Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

‘He was so honest. Did you know him?’

  ‘A man who always told it like it was, Mrs Vingerhoets. Absolutely.’

  ‘The best father you could imagine. The children come first, that’s what he always said.’

  ‘It’s so sad.’

  ‘When are you going to pick those bastards up? They’re terrorists! Sewer rats! Out on the street, when he was on duty… Have they no shame?’

  Evidently nobody has had the heart to tell her that her late husband was discovered one step away from his favourite bar. Everybody knows what goes on in the White Raven, where the ladies let themselves be pleasured between beers. ‘That finger of his,’ someone told me just after his death, ‘he knew how to use it on those floozies.’ Typical that somebody’s dirty side only really becomes a topic of conversation when his cold body is lying on a marble slab.

  The Finger’s widow gives up eventually and stops coming to the station.

  Some time later I hear she’s on the booze and having it off with a postman. Apparently he’s a Communist.

  Everyone knows everything. But at the same time bugger all. Normally you’d think that the killing of a policeman would have every unit keyed up and ready to go, that a ruthless manhunt would ensue until the murderer or murderers had been collared. But that’s not how it works in an occupied city. A smokescreen goes up about ‘current lines of enquiry’ that are being followed closely. Even when he was alive you couldn’t find many people who were keen on the Finger. His real friends are in the White Raven and no cops set foot in the place, apart from me. When he dies it’s a sigh of relief more than anything that passes through the corridors of the Vesting Straat station. A man like him must have had ambitions. By his age he should have been a good bit further than one stripe more than me on his sleeve. A real promotion never came his way and that says enough. But the debt still has to be settled. A dead policeman demands reprisals, preferably without the intervention of any judges or courts. One’s been crossed off on this side, then a few need to be crossed off on the other side, preferably without too much trouble or them having anything remotely to do with the case. The debt is settled by shadowy figures who are not necessarily on the force. Field Command announces ‘the deportation of ten Communists as a reprisal for the murder of the police officer E. Vingerhoets’. Maybe that’s why we’re told those stories about that screw in Breendonk slaughtering Communists, even if most of them contradict each other. True or false, they show that the murder has not gone unavenged. At the end of the day the books must balance, that’s what it comes down to. I no longer hear Meanbeard jabbering about vengeance. That tells me enough. It means people have been picked up and carted off, identified by Meanbeard and approved by mein Freund Gregor. Lode doesn’t approach me about the Finger’s death and I’m happy to leave it at that. Who’s to say he had anything to do with it? Who’s to say I had anything to do with it? A spider doesn’t necessarily come rushing out at the slightest trembling of its web. It generally takes more vibrations, more people expressing their will, a larger group demanding a sacrifice or wanting to see some situation or other resolved. That’s how things work these days. Maybe that’s how they’ve always worked, but now action and reaction follow that trajectory, deeds and consequences, without any fuss, without any excuses, rough and merciless, unseen and in the dark, but with everyone’s full knowledge.

  A week later for a change there’s something truly interesting to read in the orders of the day, which we are meant to consult every time we go on duty. We have been strictly forbidden with immediate effect—‘en vigueur avec effet immédiat’ as they would write in the statute book—from picking up work dodgers. Orders from the mayor! And the attorney general! Are the bigshots in the town hall starting to feel the heat on the backs of their necks?

  ‘About bloody time,’ Gaston says, wiping the beer froth off his lips.

  ‘What difference does it make? How many times have we reported back that nobody was home? We never hauled in anyone unless they gave us a mouthful or we didn’t like the look of them.’

  ‘Come now, Wilfried! So cynical!’

  Gaston laughs.

  ‘And weren’t the foreigners so-called work dodgers too?’

  Gaston and I have stopped using the word ‘Jew’ in our conversations. A tacit agreement.

  ‘Watch it, whippersnapper, or I won’t buy you a beer.’

  ‘Landlord! Another round!’ I call.

