‘Ah, my young friend, a wise man once told me that it’s better to believe you chose your parents than the other way round. It is better to assume that the soul itself decided to reincarnate here, surrounded by these very people. That way everyone has made his own fate and only has to answer to himself.’
‘Do you really believe that old tosh?’
Meanbeard nods triumphantly. ‘What you call old tosh comes from the Orient, where our race arose many thousands of years ago. Don’t let yourself be distracted by the treacherous teachings of Christianity or by overestimating the importance of rationality, which is just as bad. Your glass is empty. Would you like another liqueur?’
Without waiting for an answer, he tops me up.
‘I’m glad I can come by every now and then to blow off steam.’
‘You’re always welcome here, as you know. But the things you say about your parents… There’s nothing terrible about any of that, surely? And those letters from your girl… She actually seems very charming to me. Don’t take it to heart so much. What shines through all of this is your poetic sensibility and that’s what matters. You mustn’t forget that.’
He raises his glass and we toast what he calls the ‘new era’ and the role I will play in it. Below us the parrot is making a hellish racket yet again. For the first time I hear his mother swear loudly. As if stung by a wasp, Meanbeard jumps up, throws open the door of his study and roars, ‘Don’t you bloody dare touch Gaspar or I’ll tan your hide! Do you hear me? Or do I need to come downstairs?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ is the quick and fearful reply from the depths.
Sighing, Meanbeard closes the door.
‘She is going mad and getting cruel, mon ami. She really is, and between you and me, sometimes she needs to be disciplined. But what can I do? C’est la vie.’
I don’t say anything else and leave the rest of the liqueur untouched.
From Monday I’m on afternoons. I check in at the desk at Vesting Straat. There is a strange tension in the station. At first the chief inspector hardly looks at me. Then he says that Gaston, a much older colleague, will be going on patrol with me.
‘Why’s that? Is Jean sick?’
A couple of the others look up.
After a long silence in which everyone stares at me, the chief says that the Sicherheitsdienst picked Jean up yesterday.
‘What for?’
‘I should ask you that, Wils. Did something happen last Saturday, perhaps? Neither of you reported anything unusual.’
‘Nothing I know of.’
The chief looks over his shoulder at the rest of them and asks if everyone’s heard me clearly. The temperature sinks to way below freezing. Someone spits on the floor.
‘Are you sure? Wasn’t there something to do with paint that night? Something at the National bloody Bank.’
‘Oh, that,’ I say quietly.
‘Hop it, lad. I’m sick of the sight of you right now.’
They beat Jean half to death. At least that’s what people said, usually adding, three of them at once, because you don’t beat someone like Jean half to death easily or on your own. Apparently he was only locked up in Begijnen Straat for a little while. After that nobody heard anything else about him. After the war he showed up again, which was something nobody had expected. He came back as one of those walking skeletons. Neuengamme. That was where he’d been. A concentration camp. I heard that he never really recovered. He didn’t want to be a cop any more and sent back the medal they offered him. No longer a Viking, but a ghost who spent the rest of his days sitting at a table in his wife’s bar, close to the stove. An old man of just over forty and—according to the stories—an object of ridicule once the war had finally been banished from everyone’s memories, something that hardly took any time at all, of course, much too little.
*
Have you ever had the feeling of suddenly being cut off from all kinds of things at once? Jean being carted off was one of those moments for me. I read my wartime diary and can picture it immediately. It’s clear that, at the time, no matter how superior I acted with my high-flown poetic fantasies, I had still drawn confidence from belonging somewhere. After Jean, that was over. Without a word of explanation, the other policemen avoided me. All support was withdrawn and I had to manage on my own. At the same time I felt observed and under suspicion. Conversations died when I stepped into the station. The chief watched me mistrustfully from behind his logbook while I gave my report at the end of each shift, as if every word was a trap, as if some malicious force had me in its power. ‘Are you sure, Wils? That’s how it has to be phrased, is it?’ I gave up going to bars with the other policemen. There was no point any more. Lode was all I had left. But he didn’t say a word about what the others thought of me and I didn’t insist. And many years later Lode would betray me too.
