its hush still stirred by the Hamlet’s little crowd. Mariette’s upbringing casts a long shadow. That was where the boys of her family lingered—her father first, then her brothers. While her mother, ever withholding, refused to patronize such a place, deeming it unfit—the word ‘sluts’ not just whispered, but engraved in marrow.
She turns away from the derelict, flat-roofed brasserie, veering onto the concrete ribbon of countryside road. A crosscurrent of whooshing traffic swerves past—she rides the long S-bend, crossing the fifth branching street, spared from the four-way intersection where traffic ghosts and lenses blink against boutiques, manicure bars, hairdressers. She creeps away from a fry shop up the street—the scent finds my mind, a memory stirring, wetting my mouth. She rounds instead the dynamic corner brasserie that feeds the bus drivers from the depot across the street. She glides on, through a shaggy green carpet of cultivated fields, unrolling to the horizon’s hush, where the N12 Antwerp highway feeds the glittering Brussels Ring.
I lost Mariette riding her bicycle. But on my walks, I fit the pieces together. As the square dark plate rises from the field, I can easily imagine her—riding the asphalt through sparse cars, weaving across parking bays toward the Delhaize supermarket entrance. And the—a holographic projection of her, wobbling on the return, only to volatilize in the kaleidoscopic glare of the four-way strip mall.
Aetheria in the mix—mirages flicker in the kitchen light, spinning spider webs in symphony, nestled within the zodiac forest. Mariette dithers around the backrest—triggering the flash of the bottle she keeps in the dark bottom corner of the dining room’s buffet-vaisselier cabinet. She slips back again, drawn by a few deceived words, as she does with her “Gardener,” as before, when her “housemaid” failed to turn up—and once more, she leaves me to reflect.
By ten o’clock, rise from the table. “I have to go now,” I say, excusing myself from Mariette’s chatter—her words a few days ago still echo in my mind: “Take the bus to the South Station.” Besides Mariette I pull the door, stepping into the paired shafts of slicing light falling from the quatro-fluted windows to the half-barrel vestibule. At the entrance, I meet the king of the forest—the fir—its green skirt filling my vision, and veer my footsteps grinding the gritty driveway, toward the green bench of a hedge beside the gateway. Across the street, the sunlight lingers, beckoning—cloaking the polyhouses of the flower cultivator, framing the silhouette of the medieval hamlet church.
But I veer away, drawn into a wizard’s wild wooded corner. Mariette’s words echo in my mind: “Il a fait fortune. . .—He made his fortune at the 1958 Expo selling sandwiches.”
Mariette’s story unfolds a vividly presence—a childhood postcard begging to conjugate itself—an African-wooden stall beneath the cast shade of a lifted awning. Behind the counter: a man and his family, industrious hands slicing bread rolls, passing chain links down the line—a frankfurter slapped, mustard squirted—hands in the rhythm with wrap and trade, a few coins crossing the counter as the queue stretches under the sun, marked by the sun-dial of the atomium. The avenue’s median lawns—soiled by the shifting shadows of gliding cable-car cabins, slipping through the Atomium’s supporting legs, into the night lights.
Fascinated by the proximity of the glittering top ball of the Atomium breaching the forest canopy—seen through the eyes of my child’s wonder. As I walk the asphalt street, curiosity ruminates in my mind—the man’s mansion looming within the overgrown property. Where fragments of bric-a-brac catch light through the tangled foliage. I couldn’t decide if the tarzan in me could’ve been held prisoner for six months selling hotdogs.
I cross over from the dirty pink, abandoned corner brasserie—once the Somers father and sons standing around chatter-tables amongst the crowded, sipping beers. Across the road, the dark-slatted African shack emerges, enshrouded in foliage—and I keep my distance, resisting the pull to be drawn in, swallowed into the shadows.
