‘Who’s excessive?’
Without any warning Nicole puts a bowl down in front of me.
‘Time for your porridge.’
And while I, despite not wanting it at all, obediently shovel down that old-fashioned stodge, I imagine you looking at me and wordlessly asking when I’m finally going to get back to the war again.
Since the night the rest of us rounded up the Jews in Terlist Straat, Lode has been shunned at the station. I’m virtually the only one who still says hello to him in the corridors. To the other policemen he’s a coward who has fouled his own nest by refusing to go on the raid. Meanwhile their doubts about me have almost completely faded. With one exception. As far as Eduard Vingerhoets is concerned, I will never belong, never ever, over his dead body, and nobody’s going to talk him round.
I’m sitting in the room that serves as our canteen. This male retreat seems completely off limits to the cleaning ladies. The heating’s buggered, the ashtrays are invariably overflowing, the tabletops are marked with sticky rings that are flecked with crumbs and ashes, and one of the windows looking out on the rear of a building on Keyser Lei doesn’t shut properly. That last bit’s not a problem; at least that way we get some fresh air, although the smell of the last shift’s cigarettes is still slow to dissipate. I’ve just started my sandwiches when the Finger comes in. He sits down at my table. It’s 2 p.m. There’s nobody else there. My physical revulsion for Mr Vingerhoets increases when I see what he’s pulled out: a fried herring wrapped in newspaper. Herring again, always herring. This year it’s on the menu in every home. A miraculous catch, people laugh scornfully, it’s the King of Fishers Himself helping us through these dark days. Although these days His ravaged body on the cross mostly torments people by making them think of a juicy steak. Take this, all of you, and eat of it.
‘Friday, fish day,’ the Finger grins to no one in particular before starting to pick at the fish. The stench would make you forget any smell of tobacco. I can’t taste my sandwiches any more, but I’m not going to give him the satisfaction. I won’t leave until I’ve eaten every last dry crumb, or no, I’ll roll a cigarette first and smoke it at my leisure. The bastard can dig into a piece of rotting blubber right next to me for all I care, I’ll never let him intimidate me. If it ever happens, in a brief moment of weakness, I’ll be finished. He’ll have me in his cage and throw away the key.
‘A penny for your thoughts, Wils.’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘Careful now, I’ve got an extra stripe on my shoulder.’ For the umpteenth time he aims his index finger at me as if it’s a pistol. He grins. Blokes like him don’t care about rank or position, that’s not what counts in their circle. The Fingers of this world exist to fuck things up even more than they were before. Under a previous regime there would have been a better chance of them staying under the radar. Men like him are always pushing the limits of what’s allowed and there’s always a high risk of their being careless and getting caught. With the current rulers it’s different: under them they have the opportunity of a flourishing career because of their recklessness, the much too blatant delight they take in it all. Now there’s more scope for what used to be unthinkable or, to put it differently, let’s say a change of regime always breeds a new variety of scum.
‘You’re a Jew-lover, Wils, you can’t fool me. A stooge of the plutocracy, that’s what you are.’
‘Think what you like.’
‘Very generous of you, boy. Thank you! I know you warned the local Abes in the summer so they had a chance to get away. No doubt they paid you well for it. Others profited too. But you’re a special case, Wils. You’ve got yourself covered. You know what I think when I see you drinking a beer with our goateed friend in the Raven? You know what I think? I think, just wait. That’s all. Just wait. Because fellers like you always slip up. Fellers like you get cocky. You should see your mug. The arrogance. Wils, enjoy it while you can… It won’t be long. And you, we won’t beat you up in a cellar somewhere before throwing you off a dock like a crushed walnut. No, we’ll gift-wrap you and hand you over to the men in leather coats.’
Not for one second does the Finger stop chewing. His rodent teeth keep grinding away with his mouth half open. It’s like his words are amplified, trumpeting out of his nose and echoing off the nicotine-stained walls.
‘Careful with those bones,’ I say in a voice that’s thin after all because of the fright he’s put into me. ‘I wouldn’t want to see you choke.’
Words I regret even before they’ve died away. Unfortunately sentences like that always hang in the air. Time underlines them, drawing them out and making them resonate. The Finger shakes his head and starts to chuckle. ‘You’re something else, Wils. Fuck me, you’re really asking for it. You really don’t know who I am.’