‘Checkmate.’
‘No, it’s not. I can take that knight with my bishop.’
‘I should have said, double checkmate. Take the knight, you’ll still be checkmated by the rook.’
‘Does that even exist, double checkmate?’
Lode shrugs. ‘Whatever it is, you can’t do anything about it.’
We’re in Café Terminus, back in that horrible year of 1993, the year of the wet bedspread with my wife lying on it.
Lode and I look at the board. Neither of us makes a move to put the pieces back in place.
‘Oh, mate,’ Lode says finally.
‘I know…’
‘Where did they find her?’
‘In one of those old bunkers near the park on Della Faille Laan.’
My granddaughter, the rebellious apple of my eye, is dead. Two days ago we found out it was suicide. I don’t know what your father’s told you about the aunt you never knew. Who knows, maybe he’s even told you something about that suicide note of hers. I have to tell you my truth about that, but not now. I don’t feel like it.
‘You’re so restless…’
She runs her fingers through my hair and gives one of my earlobes a little tug.
‘You make me restless.’
‘I can tell,’ she says, sounding a little sad again.
I say I don’t know what’s got into me.
In reality it’s quite simple. I’d rather be draped over a chaise longue, acting like I’m suffering from some kind of poetic consumption that wracks my lungs and limbs, but sets my soul on fire. The problem is I can’t see myself lying there like that. I’m not consumptive and I’m not a seer. It’s that longing, the ache to be something I’m not, that’s weighing on me. All I want is to stare hollow-eyed at the horizon, at the birth of a fantastic vision that only I will be able to capture in verse that will leave the world staggered. I want to be praised and hated, with enough people at my feet and the rest frothing at the mouth to curse me. I need to be offered prizes, not out of love and admiration, but because of the fear of misjudging me. Prizes which I, of course, would arrogantly refuse, hurling accusations of the most dubious double-dealing into the faces of the jury members. I want to shine in people’s imaginations like a creature of fable that is beyond the reach of mere mortals, a being with goat’s legs and dark gentle eyes you mate with at risk of eternal madness. Piss off, all of you, I want to be a poet, a lyrical genius, a monster whose satin lips adorn a mouth that spouts verse. I want to spin the wheel of fate, giving it an almighty tug, a gambler who risks everything on everything. All or nothing!
But I’m almost twenty-two and sitting here on a sofa above a butcher’s shop with just one person to worship me, who seems to have completely suppressed all thoughts of the darkness she once saw in me. I sit here as an off-duty cop who, since this business with Jean, is considered completely untrustworthy by Lode and everyone else at the station. Another one of those things: off and on duty. That’s how we all refer to our time. As if they’re the ones who turn us on and off… Even when I’m off duty, it’s on their say-so; my time is not my own. Do you see how work takes you over? An off-duty
cop. Someone who sees himself that way doesn’t even realize how much he’s been enslaved. I am imprisoned here, that’s what it is, locked in concrete from my ankles to my crotch, with a life that’s still ahead of me but already seems to have been chewed over from beginning to end by toothless ancestors. So I’m just like the others, like everyone. And that takes time to process, that makes a person—Yvette, your beautiful future great-grandmother, is right—a tad restless.
‘Your tea’s getting cold. And I made it for you with so much love.’
‘Whoops,’ I say and take a sip.
We are alone, inasmuch as two young people could be alone in a parental home in those days. Her parents are downstairs cleaning up the butcher’s shop and Lode is on duty. We, of course, are in the living room. I would be refused entry into her home for all eternity if I ever got caught in her bedroom.
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘that’s enough gloom and doom. You’ve hardly given me a second glance all day.’
Without a word I undo a button of her tightly fitted, mauve satin blouse.
‘Ah, down to business, is it?’
