The chief looks at us from behind his desk and sighs. He pulls out the incident log, a thick book with blue horizontal lines and a big red line down one side, and dips his pen in the ink. Together with him, I listen while Lode tells the story, his rage flaring as he progresses, which makes me, in turn, more and more nervous. Finally the chief lays down his pen, takes off his goggles and gives me a weary look.
‘Do you agree with what your chum here has to say?’
I tell him it’s true that the Germans never once said what the Lizke family was accused of.
‘Your mate here says they were unlawfully accused of something. That’s a totally different thing. Did those men show you any documents?’
‘Just a piece of paper with the address of that bed store on it.’
Lode slaps the wooden desktop. ‘It’s not right, chief! Not one of those children was over fifteen. A woman and a bunch of kids? And how are we supposed to know if the father really was a work dodger? Has everyone gone mad?’
A fiasco. But what do you expect? Most people run around like headless chickens. You need to know that I had to convince Lode to make a report in the first place. It took a lot of effort on my part on the way back. He kept saying that we shouldn’t start shit-stirring. It was mainly his disgust speaking. But he had it wrong. That was exactly what we needed to do. The reasoning was pretty obvious. We could assume that those two field arseholes would go and make a report of their own once they got back to Field Command. That meant there was a reasonable chance we’d be called to account. Those fellows were thorough and may very well have taken note of our numbers. Not having given our version of the facts beforehand would put us in an even worse position. There was only one important thing that we—and this is how I emphasized it to Lode—needed to be totally clear about. I had held that field gendarme back because I was worried he was going to attack my fellow officer. That was all that mattered. The rest of it had nothing to do with us. We had to cover ourselves. In the end Lode said I was right. But I had misjudged him and, most of all, I should have spoken first. Instead of concentrating on that one fact while dictating his report, his rage began to play up and he couldn’t resist making it a complaint, emphasizing the great injustice he thought he’d witnessed… And that wasn’t all. There was something else, something I only understood later. If Lode had told me that one thing then, I wouldn’t have believed him, not even if he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die. Lode knew that foreigner. He knew the Jew Chaim Lizke, who we had helped put on a transport along with his family.
‘You do understand, Metdepenningen, that this is going to Field Command?’
‘It goes to the mayor too, doesn’t it?’
The chief inspector scratches the side of his head and puts his glasses back on.
‘So, boy, are you trying to teach me how to do my job? How long have you rookies been here anyway? Four or five weeks? What’s this got to do with the mayor?’
The chief’s patience is exhausted and Lode has finally realized it. He hesitates, uncertain.
I just described him as a Hollywood hero and I’m not taking any of that back. He was impressive and single-minded, radiating a strength people seldom see and normally associate, perhaps justifiably, with long-forgotten heroes or the terrifying beauty of gods. But more than anything else, people are pitiful, they’re not consistent and they seldom face facts. Nobody stays a hero a whole life long.
‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’
I hear Lode swallow.
‘It is a case of maintaining public order and then it falls under the, um…’
With his thumb and index finger almost touching, the chief says, ‘You are this far away from getting night duty for the rest of the winter. Is that what you want?’
He looks at Lode first and then at me, the reasonable one. ‘The word “unlawful” is not going in it. Now get out of my sight.’
When we get back outside Lode is as good as convinced that the chief is a ‘real one’, a mole in other words, who was already conniving with his fellow fascists before the war, part of a secret society dedicated to undermining city and state, or rather bending them, with or without violence, to the whims of the occupier. The way he tells it, early on that January morning in 1941, makes me picture a huddle of masked men swearing eternal loyalty to each other and their new Fatherland by flickering torchlight. By this time I already know treachery exists; I don’t need kitsch images bubbling up inside me. But they’re something I have never been able to resist.
