MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL V

[Eric Georges Charles Weets]

We had a lot of this blue cover paper in stock, because brother dear bought much too much of it in the beginning of last school year. Grandmother threatened that time that he had to bring back the overload of cover paper to the newspaper shop, because money was not growing on her back. But in practice the blue paper came to lay on the highest shelf in our inbuilt closet.

Sending us back to the shop, if we bought of something too much, did grandmother rarely. The strange woman was namely afraid that the neighbors should think she did not have enough money to buy it.

Grandmother put an opened notebook carefully on the sheet of cover paper, snipped with the scissor around the notebook, leaving a margin of two centimeters so she could fold easily that piece over the side of the hard cover. And so she covered one book after the other, while continuously complaining that my ears almost fell off my head, that I was always the one, who saddled her up with a lot of work.

I protested heavily against this accusation because in principle, I had nothing to do with it. If she wanted to complain then she had to go to the master. It was him who gave me all those stupid books and demanded that I should bring them back, covered. And by the way, all that complaining was a big act. The old woman liked to cover books. For hours together she could keep herself busy with it. What she however, did not like was writing the labels.

Her dentures almost jumped out of her mouth when she wrote, extremely slow, my name and school grade on the labels with blue lines. I did not understand why grandmother got always so nervous, every time she had to write something. Personally, I thought that her handwriting was beautiful. The way she wrote my name with those curly letters looked gracious. Sometimes, after seeing her write my or my brother’s name or signing papers with grandfather’s name, I tried to copy her letters, but mine looked more or less on chicken feet.

Just a little after five thirty, brother showed his face again. He also wanted to see his books covered. But Mister had not to put his hopes on any help from grandmother, there he was big enough to do it by himself, she said.

As a joke, I offered him my help. With a hit on my brain, he made it clear that he could not laugh with my joke.

Yves opened his school bag and showed grandmother, in despair, the books which had to be covered. Those were many. But grandmother stayed firm. It was his own fault she said, he could have started covering immediately after he came home from school, instead of visiting Marcel. Irritated as he could get, brother threw his school bag on the table and pushed me out of the sofa, as if I had something to do with this. the brut took from me the seat I warmed up, with a mug face and swung his legs over the arms of the sofa. Something normally not allowed to do, but grandmother turned a blind eye. “Everything off the table”, she shouted, “ we are about to eat”. I looked up to the white ceramic wall clock, which grandfather won with his pigeons, hanging there above the mirror, running seriously behind.

I did not understand the watch yet, but I knew when the big hand and the small hand made one straight line, it meant dinner time. It was the same when the big hand was lying on the small one, except that this meant lunch.

There came four deep soup plates on the table, soup spoons and forks. Grandmother warned us to stay with our fingers away from the big soup kettle, just removed from the fire, when she put the pot in the middle of the table on a metal under layer. These under layers, which we had plenty of in all colors and designs, were no luxury. My brother put once the potatoes on the table simply like that, and you still could see clearly the burnt in circle, nicely engraved in the plastic table cover. Luckily for Yves, disappeared the red finger marks on his thigh, left by a very angry grandmother, in a couple of days.

Grandmother always made soup for couple of days. Her specialty was tomato soup with tiny meat balls, but that we got only in the summers, when the tomatoes were in season and cheap.

With the big ladle she made couple of rounds in the pot before she filled our plates, till the brim with vegetable soup. For herself, she took just a little bit.

My brother and I greedily lapped the soup inside in no time, because there was Flemish beef stew waiting and let it be that this beef stew, with boiled potatoes and a good amount of mustard on the side, was a favorite we would maybe not die for but surely fight for.

Brother thought that he, because of our age difference, should get more meat than I. But appetite had nothing to do with age. Our grandparents were eating much less than we did, although they were much older than we were. It had more to do with the size of the stomach I thought, and mine was just so big as my brother’s, if not bigger. In this, grandmother agreed.

Brother called me greedy, said that I was eating so much only to show off. Grandmother thought that it was not his affair and advised Mr. Complain, to watch in his own plate.

