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white wafers that became the body of Christ!
    Back in class, I couldn’t explain clearly to the teacher what had happened. I stuttered my story several times over: ‘I-I-I was stuck in the kakkestoel !’ In my confusion, I used the colloquial for high chair; literally, the chair for shitting in, since it had a hole in the seat for a baby’s potty. The other children understood, and they couldn’t stop laughing. The more they laughed, the more I got it wrong.
    My father did not know that his six-year-old daughter had gone to the devil. In my despair, I thought the devil to be a better ally than a punishing God. Every time my papa came to me at night, I thought I would die from suffocation. I wasn’t able to face a hell worse than the one I was already in.
    The recurring nightmare which I had begun to tell to Pater Janus was now strangled in my throat. I felt that the best course of action was to be as inconspicuous as possible, preferably invisible. More than ever, I felt obliged to get up very early in the morning and go to Mass (I never missed Mass unless I was seriously ill and couldn’t walk). I had toeat, and go to school, and do my chores, but it was too dangerous and stressful to interact with anybody. I felt like a trembling weed, tolerated in the garden of life if nobody noticed me.
    I could no longer bring myself to play with other children in the playground. I watched with agony, longing to join them when they skipped in teams, or hopscotched, or sledded along the icy paths they had made with buckets of water on the frozen ground.
    When I was a few years older, I did sometimes join in, especially sliding on the ice. You had to take a run-up, then launch yourself onto the thin strip of ice and try to make it to the end. At these times I glowed with contentment. But for two winters, while I suffered from cystitis caused by contact with my father’s unwashed penis (though, for reasons clear only to himself, my father never penetrated me), I couldn’t play outside for fear that the infection would get worse. I watched my classmates play from the corridor windows on the first floor, sipping warm milk from a thermos flask.
    MY GROWING THINNESS was eventually noticed. My mother could see that there was something seriously changed in her daughter, but if she ever suspected the cause (because she did know her husband), she did nothing. My father, who watched his sturdy girl wilt and grow woefully thin, hid his terrible knowledge from himself. And so his eldest daughter, once so wickedly wilful, was brought to the doctor because she was inexplicably listless, underweight and wan. I was sent away to a health resort a few months after the war ended, to recover alongside emaciated war orphans and shell-shocked children.
    I spent six miserable weeks in an institution run by nuns in an incongruously military style. They were harder, it seemed, than the nuns at my school. I was so homesick, so ill with pain in the whole of my gut, that I couldn’t eat. In the refectory, the voice of an invisible all-seeing nun would boom out from a hidden loudspeaker, paralysing me with, ‘Carla, eat that up! Don’t try to pass it to your neighbour!’
    We were searched for head lice, and for the first time in my life I felt the shame of having DDT powder poured all over my long blonde hair and the taste of it in my mouth. Back home, we were used to the almost daily ritual of picking out the nits. This was a serious business for my mother, the head baboon. From her we learned how to squash the tiny eggs, and the occasional runaway louse, between our fingernails. We never had to use poisons to control the lice we brought home from school because of our proud vigilance. Now I had to endure the nauseating smell of the white powder which was impossible not to inhale.
    The nuns even checked how we lay in bed, arms crossed over our chests, not daring to move all night.‘Don’t pull the fluff off the blankets, Carla! And all of you, children,