On a Sunday morning at ten o’clock I’m standing at the door of a closed shop on Plantin en Moretus Lei with cold knees and my French books under one arm. The door opens and a smart woman in her sixties purses her cherry-red lips and asks if I’m the Wils boy. Inside there is a smell of fine leather. I have to take off my shoes. Everything is excruciatingly tidy. Somewhere deep in the house I hear the screech of a parrot (Gaspar, as I learn later, a creature best given a wide berth). ‘Just go upstairs, child, my son is expecting you.’ The stairs creak. An open door at the top reveals a study with books arrayed behind green glass. Tobacco smoke as thick as fog over a marsh. I give a little knock. ‘Knock, knock,’ I hear immediately, ‘ça doit être le petit seigneur Wilfried, n’est-ce pas? Mais entrez, bonhomme, entrez.’ Around the corner, stretched out on a threadbare chaise longue, Felix Verschaffel is chewing on a pipe. He asks me to hand him my textbooks and indicates a chair. He is wearing a brown three-piece suit; his bulging eyes betray a temper and his meticulously trimmed goatee makes his face look even meaner. He turns page after page, sometimes sighing, sometimes chortling. ‘What’s your teacher’s name?’ he finally asks without looking at me. ‘What? Goetschalckx? One of the Paarden Markt Goetschalckxes, I suppose. Not Cyriel? I thought so. The whole family’s two-faced. His brother’s called Robert. A lawyer… of course. Only two things need to be well greased, you know… Well? Spit it out, Master Wilfried! What needs to be well greased? Cartwheels and lawyers, jeune homme. Remember that. Anyway. We are going to converse with each other in French as much as possible, is that understood? Which is to say, I speak and you listen. This here…’ He tosses my books onto a side table stacked with newspapers. ‘This is not French. It is not alive. If you want to master a language, you have to leap feet first into le fleuve culturel. You have to get drenched head to toe in love for the suppleness of this highly civilized language. Our heartfelt love for our mother tongue does not prevent us from keeping a maîtresse. You should see your face right now. You don’t get that last bit, do you? I see you thinking: Does he mean “mattress”? And yes, sometimes that too. A maîtresse can be a mattress…’ Meanbeard smirks and knocks his pipe out into the overfilled ashtray. ‘But those are vulgarities and we’re not going to get into that now.’ He reaches behind him for a book, while using his other hand to pour a purplish liqueur into the smallest glass I have ever seen. Without trembling, he fills it to the brim. Just as I too, after spending several Sundays with Meanbeard, will be filled to the crown with intoxicating poison. Without looking at me, he says, ‘We will begin with Les chants de Maldoror, written by Isidore Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont…’
Look that up on your computer, son. Or better still, let me write down the beginning of that book for you. In translation at least, because I suspect that the apple never falls far from the tree and, for now at least, your French is probably as execrable as mine was then.
May heaven grant that the reader, emboldened and momentarily as fierce as what he is reading, not lose his way, but find a wild, untrodden path through the desolate morass of these dark, poisonous pages…
It hits me like a slap in the face. Angelo feels the earth move and both he and I know that my balls are trembling too. It’s 1937.
Weeks later I again walk the now-familiar route from Kruik Straat, where I live with my parents in a somewhat rundown house, to Plantin en Moretus Lei and my miracle worker’s study.
‘How are your marks, jeune homme?’
‘Better.’
Meanbeard’s bulging eyes are like two black mirrors. Not everything disappears into them, but enough. ‘You can’t fool me. Definitely not with un coeur encore assez simple like yours.’ A stab in my apparently still-too-simple heart. I thought I was already depraved, but apparently more patience is required.
‘I have my report here if you’d like to see it.’
‘Bravo. Now I believe you.’
My stuttering is over. Gone from one day to the next. Thinking back on those days I see myself as a rambler, lost and treading on the spot. Meanbeard lifted up the overhanging branches and revealed a path. That was all it took. I could walk on.
He tells me he saw my father last Saturday. I saw Father leaving that day. He refused to say where he was going, only that he would be late home. It turns out he was in some village in the Campine, together with my temporary tutor and many others beside.
‘We were in the Royal.’
‘Knocking them back…’
He chuckles. ‘Definitely. And we had a good laugh too. It was a special evening I organized with some friends, right in the devil’s heartland. I thought it was a shame he hadn’t brought you along and I told him as much.’
‘Now I think it was a shame too.’
