Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  They patched me up in hospital, St Vincent’s, of course, and you’re supposed to talk about how dedicated and loving the nursing staff were, but that’s not something I can bring myself to say, no matter how true it is according to Nicole. People who empty your bedpan, stick a tube up your dick and wash your body from arse to nostril while constantly trying to strike up a conversation are nothing but a plague. I can’t see them any other way. From the first day to the last, almost all I said was, ‘I want to get out of here, this is hell.’ There was only one solace: morphine. I had never been on a pain pump before and, those first few days in particular, I was very pleased to make its acquaintance. Your generation and your father’s are not averse to drugs, I know that, I wasn’t born yesterday. But if you ask me, your wacky baccy and the powder some of you snort up your nose don’t come close to the fabulous haze called morphine. God, the pleasure of it! It wasn’t long before I was insisting that I suffered from a particularly low pain threshold and they just went along with it, probably to be done with my whinging. Morphine dreams pack a punch and it’s not even much of a problem when the dream and so-called reality start to bleed into each other as if a gentle rain is merging the colours of a painting left out by an amateur painter who went inside for a hearty dinner with a glass of wine when the sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky and has only noticed hours later that the weather is no longer particularly summery and his landscape has taken on another form. Suddenly naked women were parading around me inviting me to snuffle up the smells of their bodies, especially between their legs. Feelings I thought I had lost forever rose up inside me. Your great-grandmother was alive again and looking gorgeous under a parasol, sipping a cup of tea, while watching happily and with undisguised pleasure as I abandoned all restraint in a forest of nymphs. My pubic hair was garlanded with a daisy chain, my proud member stood firm, wild boar grunted contentedly in the sun, and two warm mothering mouths were sucking my nipples. I was French kissing like a champion and comparing the saliva of these mythic females like a connoisseur of sweet wine. Love? To be sure, it was an overwhelming love without pain or sorrow, guilt or jealousy. Everything had become one, like those crazy Hindus once wrote in their Kama Sutra. At the same time I experienced the ecstasy Lucretius must have felt while writing his long poem about the building blocks of life, a book I had devoured not that long before with some admiration and even a certain sense of loneliness. All atoms, all one. After a while there was also darkness, I don’t mind admitting it, but that didn’t stop me from pressing the pain pump again to forget my hip and the bedpan under my bum. The darkness took the form of a work of art under construction, a kind of temple on a piece of waste ground where hippyish youngsters were doing the building work while performing strange rituals to usher in the end of days. A granny took me by the hand and led me deeper into that artwork. Most of the hippies turned out to speak German, but there was also English and I even heard some Dutch. The old lady showed unsuspected vigour and resolution and dragged me deeper into the musty-smelling dark. I heard singing and the sound of someone digging. ‘There he is,’ the old dear said, and I made out the shape of a young lad, seventeen or thereabouts, just like you, or have you turned eighteen by now, or even nineteen? ‘Hello, friend. Everything OK?’ I asked. The digging stopped. The boy turned his face towards me and something cold took hold of me. ‘My name is Wilfried,’ I said, suddenly trembling. The boy gave an impassive smile, as if wearing a mask that had suddenly come to life, and said, ‘I know. And you know who I am too…’ Behind me I heard the old woman clucking like a spiteful turkey, a bit like the sound Muslim women make at weddings, but joyless and, above all, implacable. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know who you are. You’re Angelo.’ The mask froze on the boy’s face and I felt the woman’s nails digging into my bony back. ‘You’re the only one who knows how filthy it is,’ she said, and suddenly I was back in that bed at St Vincent’s resolving to keep off the pump until at least midday, no matter how gruesome that prospect seemed at that moment. In the days that followed there were no daisies draped around my paltry manhood and it was mostly family who came to haunt me. One in particular tormented me mercilessly: my granddaughter, your father’s sister, your late aunt, who constantly drove me beyond the edge of a terrible rage that took a long time to shake. ‘It’s me in those pictures,’ she screamed, ‘the photos you were looking for, the photos that made you land on your arse…’ And then I saw something I had forgotten during the fall: the envelope falling down to the floor alongside me. From then on the morphine didn’t give me a moment’s peace. Louder and louder I begged them to take me back home with the gnawing pain that remained and yet, eventually, proved manageable without drugs. Finally, I was discharged and delivered up to Nicole and the quiet of my own flat. If thoroughly rested, the hip would come good, they assured me. I’d still be a lively old fellow with a relatively supple body. But I knew better. A busted hip, half a man. Cobbled together.

