‘Smart alec.’
‘Your girl left me in the lurch, pal. My mother’s strict. It’s your Yvette or nobody. So now I’m stuck here. I was going to go do something with Jenny.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘You’ve obviously got something to make up for. I can’t say I’m surprised. It seems you really played the swine last night at the Hulstkamp.’
‘That got round fast.’ More than fast. It’s an innate quality of probably every city. The tendrils spread far and wide, creeping over everything. Someone relieves himself in one neighbourhood and in no time there are people on the other side of town who know who’s caused the stench and which bowel problem explains it. All crammed together in a roofed, windowless playground where rumours, gossip and half-truths try to slowly strangle the breath out of us.
‘I bumped into mein Freund Gregor yesterday in the Raven. That’s where he likes to drink his nightcap, together with his real friends.’
We sit down. We wait. I unbutton my jacket. Now and then the old lady in the next room groans, as if she’s just been bitten by a nasty insect. Her son doesn’t budge.
‘She’s really not coming,’ I say at last.
‘That bloke you beat up in the toilet…’
‘Don’t bloody start.’
So it’s true, seeing as it’s already hardened into a story. The proof of the wound of shame that has been afflicting me all day has been delivered and there’s nothing I can use to bandage it.
‘Sus… such a harmless fellow. Assistant librarian at Conscience Plein. Maybe he’s even got a permanent position there because there’s not much else he’s up to. His poems are even worse than you’d expect from a parvenu like him, a lot worse, but that’s no reason to put him in hospital.’
‘Ow.’
‘I hear he needed a lot of stitches. Gregor had his driver take him to St Elisabeth’s. Yes, pal. Go ahead and shit yourself. Sussy-Boy is a friend of the Obersturmführer’s…’
‘Help, help!’ screeches the old lady suddenly from the darkness.
‘Just ignore her. She’s up to her old tricks again…’
Meanbeard stuffs his pipe and sucks the flame into the tobacco. The old lady calls out again.
This time her son reacts immediately and especially loudly. ‘Do I have to bloody well come in there or what?’ She lets out a sigh, as if she’s a deflating balloon filled with aggravation and mismatched maternal love.
‘I’m in deep trouble…’
Meanbeard starts laughing at me. ‘Look at him sitting there, the pugilist of the sixth division. Trouble? Let’s just say you made up for it, but from the look on your face you’ve forgotten that bit because you had too much booze in you.’
Gregor looking at me, me saying things, him answering—that’s really all I know.
‘It’s very simple. You’re on our side and we help each other. Our Oberscharführer knows that, I know it and you know it too. It’s going to get interesting. There’s a lot of swindle and theft with the ration books. Omer and I have quite a lot planned for the next few weeks. We’d appreciate your help with that. Help, by the way, that you last night swore a solemn oath to provide, like a choir boy, just pissed off your face and with someone else’s blood on your knuckles. Gregor did an impression of you. We fell off our chairs laughing.’
I stand up and button my jacket.
‘Oh, you going? Don’t forget your flowers.’
‘Give them to Jenny.’
‘She’ll be over the moon. Thank you, Wilfried.’
I must have sent her seven or eight letters, all starting with, ‘My dearest darling, still no news from you. It’s what I deserve, but still…’ She’s closed all of her shutters and locked the doors. After the first couple of letters remain unanswered, I stuff my begging epistles through the butcher’s-shop letterbox myself late at night, firmly convinced that the postman is refusing all cooperation, that the universe itself will no longer bend to my ardent longing. Still her silence continues, encouraging me to bang on even more about love and pain, probably getting weepier and more tasteless with every sentence. Angelo is disgusted but holds his tongue. My inner self sounds as hollow as a cathedral after midnight. I lie down on my bed and start crying for no reason. Only the faintest echo gets through to me, nothing more. ‘I am not a bad person, I am not a bad person…’ I repeat quietly to myself, which makes the crying fits even more intense, so that I walk around the next day with puffy eyes. My so-called mother has come round and forgotten the vomit in the hall. She now looks at me the way she’d look at a suffering cat that’s crawled under a wardrobe, and at the dinner table she keeps warning me that it’ll be the death of me if I keep it up.
