‘Sit back down. You’re making fun of me.’
I sit down again and straighten the creases in my trouser legs.
‘Can’t we lighten up sometimes?’ I sound a little too plaintive. After all, I’m the one who’s always too serious—she’s told me that dozens of times. Being with me isn’t enough fun. I’m too distant and too dark. But that last bit, the darkness, is attractive now and then—she admits that too. More than anything, it’s the betwixt and between Wilfried, neither fish nor fowl, who gets on her nerves, who gets her goat, as she puts it.
‘Do you think I want you to call our mother “Mum”?’
‘Yes.’
She gives me a hard slap on the cheek. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Ow.’
‘Yes, ow… silly little twerp.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘What I want is to sing. I want everyone to hear my voice. For them to call me the nightingale of De Coninck Plein, a woman of humble origins whose career has taken her to Milan, Paris and New York. I want…’
‘That’s what I was just thinking.’
‘What I want is to be free. I want the freedom to travel from place to place. I want you to come with me and write your poems. You shouldn’t call our mother “Mum”. Who knows, maybe we won’t get married and live in sin, never settling down. You have to do what you want, just like I want to do what I—’
‘Be who you—’
Slap on the cheek again. ‘You always interrupt me.’
I grab her tight by the wrist and say in measured tones, ‘Being who you want to be is the most difficult bloody thing there is.’
‘That’s him again. I can see it in your eyes. The bastard’s back.’
Aunty Emma waves to us, so full of expectation I regret having arranged to meet her. She’s wearing something white with puff sleeves, combined with a double string of pearls hung loosely around her neck. I wave back and lead Yvette over to her, cutting between the other tables at the Hulstkamp. My sweetheart is dressed like a well-bred Bohemian, a Gypsy girl in a wide, high-waisted, black-and-white-striped skirt with a red blouse under an equally red bolero she made herself.
‘But what a beautiful girl you are!’ my aunt cries, and the women exchange three ostensibly cheerful kisses, executed left and right with twisted mouths to avoid marring the other’s cheek with a smudge of deep-red lipstick. Among women, as Yvette recently told me, this kissing technique is an expression of deep respect. In other words, when encountering a woman you would rather drown in a shallow tub full of sulphuric acid, you do exactly the opposite.
After all the kissing, Aunty Emma settles back down cautiously like a goose trying to keep her freshly hatched goslings warm. ‘I always come early to get this table. It has the best view.’
‘Yvette wants to dance.’
Aunty Emma looks at Yvette with a twinkle in her eyes. ‘Oh, that will come, definitely. Don’t worry. The moment my Gregor walks in with his all his friends, this place explodes.’
Between the two women’s heads, I see a peculiar figure drinking jenever at a table at the back. He has pitch-black eyes, wears his hair as if it’s stuck to his head with wallpaper paste, and is clad in a black velvet suit with a red bow tie and waistcoat, over a white shirt with cuffs that come down almost to his fingertips and are trimmed with lace.
‘Have you seen that joker there, next to the door to the loos?’
‘Oh,’ sighs my aunt without looking over her shoulder, ‘do you know him? That’s Sus. He thinks he’s some poet who used to hang around here like a bad smell.’
‘Crazy Paulie,’ I say, almost boiling over without letting the others notice.
‘Keep your distance, lad. Sus is seriously gabby and before you know it, he’ll have invited himself to our table and our whole evening will be ruined.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Yvette whispers.
‘Nothing,’ I say hastily with a forced smile, ‘nothing.’ Sometimes this city and her poets can drive you completely mad. How many fakes, how much verbal diarrhoea? Acting like you’re Paul van Ostaijen, how low can a pseudo-bard sink? You can’t compel great talent into being by a change of bloody wardrobe. It takes work and living on the edge, not ambition, a pose or clothing you’ve borrowed from someone else, especially not that. ‘So,’ I say, ‘what would the ladies like to drink?’
Aunty Emma laughs boldly. ‘Later it will be champagne, but make mine a cold beer for now.’
Yvette would like some wine. I raise a hand and give my order. ‘And for me, a beer with a jenever.’
