At last I am writing to you again, because great things are about to happen, and all thanks to Mr Van Schoonbeke.

You should know that my mother died.

An unpleasant business of course, not just for her but also for my sisters, who nearly killed themselves keeping vigil.

She was old, very old. Although I only have a rough idea about how old exactly. She wasn’t really ill or anything, just utterly worn out.

My eldest sister, with whom she lived, was good to her. She soaked her bread, made sure she went to the toilet and gave her potatoes to peel to keep her busy. And she peeled and peeled, as if for an army. We all brought our potatoes to my sister’s, and so did Madame from upstairs and a couple of neighbours too, because once my sister ran out and tried to make her re-peel a bucket of potatoes, but she noticed – would you believe it? – and said: “These have already been peeled.”

When she could no longer peel, because she could no longer coordinate her hands and eyes, my sister gave her wool or kapok stuffing to fluff, as it had become lumpy from being slept on. This produced a lot of dust, and Mother ended up covered in fluff from head to toe.

On and on it went, day and night: nodding off, fluffing, nodding off, fluffing. And every now and again a smile passed her lips. God knows who she was smiling at.

My father had only been dead five years or so, but she didn’t have the slightest recollection of him. He had never existed, despite the fact they’d had nine children together.

Whenever I came to visit her, I would occasionally bring him up in an effort to shake her out of her lethargy.

I would ask her if she truly had no memory of Krist, which had been his name.

She would make an immense effort to follow what I was saying. She appeared to understand that there was something she needed to grasp and, moving to the edge of her seat, she would look me in the eye, her face tense, with swollen veins on her temples: a dying lamp about to explode by way of farewell.

After a brief battle, the spark would die and she would produce that heart-rending smile again. If I insisted too much, she got scared.

No, the past no longer existed for her. No Krist, no children, nothing except fluffing kapok.

There was only one thought that haunted her: namely a small mortgage on one of her houses that hadn’t been paid off. Was she holding on just to scrape together that trifling sum?

In her presence, my dear old sister talked about her as if she weren’t there.

“She ate well. She’s been very difficult today.”