A Christmas Story

Luc Sr. lived in room 3.17, where time had withdrawn into a linoleum shade once marketed as ‘spring sand’. The care home smelled of boiled cauliflower and good intentions. On the bedside table stood a photograph from earlier days: Luc in a grey suit, folder under his arm, shoulders square. Government service. That had not been a job; it had been a sacrament.

In the sixties he had lost God, somewhere between a school desk and a cigarette break. Not through argument, but by mutual consent. God was busy; Luc was too. And he had read Reve and Hermans—enough to know belief was negotiable.

What remained was order, forms, the faith that if you filled everything in correctly, someone would eventually see you.

His children came once a year. That was manageable. They sat as if waiting on a platform. They spoke quickly, as though their words needed to generate returns. About targets. About visibility. About themselves. His daughter Sandra proudly reported that her youngest already showed avoidant attachment.
“That’s what the nanny says,” she added, smiling as if it were a medal.
The grandchildren bent over their phones, thumbs ticking like small metronomes from another world.

Luc felt lonely and unheard. Even the staff paid him little attention. They hurried through his room during the weekly clean.

When Luc heard that the intelligence services listened in through mobile phones, he felt something warm. Someone was listening. He began to pray to the man from the AIVD. Not loudly, but carefully, in sentences that might also appear in a policy memorandum. He lit candles and placed them on either side of his mobile phone. He sang The Internationale, softly, because it was after eight. Just after the NOS evening news, which he followed faithfully. It became a scene with rules. That mattered.

The letter arrived on a Monday.
The listening entity at the AIVD felt offended by Luc Sr. It was not a man but an it, and wished to be addressed as human. A fine followed, along with a mandatory gender-awareness course. Luc read it three times. Then he nodded. Confirmation. He was being listened to. He was being answered.

He prayed to a god who spoke.

He could no longer wash himself. Staff had been cut back; management and consultants needed their bonuses. In his head he compared it with earlier times. In forensic detention, he remembered, the care had been better. More attention. Suddenly that felt like a solution. He confessed his crimes to the human from the AIVD: undeclared earnings, tax evasion. And the voices. They had told him to sin.

The courtroom was cool and vast. Guilty, said the judge. Given his age, no forensic detention, but a psychiatric institution. There they injected him into compliance and strapped him down. Outside he heard the director and consultants boasting about their Christmas bonus. Familiar names from the general assembly, from the party he had belonged to all his life. It sounded like the old days, but without him.

He wanted to pray, but he had no mobile phone. And he was too sedated. His children stopped coming.

Only Mien came once more. Out of pity. She talked about the Rhine cruise, about the Caribbean. A bargain. Easily affordable on her pension.
“And you’re not lonely there,” she said.
Luc blinked. Words stuck. Too dulled by the medication.

When Mien left, it grew quiet.
The silence did not listen.

by Johan Jongepier