‘Oh my, jenever. Watch out you don’t get in trouble.’
‘This place is known for its jenever, darling.’
‘Make sure you don’t get a reputation here too, darling.’
Yvette and I smile at each other, but I can tell from her eyes that she’s serious.
Aunty Emma claps her hands together exuberantly. ‘What a nice couple you make. You’ve got spirit, Yvette. Exactly what this one here needs. You wouldn’t believe the mouth he had even as a little boy. Do you remember, Wilfried?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Really?’ Yvette teases.
‘The lungs on him too. He was hardly taller than this table when he started acting up with his mother and father. “You’re not my father!” I can still hear him saying it. And just the same to his mother. We could hardly stop laughing. It was priceless.’
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
‘Extase sans phrases, adieu la raison…’ sings the gramophone not all that loudly amid the conversations at a dozen tables.
A cheerful Yvette sticks one finger up in the air, ‘“La java du clair de lune” by Suzy Solidor!’
‘Goodness, child. You know your music.’
‘She wants to be a singer, Aunty Emma.’
‘I can believe it. She’s got the figure for it.’
‘Suzy Solidor has one of those short blonde hairdos with a fringe just over her eyes. I’d like one like that too.’
‘Child, mistreating your hair like that! What an idea. Anyway, that butch look is totally out of fashion.’
‘I thought you wanted to sing in the opera, darling.’
‘As long as it’s on a stage, dear.’
Here are the Germans. Suddenly the place is teeming with uniforms, black and field grey, and my Aunty Emma is in the warm embrace of the city’s Oberscharführer and Jewish Affairs Officer. His comrades-in-arms are already three sheets to the wind and hanging off their women out of necessity. They murmur their surnames almost incomprehensibly. Gregor himself is friendliness incarnate, greeting Yvette and me with charm and promptly ordering champagne and a bottle of jenever. Oberscharführer Karl is with a blonde, who has a thick head of curls pinned half up and a dazzling set of teeth. In contrast to Gregor, Karl is a typical SS officer, the kind who only ever deigns to look down on us natives from a great height, but making an exception, of course, for beautiful women like Yvette, who he immediately treats as if she’s been waiting demurely for years to be educated by a know-it-all like him. Without her asking for it and even before an ice bucket has been placed on the table, he provides her with an account of the choice champagne houses and which varieties of grape they use to obtain their excellent results. Karl’s girlfriend flashes Yvette a smile that would have King Kong blubbering like a sissy. Hauptsturmführer Heinrich refuses to be addressed as befits his lofty rank; after all, he’s much too drunk for that, and anyway these officers don’t seem to set much store by formalities once the sun has gone down and waiters in livery are surrounding them like nurses with trays full of alcoholic medicine. The Hauptsturmführer has a deep scar on his left cheek and a drowsy eye. He doesn’t notice us. Instead he is bestowing his complete attention on the two women he has brought with him, who claim to be sisters. In no time, even more women have gathered around him and he seems to know them all, even if I don’t catch him using any first names, preferring to apply ‘Schatzi’ and ‘Mausi’ by turn as he addresses them.
<
br /> Ever since the SS settled around us with Wehrmacht officers and hangers-on in their wake, the pseudo-poet has been trying to get my attention by raising his shot glass of jenever with a wink in my direction every time he’s about to purse his lips. I ignore him and top myself up. Oberscharführer Karl’s ongoing lessons have made Yvette unattainable and, after a few attempts to involve me in the conversation, Aunty Emma has resigned herself to Gregor demanding her full attention while he giggles over stories I can’t follow.
Meanwhile the place is filling up. Yvette shoots me a look of silent desperation. Aunty Emma sees it too and whispers something in Gregor’s ear.
‘Eine ausgezeichnete Idee!’ he bellows at once.
He snaps his fingers, calls out a few things to the people behind the bar, and immediately chairs and tables are being slid out of the way, the gramophone has been turned up, and he and Aunty Emma are smooching on a square metre. Before I can get up to dance with Yvette, she’s accepted an invitation from that cursed Karl. His blonde girlfriend watches them with her arms crossed.
