Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  ‘Come on, Will. You know what I mean.’

  Someone like you: it echoes through my mind. Because as much as I see myself as an outsider, I had hoped it wouldn’t be too visible. No, I have to be honest. I didn’t want to stand out at all, I just wanted to belong. It was naive to think it was a problem that could be solved by pulling on a uniform. My blue balls make that obvious now once and for all.

  ‘There’s one thing I have to ask you, Will…’

  ‘You want some more of this sticky muck?’ I laugh and reach for the bottle.

  ‘The White Raven… true or false?’

  ‘True,’ I say, pouring the liqueur. ‘My old French teacher took me there, the one who helped me get through school.’

  ‘That guy’s a rat.’

  ‘Agreed. But sometimes you get to know things by playing dumb.’

  Lode whistles quietly. ‘Bloody hell…’

  ‘You get me, right?’

  ‘Mate, it’s not a game. One false step.’

  ‘Look who’s talking.’

  Lode starts to laugh. ‘I’m not going to tell you everything. Everyone has their secrets. One last thing and then my lips are sealed. The Germans and their little friends like your teacher are in for a surprise if they try to round up another batch of Jews. No, now you should see your face. Not another word.’

  The bottle ends up empty.

  Hopefully you, my great-grandson, will one day read this, even if we don’t know each other and you never requested my memoirs. The aunt you never met, my beautiful granddaughter, who ended up doing away with herself with a rope, did ask about my memories of it all. She wanted to know, she wanted to know everything.

  ‘Keep that old rubbish to yourself,’ my wife snapped under her breath while carrying tea and homemade biscuits into my study. She smiled indulgently at Hilde and said, ‘Child, leave your bompa in peace.’

  I looked at her; she was eighteen at the time, with spiky hair and wearing baggy trousers and a ripped vest. Her eyes were made up like a witch’s. She looked a fright, I suppose, but it didn’t bother me. I saw her as a rebel, with something dark about her too. She’d brought her parents to the edge of a nervous breakdown with her sudden crying fits, slashing her arms, calling out that she sometimes saw visions of beauty and heard voices warning her that she and everyone else needed to better their ways.

  I looked at her and held my tongue. I did it so as not to disturb your great-grandmother, because she was scared that my stories might make our granddaughter even crazier. I stayed silent and I have cursed that silence to this day.

  *

  I’ve never seen Meanbeard this furious. He’s frothing at the mouth. Foambeard.

  ‘You and all those other cops are a pack of scabs! Turncoats, the lot of you!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He jumps up off his chaise longue, comes over to stand right in front of my chair, and starts his tirade. ‘No, that’s not going to work, friend. Don’t play dumb with me. I had to calm Gregor down. Do you know what kind of position you’ve put me in? I presumed you would keep me informed and that’s what I told him, an SD man. “Gregor,” I said, “the boy’s on our side. You can rely on it. If he knows something, we’ll know it too.” Now he’s rubbing my nose in those words. And I guarantee you that’s no laughing matter with a man like him. From one moment to the next, Gregor turned into a hurricane. Roaring. And this, and that! They’ve had to cancel tonight’s operation entirely. And you undoubtedly know why. Your station’s crammed with Jew-lovers. No, damn it. That’s putting it too nicely, you stupid idiot! Because don’t try telling me no money changed hands. The raid’s off. Happy now? But you’re all going to pay. The lot of you! If not one way, then the other. But it’s going to happen!’

  ‘I simply didn’t know a thing about it,’ I say, as calmly as I can.

  ‘No, that much is fucking clear. It’s a good thing Eduard Vingerhoets knew more than you. The Finger warned Gregor straight away. He’s someone you can rely on. It’s time you got to know your friends a bit better. He knows which side you’re on. I told him again.’

  ‘That bastard hates me.’

  ‘Get it into your thick skull: the Finger is one of the few friends you’ve got on the force. But the question remains, can we really trust you? The question remains, are you one of us? With the Finger there’s no doubt, but you? Well, do you have anything to say? Did you or didn’t you know your division was so rotten some of the cops are on those hook-nosed bastards’ payroll? Yes or no, what’s the story?!’

  He looks down on me. He’s sprayed his outburst all over my face.