  ‘The cat’s amongst the pigeons now. He’s pulling out his wallet.’

  After the beers have been put down on our table, Gaston bends towards me, amusement glinting in his eyes.

  ‘Just between you and me, do you realize what this is going to lead to? I don’t know if I’ve already told you this or not, but our inspector’s actually a pal of mine—’

  ‘You could have fooled me—’

  Gaston grabs me by the shoulder and starts whispering. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but he’s married to the daughter of, um… Wait. No, that’s too difficult to explain. Anyway, someone in my family. And then you soon find out one thing and the other. Turns out this whole palaver about the ban on picking up work dodgers has gone off like a bomb at headquarters. Everyone with an extra stripe on his shoulder’s shitting himself, all the way up to the commissioner, apparently. You understand that.’

  ‘No, I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Come on, mate. Think it through. We’ve been picking up people the whole bloody time, foreigners, people from here… And guess what?’ Gaston lowers his voice. ‘Suddenly the word from town hall is that it’s against the constitution. Get it? We’ve been breaking the law. And we are the law!’ Gaston starts to chuckle. ‘If anybody ever finds out… that we’ve been following orders that were completely illegal… Do you follow me?’

  ‘Like a cyclist in the Tour de France.’

  Gaston laughs even louder. ‘I’ll have to remember that one. Anyway, you can ride at the front of the peloton, as quick and smart as you are. Look, lad, to be honest, I don’t want to make a fuss about it, but… this is priceless!’

  Priceless indeed. Up to this point our actions have been guided by a tacit agreement: there is no alternative and, what’s more, everything’s normal. But some people’s fear of a day of reckoning has begun to grow. They’ve started to shift responsibility: from the attorney general to the mayor, from the mayor to the police commissioner, and so on all the way along. In the middle section of the facade of the town hall, where the mayor acts like he’s in charge, one can admire two statues that represent the virtues of this city. On the left, fashioned after the delusions of ancient Greece, we have Justitia, and on the right, equally classical and therefore harking back to our unquestionably glorious past, Prudentia. In wartime, if not generally, justice is at most a pious afterthought, or something to work on when there happens to be time left over after the real challenges, and that gives more scope for the virtue of prudence. Prudentia is depicted with a mirror in one hand and a snake coiled around the other. The mirror presumably stands for self-knowledge rather than vanity and the snake refers to her ability to maintain control at all times. Prudentia is about making the right decision at the right time. The painter Breughel was working in this city when the town hall was built and his print representing prudence shows food being harvested and salted while Prudentia herself stands on the rungs of a ladder that is lying on the ground with her right arm wrapped around a coffin. At the bottom it says in Latin: ‘If you want to be prudent, keep your mind on the future and think of everything that might happen.’ Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you understand how much this city was wedded to the virtue of prudence and has, by the way, continued to practise it to this day through a long line of mayors? What the people saw as a new era with new masters and customs had already turned stale in the eyes of the city’s administrators. They, dear great-grandson, had undoubtedly caught a whiff of fresher bread to come, yet another new normality with new rulers. As for me, I couldn’t smell a thing. I was in the middle of it. I
weighed up one side, then the other. I let what one person had told me collide with someone else’s confidences. Inside of me Angelo couldn’t see any normality; instead they were all opportunities to give life a spin, a mighty spin that would unhinge everything and send the horses on the merry-go-round galloping out into the streets with foam on their lips, all following the big black horse I saw myself astride with my truth hidden behind a sneering mask. That’s the truth of the young, who never want to go along with what older people consider normal.

  ‘I need your help.’

  Lode’s standing at the Vesting Straat exit with a large gunny sack at his feet. It’s 6 p.m. and I’ve just gone off duty.

  ‘Have you been waiting for me?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  He swings the sack over one shoulder and I follow him. We don’t speak. We go up Vesting Straat and cross Keyser Lei in the direction of the Geuzen Gardens, past my old school, the Atheneum, and into Van Maerlant Straat. At one of its imposing homes Lode pulls out a bunch of keys. The building has two front doors: one with a row of doorbells and letterboxes, the other without any. That’s the door he opens. We step into a hallway. Lode flicks a switch and a dim bulb starts to glow. There is another door in the semi-darkness at the end of the hall.