But her voice doesn’t sound reproachful and her hand doesn’t push away mine.
I undo another button, then look into her eyes.
She asks if I’m proud of myself now.
A bit of her flesh-coloured bra is showing.
‘Are you too scared to go any further?’
Her tone of voice makes my blood race. Like a cartoon hero who is suddenly surrounded by an enormous gang of bandits and doesn’t want to let on how terrified he is, I hardly dare swallow, scared that it will echo through the whole house.
I undo another button and try to do it as smoothly as possible, as if it’s routine. Trembling fingers start on the last button, which needs to be forced through the buttonhole. The blouse falls open, revealing the shape of her breasts, covered in flesh-coloured lace. She’s still gazing at me, the look in her eye betraying curiosity. My heart is pounding. Hers seems unaffected. She hooks a thumb under a strap and pulls it down over her round shoulder. She slides away the other strap too. Then with one hand she raises her left breast up out of all that lacy fabric. For the first time I am staring at one of her nipples. She offers it to me, slowly pulling my head down with her other hand.
‘Here. This is for you,’ she whispers, and only now do I hear her own excitement. ‘Here. Spoil me. It’s all yours.’
Her own words make her nipple swell.
I press a kiss on it and smell her skin. She smells of things that until now have only existed in my imagination. Things from an unknown south, the south of the sun, the south of naked bodies, undiscovered still, but already filling my secret thoughts.
My kiss is a little too cautious for her taste.
‘Again.’
I close my mouth over the nipple and suck.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s it.’
My trousers tighten. I try to breathe calmly. I run my tongue over her nipple, exploring its softness and its hardness at once, the lust that’s shaping it.
‘There’s two of them, remember…’
This doomed poet is reduced to forced labour in the fields of love.
She calmly strokes my hair while my tongue looks after her other nipple. It feels like she is lost in thought, as if her head were turned away to look out through the window into the endless distance, consumed by a dream. But am I that dream? Who says it’s not some film star? When I reach higher to press a kiss on her lips, her eyes welcome mine. Gently she pushes me off the sofa and forces me to kneel. She hikes up her skirt and spreads her legs, welcoming there too. My mouth goes from nipple to nipple while I press myself closer against her. As I lick, I surreptitiously look up at her and see her head tilted back. I feel a trembling pass through her. She wraps her legs around me. The shoes she is still wearing press against my back and I hound myself with questions: now? Already? Here, like this, without so much as a word? I lick her throat and want to breathe in her scent there too, but she pushes my head back down to her nipples. Again I feel that her attention is drifting as I suck, that she is letting me have my way, allowing me to do as I please with something that in her heart is reserved for someone else, someone unattainable. A short groan makes that suspicion ebb away again. But my thumb on her inner thigh, on the thin strip of naked skin I find there, meets with a reprimand, if friendly and patient. Only her breasts and mouth are available; the rest must remain a promise. As excited as I am, for all that my head is spinning, and despite the painful, straining desire in my trousers, I can accept it. More than that: maybe it comes as a relief that I still have to limit myself to those areolae, now wet and warm, still half imprisoned in her brassiere, and those hard, deepred nipples that are begging to be bitten, not hard, but hard enough for us to imagine ourselves as animals that don’t know where lust ends and hunger begins.
Then she takes a sudden sharp breath and says, ‘Oops.’
I hear Lode’s voice behind me.
‘Come on, you two…’ he sighs.
21st March 1942. According to my diary this is the day I see my first dead body. Early on a Saturday morning Gaston and I are at the end of Ommeganck Straat. We’re not making a fuss about it. That’s Gaston’s favourite expression, which he applies to virtually everything that can happen during a day’s work. He also said it when they informed him that from now on he would be walking the beat with me. Early this morning, before we’d started our round, he came back from the toilets with the announcement that he’d just pissed blood. But that too was nothing to make a fuss about. My hesitant expression of concern didn’t throw him. He’d been expecting it, he told me calmly. It was no surprise. ‘They work us to death. One more year of this misery and I can retire. Let’s not make a fuss about it, Wilfried. Someone like me making it past fifty is incredible enough as it is. The missus is always telling me I’m grinding myself down. Know what I say? “What about you?” I say. If I kicked up a fuss about things like that, I’d never even get out of bed. It’s my kidneys. They’re stuffed. Too much piss: going in and coming out.’