Our Miret had the habit to come, while we were eating, and and lay down under my feet. Our dog did this, according to Mr. Yves, because of the fact that I was born a dirty fellow who could not eat properly. I dropped more food on the ground than I put in my mouth, he said and dogs know instinctively where they can find leftovers.

Even when grandmother was trying to finish her dinner peacefully, the boring guy went on eating her mind, about the books he had to cover. He told, almost with tears in his eyes, how Marcel’s mother helped Marcel even when he was in the fifth grade. It was true that he could easily do it by himself, if there were not so many. Why it must always be him who had a family who did not care. He said, that grandmother had to know, that if he went with uncovered notebooks to school, the master would not be soft with him.

I saw him already, in my imagination, standing in front of his teacher, with his uncovered note books, his pant full of shit and a painful red elephant’s ear. Only the thought gave me some kind of satanic pleasure.

Again and again to my regret I had to admit, if I wanted it or not, that darling brother was much better in manipulating grandmother than I was. Even before the end of our dinner, he got the old woman where he wanted her. Grandmother agreed, to get rid of the suffering around her ears, to cover the big books because brother after all, could not be called the most handy one.

The table got cleared and the plastic table cover cleaned, first with a wet cleaning cloth and then with a dry one, as usual. I threw myself down in the big robust sofa which stood between the television and the Singer sewing machine, while Yves and his granny started, in perfect harmony, working as if their lives depended on it. Yves sat on his knees on a chair, covering the smaller note books and grandmother stood on the other side of the table, with her back to the coal stove, doing what she promised and I sat there watching them without really watching, getting seriously bored.

There stood one sofa in the kitchen, a dark green one, with very big round arm rests and fat velvet cushions. Grandmother did not like to sit in that sofa, it had something to do with her back, if I understood well. Grandfather stayed out of it because of his principles. In the old man’s opinion, only lazy people, who don’t like to work, hang in sofas. For him a normal simple kitchen chair was more than good enough to sit on.

I and my brother were not interested at all in what these old people thought about the sofa. For us it was simply going about the fact, if they don’t want to sit in it, who else will? and this green sofa had something majestic, worth a battle.

Most of the time, and this to my great regret, I was the one who pulled the shortest straw, because brother was anyhow, even when it was extreme difficult for me to admit, physically much stronger than me. This did not mean of course, that I gave up the sofa without putting up a fight.

Every time my loving brother refused with that stone head of his to give me five minutes in the sofa, I attacked him with all my force available. I pulled on his sweater, on his pants, on his legs, his feet to get him out of the sofa. I did not give up even when it cost me my last drop of sweat, or after he hurt me so much that I had to go in retreat for a while to lick my wounds. No, you could bet your head on it that I went on till, Yves got so bored that he gave up the sofa, or till grandmother got her stomach full of it and came with rough measures. Then it was over of course, because without she made too many words dirty on it, she gave us both a couple of swift, straight hits from grandfather’s leather belt and demanded that we sit on chairs, as far as possible from each other.

Yves was convinced that everything that went wrong with him, had something to do with me. The idiot carried this impression about me, because of his tiny gold fish brain, which could not remember things much long. Mister namely forgot that it was because of my person that we, together with the butcher, were the only ones in the whole neighborhood, who owned a television.

The butcher and his madam were the first in the village who were the proud owners of the invention of the century, and because they were not only our neighbors but also very good friends of my grandparents, we, me and Yves, were allowed to go there daily to watch the children programs on that big wooden box with that almost oval tube and strange giant white tuning buttons, standing there in the corner of their kitchen, behind the kitchen table.

This, anyhow till that unforgettable notorious day, that madam of butcher invited us one afternoon to come and watch the animation movie, “the ice queen”.

It was a beautiful but sad story with, here and there, a few frightening fragments. Specially where the ice queen kidnaps the girl and takes her to the ice palace, my neck hair stood straight and a cold shivers ran down my back bone.

Every time when we were sitting there calm and quiet watching TV, madam butcher gave us a few biscuits and something to drink.

