Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  Behind the bars of the visiting room, Meanbeard coughs.

  Everything smells of carbolic acid, the disinfectant they use in hospitals and morgues, but also of piss and shit, despair and unshakeable belief, rotting away like a lump of meat teeming with the maggots of misunderstanding.

  ‘No one comes to see me,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. He looks up, laughs on the wrong side of his face. ‘Yes, you…’

  ‘Better than nothing.’

  ‘Have you heard about Omer? A couple of bastards smashed his head in. They found him on The Boulevard. Apparently it took a while before they could identify him. You hardly hear anything here, but news like that gets through. The jackals come and whisper it in your ear first chance they get. I thought he’d managed to get away. Spain, I hoped… But no, just beaten to death. Such a beautiful human being, so cultured, so much class. He knew Ancient Greek. Long bits of the Iliad off by heart. And then, for no reason… like…’

  Meanbeard starts to sob. His bulging eyes give birth to big tears. He looks away, wipes his cheeks, blows his nose into a rag he immediately puts back in his pocket.

  ‘But they’re not going to get me. Non! Non, à present je me révolte contre la mort! Le travail paraît trop léger à mon orgueil: ma trahison au monde serait un supplice trop court. Do you understand? They can’t take away my pride. I didn’t betray my principles. I will continue to resist death. Like…’

  ‘Like Rimbaud.’

  ‘C’est ça… Although that big-mouthed genius poet might have looked down on me for still being alive, for not having been put up against a wall and shot. That would have been honourable, that—’

  ‘Come on.’

  Meanbeard sniffs. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘To see you, of course.’

  ‘Maybe it’s so you can laugh at me. Have a good look. Feast your eyes. Were you there when I was sentenced?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘I looked them all straight in the eye. I didn’t bow my head or deny anything I’d done. “I did it for everyone”—that’s what I said. They almost exploded with indignation! The gall of the man! I should be ashamed! My comrades sitting next to me in the dock all looked away. A few hid their faces. They were ashamed of me, of the things they’d all done. One of them hissed that I’d lost my mind and had to shut up. But then I cried even louder, “I’m no lackey of the plutocracy and I will never become one! I have always served my country, my people and my king by fighting the Jews!” And then it went quiet. The prosecutor clutched his heart. He was so furious he couldn’t speak. The judge looked at me and said, almost with respect, “I believe you, Mr Verschaffel, but the facts are still the facts. You broke the law.” And then I shouted, “Which law?!” I got life.’

  ‘A few years inside and, who knows, maybe they’ll let you off.’

  Meanbeard brushes my sentence aside as irrelevant. Suddenly he’s almost cheerful, as if he’s found a subject that will perk him up again. ‘How’s the tobacconist’s? How’s our Jenny doing?’

  I don’t know what to say to that. When the city was liberated Meanbeard was one of the first they picked up. A furious mob dragged ‘our Jenny’ out of the tobacconist’s, shaved her head and painted a swastika on her forehead before taking a photo of her together with a few other women, surrounded by an elated throng. Meanbeard must know that, or he must have heard rumours at least. Yeah, what’s a Jenny going to do after something like that? Where can she go? Back on the game, I suppose.

  ‘She doesn’t even write to me. Well, she doesn’t really have a gift for words.’

  ‘I’ve lost touch with her.’

  He looks at me and I can tell he doesn’t believe me.

  ‘And the shop?’

  ‘Someone else is running it…’

  ‘But what the… That shop’s mine. Signed and all! I have the papers!’

  ‘Just let it go.’

  Meanbeard suffered a major heart attack five years later. The story goes that they left him to die like a dog, that it took a whole hour for a doctor to get there. That’s what someone told me, anyway. I’ve long forgotten who.