  I try to control my rage. Does everyone really think they can do whatever they like with me, that I’m at their beck and call, the way my father is so fond of saying? Suddenly an enormous hate rises in me, a hate that sweeps away the smouldering humiliation I’ve been going through recently. Why on earth am I holding back? Why do people just keep on taking it until they’re nothing but soulless dummies? I’ve finished school, I’ve done my training, it’s enough. I soaked it all up, took what was worth taking, and the rest of my education, that thinly disguised brainwashing that never really took, is over. I wipe the saliva from my face and stand up like a man.

  ‘Did you have to spit in my face like that?’

  ‘Sorry, what? N’as-tu pas honte? You’re shameless!’

  I straighten my back and show him Angelo. I let him see himself being knocked over like a pawn on a chessboard, dragged over the floor by the hair to the stairwell and kicked all the way down. I see Angelo’s fists descending on him like hammers and skilfully beating his bearded face to a pulp. I see Angelo’s face covered with splatters of blood and how he then unbuttons his fly and pisses on the mush that was once a head. It only happens in my head, but I make sure he realizes. And it works immediately.

  ‘All right, take it easy,’ I hear him say. ‘I’m a bit on edge.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say.

  ‘I know you’re different. But you have to understand… my position.’

  ‘Maybe you should start out by making an effort to understand just who you’re dealing with.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Meanbeard puts on an uncertain smile. ‘Tough talk.’

  ‘Don’t ever shout at me again,’ I say and leave.

  ‘No,’ Lode says, ‘not with me. I’m not going to be a part of it. You can scream till you’re blue in the face.’

  The chief looks at his log. ‘I’m going to have to make a note of that, boy.’

  ‘Do whatever you like.’

  We’re on night duty. It’s about three in the morning, 28th August 1942. We’re being drummed up for a new operation. There we stand, like little children. And now one of us is talking like a man. Or a fool. There’s not much difference.

  Gaston tugs on Lode’s sleeve. ‘Have you lost your mind? Don’t make a fuss. You know what it can lead to.’

  Someone says, ‘It’ll be Breendonk for you, pal.’

  That’s the rumour. Anyone who refuses to cooperate goes straight to the camp of horrors, that’s what people are saying. So: here are the names. Go to Terlist Straat. Round them all up.

  ‘If none of us go, nothing will happen.’

  ‘You’re making it even worse. This is insubordination, Metdepenningen!’

  Gaston leans in towards him. ‘Don’t exaggerate, chief. Leave it. We’ll talk him round.’

  Lode looks at the rest of us, shakes his head and leaves without wasting another breath on it. I waver. I don’t want it to end like this. I can’t see myself being beaten into submission in a camp, surrounded by victims and swine, begging for a scrap of bread and finally realizing that it was my own fault, that I was the one who had stopped the wheel of fate forever.

  We’re gathered in a deathly quiet Terlist Straat. This time there are no Germans present. This time we really are alone. The names are shared out. There are about twenty of us, maybe more. Two of us are guarding the synagogue in the street. That’s where
we have to lock them up.

  Gaston says again that we shouldn’t make a fuss. I sigh.

  ‘We’re going to stay calm, Wilfried. Just knock on the door and—’

  ‘Be polite?’

  It’s Gaston’s turn to sigh. We’re spread out in front of the doors in groups of two. We all knock at the same time. ‘Open up! Police!’ It almost echoes in such a quiet street, but that doesn’t last long. Pandemonium bursts out almost immediately. Cries and shrieks from the houses. We can’t even hear each other speak. Our door opens slightly.

  ‘Teitelboim, Abraham?’

  Through the crack we see an elderly man with a beard. He shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes. He’s in his nightshirt. ‘Nein, nein, nein…’ he whispers.

  ‘Get everyone in your family dressed and pack some food. Please hurry.’

  The man tries to slam the door on us, as if we’re hawkers with products he doesn’t want, but Gaston has his foot in the gap and pushes the door open. Children look out at us from the stairs. Total fear, fear you can never forget. My partner tries again. ‘Please stay calm. Get dressed and come with us.’ Two women start shouting at once. The waiting takes forever. What can I say? The waiting is getting on my bloody nerves. Finally they’re ready. But they start begging, one after the other. One of the women holds some jewellery in front of our noses. ‘Bitte, bitte…’