  Although she sadly took her own life before you were born and never even saw you, your Aunty Hilde is inescapable. Her story is tied to us all, including you. Her story is in that purple envelope, visible in the countless photos I have of her, the ones I’ve looked at so many times with tears in my eyes and then, disgusted with myself, put away again, cursing the envelope without ever being able to bring myself to throw it away. Maybe that’s why I’m writing all this down for you, because it’s taken me years to accept the idea of that bond. That’s something I think I’ve only realized now, after the fall and all that stupid pain. I’m writing to you to make it clear that everything is bound up together and that was also the cause of the pain that led Hilde to kill herself. When I think back on her (something I’ve done all too often these last few weeks) she loses her humanity and that makes me furious at her all over again. I try to summon up details of her life. The way she laughed… always with a sharp edge, it seemed to me. If a cat could laugh it would pull a face like Hilde’s. Her laughter always sounded like she was ridiculing the world, as if despite her youth she really could see through everything. She’d joke about politicians, about anyone with power and prestige, and the phrase she’d always use was ‘poor baby’. That was so killing, the way she said it. My wife couldn’t cope with her sarcasm. ‘She’s got an old soul,’ she would say after our granddaughter had come over for afternoon tea and gone home again, ‘and that’s never good. You shouldn’t know that much at her age.’

  ‘She thinks she knows things, Mother.’

  ‘You think that’s all it is, Father. You’re having yourself on.’

  What Hilde managed to pierce most effortlessly was pretence. An ability that went back to when she was very little. When St Nicholas appeared at the door with his sack full of presents and her brother, your father, was trembling with fear even though he’d already stopped believing, Hilde greeting the wigged and bearded, fully costumed saint with a terse but fatal, ‘Hello, Uncle Lode.’ Lode was so bowled over, he used the expression for years afterwards to indicate that he was onto something and people shouldn’t try to mess him around. He’d say, ‘Bleeding heck. Hello, Uncle Lode.’ And every time we’d both burst out laughing and see little Hilde before us, me as a proud grandfather and him as an equally proud great-uncle. That must sound like a pleasant memory, but thinking back on it now I am furious with Lode. If he was anywhere nearby I’d ram his head through a fucking window. Not that anything like that’s possible any more. He’s been dead and buried at Schoonselhof for quite a while now.

  Spring is almost over and I realize I’ve shut myself off from the world for months. I haven’t been reading the papers; I haven’t even held a book. Nicole and me, that was it. For months. Even you, dear boy, I’ve hardly given a second thought. But that’s over now. I can walk again without any pain. ‘It’s a medical miracle,’ says the doctor, suddenly relieved that his professional optimism turned out to be a prediction after all. What does someone like that know about being cursed? Even worse, what does someone like that know about
freedom? People try to stay out of the clutches of the white coats as long as possible. It’s a kind of race against time, but on crutches, with your own body as both stakes and trophy. You mustn’t ever submit to those blokes, never let them look you over, unless it’s in circumstances beyond your control or because of a fall like mine. As soon as they get their claws into you, your body is theirs. They postpone your death without even taking you into consideration. Before you’ve realized what’s happening, they’ll have you on a drip with purgatory seeping into your veins and keep you there for months. One minute you’re at death’s door and begging admission, and the next thing you know, they’ve turned you into a kind of earthbound chemical vat. And that’s what makes me so furious, that you swallow the illusion of freedom all along and then, right at the end, give yourself over to unfreedom. In the end not even the prospect of death is a comfort, but the whispered hope of recovery is deployed like a little ball bouncing around a roulette table, your body turned into the outcome of a wager against the eternal bank, funded by a less than eternal savings account, betting against an inevitability that all the chemicals in the Port of Antwerp can’t prevent. And no matter how long it lasts, you end up going bankrupt at your and everyone else’s expense and a few white coats do well out of it, their hands in the till along with the pill peddlers’ and the chemical conglomerates’. Meanwhile the blessings of science are praised with delirious sentences like ‘It’s amazing what they can do these days’. To that end they have you stumbling to death like an exhausted galley slave. Shuffling drowsy-headed through the corridors of their hospitals in your pyjamas, chained to a drip, they praise your courage and fighting spirit, as if the struggle has only just begun. Courage? Is this what they call courage? What bloody good does it do you? You reach the finishing line penniless and completely defeated, unfree after all. That mustn’t ever happen. I’d rather die like a dog on the street. That is courage.

  Nicole, however, watches over me like a German shepherd. Not that I suspect her of collaborating with those who want my old body in their bed and on their drip. No, she’s not like that: her mistrust of those legal drug dealers seems almost as great as my own. But when it comes down to it, she will reach for the telephone, call the ambulance and, sighing deeply and whispering that there’s no alternative, finally deliver my body up to chemical torment. For the moment she’s popped out to do some shopping and freedom beckons, something beckons, something tells me I must go out now. Unaccompanied for the first time, I walk down the street to Quinten Matsijs Lei, catching my breath on Loos Plaats, on one of the cold white blocks that can’t decide whether they’re art or street furniture and which vaguely resemble a wolf’s hook. There is a flame burning in one of my hips that flares up at the slightest exertion, a pilot light fuelled by the fear of falling again and becoming permanently crippled.

  Didn’t I write somewhere here that I’ve never known fear in my life? It turns out that’s a load of rubbish, and it always was, too. I promise that I will no longer conceal my blindness to my own fear. My untrustworthy body has brought that message home to me. Just like all those other voices in everyone’s head, your fear is something you can talk to. You can even bargain with it, just never trust it. Keep your fear at a distance, don’t entrust it with your wallet, never lend it to a woman you love and refuse politely when it offers to take you on a trip. Tell fear you know what it is and that’s enough for you. Tell it you know it’s a teacher. No, people everywhere cry, that’s totally wrong: fear is a poor counsellor. Maybe, but it does teach you what it means to live intensely, to value a lie, to play the game, all as long as you’re able to keep it at arm’s length.

