‘Oh, oh, oh,’ Lode pants, covering his eyes as if watching any longer will plunge him into even deeper trouble or drive him to more desperate deeds. Then the drumsticks leave the belt and Jos makes his way back over armrests, floor and bannister to the wooden stage and finally the drum kit, like a character in a film that’s being run backwards before our eyes. The rest of the band come together again for the finale, louder than ever, then it’s very still for the briefest of moments before everyone is on their feet clapping, whooping and whistling. The drummer looks at us a little sheepishly, as if he has already forgotten what kind of god he was just a minute ago. Stan Brenders, on the other hand, stays God, even if he too looks a little shy.
‘The war is almost over! I can feel it! We’re almost rid of all this misery!’ Yvette cries with tears in her eyes and one fist in the air. The whole city can feel it. They can all bugger off and leave us alone! Up yours, it’s over!
Lode and I nod at each other but neither of us feels that joy.
People keep shouting and applauding. Then the house lights go on. I urgently need the gents. Yvette nods. I walk down the marble stairs. My full bladder is just an excuse. I need to be alone for a moment. There are already quite a few elated men standing at the urinals with one palm planted on the wall and their feet back a little to give their cocks free play and keep their shoes and trousers dry. I retreat to one of the cubicles and unbutton my fly. I hear Lode call my name.
‘Here!’ I answer.
‘Open up!’ He hammers on the door a couple of times. ‘Come on!’
‘I’m busy, you idiot!’
‘Come on!’
I slide the latch open and Lode immediately squeezes in. His hand goes to my throat and he pushes my head back against the wall while closing the door behind him.
‘Tell me why…’ he whispers several times. His breath smells sour. I can’t get a word out. He’s squeezing my throat shut. ‘Tell me why…’—now sounding furious—‘we haven’t been picked up yet? You’re the mole. You’re the bastard. It’s you. You’re the traitor.’
Then he tries to kiss me.
GROPING THROUGH THE DUST, GASPING IN THE ICY WINTER AIR
GROPING THROUGH THE DUST, gasping in the icy winter air, that is how your great-grandfather sees the first survivors emerge from the rubble of the Rex Cinema, people like walking corpses, with dazed expressions and blood trickling out of their ears, not knowing which hell they have left behind or what underworld they have now ended up in. The rocket, the V-2, the Germans’ second weapon of retribution, drilled deep into the packed cinema like a bolt of lightning hurled by an Aryan deity, a deity who no longer gives a shit about hitting targets, as long as he strikes terror into his enemies. Terror? You can rest assured of that. The city has been liberated but her inhabitants are quivering in cellars, desperate and famished. My parents have been camped in ours for about three months now, but although she who calls herself my mother has made up a bed for me there too, with a sad piece of material hung up between their sleeping place and what they hope will become mine, I refuse to bow to her unbearable pleading and continue to insist that I’m not cut out for cellars and would rather die if that’s what it comes down to. If the bombers and bolt-throwers have written my name on their weapons like the merciless, murderous and, above all, vindictive supreme beings they are, nothing’s going to help; lying in your own stench between your so-called parents in a cellar won’t make any difference, you’re doomed anyway, and besides, you still die, you do it every day.
Just two days after what is now two hundred and fifty dead and countless wounded, all of whom only wanted to watch Buffalo Bill on the silver screen one cold afternoon—so many dead that the Americans have decided to store the crushed and ripped bodies temporarily in the zoo as the morgues are so full they can’t even get the doors shut any more—my beautiful Yvette tells me she is pregnant, that my sperm was too fast for both of us and soon there will be a new life in a city where death is still staggering around like a stuffed but never sated, totally pissed, reckless whoremonger.
‘Hello, this is Joe.’
That’s my Aunty Emma speaking in her best English and the way she says hello sounds very ‘now’.