The De Lijn bus pulls up. I step on, swirl around to a seat. Scrutinizing my way—without addressing the driver—I’ve grown skeptical in this Flemish region. Arriving at the cobblestone farmer road, memories stir: my final stretch last week, and that errant newspaper trip—launched into the moonless night by a Flemish driver who mumbled and chewed his words.
We skip the fifth-diagonal branch, approaching the four-way traffic lights. The fenestrated brick facades wrap the corner—splashed with inviting Jupiler beer decals, but shading a somber interior.
On a search near the Delhaize supermarket, I had pressed the angled door notched out the sharp corner—entering a somber interior. where four flemish men stood in a tight circle, beer glasses in hand, chafing one another in guttural tones. I scanned the uniforms, searching for the driver who, the other evening, had dropped me off to face Nyx.
Through the window behind the bus drivers, the tables sit vacant—bar a few lamenting old men. Across the street—the glow of sunlight bakes the De Lijn bus depot. The asphalted apron lies deserted, the block quarter hushed. Yellow De Lijn buses wait in parallel—’for what? Their next scheduled shuttle? Or to slip, one by one, into the yawning workshop door?’ But I approach the counter, shouldering the group of drivers, edging close to the barman, eavesdropping on their coarse Flemish. In my broken Flemish, flatly, I ask: “Mag ik een koffie hebben—Can I have a coffee?”
I felt the intensity of the pack, but my humor thought of piercing unnoticed, as the code echoed from the elementary school bench in Goma—the memory of Flemish and French, side by side. Classmates, a cardboard shield held hand in hand, a colloquial sword of words slicing the edge: “schld”—withdrawing the blade, unstained—Reverberate—“Vrndt”—to a sigh. Enemies once met at the edge of a word. “Schild en vriendt—Shield and friend.” A code used during the Bruges Matins in 1302, when two simple words decided who passed the drawbridge—And who tried to slip through, a spy. A shibboleth sharp as a sword—one the French classmates could never quite master.
I turned to the group of drivers, asked: “Is het normaal dat, als je in het Frans naar een bushalte vraagt, je iemand de nacht in stuurt—Is it normal, that when asking for a bus halt, in french, you sent a person into the depth of the night?”
One of the drivers lifted his chest, his uniform buttons catching the window’s light beside me. He didn't intimidate me. He fired back in a vile voice. “Hier ben je in Flanders, hier spreekt men Vlaams—Here you are in the Flanders, here we speak Flemish.”
My blood boiled. In the midst of this pack of wolves, I lingered in the shadows, confronting their stupidity—watching, waiting to spot the driver from the other night. A thought tumbled in—’Get friendly. Gain their trust. Get his details. Report him to the authorities.’ But alas—with rusted flemish and a thin vocabulary, I couldn’t imagine twisting words subtle enough for them to snitch. So I left it there. The drivers’ glare relented, slipping back into their milieu. They turned their eyes away, dissolving into indifference—unapologetic, retreated into their tight circle.
I felt only repulsion. So did the barman—his expression froze. He turned his back, as I questioned the drivers’ ghost across the street, ’Do they drink, after a morning shift, or before a noon shift, with school break?’ The question returned my coffee. I eavesdropped on the fluent Flemish, sipped. Return the empty cup to the saucer. Paid. Turn away toward the door. Pause—the thought tugged again: Is it normal that you mislead passengers into the night?’ I left it there. And stepped out.
Beneath the viaduct ahead, under the railway gantry strung with spiderweb-spanning electrified cables, we pull up. I alight the De Lijn bus and walk away from the cast shade of the South Station. In the sun’s blunt glow, I ask whoever crosses my path. “Pourriez-vous me dire où est. . .—Could you tell me where Clemenceau Avenue is?”
Until I’m alone—swallowed in the sprawl of a wide-spreading plaza. Too far to call out, a lone figure drifts abreast, skimming the prow of fenestrated brick facades. In untethered strides, mirrored—heading toward the corner brasserie, while the ebb and tide of traffic lights pulse—and the trickle of cars folds away behind me.