  I’m panting, not just because of the effort, but mainly because of my suddenly rewon freedom, which is starting to feel less reckless. Sweat trickles down the inside of my collar. Then I see two army trucks driving up onto the central reservation in front of the police station. Paras with machine guns jump out. Two by two they move east into the city. Four of them give me a friendly nod as they pass on their way to Brialmont Lei. Two take up position in the middle of the street in front of a Jewish school. The other two move on. The two at the school light up cigarettes while a crowd of children come out to race home on their brightly coloured hand-me-down pushbikes. I wait until most of the mob has disappeared and then stand up. I find it less difficult than I expected. After reaching the school I ask if the revolution has broken out. A blonde para of about twenty laughs and tells me they’re here for security reasons. ‘We’re here for you too,’ the other adds. I put on an expression that is as innocent as possible and say, ‘Thank you.’ Has the world gone mad during my quarantine? At the end of Brialmont Lei I see another two standing on the other side of the railway line, close to the synagogue in Oosten Straat. I turn left into Mercator Straat and head home with a head full of questions.

  Unfortunately, Nicole is already back. Of course, she gives me a dressing-down. And this and that. I could have been dead and what would she have done then? I should be relieved it turned out so well! I can count my lucky stars!

  ‘I saw some soldiers,’ I say, hoping to calm her down a little.

  ‘They’ve been here for months!’ she snaps from the kitchen.

  Months?

  ‘It’s all propaganda!’ she tells me. ‘They’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes.’

  They’re always trying to pull the wool over our eyes, son, and don’t you ever forget it. I learnt that long ago, as I told you much earlier. People tell you who they are and what they’ve come to do in your life and you just have to believe them. Here is your father. Here is your mother. We’re here to protect you.

  ‘How long are they here for?’ I shout through to the kitchen because it’s always amusing to wind up Nicole with her undoubtedly extremist left-wing sympathies.

  ‘Nobody bloody knows!’

  ‘And the police?’

  That goes unanswered.

  This city is fond of a firm hand now and then. And when someone tells her off, she responds like a whore in a clip joint, or cabardouche as they call it here. Talk about law and order and this city starts to coo. She runs a finger over the rim of her champagne glass, looks deep into the eyes of yet another papa who wants it all stricter and then pants, ‘Tell me more about discipline and security on the streets?’ Order always gets her hot at first, or freedom too for that matter, if that’s what’s being held up to her. After all, they can offer her anything. The papa who’s proposing it just has to come over as self-confident, that’s all, and what’s he’s actually arguing for doesn’t really matter. That leads to the kind of misunderstanding that’s typical of johns. A papa like that thinks the prize is already his. You’d do the same if a city spread her legs for you like a cheerful slut. But this city gets bored in the end. Sometimes it takes years, but finally she’s overcome by her characteristic ennui. The rancour festering in her gall bladder takes charge. Suddenly she views everything with suspicion. The man she put her faith in most of all, the stern father, becomes a figure of fun: she laughs behind his back at first, then more and more openly in his face. Authority is nice, but not always, not when it’s unrelenting, not when it’s really serious. This city sometimes has a public love for uniforms. She gives short shrift to those who attack the cops. But that doesn’t detract from her conviction that every individual cop is probably a loser who needs a uniform to be someone, especially those who lack a sense of humour. Because much is forgiven here if dished up with humour. This city is fickle, with a tendency to hypocrisy, but a thirst for pleasure. She loves hearty, unsparing laughter, but likes to play the victim too and doesn’t feel obliged to be fair when calling others to account. A respectable person shits on someone else; this city is shameless enough to shit in her own bed and blame someone else. What’s in her heart? That’s something I’ve asked myself far too many times and sold others much too much bull about. But when I feel something, I know it too. Because that’s what this old man tells himself: after all these years th
ere’s no barrier between his heart and his head, just like the way this city wears her heart on her sleeve and sees her feelings as thoughts or insights. Deep inside this city there is a lack of self-love, she’s just not that keen on herself. She has a split personality, it’s sometimes claimed, ready to be divided into two diametrically opposed creeds that can’t bear the sight of each other. But that’s too simple. Mainly she lets herself be divided because she doesn’t know what else to do. Put her under a new regime and she will stay calm and submit to discipline, reluctantly or gladly, grumbling quietly or rejoicing as if a new Messiah has arrived. But what really unites her is mistrust and a horror of looking in the mirror. She’d let herself be rebuilt over and over again rather than undergo that. She doesn’t love herself, not really, and neither a stern papa nor one who offers more freedom, neither gruff words nor swinging hips, neither a new broom nor a celebration of the arts can fix that. Those who don’t love themselves can’t love others, that’s what the self-help books say. Bollocks. This city can do that, it’s just that her love is always a little too sentimental or too provisional, too showy to be genuine or simply too excessive, that’s possible too.