‘It’s like a festering wound in his head,’ she whispers to her husband in my presence.
‘He’s got to come to his senses,’ my so-called father agrees.
With Lode I don’t dare broach the subject of Yvette at all. He doesn’t give me much chance either. Our paths cross at work, we even go for the odd beer together, but our conversations are about everything except women, love and family. We have a code for Chaim Lizke’s food deliveries. ‘The potatoes are at the gate,’ Lode will say and I, as if hypnotized and still part of the family, proceed to the gate next to the butcher’s shop at dusk and deliver the bag I find there to the Jew.
All the while my thoughts are on the letter I’ve just slipped into their letterbox. Was I being too blunt? Was the end too tearful again, not manly enough, too childish? Wouldn’t it be better to simply say goodbye to her and finally behave the way men are supposed to? Does a poet like the one I want to be have any use for a woman who can’t keep up with him, who at the first slight setback decides to shun him for the rest of his life? It’s true, it really has gone on too long. I’ll put an end to it and we’ll each go our own way. But why do I suddenly feel so cold or get in such a foul mood when I imagine her being with someone else and doing the things with him that she has already let me do with her? ‘Bloody hell,’ I think, ‘she’s turned me into a mewling brat.’ And those wheels just keep turning in my head, crushing everything. The flesh and blood of my poethood is drawn through this sighing, worrying grinder and reduced to banal, petit bourgeois mince. After which self-loathing knocks on the door and asks to be let in. And still no Angelo, no nagging voice to tell me to pull myself together. Although he only exists in my mind, I can already see him in bed with her and laughing while he tells her about the minced meat in my head before giving her another… Anyway, I can’t go on like this.
Chaim Lizke smiles and nods at me again, takes the food out of the bag and, without deigning to give me another glance, sits down at the kitchen table to pick up his opened book. He really doesn’t care whether I stay or not. I sit down on the sagging sofa and compose a better letter in my head, the ultimate letter, a letter that will melt her heart. But as soon as I think about it, I feel like I’m throwing away the last little bit of myself, even though the sentences still only exist in my thoughts.
For about two years I’ve kept a leather-bound notebook in my inside pocket with the stub of a pencil. In all the times I’ve pulled it out, I’ve never got any further than a line that is doomed to instant oblivion, as if the act of pulling the notebook out of that inside pocket is too premeditated and therefore too innocuous, too focused on poethood itself rather than forging poetry that will put the fear of God into everyone. And now that notebook is lying in front of me, with that pencil stub lined up next to it, without me remembering taking it out of my pocket. I open it and cross out the words ‘incandescent tale’, which I had previously seen as a possible title and now suspect I may have stolen from someone else. Above it I scribble ‘Confessions of a Comedian’. Not once does Lizke look up while I fill page after page with filth, with poems that have not yet been thwarted by anyone or anything. At the start of each first line, I hear Angelo holding his breath.
And then, finally, her letter is lying on the tiled floor of our hall. I recognize her ha
ndwriting from the top of the stairs. Like my last four letters, hers doesn’t have a stamp. She must have posted it through the door herself, as if she too doesn’t trust anything or anyone between us. I tear the envelope open. The sheet of writing paper only has a date and a time with a question mark, followed by: ‘You can find me on the bridge in City Park.’
She has been giving it a lot of thought. I see that immediately as I approach her on the bridge at the stipulated time. She is standing bolt upright, her feet a little wider than one expects from a lady, almost like a man bracing himself for a row that might end in a fist fight.
‘Don’t say you’re sorry. You’ve already done that too much.’
Below us ducks are quacking. The winter is almost over.
‘I’m so crazy about you,’ I say.
‘They’re just words,’ she replies.
‘I’ll change.’