I start to roll the cigarette as slowly as possible, despite still having two untouched sandwiches in my lunchbox. I’ve only just lit it when he starts to sneeze.
‘Pardon,’ he says immediately, as if he still owes me, the mole, the treacherous bastard, a duty of politeness. But the sneezing doesn’t stop and gets even more intense. Hachoo. Again. Hachoo. Bits of fish spray out of his mouth. I lean back as far as I can. His tiny red eyes are suddenly flooded. I stare at that body that no longer knows what to do with itself, abruptly at the mercy of the tickling in that enormous nose and as ineffectual as an overgrown child’s. He manages to blurt, ‘What the hell’s this?’ Yes, what’s going on with all this sneezing, I think to myself. Eduard Vingerhoets unbuttons his uniform jacket double-quick and sneezes again. Tears roll down his badly shaved cheeks. Another sneeze. His nostrils flare. With his crumpled wet eyes closed, he reaches for his inside pocket. A hankie with light-blue stripes appears. Immediately he presses it to his red and swollen nose. But his brusque fumbling has also caused his wallet to flip out. It’s lying on the floor, open and defenceless. In a flash I see a deckle-edge photo of him in a dark suit next to a smiling woman and two children, whose faces have popped up under her hefty bosom, a son and daughter with their mother’s sparkling eyes. A dried flower covers the rest of the family portrait. How proud he looks in that photo, how loving too, how… Between two sneezing fits, he snatches the wallet away.
‘Don’t forget, Wils…’ he squeaks, ‘don’t forget. I know where you live.’ He stuffs the wallet back in next to his heart and hurries out of the canteen with the hankie pressed firmly to his nose. I hear him sneeze again on the stairs. Haaa-choo. He’s left the half-eaten fish on the table in the greasy paper. I stub my cigarette out on it. My hand is shaking, not Angelo’s.
As far as my duty roster allows, I am meant to spend my Sundays with my sweetheart’s family. Under no circumstances may I refuse the midday meal. The one time I tried to get out of it, it caused an almighty crisis. ‘So, you can’t have been so very sick,’ I heard the following week, seeing as I’d been spotted strolling through Harmonie Park with a mate who later took me to the Welcome Inn in the German quarter for a beer. Complete twaddle—I’d spent the whole day in bed. Yvette’s recriminations were furious, but behind her back Lode was winking at me. The nasty sod had made it all up to ensure that from then on I would feel completely obliged to turn out on parade every Sunday freshly washed and shaven and wearing a neatly ironed white shirt.
Yvette’s father recently assigned me a fixed spot at the table, to his left. Directly opposite me sits his son with my girl next to him and Mother sits at the other end of the table. She brings the soup in from the kitchen and dishes it out at the table. She towers over us and follows a strict order. First Father gets his soup, then I, as the guest, get mine, and then the others. We pass our bowls to her one after the other in that order, so she can slowly pour the soup into them. Father tastes his, blowing on it gently first with pursed lips. After he has given a nod of approval, everyone else is allowed to start. On Sundays hardly a word is said during the meal and a certain lethargy takes charge of us all. Wine is served and drunk by the men. One bottle, of co
urse, never more.
After the meal the women do the washing-up; Father disappears behind his newspaper and Lode and I talk a little, sometimes in the living room, sometimes in his attic room, a privilege that occasionally provokes a jealous reaction from Yvette, as it goes without saying that never in a thousand years would it be possible for me to spend even a second alone with her in her bedroom. If we were caught there together, my only way of averting the scandal in the eyes of her father would be to ask him on the spot for her hand in marriage. The only thing we are permitted to do together is go out for a walk, but only after the washing-up has been done and tidied away, and that can sometimes, to our great annoyance, take a very long time.
Lode leads the way up the steep stairs to the attic. Yvette catches my eye for a moment and purses her lips to blow me a kiss. I give her a quick wink.
‘Bleeding heck, I stuffed myself and now I feel like a slug…’ Lode sighs and kicks his shoes under the bed as he enters the room. It’s true. It’s still a feast when you eat at a butcher’s. Families like his don’t need to do without. We’re still getting by at home too, especially when my partner and I have managed to nab another black-marketeer, but otherwise it’s moans and groans all round. The city and her residents are sick to death of rationing and can hardly bear the sight of yet more herring, as if the whole thing’s a game that has gone on too long. There’s a lot more begging too. Sometimes you see little children holding out their hands. They rarely get anything.