Around me, paved medians and sidewalks drift to curbs that serve the trickle of asphalt streets. Traffic disperses—slipping left, veering right, threading through the middle interstices of rows of townhouses. I step into a suspended era—ghosting its people in a flurry of tram-fed rhythms, their egress and return marked by the hush and swing of their entrance doors. And I, following only the silver treads of embedded tram tracks—through the assured and deserted taper of “Avenue Clemenceau,” in the distance. half-aware I’m heading toward the need to win a position.
I count doorstep numbers along the stretch—margin walls of striated facades. Until the crack of a white translucence unfolds in my approach, faltering the classic frontage, bloating the transom’s facia. Alongside an open display window to upholstered furniture, I push the side door and step inside. Following a central aisle past a diversity of client chairs—populated, yet empty. An agency’s gesture—greeting me into upholstered comfort. Obviously, a greeting for customers—for agents in hope, at bare contracting tables or desks of one’s choice, to close a deal.
A woman in the depth, behind the front desk—efficient, yet strangely out of place. One expects a calm, serviable smile—but she was burdened with folders. I addressed her. “Je suis ici pour mon rendez vous avec Monsieur. . .— I’m here for my meeting with Mister Guy Duchatel.”
The dedicated woman lifts the handset, her voice edged with a Flemish accent as she announces my arrival. She replaces the phone, turns to face me. “Monsieur Guy Duchatel va descendre dans une minute—Mister Guy Duchatel will be down in a minute.”
I watched the off-side debut of stair treads. A fluttering dark suit descends the spiral staircase—revealing a slight Latin figure, stepping down the last few risers. He approaches, gesturing—unexpecting—away from the four interview areas. He greets me into a kind of card game, asking a few questions of my parcours; I slip him a few cards—one by one. He leads me ascending the spiral staircase—hough more esthetic devotion than practical intent.
At the landing, in the corner of my eye, a sentinel door guards a boardroom—through the ajar gap, a table huddled with a dozen backrests. But he ushers me away from the leading corridor, borrows a cranky dogleg staircase to the bone of the structure's upper corridor. There, without a qualm, the end door swings open—clearing a bright office, his silhouette framed a poker player’s hand. Timed—just so—the construction manager’s absence from his desk. I’ve learned to read this move. Until Guy Duchatel turns—not to see my face entering—but left to wonder.
He faces a wall—resembling my executive office’s chartered panel back home in Kelvin, Sandton—SFB Properties Limited. Its Lego planning board once spanned the wall of a double garage. I read our discrepancies.
While Guy Duchatel focused on the timeline of his construction sites—charted by miniature bricks, each color debuted a trade and ending the job—I’m puzzled. ‘Why the gaps?’ Each trade treated as block—One trade finishes, days pass, and only then does the next begin.
My mind sways—to how I used to run sites: incentivized performance, each trade on the verge of walking over the other's trades. A visual interwoven, pulled from computer logistics—layered in motion. Sites progressing. Payments received before suppliers’ invoices were even due—keeping the concentration of the traffic.
We descend the U-shaped staircase, and turn away from the boardroom door, alongside which he leads me onto a massive Xerox machine, on stand by besides an accountant’s desk. With a brushing gaze, he introduces me to a wall of arch lever folders. Guy Duchatel says: “On photocopie chaque facture après avoir octroyé un numéro de série, selon l’ordre d’arrivée des factures au bureau—We photocopy each invoice after numbering the invoices in the order received in the office.”
‘What,’ I exclaim in the hush of my mind—stupefied—I couldn’t fathom such a parallel between government and business systems.
While ruminating how I could never run a business under such conditions, I began to explain—half-voiced, drawn into the void by the flicker of Duchatel’s eager learning. With a glimpse of Aetheria out in the street—her mirage in the glow of sunlight—threading me into the peripheral light of my ship’s bridge, sailing the pooled suburb of Johannesburg and Pretoria and rippling afield.