Standing in our best room is a great big fellow, a Canadian Indian, one of our liberators, a sergeant no less, not just a soldier without stripes or medals. Mother has finally consented to have him over. It wasn’t so much his character or race that bothered her, it was more having to leave the cellar to put the best room in order again. Temporarily leaving her fear behind and surrendering to the randomness of fate. But she’s not alone. The whole city has finally accepted that these days death can do for you between a fart and a burp, between the soup and the potatoes—both figurative at the moment seeing as there’s almost nothing left to eat, and that’s another thing my mother’s not happy about, having someone over from another continent without the requisite feast on the table. ‘When does the war start?’ goes a bitter joke. ‘When they turn off the sirens…’ It’s the truth too. There are so many winged bombs falling every day now, so many V-1s, and so many rockets, V-2s, that there’s no longer any point in even turning on the sirens, because over the last few weeks they’ve been wailing constantly. So, starting this week we don’t hear anything any more, and whatever falls from the sky falls from the sky. ‘Have another drink, José!’ ‘Gladly, André, except we’re all out. There was another bottle, but your wife just dropped it!’ I’ve never heard as many jokes as I have these last few weeks. The grimmer everything around us gets, the more people laugh. But their laughter is not what you’d call hearty, more something that’s midway between coughing and puking.
‘Hello, hello,’ my father says, trying out his English and sounding like a radio operator battling poor reception.
Joe doesn’t say much. He stands among us like a totem pole, but his eyes are gleaming. My hand disappears in his, though at least he doesn’t squeeze.
‘Emma tells me you’re a policeman.’
‘Oh, yes…’ I say and realize I sound like a vain French actor who’s pretending to have mastered the language of Shakespeare and John Wayne. What am I supposed to say? Yvette has gone to work with needle and thread to patch up the worst bits of my uniform so many times there’s almost nothing left of it. The English, the Americans and the Canadians, like this heathen idol in our own home, couldn’t care less about the dignity of our uniform, let alone what it’s supposed to represent now the occupier has left the city and is taking a beating in his own country. We’re the butt of jokes, good-natured ones, but jokes all the same. In their eyes we don’t seem entirely real, with our white helmets and worn black capes and the holes in our boots. They tell us to stay back when another bomb has hit, looking at us as if we’re children who are getting in the way. They burst out in unabashed laughter when I blow my whistle after seeing yet another dead body. They tolerate us, that’s all, and even that only within strict limits. As far as they’re concerned it would be better if we just stayed home for a while. That’s not something they’d ever say out loud, these jovial, relaxed liberators of ours, but you see them thinking it. We’re the clowns, they’re the heroes. And what’s more, they’re never sure where our sympathies lie. Don’t a lot of us still secretly stand in front of a portrait of the Führer with our right hand stuck up in the air when no one’s looking?
Sergeant Joe sits down to drink some weak tea.
Aunty Emma’s beaming. During the chaos of liberation she moved as fast as she could to the other side of town: a small flat near Schilder Straat, behind the Museum of Fine Arts. We didn’t hear a peep out of her after that, not even when the first V-1s wiped out lots of her new neighbours and silenced the wild joy of liberation forever. Mother was at her wits’ end, even though Aunty Emma wasn’t on any of the lists of dead and wounded. A few weeks later we heard from her after all. But it wasn’t until winter that we saw her again, after Christmas and New Year, and immediately in the company of Sergeant Joe.
‘Don’t you need to speak English?’ Mother asks. ‘You can’t, can you? Even our Wilfried, the genius of the family, can hardly manage that. Or am I wrong?’
‘I’m a fast learner…’ I say and slurp my tea.
‘Hey, Joe,’ my father chuckles. ‘Everything wonderful?’
‘The best is yet to come,’ the Indian nods.
My so-called sire has had to sweat it for a while, but now everything really is ‘wonderful’. Despite his membership of the ‘movement’ he has been able simply to continue working at the town hall. ‘They’re going to track me down,’ was his frightened comment when the Allied tanks were rolling through the streets. But they didn’t track him anywhere. Typical of my father, happy as a sandboy to have never meant anything, to have remained so insignificant that nobody bothered to look into him. He gives Joe the thumbs-up. Joe replies in kind and suddenly he laughs, baring his gleaming white teeth for the first time, like a coconut that’s been cracked opened to expose its insides.