I must have been about seven. My father told me that on my mother’s side the family once lived in a small castle. That night I had a dream: me in the middle of that castle, with my first sensation the horribly cold marble floor under my bare feet. My mother is standing at the top of a high staircase, beckoning. An enormous door swings open. I follow her, but she keeps slipping ahead. Door after door opens, all lavishly ornamented with figures carved into the wood: angels swarming over each other, eagles pecking at each other’s bodies, writhing snakes. The last door opens. My treacherous mother has disappeared. I see a countess clawing at her neck, trying to dig out something rotten. She is followed by a maid in a white bonnet spewing blood in the privy. I see a count as a knight, holding his sword high in the throne room and with churning madness in his mouth. A greybeard, dressed in rags, sticks an admonitory finger in the air while a dog licks his unshod toes. A carelessly discarded banner lies at the foot of the stairs, stinking of mould. Outside the fish in the evaporating pond gulp for air, baking in the sun. Around that stagnant pool: the mutilated bodies of men, women and children with millions of green blowflies swarming around them, crawling in and out of their wounds, laying eggs. And yes, men with torches, them too. In the morning I woke up with the flu.
‘We can’t trust anyone.’
‘Who says you can trust me?’
Visibly shocked, Lode looks at me, searching my face for mockery or sarcasm, then decides to burst out laughing anyway.
‘Will, come on! Pull the other one!’
‘No, I’m serious. Who says there even is a “we”? Who says you can trust anyone without knowing?’
‘But you, I can!’ Lode cries, giving me a sharp poke in the ribs. ‘I can trust you.’
*
Me? That’s questionable, son, and I mean it. Not that somebody like me would have been capable of betraying Lode for any reason at all. He would have risked charges, possibly deportation and then death. That sounds a bit exaggerated, but it’s anything but. Two years after that poke Lode gave me, when the Germans had really started to shit themselves, they dragged people off to concentration camps for a lot less. In any case, does someone deserve to be trusted, even if he wouldn’t do anything to harm or betray his mate? There’s an old French police film from the seventies where Alain Delon’s character says that when it comes to cops, there’s only one correct way to approach them, and that’s with a combination of ambiguity and contempt. The reason I had to laugh when I heard him make that cool pronouncement was that Delon was playing a cop himself in that film. Policeman’s a strange profession anyway. I’ll tell you later how your great-grandfather stumbled into it. Or why not now? Get it over with. I accepted the job that had been arranged for me as a way of escaping the forced labour imposed by the Germans. Do you already feel that ‘ambiguity’ turning in your stomach? Youngster becomes a cop to avoid being carted off to Germany as a worker and, as a cop, helps to pick up people who want to escape that same forced labour. But of course with the Lizke family and their kind it wasn’t about work. Which is not to say that the Germans themselves knew what they were supposed to do with those people in the winter of ’40–’41. They had to get rid of them, that was all. Worse still, back then there were plenty of people in town who were pissed off that there were still Jews walking around at all. It wasn’t going fast enough for them. It’s one or the other, they said, you can’t have it both ways. If these people are so dangerous and reprehensible, why is the city still lousy with them? H
ow is it possible that the master race still tolerates this enemy of the people on the streets? Are they really going to wait until this riff-raff have been terrified into adjusting to our way of life? They could wait a long time. Never gonna happen. A leech can only do one thing—it doesn’t adjust. The Germans had been here since May. They’d conquered a whole country in under a fortnight as if it were nothing. Weren’t they ashamed of themselves for not finishing the job? And then, of course, the rumour went round that it came down to the sparklers, that the Jews were being allowed to stay to safeguard the city’s pride and prosperity: the diamond trade. They’re all the same, people said; even the Germans have succumbed to filthy lucre. Only a month earlier, according to a friend of my father’s who worked at the town hall, the Jews had come in to register as Jewish around the back of the town hall in Gildekamer Straat. There was an endless stream of people. Everyone at the office had to work overtime. My father’s friend said they were queued up out into the rain under big black umbrellas. They’d been ‘summoned’ to present themselves with their identity cards, a bureaucratic way of saying they’d better obey. ‘You have no idea, the things I saw there… It beggared belief. The way those fellows came in and all the documents they had with them. Don’t get me started. Poles, Germans… Family here, family there, and all those names. Some of them had been living here for years, but they still couldn’t speak a word of Dutch or even French. But the thing is, it wasn’t all beards and black overcoats. Sometimes women came in… real pin-ups. You’d fall over backwards if you saw them… Who’d have thought the tribe of Abraham included such magnificent specimens?’ My father’s friend held his glass out for a refill. Only a couple of weeks before the mass registration cafés and restaurants had been forced to post a notice on the door if the business was in Jewish hands. But all those measures weren’t enough for the old bags and drivelling fools, the bellyachers and troublemakers. And suddenly they were getting what they wanted. Loads of Jews were being put on trains to the orchard town of Saint-Trond, which they threw into a complete uproar. People moaned and whined. ‘Why do we have to take care of the foreigners? Do you know how much it costs? And what are they going to do here? Help pick the apples? It’s the bloody season for it!’ After a few months the Germans let the lot of them quietly return to the city. That’s completely forgotten now because two years after that debacle they did know what to do with them and shipped them off much further east to places where the chimneys smoked and corpse after corpse fed the fires day and night. And no, we didn’t know those details at the time. But that the Jews and others were being dispatched to places where they would be given an opportunity to earn a place in the Reich by the sweat of their brows, no, that was something none of us believed. Only gutless wonders claimed otherwise after the war, and some of them kept broadcasting their craven slave morality by weighing one thing up against the other, what they’d seen and what they hadn’t seen, with an emphasis on that ‘hadn’t’, with their sudden myopia accepted by others for the simple reason that nobody, from high to low, from the permanent secretary to the provincial governor, from the mayor to a rookie in uniform like me, was free of blame. Difficult times—you’ll still hear people saying that today and also that you have to see everything in context. I’m with Alain Delon—I say his view of cops applies to everyone: they were times of ambiguity and contempt, and in that they’re no different from any other times. In other words, they never ended, they’re still haunting us now.
A few years before you were born I had already considered writing down my experiences. I’ll tell you how that came about. It’s 1993. I’m sitting in my study, which looks out over City Park, and sorting out my papers. Not really. I’m actually just pretending to sort them out. In the next room your great-grandmother is lying on our bedspread, crying. I’m finding it an enormous strain. Powerlessness is exhausting. It cuts someone like me off from everything. Of course, I know why she’s crying. I just don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to think about it. And more than anything else, her tears make this the last place in the world I want to be. Anyway, it’s almost noon. There’s no food in the house. I’m hungry and my wife is definitely not planning on doing anything about it, even if I had the gall to ask her. I feel like some potted meat, duck rillettes to be precise, and I know a good butcher’s in Carnot Straat. The main thing is to get away from here, because I can’t bear another second of her wailing. The city has let itself be crowned European Capital of Culture and posters everywhere are celebrating the fact. If anyone had asked my opinion regarding which image to use, I would have pleaded the case for Mad Meg. It’s a miracle you can see this extraordinary painting by Breughel the Elder here in a small room in a small gallery. That alone shows who we are in this city and the painting itself is just as revealing: naked terror in plain sight, plunder at the mouth of hell. Having it right in front of your face doesn’t make a revelation any less a revelation. Mad Meg rages and rants through an insane landscape full of war and memories, rendered in bright reds, blacks and browns. Eyes wide to see everything and nothing. Has she caused this horror or is she just caught up in the general bastardry and going along with it? You should go to that art gallery one sunny Saturday and take it all in. True, you can see it on the Internet and kids of your generation always find more than they search for. Go and see the painting itself and then look up how this revelation came to be hanging here. Maybe then, with your own brain-power alone, you’ll work out why it says so much about this city. But fine, back to 1993, when a poster with a photo of Laurel and Hardy as jailbirds was thought enough to herald a year of culture. They look crestfallen, as only they can. It’s obvious that they’ve just tried to dig a tunnel only to end up back in their own cell. I look at them and recognize myself. Blazoned above their daft faces is the question ‘Can art save the world?’ Get stuffed, I think. I want toast with duck rillettes. But at the end of Quellin Straat I don’t turn right towards Carnot Straat. I’m suddenly thirstier than I am hungry and keep going to the Geuzen Gardens, the square that only gets called that by the city’s most elderly residents, where there used to be four public gardens, each with a handsome statue of a renowned painter or notorious mayor in the middle and surrounded by trees that once shaded infatuated couples, who sat under them to hold hands. Now it’s always full of choking buses waiting to get a mass of day-trippers back home as fast as possible. There on the corner, on one side of the opera, is a large café with pillars that flaunt its faded elegance, a place I sometimes go to meet my old friends. It’s around 11 a.m. I’ve hardly set foot in the place before somebody’s calling, ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in.’ A few old mates of mine are sitting in the middle of the dining room playing cards. I’m glad to see them, glad that I won’t have to sit at a table by myself like some kind of sad pot plant while I drink and reduce beer mats to little molehills of torn cardboard out of sheer boredom. Richard—built like a brick shithouse and a pal of mine, who, little over a year later, would be discharged from hospital with a plastic bag on the outside of his body instead of a stomach, and then carry it round with him like a walking skeleton for another six months before taking it with him into his grave—beckoned. Another one of the card players is called Leo. Since finding out that I’m a poet, the twerp has been addressing me as ‘Maestro’, half surly and half serious. He’s actually only known for a year or two, after I’ve been publishing for forty bloody years, but his attitude is typical of this city, as typical as it gets. I only vaguely know the other two. I sit down at their table and order a beer. They’re playing whist, a game I’ve never really understood. I sip my beer and look around. ‘Diamonds trumps!’ Richard shouts and winks at me while wiping the froth out of the tash that has won him honorary membership of the local Moustache Club, something he prides himself on. At that moment I’m already over seventy, but the salutary proximity of these card players reduces me to a child. It doesn’t last long. Between tricks Richard asks if I’ve seen Lode. He might just as well have given me a kick in the
balls. ‘No,’ I say, looking away. In that instant I notice that a man at a table on the other side of the room is meeting my gaze through his thick glasses, completely unembarrassed. Balding and badly shaved, he’s looking at me as if I’m an exotic rat in the nocturnal house at the zoo. I think I recognize him, but that’s impossible. The last time I saw him I was a cop of about twenty-two and he—and this makes my hair stand on end—just like now, was in his mid-forties. I’m sitting in one of the corridors of the SS Intelligence headquarters—at the time they were still housed in an enormous mansion on Della Faille Laan—waiting for some document I have to pass on to my inspector. It’s unusual because we don’t have much to do with the Gestapo. They run a regime within the regime. Still, around this time they have started to interfere more and more with ordinary policing. Field arseholes aren’t easy, but these plainclothesmen in leather coats are something else, one step up in the theatre of gross violence, where we have front-row seats and will later claim to have seen almost nothing. An office door is ajar. I see Four-Eyes standing there in a black uniform, his cap slanted on a bronze bust on his oak desk. I see him and I hear him, although I turn my head away now and then, just as I also turn away from him here in this café. He’s shouting and hurling papers at a woman, a Jew or a Jew’s wife. Yes, that’s it: she’s married to a refugee from Austria. I see her regularly at the baker’s in Jacob Jacobs Straat, where she buys cheese cakes and I sometimes queue up for my father because he’s so crazy about rugelachs. I recognize her profile immediately. She looks away from his black-uniformed spitting and yelling. He screams that she’s arranged it all very nicely, that every Jew out there knows somebody who’ll lend a hand in an emergency, and here, here are your papers, you lackey to a Christ-killer, here are the papers, and now your bloke can carry on profiteering, he won’t be put on a train to a work camp, relax, shouts Four-Eyes, rest assured… She stands straight and proud, even thanking him while picking the coveted papers up off the floor. She doesn’t look at me on her way out, but he does. Four-Eyes stares straight at me. Just like now, in 1993. He hasn’t changed a bit. Not as well groomed, perhaps, but the expression behind those convex glasses is exactly the same. He stares at me through a rip in the curtain of time, then folds a piece of card and uses it to push bits of food caught between his teeth back onto his tongue before swallowing them. ‘Look at me here,’ he says soundlessly, ‘and know that I recognize you, and that you were once witness to an incident that almost cost me my head, or rather saved it, because in the end the bitch I treated with such disdain was willing to testify on my behalf when I was locked up with my comrades in the Harmonie. I had saved her husband, after all. Against my wishes, but still, I saved him, and in the end that saved me too.’
Will Page 2