Remembering aloud—how, after issuing a purchase order from my computer’s keyboard to suppliers or subcontractors, the process ran its rhythm. Beyond the full glass partition to Jean’s accounting department, on the other half of the upstairs floor. delivery notes returned from scattered construction-site—signed by the men—matched to the supplier’s invoices, and waited, folded with vendors’ monthly statements, until all invoices were due reconciled for payment.
When Jean brought each vendor’s paperwork onto my desk—check attached for my signature—it marked the close of that cycle. Prompt payment discounts applied, the check mail to the supplier, the paperwork’s course completed—hung upside-down in the suspended folder system, and mirrored digitally by updating the computer: unit prices fed into the database, forming the base for forecasting the cost of each project.
I was so attuned to the quantity take-offs—verifying customer’s contracts the sales team brought to my desk. Begging for a visual, I planted Lego bricks—charting the process through design, spreading into our company two years’ projects.
Evening falls. Guy Duchatel, in his fluttering suit—subtle, as though inviting me to trail along—leads us out the reception area. The staff are gone. He locks up behind us. We cross Clemenceau Avenue and slip ahead into the debut of a side street. He walks us past a long stretch of fenestrated rows of brick townhouses, until we reach a corner brasserie’s landscape-shaped glass, splashed with Chimay Trappist beer decals. With a swirl, he presses the angled door—serving both stretches of street—the swing clears a somber bar,and he enters.
Past a few tiny round tables, sparsely populated, he leads the way to a far corner—quiet, deep, the window sharing the last sunlight reflection from across the street. His settling is an invitation to the other vacant chair. In his draping suit, one elbow resting on the table—half-turned toward the bar counter—his gaze, a patron’s signal. I settled across from him, also half-turned, helbowed, legs crossed—the waiter stopping just short of our raised shoe-tips.
Guy Duchatel orders a beer. Waits. I’m alone. The least measurable damage to my reputation—not knowing the one beer from the other—is to join my host. “La meme—The same,” I say.
The waiter drifts behind the bar, and soon returns with two white-foamed beer glasses—for a wine sipper, that’s volume—which I hadn't the nerve to refuse.
Our talk meanders off work. Seamlessly, the little Frenchman—in a tone of proud defiance—declares: “I’m married to a Flemish woman!” The genie of his mind plumes out the bottle leading due north—his words speak living in Flanders—a course neat into the countryside. The Hydra-head of my mind hovers—drawn into an exurb of hip-and-valley tiled-roofed villas, nested in lush greenery. His words, while sounding an unexpected alarm, continues as my Hydra’s eyes descend—shadows the figure of his wife, and four scattered children through the rooms on the white ceramic tiled floor, as he drives up in the driveway.
I’m stunned. I can imagine a Flemish woman shopping, taking children to school—but for a Parisian to live amid Flemish hostility toward French speakers? Then again, he’s a Leo—the big cat, charismatic in his slight stature. I glance beyond the advertisements-splashed windows, the street corner panes no longer hold the day—they unfettered the last light into the haze of awakening streetlights—twilight’s gentle concession to the night, And I wonder: ‘How am I going to get home?’ As Nyx dissolves all perspectives of my bus ride into the night.
Then, Guy Duchatel—away from his draping suit, soft through the fold against the hard chair, along the baby table, legs crossed beside mine—the fabric almost skirt-like in its elegance. His gaze signals the waiter. Expecting the bill, I’m surprised when he orders a second beer for himself—I dare not refuse joining him. All the while, I feel this extended application scrutinized in deed, through every crack of my private life. The waiter returns with the beers, exchanging the empty glasses.
Our gazes have lingered on the men—kept at a distance only by the hush of our quiet corner—the kind who quietly patronize this establishment: scattered at tables, or along the bar counter, breezing through the entrance door, they might as well belong, just coming from offices tucked in this residential stretch of workmen's townhouses.