  ‘Give me a bit of light…’

  Lode passes back his torch and I raise it up above his shoulders and aim it down. The key goes into the lock and the door creaks open. We’re in a roofed courtyard that stinks of shit.

  ‘Your father’s not fattening up some animal here, is he?’

  ‘Not too loud,’ Lode whispers, pointing up. ‘There are people living up there and you hear everything. Screen that light.’

  On the left of the courtyard there is a green, padlocked door. Lode unlocks it and pushes it open. He gropes around for a light switch and suddenly we’re in a high-ceilinged storeroom about ten metres long. Completely empty except for two cages at the end of the room. I hear a pig and some piglets.

  ‘I knew it…’

  Lode reaches into his big gunny sack and tosses potato peel and vegetable scraps into the cages. ‘That’s not what I need you for.’

  He takes a broom and sweeps the straw between the cages to one side, revealing a trapdoor. More jingling of keys, more fumbling with a big lock. Lode opens the trapdoor and shines his torch down into the cellar.

  ‘Let me go first.’

  With the gunny sack in one hand and the torch in the other he goes down a rickety staircase and turns on a light.

  ‘Come down and close the door behind you.’

  Now we’re in a dry and fairly lofty cellar, about four metres high by my estimate. Cardboard boxes are stacked left and right almost to the ceiling with a narrow path between them leading to some pallets.

  ‘Can you give me a hand?’

  I help him slide the pallets out of the way. They aren’t very dusty. Then Lode knocks three times in quick succession on a door and then twice more. Someone on the other side knocks in reply.

  Lode pushes the door open and all at once we’re in a drawing room, fully furnished, with lamps here and there, a kitchen stove, an armchair and a table with two chairs, a reasonably sized bed and heavy drapes.

  ‘Haben Sie einen Freund mitgebracht?’

  A smiling Chaim Lizke is standing there to welcome us while drying his hands on a tea towel, a tub of dishwater at his feet.

  Lode puts the gunny sack on the table and says he has brought him some bread.

  We’re in Betty’s Tavern in Rotterdam Straat.

  Lode looks at me. ‘Because you’re practically family… That’s why.’

  So simply because my naive hands have found Lode’s sister’s? Anyway, wasn’t it more the other way round? Didn’t she grab mine first? Because her father now greets me with more than a snarl and doesn’t take quite so long to offer me a seat? Because their mother now occasionally expresses her concern and offers me the odd maternal rebuke, telling me I’ll catch my death, for instance, out and about without a scarf when the leaves are falling? Because he and I now go for a beer together, understand each other wordlessly and seem to have become friends for life? Or because he imagines us sharing other things? Or just because she, the stylish and beautiful Yvette, now has a claim on me for the rest of her life and makes that plain over and over again in her letters? And if it’s not that, it’s because of her delicious kisses, the breasts she offers me, her promise that I will one day, who knows, perhaps sooner than I think, be able to enjoy much more of that magnificent body, maybe even before I stand before the altar while her mum and dad blubber away because their little girl, the most beautiful, is going to be given away just like that to… Anyway, fine, he’s not too bad, but what’s his name again?

  That’s why; all those reasons are why I am now family and have to help Lode take care of the Jew Chaim Lizke, who just now in that cellar looked nothing like the night we drove him and his family through the snow to the bellowing of that pair of field arseholes, some two years ago now, on the way to what seemed like nowhere. He was a miserable creature then, a whimpering lamb on its way to slaughter, but now he seems like a man of the world, a plucky type who entertains us in a sort of bohemian salon, where the hostile universe has been magically banished and he enjoys total immunity in an artistic isolation he has chosen to create his masterpiece.