‘That whole village is full of beautiful houses. English style, more or less. Did you know there’s a synagogue there? In the middle of the Campine… The place is lousy with Israelites. We had an entertainer come. The terrace was packed. You should have heard the things he came up with. He came on stage with a big fake nose, just like one of those people. We almost pissed ourselves right then and there. Humour is a weapon, my friend. All those Shlomos and Isaacs and whatever-elses heard our laughter echoing all the way into those big fancy shacks of theirs.’
Meanbeard slaps his right leg hard, braying with laughter. He even has to pull out a hankie because of the tears in his eyes. ‘Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. Neither could your father. Afterwards I told him, “Jozef, it has to come from the bottom up. That’s what this evening’s taught us. You see the kind of people we can mobilize.” He couldn’t have agreed more.’
‘He didn’t say a word to me about it.’
‘Anyway, it got late and we had to catch the last train. So a whole crowd of us are hiking it to the station when suddenly I spot something on the ground. Just like a train ticket. I pick it up and… Wait, I’ll show you.’
Meanbeard hops up off his chaise longue, reaches for a piece of paper and hands it to me. From a distance it really does look like a train ticket, except it’s printed on a different kind of paper. In messy letters it says, ‘All Hitler lackeys to Berlin in fourth-class cattle-trucks!’
He stares at me, waiting for me to catch on.
His voice goes down an octave. ‘The whole platform was covered with the things. Can you believe it? In our own country? Those bastards had them printed just for our night out because they, of course, are not short of money. Read it again. “All Hitler lackeys to Berlin in fourth-class cattle-trucks!” Enough said, eh? That’s what they want to do with us. That’s what all the Freemasons, Bolsheviks and hook-nosed sons of Judah would like to see happen. Do they ever mention freedom of speech at that school of yours? Well, around here it’s dead.’
He presses hard on the piece of paper in my hand with his index finger. ‘It won’t be us. You’ll see. Not us.’
Who are the people around us? And most importantly, what role will they play in our lives? I can imagine that’s a question you haven’t yet asked yourself. At your age friends grow on trees. They’re there. That’s all. At least, I hope so. I hope you celebrate life with your friends, even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing. But my circle of friends has been seriously depleted, almost all dead and buried, and my family, as you know all too well, sees me as a curse. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is shouting at Wilfried Wils that there is no place for him any more, that I should just die. But I admit that those feelings mostly rise after I’ve been at the Calvados. No old folks’ home for me, you know that too. But before you start thinking I’ve been abandoned to my fate, let me reassure you. Your sire twice removed has a nurse at his disposal. ‘Homecare’ they call it, and she herself is called Nicole, a strapping lass in her fifties. No, I don’t need her to wipe my arse or help me into the tub. The woman’s a good cook, she does the weekly shop, and if I don’t snap at her the moment she comes in, she’s liable to start singing in the kitchen. That might lead to me slam
ming the door of my study or shouting ‘Give us a break!’ because an old bastard like me is expected to be bitter and bad-tempered, and it’s best to live up to that expectation. But last week, when there was still no sign of snow, and rain was lashing the windows, I heard her singing and for the first time I wasn’t annoyed. In a soothing voice that wasn’t sad at all, she sang Charles Aznavour’s ‘La bohème’. That name doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? Don’t look it up, it’s old tosh you wouldn’t like anyway. The song is supposedly about Aznavour himself when he was flat broke in Paris but oh-so-happy. He sings about him and his mates being young and crazy together. On the telly Yvette and I had acquired not that long before, we saw him singing the song with one clenched fist and a white hankie in the other hand. Anyway, hearing that song I asked myself for the first time what Nicole was going to mean to me besides being someone who throws the clothes in the machine and does the washing-up and plonks a cup of herbal tea down in front of my nose every morning. That question thrilled me, son. Because there’s a fair chance she’s going to be the last person to play an unexpected role in my life. I have long since figured out all the other people who have crossed my path, placing them on the chessboard one after the other over the last few years, like a former chess maniac setting up the pieces to relive the games that once meant so much to him. His playing days are over, only the memories are left, by which I’m trying to say that my life is no longer that complicated. But her singing about those artistic Bohemians made me realize that there is still a game in play after all, albeit a much simpler one. Something with dice, maybe, and two counters on a snakes-and-ladders board. That’s enough for me. When you’re playing a game, time’s claws aren’t in you quite so deep.