‘This is madness. . .’ I'm thinking, as the alcohol fumes rise—pulling me back to a childhood memory: left by our parents, to sitting among the Belgian-Congo's deep jungle natives around a little brushwood fire, dim lighting in the the straw hut, enshrouded in wood smoke chasing back the night’ chill. The alkohol smoked my brain, then as now.
I daren’t speak—empty-headed—yet I sip at long intervals—He remains seated. Our elbow atop shares the baby table. I sit in fear of marginalizing myself before a man who seems to be appraising more than skills—judging if I might integrate into his team.
The door sillage spells Nyx—creeping out of the north pole air, dousing Helios’ summer scorch, into oblivion. ‘You’re on your own now!’ punctuates my mind. Then Guy Duchatel stands. Without a backward glance, he walks off, passing the barkeeper, who quietly wipes glassware. A connoisseur’s glide—his hand brushes the counter—and a few banknotes remain behind. I can only assume they cover the drinks and tips, as I’m left—estranged to the milieu.
I drift across the buoyant floor, trailing Guy Duchatel into the street—unsure if he’s accustomed to alcohol, or simply mastered its mask. The fenestrated terracotta brick—those saddened prows of corner facades—untether fleeting lights through their drawn curtains. I, too, untether from stumbling on his shadow—his fluttering dark suit and trailing pants. Keeping pace, avoiding sway or waver, I lock instead, on the straight course of the paving slabs. Each step a deliberation, a quiet vow to hold course.
Approaching through the interstice between marginal walls of townhouses, the block stretches—unfolding toward the distant avenue—streetlight athwart. Emerging from the haze, the luminescent red scores the white band—from where we departed earlier. Guy Duchatel fumbles in his pocket—metal jingles from the floating fabric of his trousers, then reaches toward my face, saying: “La Citroën est parquée au tour du coin—The Citroën is parked around the corner.”
With the clearing haze, “Team Construct,” unreeled across bright white translucent fascia above the upcoming storefront on Clemenceau Avenue. Mr. Duchatel drifts toward the side street curb, weaving through the gap of headlights and taillights—crossing the sidestreet, threading through a break in the bumper-to-bumper cars dozing along the opposite curb. But when I glance back from upfront up ahead, where lantern spills creep and shelter into the reception interior for the night—his figure had vanished into the shadows of the sidestreet lamplights.
Where the fenestrated brick townhouse clears the corner, and escapes into the wings of the avenue, I pace in a deliberate lurk. The silver tram tracks lie athwart, a barrier—beyond them, sleek gleams of confused dark chassis and undulating glass. A suspicion stirs: Guy Duchatel still stalking me from peripheral sidewalks. I don’t stop—just keep my snail’s pace, stepping down the curb, crossing diagonally over the deserted Avenue, scouting a train of slumbering cars. Until one stirs—a white car, pointing itself outward from the hush, its lines shaping a station wagon, ghosting the hand of an automotive clay modeler. The sheen whispers: ‘N’est-tu pas belle—Ain’t you beautiful?’ with a flicker of childhood memory: ‘Citroën’—a name twinned with a Frenchman’s pride.
I stand by the door, measuring my steadiness. The key picks the lock—‘It’s a match’—I exhale in a hush, disbelief folded in relief. I pull the door, circle the swinging panel, and slip into the driver’s seat. A breath sighs, freezing my grip—a relationship in its wake.
But it’s not the past of driving cars that sits foremost in the chemistry of relationship—it’s the tool my mind grasps: the rhythm, a pact, a mirror—suspended on the horizon, like Aetheria’s fishing line, hooking into Mariette, my destiny mushrooming from her scattered groups of people.
While I’m thinking—’better than a bus ride,’ the thought is short lived. I sense the persistent stalking eyes, without yet considering that his genie might still be outside the lamp, hovering—thoughts coil over our passage through the afternoon. I watch for sudden bursts of headlights, or trailing red taillights unfolding into the avenue.