Mother recoils. ‘They can’t conceal their savage origins.’
‘Excuse me!’ says Aunty Emma.
‘I’m smiling too,’ my mother replies, and it’s true.
Sergeant Joe isn’t like most of the Canadians, who seduce the women of this city with stories about the enormous ranches they own back home or drive them wild with voluptuous tales of wealth. All those supposed landowners go back home, sometimes with a woman they’ve knocked up, mostly like thieves in the night. Joe stays and opens a bar with his Emma. After a while they rechristen it the Cheyenne, because Joe has figured out that people here like being served by ‘a real Indian’. A feather headdress hangs on the wall behind the bar and there’s a tomahawk above the glasses. A real one, according to Joe, once used to scalp whites. The bar is a success, Emma’s marriage to Joe less so. But ‘married is married’ as my mother says after each of her sister’s crying fits. Twenty years later Aunty Emma goes mad, shouting and seeing ghosts. Dementia, they say. In the end, just before they cart her off to some institution or other, she roars that ‘that nigger’ in her bed isn’t her real man, then lisps the name of her German lover (‘Ach Gregor, mein Liebchen!’), who she hasn’t seen since the summer of ’44 and who, in that wartime autumn, ordered some fifty men machine-gunned in the Netherlands and either ended up in a ditch with a bullet in his own head as a result, or has been relaxing beside a swimming pool in South America ever since, but has remained, in her glaucomatous eyes, her one and only. She dies and Joe looks down on her coffin with tearless eyes. A year later, the war catches up with him after all and he too dies, silent and far from all other Indians.
‘I SAVED YOUR LIFE,’ Omer says. ‘Yours and your mate’s, Lode Metdepenningen.’ He sighs and growls like a declawed circus bear. ‘I even knew where you were keeping that Jew. I fucking knew it all. Why do you think I’m here now? I’ve been keeping my eye on you. What are you doing here? I know about the storeroom they’ve got in here. Didn’t your mate tell you I was his father’s lawyer? I’m a patriot and they’re after my blood. They call me a collaborator! Can you believe it? Ungrateful bastards. Hunted like an animal.’
We’re in Van Maerlant Straat, where I was just about to open the front door. Omer steps out of the shadows and grabs me by the lapels of my overcoat. He stares deep into my eyes. It’s been days since he’s had a shave. You can smell the desperation on his breath.
‘I knew Lode’s old man had Jews tucked away. Of course he did. He was in it for the money. They were his best friends, those diamond traders. He saw it as an “opportunity”. He said that before the war even started. I knew all about it, but I kept my mouth shut. More to the point, and I repeat, without me, you and your mate, the good-looking butcher’s boy, would be rotting away in a camp now, more dead than alive, or already in a hole in the ground. You get me?’
‘Let go of my coat, Omer.’
‘Let me in. That’s all I ask. Or are you too ashamed? Has the butcher still got a dirty Jew hidden in here paying with sparklers, one who doesn’t know it’s all over?’
‘It’s all over for you. You’re wanted.’
‘And you? What have you done? What’s on your conscience? You’re a two-faced bastard and you know it!’
I push the door open and lead him to the former hiding place of Chaim Lizke, the Jew who got away. He looks around and asks what all the papers are.
‘Poems,’ I answer. ‘I come here to write.’
Omer forgets his own fear and despair for a moment and roars with laughter. ‘You write poems? Who do you think you are? Everything’s fucked, there’s hardly a wall left standing, it’s raining bombs, everyone’s living like rats in a hole, and his lordship writes poetry. He sits down here with a peacock quill and an inkpot and worships his Muse like a born pen-pusher. Is that what you have to do to keep from going mad?’
‘Sit down,’ I say calmly, but I’m already picturing him hanging from a hook by his tethered feet, bleeding into a pan like a slaughtered pig, like Mussolini and his lover, like useless meat.