  I DUG OUT THE POETRY collection again, great-grandson. I searched and finally found it. What was once a promise on the page, as fresh as that morning’s bread, now looks as old and forgotten as the person who wrote it, locked up in the past. The coarse, rationed paper has turned brown and feels almost like cardboard. The sad little picture of a woodcut under the name ‘Angelo’ on the cover and the greasy letters that form my poems on the inside pages can’t even be called old-fashioned any more; instead they seem to come from a world as lost as Atlantis. Confessions of a Comedian—even then, the ironic intent of the title was overshadowed by the grim design, universally accepted as the norm in a period that was still suffering the aftershocks of a grim era. MCMXLVI, it says, printed in 1946 in other words, by Advance Publishing, which was run by a magazine publisher who was always a little scared of me after I paid a visit to his home on Paarden Markt to let him know how presumptuous it was of him to assume that a policeman couldn’t be a poet.

  It’s sometime in November 1946. We’re in Betty’s Tavern in Rotterdam Straat and the publisher is busy demonstrating how shy he is. Not that long ago gramophone records were being smashed on the floor in here. We’re still drinking pathetic, watery beer because the shortages aren’t over yet. With just a few other people, I’m celebrating my collection finally seeing the light of day. I’m glowing because I’m kidding myself that I’ll soon be a full-time writer, one who’ll never have to wear a uniform again. My wife Yvette is not by my side. She preferred to stay at home with our son, your future grandfather, who is almost two and coughs himself silly at night in his cot. I know she’s long stopped kidding herself about anything. She knows she’ll never become a singer, never be a nightingale of the international stage, but simply a mother and a housewife like so many others, though at least one who makes her own clothes and draws jealous glances all over the neighbourhood for her style and class. It’s cold comfort when pushing a pram or boiling nappies, I know that too, but at least it’s something. We don’t talk about it. She’s grateful and even looks like she’s in love when I pull back in time and don’t run the risk of making her pregnant again. That’s our unspoken agreement. One child is more than enough, but neither of us would say so to anyone else, or even each other. The moment we did, it would become a scandal.

  Standing there in Betty’s, waiting for more friends to arrive, I’m not thinking about any of that. On the contrary, I’m luxuriating in the thrill of it all. I hear a loud ‘Ding! Ding! Ding!’ in my head, the sound of a hammer beating an anvil to shape the glowing metal of my will into something useful, four horseshoes, for instance, to nail steaming hot to hooves so I can ride the Muse. Yes, that’s what I’m telling myself in that instant. I can’t imagine that in the next few years the Muse will hardly emerge from the stable, at most to graze a little in a paddock, but never to gallop away with me on her back and that I will stay a policeman for the rest of my life and never become the poet I dreamt of being. Yes, I will continue to write and I will be published, by publishers increasingly more prestigious than that poor joker from Advance Publishing. In the end I’ll even be included in the Overview of Dutch and Flemish Literature, where they will describe me as ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘recalcitrant’, as I wrote at the start of this story, but that’s as far as it will ever go.

  The door opens and I think, ‘Not him, surely?’ No, it’s not Chaim Lizke. Just some wanker who looks like him. He’s been swallowed whole by history and then discreetly puked up in a corner as a ghost. He sometimes appears here in this bar, on other occasions, somewhere else. Sometimes his spirit demands atonement, sometimes he’s melancholy. Sometimes he seems to belong, mostly not at all. That’s no way to find peace, anyone could tell him that. But having a wandering ghost that terrifies everyone now and then is preferable to being forced to admit that he was ever real.

  Around
me they’re not talking about ghosts. Gaston, who’s still on the force, is talking about politics because it’s almost that time again: elections are coming up.

  ‘I don’t want to make a fuss, but it’s just like before,’ Gaston spits. He pulls a newspaper out of his inside pocket and unfolds it at a cartoon showing the pre-war mayor—who is running for election again in this post-war era—as a whore on a chaise longue above a caption saying, ‘Whose mistress?’, because he is surrounded by coarsely drawn, hook-nosed, cigar-smoking Jews waving wads of cash.

  ‘What do you mean like before?’ someone asks.

  ‘The Jews pulling the strings again, of course.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ asks another. ‘This city runs on diamonds.’