Through my thoughts, I resist being drawn into streaming highway traffic wrapping the city Ring. Stalking eyes are on me—maybe hiding in the train of parked cars. I opt for a snail's drive, pressing forward, still tipsy. Turn the ignition, listen to the engine’s idling purr. After an extended wait, I tell myself: ‘You need to move.’ I plan a reverse course—tracing the bus route, threading through peaceful, deserted communities. Families, tucked behind their television set with dinner, one halt to the next, curling north.
I urge my palm to nudge into gear, dreading a bump to the car in front—or behind—setting off alarms wailing through hollow streets. I edge from the stalled space, wheel spinning lock to lock, palming through neutral, back and forth, until I'm ready to lurch into the deserted avenue. Rearview mirror catching glints. Side mirror scanning the bluey shadows. Fearing a sudden headless shadow, I crank my neck—a glance behind—while my other eye follows the headlights’ faint sweep across the tramways. Out of the U-turn, I settle into the straight, weaving back to the earlier plaza, with the rising railway viaduct in the shadows—picking my brain for the De Lijn bus route out from the South Station, debuting my course to the next halt’s signpost.
En route, I lost the bus’ morning course—but kept probing forward—no other option—hands steady on the wheel, weaving through instinctive suburban recalls. Then, across the roundabout, the restaurant rises—this morning’s terrace chairs and tables, pilled and chained, spills some reassurance. Streets fan outward, but I coast along the dented curb, shadowing the main road. I steer past by the broad corner terrace—layed out for customers, hollowed-out by the circle—until a De Lijn yellow halt signpost creeps from beneath overreaching branches—greeting the curb like a passenger’s waiting omen.
Lucifer's flickers in disappointment, as I'm thinking to myself: ‘You’re on track.’ My own evanescent intoxication trailing behind—clear-minded, I drift through channels of streets—rows of townhouses flanking me, their solid, sealed doors surmising lives tucked behind lowered blinds. Families gathered at evening tables, gazes fixed on animated flickers of television screens.
Apart from another drifter, briefly caught in whisky-passing headlights, I’m alone in the streets. Then the flat-boxed architecture of the derelict brasserie rises—Citroen’s headlight mirror sweeps the glazed band across its facade, dissolving into the deserted street. But it cast a spell of dangerous solitude. With no parked cars for cover, the street’s free curbs feel exposed—open to onslaught. Sensing the need for shelter, I steer through the gaping gateway, tucking the car alongside the neighbor’s hedgegrown wild foliage. The distant majestic fir stir—jealousy-struck:’How dare you park that car in here?’ Far in retrieve, taillights’ glow red, seated against the bench-height hedge, shadowing the sidewalk. I tweak the ignition key.
I step out, lock the door, and head toward the fallen fir in silhouette—Jealousy-stirred by the tires that trespassed the pedestrian park. My steps grind toward its looping trace. Besides the fir, I press through the half-gazebo’s door, stepping into the vestibule.
A meek, globe’s light spills from the stained glass dining room doors into the atrium—denouncing, around the blind wall, what waits ahead: Mariette in the lounge, enshrouded by the flickering glow of her favored Nagui show. Courteous as her guest, I head to join her—watch the news through, until her restlessness calls her to bed.
Meeting Helios' tongue, Mariette waxes—slipping through Nyx, as if still speaking to August. She drops a few words, her lingering despise returning fragmented. She dithers into the kitchen, circling the backrest—grieving Frans—slipping into speech again.
Like a mausoleum, the middle out the trio of red wood panel-doors in the vestibule, is locked to preserve, the blind flight of stairs down into a basement, where Mariette keeps Frans’ museum lingering: rusted vintage tools, the dormant hush of his workshop. It sleeps beside the garage, where his metallic bronze Opel Kadett—1980s—rest beneath a decade-thick film of dust, untouched without even the smudge of a finger.