‘Really, why? To make me think it’ll get better. I’d rather not. It’s a waste of time and I’ll only be letting you string me along.’
‘Don’t you want me any more? Is it over? Say so and I’ll accept it.’
‘You’re in a hurry all of a sudden.’
I shrug like a vaudeville clown, with sad-face make-up and a painted tear under one eye, as well as flat feet. ‘It hurts too much. It would be better to have it over and done with right away.’
I look away from her, rest my hands on the railing and look down at a couple on one of the paths below, strolling behind a pram, each staring straight ahead and not saying a word.
‘You love playing games so much, Wilfried, you don’t even know any more when you’re spouting hot air and when you’re not.’
‘That’s possible,’ I say. ‘It’s possible. I don’t know.’
‘Come here.’ She takes hold of me and I feel my body tensing up. ‘Just stop it…’
We hug each other and I bite my tongue hard to avoid bursting into tears like a baby.
In that very moment someone wakes up.
In that very moment, Angelo says, ‘Comedian.’
And she says, ‘That German was touching me. And you did nothing. You didn’t protect me.’
She kisses me. I kiss her back.
‘It won’t happen again…’
‘Just forget it,’ she says and kisses me again, warm and wet.
And suddenly I no longer have the faintest clue what love is supposed to be.
I’m pushing my writing paper, notes and diaries to one side, dear great-grandson. I’ve had enough of it for the moment. And there’s also a waiting cigar I’d like to savour without Nicole bursting in screeching. I just heard the front door click shut, so I know she’s gone out to do her shopping. Maybe I should open a window, maybe not. I’ll smoke shamelessly like a factory chimney in a nineteenth-century industrial city on a polluted river. It might make it even more fun later to deny this lung-rotting activity while the smoke is still hanging in the room like a brown mist.
For you I have become the hero of a novel in these pages, one who doesn’t know what will happen the moment he goes out the door, and therefore takes one slap in the face after the other, like a fool on a burning mountain who doesn’t realize the raging fire was caused by the smouldering cigar he carelessly left in the dry grass. After all, so many things can still happen; what it comes down to is the moment you yourself say or do things that will require you to pay a price—regardless of whether it’s exacted a scant few seconds later or after dozens of years. The more I write down for you, the more I let all the things I know be covered over, snowed under, the more I act like this old man is just a ghost, a shadow cast by the young Wilfried, who stares straight into the sun of yet another new day, a youth who understands too little of everything and fools himself that nothing can hurt him. When I thought about the conversation with your great-grandmother that smug dream burst. Just forget it… That’s right, just forget it.
I’m enjoying my cigar less with every puff. I’d prefer to just stay Wilfried Wils for a while, an old fellow who’s contemplating the things around him. Look at that blackbird outside in the tree, how droll. And there, so cute, that tyke with the oversized woolly hat that’s almost covering his sulking face. Look at this and look at that. Keep looking long enough and you’ll see a Breughel in contemporary colours with both you and the painter on the outside. Because looking stays looking and in the end it dispels absolutely nothing. I have to think of my doomed granddaughter, Hilde. See us walking together. We stroll down the Meir. Sixteen or thereabouts, she’s hooked her arm through mine. The twentieth century has started on its last ten years. We’re experiencing the end of history, or so we read in no less than two of our local newspapers, which evidently believe they are announcing something special that has wafted over to us from that eternal foreign elsewhere. Everything is happening in the present, no longer in the past, and from now on nobody will be burdened by the deadweight of yesteryear. Complete bullshit.
‘This whole pleasure centre is designed to squeeze money out of you, Bompa.’
‘Oh, my God. And here I was, just about to treat you to some new clothes.’
‘Is there something wrong with these?’
She lets go of my arm and turns on the spot. She’s wearing one of my old coats, which she nagged me into handing over. Around her neck she has a long, rainbow-coloured scarf some friend of hers knitted for her. Her feet are in army boots she has decorated with all kinds of symbols in white paint. She is wearing tights with skulls on them. Her lipstick is black and so is her nail varnish. Her hair is sticking straight up. She has countless rings in both ears and one through her nose.