  We push them out the door. On the street the chaos is complete. But as soon as people see that there are no Germans involved, resistance grows. People pull on our sleeves asking for an explanation, ‘Was haben wir getan?’ and plead, ‘Bitte, bitte…’ But also swear, ‘Bastarde! Bastarde!’ and curse us, ‘Schande über euch!’ We drag the Teitelboim family to the synagogue. One of the women stumbles while hanging off my arm to beg for mercy. I drag her over the cobbles. Gaston raises his truncheon menacingly. Meanwhile some of our fellow policemen are simply hitting them, in a total frenzy, completely alone in their rage. They’re all yelling themselves hoarse. I see one who has to be pulled off a Jew: he was beside himself and wouldn’t stop kicking him. For a moment I can’t work out who it is who is being so excessive, then suddenly I see the Finger’s bony face under his helmet. He sees me looking at him and winks. ‘Now the moment’s come,’ I read in his eyes, ‘prove you’re not a mole.’ It feels like wet shit being rubbed in my face. The Finger tries to catch my eye again, then shrugs, and resumes his kicking.

  Blood on the street. People crying, scratching, biting.

  ‘Wilfried, careful! You almost lost one!’

  I go after a boy of about seventeen. The street is closed off. He has nowhere to go. Like a child playing a game, he starts zigzagging in the hope of shaking me off. I kick his legs out from under him and try to grab him by the collar. His sudden hatred lashes out. He scores my face with his nails. I punch him. Then again. I drag him over the cobbles. His mother cries out for compassion. She hammers my chest with both hands. I grab her by the neck. We shove them into the synagogue. And so it goes on. At the next house on our list a madman spits in my face. A second later he’s on his knees begging for mercy. ‘Sir, come on, please…’ I say, again as politely as I can. I take him by the shoulder. He lets himself almost fall down the stairs, a sack of rags, suddenly hardly a man at all. Then he just walks along beside me in shame, as if he has let himself be carried away by insanity and now thinks he is acting reasonably again.

  Then I see Gus, his face covered with blood. He’s standing there weeping, snot running out of his nose. The knee in my balls is immediately forgotten. Seeing someone like him like this is unbearable. I grab him by the elbow.

  ‘Where are you hurt?’

  ‘Hurt? No…’ Gus sputters. ‘We… I.’ He takes a deep breath and tries to wipe the blood off his face. Again he says, ‘We… I.’ After a few attempts he gets it out, in the middle of the enormous racket. ‘This bloke opens the door, sticks his chin out and cuts his own throat with a razor. He spurted fucking blood all over me. And inside… inside…’ Gus tries to get a hold of himself while wiping the blood off his face. ‘And inside they’re dead… All dead at the table. A woman and… five children. Dead as doornails. What is this?…’

  Gaston shouts at me. ‘Come on, lad, don’t stop!’ Gus waves his hand as if he has everything under control again. ‘I’m fine. Go do your job…’

  Gaston is pounding on a front door. ‘We’ll have to kick it in…’ On the third attempt the lock splinters. Someone upstairs shouts down that there aren’t any Jews here. Loud swearing follows. ‘What have you fuckers done to my door!’ We only just evade a full chamber pot that comes smashing down on the floor in front of us and then storm upstairs, knocking a small table over in our rush. A vase topples. We kick in one door after the other on the first floor. ‘I’ll file a complaint!’ shouts a skinny man with not too many teeth. He’s standing there in his pyjamas trembling with fury. His wife is quivering in bed with her face in her hands and a pink nightcap on her head. ‘Is your name Herschell?’ The man hurls his papers in my face. No, evidently not Herschell. And without the word ‘Jew’ stamped on his card either. ‘Our apologies, Mr Vanderwalle.’

  ‘This won’t be the last of this, you morons.’

  Outside people are crying, gathered around a child who lies quivering spastically on the cobblestones. He’s drooling and his eyes have rolled back in his head as he convulses like a freshly slaughtered rabbit. One of us picks him up roughly and carries him off.

  It takes hours before we’ve got them all in the synagogue. Once inside they won’t stop pounding on the door and shouting. Then we hear the trucks arrive.

  Gaston and I are given a reprimand for having kicked in the wrong door.

  ‘Straight from the mayor, men. He’s furious.’

  We shrug. The things that happened in Terlist Straat are still eating away at me. Am I the only one? We will forget it together, presumably. Together we will forget it, because all at once I’m one of them again, after what we have been forced to do together.

  Lode gets a reprimand too, also straight from the mayor.

  ‘You know why he’s not being sent to Breendonk?’ Gaston’s voice is dripping with venom. ‘Because we did what had to be done. We did the dirty work without him. The Germans have got what they wanted. You see that, don’t you? That’s why he’s still home.’ He spits on the station floor. ‘I need a beer.’ He throws down the cigarette he’s only just started smoking.

