COMING OUT SOON!
Chapter 1
End of the Spring term at the University of Antwerp
My name is Geert Vandiest.
At the time of the story, I am about to tell you, I was a professor of International Relations at the University of Antwerp. I taught the Principles of International Politics to a class of graduate students doing their Master in International Relations. I also headed the Seminar group.
The Seminar group was made up of a handful of last year students who had presented a research subject to both the Rector and Lead Professor. If the subject was accepted, they were allowed to research and write their papers on their own i.e., outside of a normal class context. It was hard work for both the student and the Lead Professor, but it was also an interesting experience. The Seminar only met twice as a group. The first time was at the beginning when the course instructions were handed out to them, and the second time was when they presented their papers.
I had been teaching there for the last fifteen years and I expected to be doing so until my retirement. My life rotated around my lessons, my students and the school year with a sprinkle of conferences here and there.
We, my wife Inge and I, lived in a hundred-year-old, three-story house that used to belong to my parents. It was located close to the Groenplaats, a beautiful large square with its statue of Rubens near the Cathedral of Our Lady. Ours was a typical Flemish house with a gambrel roof and curved eaves along the length of it.
I used to walk past the Cathedral with its three stained-glass windows depicting Our Lady of Stekske, Saint Ursula and Saint Gaspar, on a daily basis. Usually, I’d pass by the Cathedral twice a day, and sometimes more, on my way to and from the University or just when going out. I loved our Cathedral for its history, its art, and its beauty. After dark when the cathedral was lit up and the splendor of the stain glass windows was displayed for the whole world to see, I would sit down on a bench and admire them for hours.
The reason I am telling you this, is because I want you to know I was not a religious man in any sense of the word. For sure, I was not an atheist. I believed in the Creator, but the rest was rather fuzzy. I would go to church for weddings and funerals and that’s about it. And when I did so it was not due to some strong inner need of mine, but rather to please someone. I would never have popped in for a quick prayer like many of my fellow Antwerpenaars do.
Neither religion nor the Church had any room in my life. Except, of course, as I have already said,to admire the work of the medieval architects.
It is important for you to keep this in mind as you hear my story. Both my wife and I considered ourselves to be free thinkers. We rejected religious dogma and based all our opinions and decisions on reason. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, we were indifferent to religious practice, although we did not tolerate the slightest ridicule of those who followed them.
Lately, I have been asking myself why religion and even God played such a small part in my life. To begin with I did not grow up in a family where religion was important. Both my parents were totally emersed in the belief that Science was the only objective means by which a society could and should determine its values. They both worked in pharmaceutical laboratories and although they did believe there was something out there, they neither had the time to devote to it nor did they have any inclination to do so. Inge’s background was similar to mine.
The previous year had been a very hard and tragic one for me. My wife, my younger brother and his wife had died in a senseless car accident in Switzerland. All accidents are senseless, but I am describing this particular accident as senseless because the car that rammed into them was driven by a drunken driver, coming home from an office party. He was so drunk that afterwards he hardly remembered what had happened.
My wife, had called me that same afternoon at 6 p.m. to tell me the three of them were going out for dinner and then to a Vivaldi concert. She told me the true reason she was calling was to tell me she had found a biography I had been searching for a long time. Inge was so excited about finding it because it was a first edition, signed by the author. I found it among her things later on.
The thing is, it was difficult for me to reconcile the fact that if we had spoken to each other at 6 p.m., she could be dead by 10 p.m.
That evening when the phone rang, I was in my study reading one of my Seminar student’s report.
“Hello,” I answered automatically, my attention still half absorbed by the report I was reading.
“May I speak to Mr. Geert Vandiest, please,” asked a voice with a strong German accent.
“Vandiest here.” I don’t know why, but at that instant I knew something tragic had happened and I felt a cold hand gripping my heart.
“Mr. Vandiest, I am calling you from the Swiss police headquarters in Zurich.” The moment I heard the German accent and the business tone of my caller I knew. My initial reaction was confirmed. I didn’t need to hear another word.
I am sorry to have to inform you that your wife, has been in an accident. Would it be possible for you to come to Zürich as soon as possible?”
The police inspector told me, my brother who was driving, had no opportunity of avoiding the crash and that my wife and sister-in-law had died instantly. Why do they always say that to the survivors? How do they know?
Yes, I guess they want to blunt the shock. I can tell you it doesn’t. Why? Because the Inspector or whoever was at the other end of the line, wasn’t there. It offended me. At first, he gave me hope, and then quickly shattered it. I know. It is not done to hurt, but it did hurt me.
I took the first flight out of Brussels and arrived at the hospital morgue in Zurich in the middle of the night. I was immediately asked to identify the bodies.
Don’t believe what you see in films. Hollywood likes to give us the impression that the entire identification experience is rather quickly done. And the individual who is doing the identification is quickly ushered into another room away from the horror. It’s not like that. It tears you apart, and your blood runs cold. Every second spent in the morgue seems like an eternity. When you finally leave, having identified your loved ones, the overwhelming smell and cold of the morgue lingers within you for days.
Things are clear up to the moment I left the morgue. Afterwards, although I went through all the formalities, and brought them back to Belgium, my mind becomes fuzzy. As for the funeral of my darling Inge, it was a total blank for months.
My wife Inge and I had no children and other than my brother and his wife neither she nor I had any close family. Inge was a dentist and like me, our professions took up a lot of our time and interest.
This does not mean we didn’t have friends or didn’t go out. We had a lot of friends. We were often invited, and we did our share of entertaining. In addition to this, Antwerp is not a city where you can easily become bored.
Although the Rector had advised me to take time off after the funeral, I had not done so, preferring to continuing my teaching until the end of the scholastic year. I needed to keep something normal in my life. Teaching and my students brought this normality back into my life even if it was only while I was with them. In truth, I was broken. Once out of the University everything about the night the Swiss police phoned at 10 p.m. to give me the tragic news, came tumbling back into my life.
Even if I knew the truth, I still caught myself expecting her to come through our apartment door and hearing her call out to me in her cheery voice, with that slight trace of the Limburg accent, “I’m home, darling!”
One of the difficulties I faced every day was eating alone. We were used to eating at the dining room table. Inge always used to set it up as if it were for a special occasion. In truth, we always considered eating together at home a special occasion. After Inge died, I tried to keep it up. . . well, at least the part about eating at the dining room table.
After a few weeks, I started having my evening dinner at the kitchen table, and I no longer worried about putting out a tablecloth or whether everything matched. We were both good cooks and we loved to prepare fantastic meals. For a while, I tried to continue cooking our favorite meals as if Inge was there. After a while that too stopped and most of the time my dinner consisted of prepared frozen meals that I picked up from the supermarket on my way home from the University.
Once my meal was finished, I would rinse the plates, and stack them up for the cleaner who came on a daily basis while I was at work. Then I would quickly retire to my study for the rest of the evening.
I was still invited by our friends, but it wasn’t the same and I just couldn’t bring myself to even think of entertaining.
The Joys of Writing 