‘To be honest, you look a fright,’ I laugh.
‘Aren’t you ashamed to walk down the street with me?’
‘Terribly.’
Our arms link up again. How is it possible, I think in that instant, how is it possible that I get to call this glorious degenerate my granddaughter? She has something to say about everything.
‘That family man is dressed like a twelve-year-old. The other one hasn’t had any for ages. You see that straight away, Bompa. Look at those kids! Complete retards! And there! Did you see how those ladies hugged their handbags a little bit tighter when that cool black dude went past? Shit, I’ve run out of smokes and money too. And I’ve got a runny nose. Can we go to Groen Plaats? Some friends of mine are hanging out there.’
‘You don’t mind being seen with this old fogey?’
She goes quiet for a moment. She seems to be taking my question far too seriously and finally smiles as if only she knows my secret and will therefore defy with great contempt any mocking glances she might reap because of the love she feels for her grandfather. It is hard for me to conceal my pride. I’m glad she just babbles on as if nothing has happened.
‘This crowd is driving me crazy. If you think about how tourists are always funnelled through this nuthouse before they let them loose on the rest of the city, it tells you everything you need to know. It’s so they can squeeze all the money out of them right at the start. And it’s no coincidence either that there’s a monstrous tower at the end with a bank’s logo on it. People are sheep…’
‘Does everyone your age think like that?’
‘Most of them are losers, so no, not really.’
‘I hope you don’t inflict talk like this on your grandmother.’
‘No,’ she says, squeezing my arm, ‘only you. You understand.’
Once again pride makes my eyes swim. I clear my throat, I cough, I swallow my tears.
‘I’d like to go to Berlin.’
‘What do you want to go there for?’ I croak.
‘At least there’s some cool people there. I’ve already saved the money but they’re giving me a hard time about it at home.’
‘You’re only sixteen.’
‘If you could just talk to them…’
‘I’m not butting into that.’
‘I’m your godchild!’
‘That’s why. I don’t want you e
nding up in some Berlin gutter surrounded by lowlifes and ruffians.’
‘Now you’re teasing me.’
‘Yes,’ I lie, against all my inclinations. Because there’s a chance she’ll talk me round so that I end up trying to convince her parents to let her go. And that’s something I don’t want either. I want to protect her.
*
‘Who do you want to protect, Mr Wils?’
Nicole has a firm grip on my elbow. Suddenly I’m shuffling through the city with her, not my granddaughter. Suddenly I’ve been dumped back in the present and I don’t know how it’s happened. Nicole’s talking about clothes I need to buy.
‘I don’t want to protect anyone. I was talking to myself.’
‘Sometimes I think you just don’t know any more if you’re talking to me or it’s all just in your head.’
‘I’ve lost my cigar…’
‘If that’s all you’ve lost, you’re doing all right. You haven’t had any cigars in the house for months now. I gave them all away. Don’t you remember?’
‘Of course I do,’ I say as decisively as I can, ‘of course… It’s a private expression of mine, that’s all.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Nicole sighs.
‘Me too…’ What else is a fellow to say? Grab a bike, then maybe you’ll keep up? Nobody laughs at those feeble jokes any more, especially not Nicole.
She leads me through streets filled with mothers and fathers who are convinced that the spring air is good for their offspring even though it’s still much too cold. Some families have already fulfilled their duty and are standing irritably at tram stops as if the world has disenchanted them yet again, surrounded by big plastic bags like sandbags trying to form a dam to hold back the melancholy nobody dares mention. My mother, she with the invariably crooked wig on her head, thought of the search for new clothes as something beautiful. I don’t think she could have imagined this world, a time to come in which commercialism, whipped up by so much advertising, would turn us all into cheerful babbling brats reaching out with sticky hands to grab something that’s been announced as the chance of a lifetime or available on ‘special offer’.
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