Omer slumps down on a chair. He’s already forgotten his laughter, it’s all melancholy and self-pity again. ‘My mother’s house got hit last week. I’d been hiding there for months. It took our mum too. Blew her head right off… Do you know what seeing something like that does to you? Your own mother?’ Snot is running out of his nose. He’s not even a caged bear any more, a St Bernard in the snow with a broken leg, unable to do anything beyond softly whimpering.
‘I’ve got gold… If you help me it’s yours. I have to get away from here. I have to go to Spain. I’ve got friends there. You and your mate can arrange documents. Your station is as corrupt as anything, isn’t it? What you did for all those Yids. Can’t you do it for me too? I was born and raised here and I protected you, I protected you… Without me you were…’
‘There’s a blanket over there,’ I say. ‘It gets awfully cold in here.’
Lode laughs, ‘You’re mad.’
I pull out the key.
‘You say you come here to write poems?’
When we enter the hiding place, Omer is nowhere to be seen. I look around, then hear a vague snoring in the dark.
‘Shit,’ Lode whispers. ‘Who’s that?’
Completely exhausted, the lawyer is lying under a blanket and a bunch of old newspapers, like a tramp sleeping rough.
‘Mr Verschueren?’
Omer shoots up as if waking from a bad dream.
‘Leave me in peace! Bunch of bastards!’ he shouts automatically.
Lode looks at me. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Hold him down,’ I say.
‘But why…’
Omer lashes out, but when he threatens to scramble up, Lode shoves him back down again. I go over to the table with my poems on it and find what I’m looking for in the cutlery drawer.
‘Hold him down on the ground!’
Omer roars, trying to scratch Lode in the face.
I use the hammer Chaim Lizke pulled out that last time to defend himself against us to cave in the lawyer’s skull: bringing it down three or four times in quick succession. Once narrowly missing Lode’s ear, but effortlessly avoiding Omer’s flailing arms. He keeps shuddering; I keep hitting the side of his bald head, now more a bowl of red porridge than a skull.
‘Stop…’ Lode says. His face is covered in blood. Mine too probably.
The hammer is sticky in my hand.
‘You know he needed killing,’ I pant. ‘He couldn’t just die in bed, not him. You agreed with me.’
Lode stares into space.
I search Omer Verschueren’s pockets.
I find a gold lady’s watch.
‘THEY DIDN’T SPIT IN YOUR FACE, did they, jeune homme?’
‘No.’
‘They do that sometimes when you queue at the gate here. I heard about a lady who had a shit bucket tipped out over her, out on the street, just like that, from one storey up. She had to go ba
ck home. She couldn’t let her husband see her like that.’
‘My,’ I say, ‘it never stops.’
‘But you probably saw enough in the beginning.’
‘You can rest assured of that.’
In the beginning means at the end, when the Germans had withdrawn and the Brits and Canadians were all celebrating. In the beginning means not being able to be a cop because everyone seems to be walking around with guns. In the beginning means joining in with all the others in the hope that people might calm down a little. In the beginning the fury was so intense it became a festival, with people locked up in cages in the zoo, and us watching and telling bystanders, ‘Keep it a bit respectable.’ In the beginning there was chaos, dark and dangerous. In the beginning there was nothing left, not a mayor anyway because he’d seized on a conflict with the Flemish SS to change his stripes and clear out before it was too late. For a little while there was nothing and we were all subject to the whims of the street, totally sozzled heroes linked arms with stone-cold-sober thugs. In the beginning there was revenge and everyone said rightly so, because it’s only normal after so many years of misery. Everyone? No, not those who were now on the other end of the whip, because they immediately cried that it was a great injustice they would never forget, let alone forgive. And the others yelled, ‘Shut your trap, blackshirt!’ The new beginning began with a drawn knife, followed by a procession, zigzagging at first and out of step, but gradually growing more and more disciplined, with normality as the camouflage net under which the bastardry continues: eternal discord with the powerful few rising above it, the permanent winners, who never get their trouser legs smeared with filth or their shoes scuffed, who know the meaning of ‘prudence’ and can judge situations in advance and arrange them to their own advantage. For them there is no beginning or end. For them everything just keeps going.
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