I sit down on Lode’s bed and roll a cigarette. Standing at the washstand with his back to me, he picks up an earthenware pitcher and pours water into a bowl, yawning out loud. He takes off his waistcoat and tosses it on the nearest chair, under the skylight. In one movement his braces are off his shoulders and he’s pulled off his white shirt and singlet to freshen himself up. Water splashes and drips on the stand’s marble top. ‘That’s better!’ he chuckles, flicking back his wet quiff. Droplets run down his back, shining in the autumn sun. He unbuttons his trousers and lowers them together with his underpants. Dancing on one leg and then the other, still without turning, he takes off everything, even his socks. The backs of his thighs are covered with soft, brownish-black hair that runs up to his buttocks. He lets some water run down his belly, goes up on tiptoes, presumably to tip some water over his cock and balls, and carries on washing. His whole body seems to be shouting out to me to enjoy its beauty. But at the same time he acts like nothing’s going on, just a routine scrub in the coincidental presence of a friend. Nothing is said, neither of us makes a sound and that makes a mockery of this being somehow routine. I manage to cough or mutter ‘Uh-huh’, but that’s as far as I get. His answer is equally inarticulate while his wet hands run a bar of soap over his buttocks. Again he bends forward to splash more water over his already-clean face, after which he slowly wipes the last suds off his behind with a flannel. The attic walls are closing in on me. My mouth is dry. I feel like the door’s been locked. Whatever I do or say in the presence of this naked body, there will be no satisfaction in it, neither for him, nor for me. Meanwhile, deep in my gut, I hear Angelo roaring with laughter. Look at him sitting there on the bed, Wilfried Wils—the great thinker who knows no mercy and longs to lead a stirring life, imposing his will on others—watch him plummeting into embarrassment and banality, as normal as everyone else and therefore doomed to die a surreptitious poser who never managed to escape his predetermined existence. Lode glances over his shoulder at me. The look in his eyes is vulnerable yet proud, a look that evokes both lust and loathing in me, making my head spin.
‘Could you pass the towel next to the bed?’
Without standing, I reach for it and chuck the stiff thing in his direction.
Slowly he starts to dry himself. The scent of soap, mixed with the smell of his masculinity, fills the still shrinking room. My brain starts to race like a rat in a maze of doors, corridors and potentially locked rooms. There has to be a way out somewhere. One man’s lust is another man’s opportunity, Angelo would say.
‘I hope you realize,’ I say hoarsely, ‘who you have to watch out for.’
Still without turning around, still towelling himself off, he asks, ‘Who?’
‘Eduard Vingerhoets.’
‘The Finger? I know what kind of bastard he is. Don’t worry.’
‘Ever since Terlist Straat he’s had his eye on you. He’s also the one who snitched to the Jerries about the Jews being warned.’
‘How can you be so sure of that?’ Lode gives me a sideways glance, slowly running the towel over the leg he’s raised up on the chair. I see his balls dangling and think, ‘Don’t be daft, it’s too dark in here, you’re imagining things.’
‘You know who I drink with. The Finger goes to the White Raven too sometimes.’
Lode turns towards me. He’s draped the towel over his shoulders. His eyes are sparkling. I have to keep focused on his face; I mustn’t let my gaze drift down.
‘Something needs to be done about him. We know that too.’
‘Who’s we?’
Lode takes a step closer.
‘Not you, at this stage.’
Another step closer. One of his fingers goes into his right ear to give it a hearty massage.
‘Give us a bit of space…’ I say. To avoid saying out loud, ‘You’re almost swinging your seriously engorged cock in my face as it is.’
It’s over. The mood turns, everything deflates like a balloon. No more frog in my throat, no racing heartbeat, no slow movements. Lode turns his back immediately, forces his dick into his underpants and gets dressed.
Is it possible to regret not having done something you didn’t want to do? Regretting something that couldn’t be, yet somehow makes you feel guilty? Regretting it because you are who you are and the other is who he is? Regretting it because your heart is pounding all the same?
Lode stretches, gives an unconvincing smile. We smoke cigarettes, but can’t find any more words for each other.