That Aznavour record came out in the mid-sixties. I was ‘on tram four’, as we used to say here—in my forties. The first time I hear the song I’m not with Yvette, but playing chess with Lode. We’re in the Terminus, as we often are, on Statie Straat, close to Koningin Astrid Plein. They have a jukebox. One person after the other drops a coin into it to listen to ‘La bohème’. Everyone knows it inside-out and there’s always somebody who’ll stand up and bellow: ‘Je vous parle d’un temps que les moins de vingt ans ne peuvent pas connaître!’ Whereupon everyone, either drunk already or well on their way, joins in with, ‘Ca voulait dire on est heureux… La bohème, la bohème. Nous ne mangions qu’un jour sur deux…’ I know I just described it as ‘old tosh’, but that song does something to blokes like us. In that instant it makes us maudlin and raucous and we both laugh at the gusto with which the other is belting it out. At that moment there is already an irreparable breach between us, something men don’t talk about, something to do with resentment. Lode is still handsome, though you can already see signs of occasional bingeing. But that applies equally to me, like the bulk of our fellow officers. We’re still in what they call our bloom though. He’s working for immigration, I’m in vice. Behind his back they call Lode ‘the Bull’; my nickname is ‘the Velvet Monkey’. But that’s irrelevant. We play chess once a week because we’re brothers-in-law and we fight our battles out on the board. He and I are bound together and neither of us can take it any more. We’re like two Belgian shepherds chained permanently to a shed, with an owner who never takes them out for a walk. But we don’t howl at the moon; we play chess and have a beer. That’s enough. No, we pretend, we accept the game.
Almost thirty years later. Lode asks how things are at home and I shrug. I’m more interested in the bishop he’s slid forward to attack my queen together with the rook he positioned beforehand, something I can’t do anything about. I’ll have to give her up and that makes me particularly bad-tempered. This is still our weekly ritual and I am always too cowardly to think up an excuse to wriggle out of it.
‘How is she now? You never tell me anything.’
‘She spends all day lying on the bed blubbering.’
I take his bishop with my knight and he sighs while taking my queen with his rook, which—infuriatingly—will have to go unpunished.
‘Didn’t you see that?’ he asks.
‘Piss off. Of course I saw it. I just couldn’t do anything about it. Anyway, I’m not sure you realize this, but chess is a game in which the purpose is to checkmate the opponent’s king.’ My voice sounds too irritable of course, too childish. It’s not enough to have him humiliate me—I have to draw attention to it as well.
‘Will, your granddaughter’s missing. It’s making me feel sick too. I understand Yvette being a wreck. But you…’
‘I’m working on it, Lode. Don’t worry. I’m working on it.’
‘On what?’
‘She’s twenty-one. You know what she’s like. She’s always doing crazy stuff. Soon we’ll get a call to say she’s off somewhere or has taken some drugs or is with some bloke in the Ardennes. What the fuck do you want me to say?’
‘She’s one of a kind. But you still get on well with her.’
‘You do too, don’t you?’
Lode lights a cigarette and looks at me. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘She’s crazy about old grandads like us. I’ve heard she’s been to see you a few times.’
‘That was to do with her course. I helped her a bit. Hey… what’s up with you all of a sudden?’
While writing this down, son, this conversation about your aunt from so many years ago, I hear that Armenian again, with his wistful song. Bohemians, Bohemians, we were young, we were mad.
And then I immediately see Lode humming along too, his hand elegantly teasing out the beat over the chessboard like an effeminate choirmaster’s while he thinks about how to twist the knife further with his rook or knight. He always plays defensively, waiting for me to launch a furious attack on his position. It’s not serious chess but, like I said, that’s not what it’s about between the two of us.
I raise a hand to order another round.
Not taking his eyes off the board, he says, ‘It’s on me. It’s my birthday after all.’
‘Oh, bugger,’ I mumble. ‘Completely forgot.’
He looks at me. His bright-blue eyes are sinking in an advancing forest of wrinkles. But now I no longer see cruel mockery in his gaze.
‘Do you remember?’ he asks.
It’s Wednesday, 19th February 1941.
Lode says, ‘Ah, you made it! What a downpour. Come in, quick!’ while opening the door wide. He leads me up the stairs to the family home above his parents’ butcher’s shop on De Coninck Plein. Yesterday he told me there was a party at his place and asked if I felt like coming. We’ve known each other for about six months now, with our paths crossing almost every day at the station and going for a beer together now and then, but the invitation still came as a surprise. We both still live with our parents, but inviting him to mine doesn’t bear thinking about. My father’s been withdrawn for quite some time because he’s lost his job, and Mum, with her wig and that possessive anxiousness of hers… I wouldn’t inflict it on anyone. That was why I wavered for a moment before accepting the invitation, worried it might oblige me to invite him round to ours as well sometime. But meat has grown scarce and a party at a butcher’s is not a thing to turn down, come what may.
Will Page 4