  ‘I meant that as a joke,’ Gaston says. ‘Look up the word sarcasm sometime.’

  ‘Gaston, the Jew-lover… That we’d live to see the day.’

  ‘Come on, lads…’ says Gaston.

  ‘Let’s not make a fuss,’ I say. ‘Who wants another beer?’

  The landlord has overheard and shakes his head furiously.

  ‘I’ve got something much better! I’ve still got two crates of stout in my cellar from before the war. What if I donate them? On the house, of course! For the city’s finest who always helped us in such difficult circumstances!’

  He descends to his cellar to the sound of cheers.

  ‘If Lode heard that…’ I say, almost out loud.

  Just then he comes in with an older man, one whose neck is too scrawny for any collar size at all.

  ‘Your timing couldn’t have been better!’ I call.

  Lode nods, but doesn’t join in the laughter. Here and there along the way, he pats one of the others on the shoulder. I get a measured ‘Congratulations on your book’.

  The professor shakes my hand and looks into my eyes. That makes me realize that I once kneed this man in the balls as hard as I could in the Sicherheitsdienst torture cellar.

  He shrugs when he sees me turning pale. ‘We all have to carry on. Life just keeps going.’

  I swallow, curse under my breath and think, how are you supposed to do that? How do you explain? Where do you start? Or do you just say, sorry, it was by accident, or not entirely, but anyway, you know what I’m trying to say?

  The professor accepts the glass of stout I offer him and calmly leafs through my Confessions of a Comedian, looking up now and then with a friendly smile and glugging down beer. ‘To the start of a literary career!’ he asserts firmly in the end, promptly holding out his empty glass.

  ‘Landlord, another stout for the professor!’ I shout in relief.

  Lode looks at me. It’s a studied gaze. He wants me to see how much disgust he can express for me without moving a muscle, without puking his guts up all over me. I simply order another glass of stout for him too. There’s no other way when it’s family. If someone can’t stand you, you stand them a beer.

  WHEN YOU CONSIDER someone a soulmate and give her all your love, you think you understand things about her that dumbfound others, drive them to despair or wrack them with anxiety. My granddaughter slashes her arms and my sin is that I think I know why. I quietly believe I understand what she’s doing or subjecting herself to. I think I know what’s burdening her. More than that, I am convinced she’s weighed down partly with the baggage I’ve given her, that she’s the recipient of a bill of reckoning I unwittingly passed down with my genes.

  ‘What can we do with her?’ Yvette laments when she’s had yet another phone call from our son about him having tracked Hilde down to some drug den or other, completely out of it and talking gibberish.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ I answer. ‘Let the girl be. She’s just a kid playing silly buggers.’

  But to me she’s not a kid and she’s not playing silly buggers. In my eyes they’re acts of resistance, signs of great inner anguish. I am convinced she’s being urged on by the voices that force people to finally discover themselves, to become who they have to be, who they really are, and that, as I’ve already said, is the most difficult thing of all, because the world doesn’t grant that privilege easily and other people always want you to be like everyone else.

  *

  You understand everything. You put everything in perspective. You lull yourself to sleep.

  After yet another round of therapy or a forced admission to hospital, she reappears at our front door, radiant as ever. She’s got a pink balloon with ‘Hello, I Love You’ printed on it and is all sweetness and light to her grandmother while giving me a wink that betrays the truth. I wink back and whisper that she shouldn’t let them manipulate her. She gives no sign of having heard. She’s wearing black lipstick and a black long-sleeved top decorated with scythe-carrying skeletons. A ladybird is walking over her shoulder and then suddenly it’s gone. She is no longer my granddaughter. They’ve pumped her full of medication that burns away the insides of her skull, making her normal, something she won’t be able to bear, something that will lead her to the abyss.

  She says, ‘Dad said I have to come and tell you not to worry. I’m going to straighten out and go back to uni. My enrolment’s all ready. Good, huh? And which one of you is most pleased?’