Yvette calls. I go downstairs.
On De Coninck Plein we walk hand in hand.
Behind the thick, fortress-like walls of the Atheneum I pull her up against me. We kiss. I run my tongue over hers. She sighs, ‘Alone at last.’
Aunty Emma has slipped a note in our letterbox inviting us over for coffee at her house in Van den Nest Lei on Sunday: ‘I hope everyone’s well. You’re all invited at four in the afternoon. It has been so long and so much has happened!’
‘It’s clean here,’ my mother says, ‘couldn’t she come up? A letter, of all things. She gets fancier by the minute.’ Mother runs her fingers over the paper. ‘She does have a beautiful hand. Always has.’
‘I hope her German fancy man’s not there,’ Father growls, though he’s unable to hide his curiosity.
‘Maybe he prefers to spend his time at the Hulstkamp,’ I laugh. Because that detail of her love story won’t let go of me: the German stole her heart in Café Hulstkamp on Keyser Lei, once a place where poets and artists bought each other beers and attempted to bend the world to their will over a game of dominoes. You could find Crazy Paulie there before he succumbed to consumption in some faraway rural village. Crazy Paulie with his bearskin hat and his bold artistic flair who died so very young. I never met him but I pick up stories about him here and there. He went to the same school as me, where he once, at the start of the previous war, gave a speech that no one could follow because of his weak, reedy voice. Were his festering lungs already playing tricks on him even then? As a poet he was an example to many, but on me, his craziness was wasted. Or actually, it wasn’t, but my love for him is of the kind that is so typical of this city, where admiration is always mixed with profound envy. Because nobody who comes after Crazy Paulie can compete with his playful spirit, his flight to Berlin and the adventures he had there, his rebelliousness, his boundless originality, his—yes, I admit it—pioneering, maybe even the ailment that made him cough and splutter till the end: he could hardly be more romantic. To think tha
t Paul van Ostaijen, Crazy Paulie, drank and flirted in the Hulstkamp, that his spirit might even linger there yet, where Jerries now buy drinks for local girls in the hope they’ll spread their legs… Why there, of all fucking places? It’s like gobbing in the face of the Muse. At the same time, and I’m sorry to say so, but it’s just as likely that if Crazy Paulie’s lungs hadn’t let him down and he’d been alive and well, he would have been pleased as Punch to see the master race marching into his city for the second time, when they would even demand a place in his own local. Sorry, but it’s just as likely he would have stood there in a black shirt with his arm up, taking a supercilious delight in brushing aside his own anti-war poems as juvenilia. You never know. Who am I to hurl gobs of saliva at the Muse? Just as likely and sorry to say, but nothing is holy, everything is in motion and nothing at all is true. It’s death that makes the artist’s life orderly, nestled in his now secure body of work, his immediately legendary preferences and whatever his friends choose to say about him. Death spares you embarrassments, choices that may prove regrettable. And when death fells a young poet, it’s showing a hunger for beauty more than anything else. Those who live too long run a serious chance of ending up bunglers or bastards in other people’s eyes. Angelo says, ‘Lay that lily-white throat of yours on history’s chopping block.’ Unfortunately, to do that, to even feel the desire to be snuffed out by a premature death, you need the poems that raise your whole being over the threshold of obscurity. And I don’t have them yet, and lately my hopes that they will one day find their way onto the page have been few and far between. My diary is a litany of woe, and a poem I recently squeezed out of my pen while half drunk caused me days of embarrassment. It was about ‘gulls burning in the inferno’ and the ‘discipline of senselessness’. Where do I get that kitsch? That’s no glorious copulation with the Muse—it’s spilling your seed in an already crispy handkerchief. And as an aside, how is it even possible? With all the things I experience every day, the bastards I see, the threats I receive, life on a razor’s edge in an occupied city, my poems should read like they’ve been written in my lifeblood. They should give hardened poetry connoisseurs a coronary. But what I’ve written up till now would leave even a schoolmistress from the la-di-da Lady’s Academy in Lange Nieuw Straat pissing herself laughing before giving me a big wink and telling me I certainly have a lot to learn. ‘Give me something lethal God I want to live.’ Who wrote that? Not me, damn it, not me! Crazy Paulie, of course. Always that Crazy Paul van Ostaijen.
Will Page 16