  ‘You see how much is involved. He needs food. He needs to be looked after. Because of the butcher’s shop, our dad can only go at night. We’re keeping Mum and Yvette in the dark. I alternate with Dad but he’s getting way too old for this kind of thing. He’s going to have problems with his ticker if he doesn’t slow down. I talked to him about it. He suggested you himself. Said you’re someone you can trust. Of course, I already knew that.’

  ‘So you want me to fill in for you sometimes?’

  Lode looks around nervously. Betty’s is actually a particularly noisy place. Nobody stands out here. The landlord’s wife puts on one gramophone record after the other while he pulls the beers, and the male customers can’t keep their hands off the women, continually leading them out onto a dance floor so cramped they’re half riding them. People are smoking and arguing, shouting and laughing, and now and then a young lady with a hankie pressed to her tear-stained face runs to the toilets to give free rein to her sorrow about a badly ended conversation with the umpteenth profligate who wouldn’t stop pawing her bum. Safe enough.

  ‘Not just that. It’s getting too dangerous here. I feel it in my bones. It’s going to come undone. He has to go to Brussels. Everyone says there’s less checks there. My uncle lives there too. He could get him to Portugal. I’ve been asking round. A few people have a plan.’

  ‘You’ve locked that Jew up in there. What if a fire breaks out?’

  ‘Don’t worry. There’s another exit. He’s got the key. But he knows he’s only allowed to use it in an absolute emergency. That door gets him more or less out into the courtyard of the house at the back.’

  ‘Where are his wife and children? Not…’

  Lode sighs. ‘It was a close call… The children are somewhere in the Ardennes. His wife is now a so-called nun in a convent in Limburg. It’s just more difficult for him.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he looks more relaxed than you do.’

  ‘He’s an odd fish. I’ve already told you that, I think. Do you remember you raised the subject yourself and I told you our dad got to know him when he was looking into diamonds? I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more back then. I had to discuss it with our dad first.’

  Those last sentences go up a little at the end. They sound a bit too emphatic as well, overly rehearsed. There’s something off about his explanation. But is it because he finds it difficult to conceal his true feelings for me and therefore regrets deceiving me even more, or is it something else? Who knows, maybe the father is abusing
his son’s noble idealism and it’s not just about saving a Jew from his fate, but doing well out of it financially while he’s at it. Could it be that Chaim Lizke is paying through the nose for my future father-in-law’s protection and Lode knows it? But what of it? The risks are enormous. The father is calculating, but maybe the son is too reckless. He’s known for his temper, and as I mentioned before, he doesn’t have a friend left at the station. Everyone sees him as a scab who let his fellow officers down when it mattered. Nobody will cover for Lode, definitely not just for the sake of one more Jew while so many of his kind have already been put on trains for work camps or worse.

  ‘You understand what happens if they find him? To you, your parents, maybe even Yvette?’

  ‘You’re in it now too.’

  I freeze. Lode immediately lays a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m rushing things. Sorry.’ His hand stays there. I have to look him in the eye and nod before he lets go.

  Somebody slurs loudly for the barmaid to put the last record back on again. ‘Can’t do any bleeding harm can it, twice in a row?’ His girl nods furiously to add weight to his words.

  The front door swings open so hard the glass shatters. Twenty or so blokes from the Flemish SS come storming in. Screams. They sweep full glasses and ashtrays from the tables with their truncheons. People throng to the door. A drunk who doesn’t have a clue what’s happening gets punched in the stomach and collapses in a gagging heap. The landlord puts his arm around his sobbing wife. Brats in uniform, hardly a day over eighteen, smash the gramophone records one after the other, with the most enthusiastic unable to stop stamping on the Bakelite shards. Most people have already left the bar. Lode and I stay sitting there. We’re not given a second glance. After the entire floor is littered with broken records, the boys hurl a few more bottles against the wall and give the Nazi salute. Then one of them, probably the leader, rummages through the till and takes all the notes. They leave the building, laughing and scoffing.