That day, she got us some drink made of milk and fresh orange juice. She made it herself, she said, in her new mixer. I and my brother got a big yellow bowl full of it. The smell and appearance of it promised not much good. It smelt sour and looked like spoilt yellow milk. After the first little sip I took to try it out, ice cold shivers ran from my forehead to my toes. The stuff tasted so extreme sour that I got instantly cramps in my jaws.

Madam of the butcher asked me friendly, like she was, if I liked the health drink with extra vitamin C. I did not know what to answer, so I looked at my brother and thought I will say the same what he says. But when I watched the idiot, I saw him drinking the stuff with a straight face. I asked myself, does he really like it or is it one of his acts. When madam butcher asked me for the second time if I liked it, I didn’t dare to say “no” because I did not want to give the impression to be the difficult one, again, so I said, with a painful smile on my face, that I liked it very much.

But every time I took a sip and tried to get the stuff through my throat, I got chicken skin all over my body and cramps in my neck. I did really my utmost best to get the horrible tasting drink for a little bit more than half through my throat. Then I could say that I liked it very much but my stomach was full of it. However, to my regret, after a sip or five, my stomach refused to collaborate any longer and sent the yellow, curdled stuff, under high pressure, back upwards.

In a desperate attempt, I tried with both my hands in front of my mouth, to swallow the whole thing back in. But no, the sour poison spurted through my fingers and fell on the white lace table cloth.

To make a long story short, in no time, I created, a mess containing a Citroen yellow milky substance mixed with brown pieces of biscuits and the left over of my not so long ago eaten lunch, in front of me.

Out of pure shame and not knowing what was waiting on me after this horrible accident, I started crying so loud that the whole neighborhood could hear it. In panic madam of the butcher came running from the butchery followed by her two sons, Richard and Armond. The little round old woman asked me “what is the matter, why are you crying?”

I did not dare to say that it was because of her yellow poison that I vomited on her table, so I blamed it on the animation movie. I told her, that there were so many horrible things happening in the movie that I got sick from it. I knew it was not the best excuse but it was the only one I could come up with.

Because of this, afterwards seen, not so clever excuse, they wrongly concluded that it was maybe better for us not to watch this kind of movies anymore and we were sent home immediately.

Yves got almost insane from rage. He scolded me and pushed me and called me names too ugly to be repeated. On returning home he could not be more in a hurry to tell grandmother, the whole vomit story with the necessary exaggerations. Grandmother felt extremely embarrassed for what I did, even before she spoke with madam of the butcher. She started praying loudly and begged God for the day I stopped bring shame over the family. She said that she could not show her face on the street any more, because of my uncontrollable misbehavior. I could not leave it and whispered, “but anyway, you never go out, what makes the difference”. This, in my opinion funny remark, triggered that grandmother went to red and I got, by surprise, a couple of hits from grandfather’s belt.

From that day onwards, we were only invited when there were snot noses’ programs shown. And madam of the butcher sent us much earlier home than we were used to. My brother frightened me continuously by saying, that he gonna kill me in my sleep, something that worried me for a while, kept me longer awake than normal and gave me bad dreams.

Grandmother threw a little bit more coal in the fire a week or two later by saying that she did not see it anymore that we were running, almost daily, in and out of butcher’s house.

When brother heard this he went completely out of his head and attacked me from behind. He would have strangled me if grandmother did not pulled him off my back .

After grandmother separated us and demanded that we sat down on chairs, far away from each other with our mouths closed, she came totally unexpected out of the corner, with something that made us stand perplexed. Grandmother declared namely, with that straight emotionless face of hers, that she thought that it was time that grandfather got us a television set. I and my brother did not believed our ears, we thought that we dreamt. We thought that the old woman was joking. But she went on saying, that a television set could be a little to expensive, but if it keeps us away from the butcher’s kitchen, it was worth the price.

So Mr. Brother, who was addicted on TV before we had one, could may be better kiss my both hands and my cheek too, because the topic “television”, should never have come on the table, had I not vomit on that beautiful hand made, expensive lace table cover of Madam Butcher.


To be continued in part VI........