‘Do you want to dance with me?’ I ask.
She doesn’t even answer. I’m infected with the same disease as Yvette. Her German lover turns out to be blessed with supple hips and other dance skills, so that Yvette visibly relaxes in his arms. The fact that he’s finally stopped lecturing her must help too. He keeps staring at her with his mouth half open, as if his dance-floor dexterity might send her into indecent ecstasies from one moment to the next. I knock back two glasses of jenever in quick succession and then messily pour another. The pseudo-poet is onto me. He stands up and grins while closing his eyes and pretending to play a violin, then teases me with a bow in my direction before pushing open the door that leads to the toilets.
‘Do you work for these fellows too?’ asks a little chap in glasses.
‘Do you?’
‘Dolmetscher,’ the pipsqueak pipes up at once. ‘Interpreter, in other words.’
‘I know what it fucking means.’
‘Sorry, pal.’
‘You stupid monkey, you stupid little delicate apprentice bastard, you four-eyed cocksucker. You can shove your apologies up your arse, get it?’
‘Whoa.’
‘Am I a horse or what? Are you a cowboy?’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the bespectacled interpreter says calmly.
I have no trouble standing up and moving through the dancing crowd to the toilets. Yvette doesn’t even notice me passing by. She’s letting herself be led about as if she’s in a trance. The poet is standing at the urinal shaking off his undoubtedly tiny cock one drop after the other as if suffering from an enlarged prostate. ‘Phew…’ he says when he sees me. I grab him by the neck and smash his face into the porcelain in front of him. He’s so surprised it’s almost effortless and after that he’s too stunned to resist a second blow that leaves blood on the white. ‘Ho-ho,’ he cries at last. Someone else who thinks I’m a bloody horse. For a few seconds I’m not sure what to do with him. I’m even swaying on my feet. But then I drag him into one of the bogs and kick him until he’s lying there puking next to the toilet. At least, I think so. I can’t be sure, because suddenly I’m back among the dancing couples.
‘You all right?’ Yvette mimes at me over the shoulder of her still highly diligent partner. I think I nod reassuringly. That too is something I’m not a hundred per cent certain of. I slump down on my chair and pour myself another jenever. The German has his hand on Yvette’s bum. I wave and give her the thumbs up. Everything’s fine, it’s all under control and so are you, apparently? She looks away.
Gregor comes to sit down next to me. Aunty Emma keeps her distance and hugs herself as if she’s just witnessed a terrible car accident. Big boss Heinrich is dancing with three women at once, or rather, they’re dancing around him as if he’s a heathen god standing naked on an altar. I no longer see the waiters, just the trays of drinks going from one end of the brasserie to the other, with no apparent human intervention. I go to refill my glass, but it’s still full from the last time. Gregor and I begin a conversation, I think. I say things. He listens. Then he speaks.
Suddenly I’m holding on tight to a lamp post on De Coninck Plein.
Yvette is glaring at me.
My stomach turns. I think I’m going to burp, but immediately start puking over my coat.
I think she’s crying. She says, ‘You didn’t protect me.’
‘You wanted to dance, you whore.’
‘You’re not listening to me. You’re not yourself, you drunk. You didn’t protect me.’
Another burst of vomiting; this time I’m able to bend over first. Thick green spouts out of my body. I taste bile. I desperately need to shit as well.
‘You hear me? You didn’t protect me, Wilfried!’ She wallops me on the side of the head. My ear starts ringing. I collapse and start to sob. She doesn’t look at me and starts searching her handbag for the key.
‘Don’t tell your brother—’
‘Don’t you dare. I’ll say what I bloody like. Shaming me like that.’
‘Don’t tell your brother that we… that we… went dancing in the Hulstkamp. It’s important… He mustn’t know… D’you understand? D’you understand? Sweetie, sweetie…’
Bang. The front door’s shut.
Walk home or crawl?