His words linger. We hear a police whistle. In Lente Straat somebody’s sprawled half over the pavement. Judging by his wounds, murdered. Two other constables are making a half-hearted attempt to block the body from view while gesturing to the people staring out of the windows and shouting for them to go back inside. One of the policemen shrugs uneasily, as though it’s an accident he’s unwittingly caused. The other is staring straight ahead as if he’d like to strangle the murderer on the spot with a length of piano wire. Cursing, he comes up to us. He looks wooden, as if walking on stilts, and, despite his fury, his eyes are dead.
‘The fucking bastards!’
He shakes Gaston’s hand and nods at me.
‘Someone you know?’ Gaston asks cautiously.
The stilt-walker nods and sniffs, then holds a hankie up to his impressive nose as if we too are cadavers.
‘My deepest condolences, Eduard,’ Gaston growls.
Eduard shakes his head and goes back to the body.
It’s a cold, dark morning, even if the blackbirds are trying to outdo each other in song. I rub my eyelids with my thumb and little finger and look again, hoping my sight has improved. The shock of the new clouds everything. A first dead body feels like a revelation from another world, as if a god or a demon has reduced this man to a bag of blood and guts, bone and flesh, cutting the thread of his life for no reason, without leaving a single clue. As if that god has left his rubbish behind with supercilious indifference to all rules and customs. It feels like something that had to happen. After all, nothing is normal any more; it hasn’t been for a long time. The man is lying on his right side. His mouth is half open. One of his eyes is staring dully into the void. His hat is on the street two steps away, an exclamation mark after a long sentence. Look at me lying here. One of his arms is stretched out, palm up, as if there was one last thing he was supposed to receive from the heavens before dying. His straight r
ight leg is under his left and forms, almost playfully, the numeral 4. A red flower has formed around his heart. The back of his head looks like someone has stamped on it, turning it into a gory crater filled with blood clots and the vulnerable pink flesh of his brain. His shoes are worn, but the overcoat and the trousers showing below suggest he had plenty of money. His wallet is lying open beside him. His ID shows that it is Clement Bruynooghe who is lying here, in Lente Straat, close to one of the Jews’ ritual slaughterhouses. Someone shot the above-mentioned Bruynooghe, Clement in the back, then put a bullet through his head. The Germans call the representatives of the newly formed Jewish Council to account, apparently threatening reprisals. For some people the occupation is no longer an unpleasant natural disaster, but something that can be resisted. From now on, people will be shooting back. It seems that Bruynooghe made no bones about his sympathy for the occupier.
‘A good comrade,’ Meanbeard adds.
‘Another policeman was there and frothing at the mouth. He’s the one who found this Clement fellow.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Eduard, I think… I don’t know him.’
‘Oh, that’s probably the Finger. Eduard Vingerhoets. Something birdlike about him? Long pointy nose, small head?’
‘That’s him.’
‘I’ve known the Finger for years. Another true comrade. Before the war we were in a lot of protests together. If you’re in the police you always have to be a bit careful with politics, of course. Great admirer of Mussolini—we always made fun of him for that. You have to be honest with each other, even if you’re on the same side philosophically, and surely that Italian windbag is comical more than anything else. Compare someone like that to the Führer, not just in terms of character, but also Weltanschauung. You feel where the true radicalism lies, don’t you? Now, I must say the Finger has never been fond of Jews. Il Duce’s prone to beat around the bush on that score, but the Finger, never. He wants them all dead and the sooner the better.’
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