  ‘Keep it respectable, Gaston,’ the chief inspector shouts.

  Yeah, keep it respectable.

  A BUS TED HIP, HALF A MAN

  A BUSTED HIP, HALF A MAN. Yes, that’s the reason it’s taken me months to take up my pen again, dear great-grandson. I feel like I’ve let you down, as if you’ve been waiting in vain for the continuation of my story. That’s total rubbish, of course, as so far you haven’t seen a word of what I’ve written. I spent late winter and early spring in hospital and it felt like I had jinxed myself. How many times had I refused to worry about slipping and breaking something? I always pictured it out on the street in front of everyone, causing pain and deep humiliation. But it happened inside. I was completely alone and the humiliation went deeper than I could have ever imagined.

  As usual I was looking for something. Nicole had long since gone home. I was reading through the last pages of what I had just written and I was stuck. Or rather, I was digressing. That was it. I know what else I have to tell you, it’s not that, but suddenly I felt overcome by revulsion. I was sick of myself. I saw my life as a careless pencil line and suddenly longed for some Supreme Being to pick up a rubber and rub me out. I saw that Being blowing on the page. Pfff, and I was gone. It had been a long time since I’d felt like that. Enough. That was the word. And the older you get, the more you feel obliged to fight against that one word and the longing it contains. You know that I survived your grandfather, my son. Emaciated, he lay in bed, locked in a wrestling match with time. Not to live longer, more the reverse. He was counting down the seco
nds, filling the time that creeps by between the moment you’ve had enough and death. Watching my own son suffer like that was perverse, a punishment invented by a vile God. Despite their mistrust, they’d let me in to see him, with dirty looks from all sides, his too, but I insisted and he no longer had the strength to show me the door of his hospital room. ‘Son,’ I said, ‘son…’ He shook his head, long since a father himself, of course, and stared at me defiantly. ‘I’ve had enough. They can come and get me.’ That hit me so deep, as if I alone had subjected him to this life, personally sowing the seeds of his cancer, poisoning him from the very beginning, and his only act of resistance to me was his own complete surrender. I’ve had enough… ‘What about me?’ I thought in that instant. He was overtaking his own father with his longing. Some fathers would say, ‘I’ve had my fill, take me instead.’ But not me. Only after his death did I too sometimes feel like I’d had enough and I’d pronounce that word as if at a dress rehearsal, without consequences, an echo of the curse my own son had called down on himself, infecting me in the process.

  I still knew what to do when I felt that revulsion. I needed to pick myself up again immediately. But melancholy and other sombre feelings are not easy to shake. That was when I remembered a purple envelope filled with family photos. I thought it might console me, although afterwards you always realize that photos are more likely to deepen the gloom. After all, darkness craves more darkness. I searched my whole library, even looking behind the rows of books, shaking some in the hope that the little treasure might be hidden between the pages, but to no avail. Exhausted after several hours of searching, I lowered myself into my recliner, my easy chair, clicked it back and, in that instant, saw at the very top of the bookcase the protruding corner of a purple envelope. How stupid would you have to be to keep something like that in such an impossible spot, exposed, gathering dust and, above all, so high up? Sometimes, often even, people fall victim to their own duplicity. To ask the question was to answer it. I’d put that envelope so high up to stop myself from throwing it away because that was something I couldn’t bear the thought of. Now it happens that years ago I had one of those wooden library ladders made to order and… You see where I’m headed, don’t you? That’s right, this doddery old fool, with, in that instant, nothing but dog food for brains, clambered up like a young buck, didn’t dare go any further than the second-last step, reached up ineffectively, ventured a quivering step higher after all, lost his balance and fell down arse and all. Right on my left hip. Crack, said the bone. Unbelievable pain shot through my body from my big toe to the back of my head. It was like a big fat Japanese wrestler had jumped on top of me with his full weight and snapped my bones like so many twigs. For the first time in my adult life I called out for my mother. It came of its own accord and the pain was so immense I wasn’t even surprised. I won’t spare you the details, as I’ve resolved to never do that on these pages, and that’s why I will now inform you that your poor great-grandfather shat himself completely and lost all control over his bladder. I lay there totally helpless and nowhere near a telephone all evening, all night and through the early morning until Nicole arrived. She walked in with her nose turned up—that’s something I’ll never forget. The stench must have been unbearable. My throat was too hoarse to cry any more, but I did it anyway.