I get a hangover to match. The next day is a Sunday. My mother refuses to say a word to me and my father keeps just as quiet. But no sooner has she turned her back than he starts off about the puke they found in the hall early this morning.
‘The toilet was obviously too far away.’
‘I don’t remember a thing.’
‘Well it wasn’t me, you pig. You should have heard yourself coming up the stairs. You were as pissed as a whole regiment.’
With the sins of a son following in his father’s footsteps after all, I am now paying for all the times it was him stumbling up the stairs. I’ve been drunk many times, but up till last night I managed to keep it hidden, which probably annoyed the hell out of him. Now revenge is sweet. Given his feeble performance as a patriarch and the open contempt I’ve shown, he’s not going to miss this chance to take it out on me now. You too, Wilfried Wils, have been worsted by male stupidity, the overconfidence that comes with booze, green-eyed jealousy on the dance floor and all the pettiness, the extreme pettiness that normally remains hidden but is enlarged and expanded by the demon alcohol until it becomes a tragicomedy full of sleaze, passed down from father to son for the eternity of a barfly’s existence. As if the simple-minded poser I am obliged to call my father has now permanently and to his great relief ascertained that his son shares his bleary liver after all, the only inheritance a weak man considers true and just. Me, weak? Welcome to the club, you little brat.
‘I… um.’
‘Ooph, you’re turning green. Hurry off to the toilet, you idiot.’
I make it just in time. The smell of soap and bleach that always lingers there makes me gag. I vomit, eyes watering the whole time, twisted over the bowl, vomiting again. Slime won’t stop dripping out of my mouth. My head explodes. I lie down next to the toilet. Inside of me Angelo is singing a song that makes my underworld peal with pain and regret. Last night’s events are full of black holes and the moment I peer into their depths they fill with the stagnant water of humiliating shame. I can’t get myself up off the floor and onto my feet. There are only obsessive questions that leave me floundering in murky waters up to my neck. Did I really call Yvette a whore? Is it possible I only felt like smashing that poet in the face but didn’t actually do it? Is there a chance of a horrified Aunty Emma launching into a tirade about me to our mother? What was I blathering to Oberscharführer Gregor about? That last question in particular makes me quiver like a rabbit that’s been skinned alive and strung up by the heels in the cellar to die. Preposterous image. It makes me puke again. Bile this time, although it feels like it’s my gall bladder itself coming up as soft stinking chunks of dog food.
Someone rattles the toilet door.
‘I’m busy!’ I croak.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ my mother snaps on the other side of the door. ‘It’s what you deserve.’
The flower stall at Groen Plaats is still open.
‘They’re the last ones, sir.’
Orange might not be her colour, and I don’t know what her favourite flower is either, but it is what it is, and what’s been ruined might be salvageable yet. I need to get to Meanbeard’s because I know she’ll be reading to his mother again this afternoon. A bunch of flowers isn’t enough; I know that too. I need an explanation, something to glue the pieces of her broken heart back together, something to convince her that this really is something that will never happen again. I’ll never touch jenever again, my God, that stuff, I’ve learnt my lesson, really, if I’d known it could turn you into such a mean drunk, I would never… Something like that? Or should I dig into the deep dark recesses of my soul? Something along the lines of her having now, unfortunately, seen what a bastard I can be, that this black-hearted monster is kept under lock and key ninety-nine per cent of the time, but that, unfortunately, she happened to be there on that one exceptional occasion when it burst free, frothing at the mouth and lashing out at everyone, and that too is a part of me, sweetie, forgive me, I am so ashamed of myself, but on the other hand, maybe it’s good… I mean, no, not good, but not bad… I mean, not that either… It’s only honest, yes that’s it, it’s only honest that you get to see the other side of me for once, as it’s nonetheless part of me, but a very small part, and most of all very well concealed, and that I now feel safe enough to share that too with you, not that I did it on purpose, but you know what I’m trying to say, that we have to get to know each other’s bad sides, especially mine, before we can really be sure of each other’s love… Something like that?
I’m half an hour too late. She’s not there. Meanbeard looks at my flowers and asks if they’re for him.
Will Page 21