Mariette closes the door to Nyx, sheltering in her veil. Through the atrium lingers the fear of the sentinel of doors—ghosting each family member.
While Helios rises beyond the windows to the thatched-roof house, the eaves shelter the saddled fenestrated facades.
The mirage stirs in the leafy zodiac forest—chirps nestling, wings bathing, a fluttering symphony of intuition comes to mind. I don’t feel that brave—but then the hush returns: the holographic ghosting of Mariette crossing the downstairs atrium.
A deja vu. She had left the kitchen, weaving toward the rotary phone atop a crocheted doily, set on the stilted table. Her voice—intuitive, brittle, emphatic—a telegraph sent across eras. Not quite naming the woman, but time circling its indictment, a latent referral as: “Antoinette. . .”—Van der Arckeren. A name otherwise left untouched, save for the refrain: “My housemaid hasn’t turned up.”
I'm left very confused—impressions muddled. Over the past few days: the farmhand, Mariette’s visitor, his Spanish wife—returned, brought back—threading links among her quiet neighbors around the block. She leaves me with the silage of familiarity. A pattern surfaces—though she never mixes in. She feeds on gossip, but it doesn’t stick. I might be echoing too, somewhere across the countryside.
I head out on an errand, into the hush of the countryside—past the fifth branch to four-way intersection, skirting the corner brasserie, into full sight of the De Lijn bus depot, and further into the shaggy fields toward the delhaize supermarket.
On the way back, by the whoosh of trickling traffic, I cross the intersection, and step into the French fry shop. I walked out nibbling crisp sticks, still caught on the chef’s remark—my Afrikaans, tangled in with Flemish.
I’d thought, ‘He must have lived in South Africa.’
But already my mind has veered—into the cosmic symphony, playing the harp to thought, drawing the threads that led me to the thatched-roof house. “Mariette is alone in that big thatched roof house,” Ingrid's words still cling—barely a week since I had left Paris. But it wasn’t obvious, I’ve taken a step into the footprints of De_P’pa—father, still fresh into that quiet generosity.
Stepping my return to the driveway, I brush through along the fir’s widespread green skirt, beside the dwarf half-gazebo. I press the entrance door, clear the vestibule—catching my breath to a pause. ‘Mariette's long-awaited housemaid. . .’ I hold back, reading. ‘Do not disturb’—measuring my entry.
As she guides the tedious suction pipe of the vacuum along the parquet skirting. I’m stunned. The woman glows—dressed in a light beige executive outfit, out of place. I step forward, envisaging a rock-n’-roll footsteps rush past her creepy-crawly head-brush, toward Frans’ distant study door, ruminating a dilemma—how to greet a woman not in sloppy work shoes, apron, scarf tying her light blond hair. Not to offend the robust Flemish woman.
I brush along the series of built-in cupboard doors—presumably holding Frans’ coats and outdoor wear—tucked beneath the blind rise of the staircase. I meet her before the gaping doorway into the atrium's shadowy gloom. A flimsy supermarket bag in hand—fulfilling a need: a thirty percent dried fruit Muesli pack and a fresh milk carton, for my daily breakfast.
My mind stirs with a blunt, misplaced thought: ‘Are you the maid?’ But it doesn’t fit a Virgo grace alive in her—unlike Mariette. I catch myself scrambling for something gentler to say, only to blurt: “C’est vous qui faites le ménage ici—Are you doing the cleaning here?”
Her charm, rejuvenating—holds no invitation. It mirrors a distant figure from the late sixties. She exhales in a hush, ‘The son of Paul,’—reasoning, holding to what she sees.
Reminiscent of a teenager’s preoccupation—entering adulthood—when De-P'pa skipped bail in the Pretoria court. When the poultry farm lingered beneath looming mansions, disguised as agricultural plots in Kyalami’s Peri-Urban zone. Mrs Coetzee, in her Volkswagen Beetle, would pull up for inspection—harassing over drifting feathers, free-running geese—a flock sight the fear of guardians—cow and calf, and Bilulu in their midst, a fox-terrier chasing rats. Farm odors wafted across the neighborhood, uninvited.