  ‘As long as you’re happy,’ my wife says, as pleased as she could possibly be.

  ‘What are you going to study?’ I ask.

  ‘History!’ Hilde beams.

  You know why. You think it’s the way it has to be. You try to fool yourself into thinking you should be proud. But she no longer rings you up, you don’t hear from her at all.

  ‘She’s on the up and up,’ Yvette says. ‘She’s probably got a boyfriend. She’s studying hard. She’s finding her way.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  But inside I’m fuming because in the meantime I’ve heard from Lode that he does see her, regularly even. That’s what he tells me during our weekly chess game.

  ‘She’s got all kinds of questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The old days. Does she do that with you too?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I say curtly and dangle my bishop in front of Lode’s queen as bait. Of course the bastard doesn’t fall for it.

  You hope. You grit your teeth. You try to be patient.

  She has disappeared.

  Nobody’s seen her for three whole days.

  Yvette goes into our bedroom, locks the door and starts crying on the bedspread.

  I say to the door, ‘It’ll be OK.’

  She keeps crying. She won’t let me into the room. I lash out at the cat.

  An icy steel fist takes hold of an artery and won’t let go.

  You don’t think anything any more. You listen to your breathing. You feel your heartbeat.

  Then the phone call comes.

  They have found her, strung up on a rope, hanging in an old wartime bunker that’s normally completely closed off, hanging there for a reason, I feel it.

  Sobbing I scratch on the bedroom door.

  ‘Open up, for Christ’s sake… It’s bad news. Open the door, sweetheart. Please.’

  But the door won’t open. The crying just gets louder and louder so that she’s practically screeching, until hours later when she can’t keep it up any longer and finally appears, suddenly aged so much there’s nothing left of her. ‘You didn’t protect me,’ she sighs and that’s all. And maybe even that’s not entirely true. Maybe she doesn’t say anything at all.

  You don’t know. You did know. You kid yourself about all kinds of things.

  But that’s what everyone does every fucking day, damn it, everyone does it and mostly without consequences. Everyone does it and it doesn’t cost them their grandchild. Most of them plod undisturbed to their grave. Not you.

  She’s left a note behind.

  Bompa is a bastard.

  That’s all it says.

  But those four words are enough.

  Yvette drinks two bottles of port every day and I don’t get another word out of her.

  Eve
ry morning she goes out for a new supply of booze, then locks herself in.

  I sleep in my study. Now and then I still hear her sobbing, that’s all.

  Bompa is a bastard.

  My son, my daughter-in-law and my grandson stare at me.

  They ask why.

  Because of the pills, I say, because of the antidepressants you all made her take. In the end they drove her completely mad.

  They don’t want to ever see me again.

  My son says, ‘I hope you die a slow death.’

  They are the last words I ever hear from him.

  I see him six months later at my wife’s funeral.

  ‘She drank herself to death,’ I hear Lode saying behind me in church, just like that, as if it really doesn’t matter whether I hear it or not.

  ‘WHAT YOU STILL DON’T REALIZE is that I’m the only person in your life who’s not scared of you. Is the penny dropping? Our Yvette, your son, your so-called friends… everyone. Did anybody from work ever show up when you said you wanted to buy them a round? Nobody. You and me, that’s all. You and me and we both know why. Because you dragged me down into your filth. You murderer… And no, what I told your granddaughter wasn’t bloody revenge. I just told her the truth because I had no choice. And what happened afterwards… It’s bloody killing me. I can’t sleep at night. But if it’s my fault, it’s yours too. If I’m paying for it, you have to too… Why do you think my sister drank herself silly? Fear. Everyone’s frightened of you the way you can never trust a mean dog, the way you can never trust someone who’s blind to himself, to what’s inside him, and always acts like it’s everyone else who’s faking it, as if nobody knows what he’s up to, as if nobody else knows how to cope with the filthiness, while you yourself haven’t got a clue how you reek of the filthy dirty bastard you are, you, the great poet, with nothing but black spots on his heart, nothing but betrayal—’