Shutterspeed by Erwin Mortier Read Free Book Online Page A

face in the photos of the Catholic Girls’ Circle, of whichAunt too had been a member before she married, had obviously been extinguished at some point in her life.
    Shortly after stowing away her useless wedding dress for evermore, she must have resolved to spend the rest of her days casting shade instead, as a sort of antidote to that old sparkle which still made me blink when I stared into her dimness for too long.
    As fussily as she specified the meagre purchases which drove every shopkeeper in Stuyvenberghe to despair, so meticulously did she weigh her innumerable invisible ailments on the scales of her words. She was at pains to describe with forensic accuracy the ache in her left hip, which was neither really acute nor dull, and not so much in her muscles as in the bone, although she was certain it wasn’t rheumatism … maybe it was just that she had a cold, or an infection, it could be a boil, since boils ran in the family.
    I asked myself how Uncle Werner could bear to listen to her litanies without feeling terminally ill himself. Miss van Vooren had only to mention her varicose veins, something she was particularly prone to doing when the shop was crowded with customers, for me to feel a blue Nile delta slithering down my own shins towards my heels.
    Her lamentations resonated in my limbs, charting every blind spot in my body and shunting me into an endless universe of pain from which I had previously been excluded. Until then I had known only the tropical heat-waves of influenza which, in the dead of winter or earlyspring, had made me lose myself in deliriously dense rain forests and released me from school.
    Wrapped in blankets, I would recline on the sofa in the front room like an oriental deity in the half-light of his sanctuary, roused from his slumber only by the tinkle of the silver spoon in the glass of lemon squash on the tray Aunt brought me several times a day. I would take the glass from her hands like a cup of poison and bravely drink it down in one go, despite the bitterness that made the roots of my hair tingle.
    Fever liquefied the days. I fancied I could smell ether or carbolic acid. I fancied I heard wheelchairs rolling squeakily down a hallway long ago, in some castle or other full of nymphs in winged head-dresses and wards with row upon row of dazzling white beds in which the sick lay wrapped in their sheets like caterpillars in silken cocoons.
    I heard the whoosh of curtain rails and a voice, possibly Aunt’s, calling out: ‘Quick, Werner, quick, he’s going to be sick again. Hold the basin under his chin.’
     
    Towards evening the wind died. Summer dusk draped itself over the village like a clammy sheet, and at half-past six the church bells set about coaxing the world back into its old routine.
    The shop filled up after vespers, which was less than an hour before Aunt’s closing time. She called for me to come from the kitchen and lend a hand. Uncle Werner was out, taking his weekly drink at the café.
    ‘The lad’s been asked to help carry the canopy,’ she remarked while I climbed up the ladder to fetch her a packet of chicory powder from the shelf.
    ‘Really? Isn’t he rather young?’ said a customer, and someone else remarked on how time flew nowadays.
    I handed Aunt the chicory powder and sat on the bottom rung of the ladder, waiting for her next summons.
    I had brought the schoolmaster’s book, which lay open on my lap. By then I had got to the chapter entitled ‘Man Revealed’. Aunt would have hated the pictures.
    As early as 1628
, read the caption to a diagram of a human heart sprouting antlers of blood vessels,
William Harvey, an English physician, discovered the circulation system in which the blood mass is pumped through the veins by the action of the heart
.
    ‘Quite the little bookworm, that boy,’ someone said. ‘Nose permanently buried in a book.’
    I pretended not to hear.
    Not long afterwards, Albrecht von Heller, Swiss biologist and universal genius,