Now I’ve inherited De_P’pa’s rapatrié footprints. Mariette withholds names—old feuds left unspoken—as if naming them might summon whispers in return. I’ve grown wise after phrasing. “My gardener”—a title that feeds her princess entitlement. Her voice, emphatic, yet that is of a lost little girl without a playmate. Now, after every turn of the clock: “My housemaid should be coming?”
I get that electric stream—what Mariette keeps buried in the dark closet of her mind: Antoinette—widowed from Marcel Van der Ackeren. Her brother, August, fostered her three children. Antoinette’s words slice through—crisp and deliberate. “Je suis là pour aider. Sinon, qui va entretenir la maison…—I’m here to help. Otherwise, who’s going to keep the house clean. . .” A pause. A look. A thought. ‘Mariette?’
Sunday morning, I stepped across the atrium toward the deep set-back sentinel doors, off left from the waking rotary telephone cradle—I step into the wing of the house, where a shaft of eager sunlight extends its reach on Frans’ desk. I circle the green inlaid leather, placing my Toshiba laptop, then swirl away toward the door panes—tapestry to the countryside’s hush, too, begging entry. I turn the door key, crank the lever, pull the door. A crisp breath greets me—pushed across the neighbor’s wood by sun-day’s heat waves. My gaze drops to the crazy-paved kitchen terrace—common to South African thresholds, both in and out, nestle in the corner of these northern doorsteps.
Back to the chair, I settle. Lift the screen. Return to WordPerfect—load the menu, call up a new page. I begin recalling my last leg: New York’ flight to Paris, still irritated having had to clear the hotel for the summer tourist. My train had arrived at the South Station over a week ago. I begin to piano the keys—unveiling Aetheria’s from the script of an unimaginable sequence of events. As wafts call up glimpses—cast shade retracting beneath the thick blanket of thatch.
By mid-morning, a calm breeze rises from an eerie hush—pleasant, tickling my tense. But not for long. The air is troubled—lifted by a distant commotion. It grows coarse, tremulous—voice dynamic and rising, approach from behind the blind kitchen corner. They break loose—I hold half-a gaze off-screen, across the paved terrace, toward the sharp edge of the corner, sturdy and white beneath the thick thatched eaves.
A jittery petite woman—late twenties—storms up a harlequin sprite: pep hands slicing the air, feet skipping the crazy paving. She veers, uncoil—holding back her own swirls at the kitchen door. Hesitant. But the rush in her takes over—darting forward forward in a blouse bursting autumn, white pumpkin shorts billowing around the thighs. She debuts in swirls, sidesteps against the white plastered wall. Pauses. Her gaze shifts through the bright glow, pinching curious eyes into the shadow of my doorway.
Enticed by her brother Jephte—If you meet him, it’ll drive you bonkers—she pauses on a retrieve step, then steals forward again, squeezes a gaze, peering through to where I’m sitting. Her flurry shoes tap the crazy paving, tracking the few plinth courses of brown brick that lead to the kitchen door—catching up with the flat-footed seven-year boy trailing behind her.
She disappears into the kitchen, trailed by a svelte man—preened in a beige-brown dress suit—who gestures for the boy head on inside. He follows, closing the door behind them.
The kitchen stirs: muffled greeting, an uproar of voices, Mariette’s surprised tumult rising—then settling. The echo drifts, resonating beneath the internal cracks of the door to the atrium, then fading. . . dissolving into the distant rooms.
I’ve returned to my screen when the internal door flings open. She enters, spins—as if for an audition—then poses in the doorway corner. Steps forward to the middle of the room, before Frank's desk, and declaring: ‘Hi, I’m Victoria van der Ackeren...’ She swirls away—swift—sealing the door behind her.
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