Bohumil took a mouthful of waterzooi, then suddenly pushed the dish away and said, Actually, I don’t really like it!
What?
I’m no historian, he said, but for me it was always history, in the past somehow, you know? The Stone Age, and this chapter of the Stone Age was called the pre-war era: the time when radical political conflict ran straight through families, one joined the fascists, the other joined the communists and so on. Did I not pay enough attention at school? But that’s how I remember it, that’s how it was told to me: in the past, in darker times, political hatred ran right through families. What kind of nightmare is that? Why should I have these dark times in my family now, now? My father isn’t coming to the wedding, by the way.
And that’s not a reason for your mother to kill herself?
No, on the contrary. She’d be happy if he killed himself. They’ve separated, they’re going to court.
Martin had wanted to discuss an important matter with Bohumil, relating to the Jubilee Project, but he decided to put it off until they were back in the office. Now he sensed that he – he! – needed to cheer him up! Raising his glass he said, I can offer you some consolation. Think of Herman Van Rompuy!
Bohumil looked at him blankly.
Just imagine: Van Rompuy was president of the European Council, effectively president of the European Union, while his sister is chair of the Belgian Maoists and his brother a Belgian nationalist M.P., an intransigent Flemish separatist. I read in the paper that the family meets only once a year: at Christmas!
Bohumil, who was just taking a sip of wine, proposed a toast: To Christmas! The European president, the nationalist and the Maoist!
And they sing “Silent Night”!
“Silent Night”! Ha ha! Is that true?
Yes, supposedly. So I read. It was in De Morgen.
Bohumil laughed and said, Let’s have another glass!
By the time they left the restaurant the demonstration had dispersed, they walked across Schuman, through barriers and past heaps of manure that were being shovelled onto municipal cleaning carts. It stank. The sun was laughing.
On the way back to the office Bohumil was quiet and thoughtful. In the lift he said, I’m going to cancel my flight on Friday. I won’t go to the wedding. I don’t want to be in the same photo as Květoslav Hanka and then end up in Blesk.
What about your mother?
I’ll tell her I’ll come at Christmas.
He punched Martin on the arm and said with a grin, Silent Night!
Half an hour later, Martin, Bohumil and Kassándra were sitting in the conference room for an update to the preliminary work on the Jubilee Project. In one of her notes on Martin’s paper Xeno had remarked that they needed to determine how many victims of the Holocaust were still alive. Is there a central register of survivors of concentration and extermination camps? How many today live in Europe, how many in Israel, the U.S. or elsewhere? Is there an institution representing survivors that we can partner with for organising the event?
They needed to find out in order to decide whether they could in fact invite all the Holocaust survivors to Brussels, or just a group that would be properly representative.
It was a real surprise, Bohumil said. Of course we expected there to be a central register of Holocaust survivors. But we couldn’t find one.
Kassándra: None of the institutions we asked for information from replied. Yad Vashem, for example. No response. When we tried again we did eventually get a reply, but even that wasn’t a proper one – look, they said they’d forwarded the e-mail to the relevant member of staff. After that, nothing again for several days. I wrote back asking them to give me the name and e-mail address of this member of staff, so I could contact them directly. No reply. Nothing yet. Then the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles: no reply. When we followed up we were informed that it wasn’t the job of the Wiesenthal Center to document the victims of the Shoah. All they had was a list of the Nazi war criminals who were still alive, it was published on their website, but they had no register of living victims of the Shoah. We should get in touch with Yad Vashem. We forwarded the e-mail to Yad Vashem, with another request for information – no response. We wrote to all the memorial sites, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and so on . . . In fact the only reply we got was from Mauthausen.
What did they say?
Here: they only had a list of the survivors of Mauthausen itself, but even that was incomplete, because of the chaos that followed the liberation in May 1945. The survivors had been able to leave immediately, and had turned to different authorities and institutions for help and documents. No information was collected centrally. Only a small proportion of the incomplete personal data held by the Mauthausen memorial service was up to date, and not even that was guaranteed to be correct. The people they had addresses for were invited every year to the commemoration of the liberation. Those who fail to respond to the invitation for several years might be dead, but equally they could have moved. The director of Mauthausen referred us – surprise, surprise! – to Yad Vashem, but also to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. An interesting lead! And they attached the text of the Mauthausen Oath, to remind us, that’s to say the Commission, that the Treaties of Rome refer to it. The director wrote . . . hold on a sec, I’ve got it here: the slogan “Auschwitz: never again” was problematic because it set one camp above the rest, i.e. ultimately it put the camps in a kind of ranking, but the Mauthausen Oath was universal, and for that very reason was there at the beginning of the project of European unity, even though you never hear about this anymore.
Martin nodded. This is exactly why we . . . he paused, then said, We’re using Auschwitz as a symbol, but basically he’s understood our idea. So, did you write to Spielberg?
I did.
No response?
Actually, yes. Short and sweet. They said they had only one list of survivors, those who had been willing to tell their life stories as testimonies on camera. But they didn’t know how many Shoah victims were alive overall, nor did they even know how many of their eyewitnesses were still alive now. The recordings had been made with people who had got in touch themselves. The archive was freely accessible. For more details we should contact —
Yad Vashem.
Exactly. Which means we know nothing at all.
That’s so odd, Martin said. It’s quite mad. The Nazis registered every individual deported to concentration camps: their name, personal details, date of birth, profession, last address, numbering everyone consecutively, those murdered were crossed neatly off the lists . . . and after the liberation everything vanishes into thin air —
Nazi bureaucracy!
Not just Nazi bureaucracy! They should have registered them all so that —
No, Bohumil said. Many couldn’t or didn’t want to return to the countries they’d been deported from. Nobody was interested in another list of “displaced persons”. They were given medical assistance, and then those that could leave were allowed to go.
I can’t believe that, Martin said. Are you telling me that Yad Vashem has traced the names of all the people who were murdered in the camps, but isn’t interested in those that survived? I can’t believe that. The list must exist, but somebody seems to want to keep it secret.
Come on, Martin, Kassándra said, there’s no conspiracy here. What would be the point in that? There are plenty of reasons why we don’t have the total number of survivors. They weren’t able to leave behind an address when they left the camps after liberation, because obviously they didn’t have an address yet. And when they started rebuilding their lives somewhere, why would they write to their former concentration camp with a change of address? Come on, Martin, camp survivors aren’t alumni! O.K., some got in touch with the memorial sites, made themselves available as eyewitnesses to talk about their experiences, some came to the liberation commemorations, some came decades later with their grandchildren – that was their triumph over Hitler – but others wanted nothing
more to do with it. Some died very soon after the liberation, so they were survivors but then died of natural causes right after the war, some felt ashamed and didn’t want their names put on file again, some remained silent because they realised that nobody wanted to hear their story, not even in Israel would anyone listen to them, the embarrassing Jew from the slaughterhouse, how could all that have been recorded and systemised?
So we’ve got a problem, Bohumil said. The list that Xeno wants doesn’t exist. It’s pointless trying to fathom the reason why. And there’s no simple solution to the problem. What is this really about? The narrative of the European Commission. You say it came about as a response to the Holocaust, it must never happen again, we guarantee peace and the rule of law. O.K., but to attest to this we don’t need a complete list of those victims who are still living. Are you going to have them muster in rue de la Loi? And count them?
Stop it! Shut up!
There are those Holocaust survivors we do know of, Kassándra said. We could make a list and see which of them would like to —
Have you asked Eurostat?
Why would we have done that?
Please, Bohumil, Martin said. We have a European statistics authority. They’ve got stats on everything. They know everything. They know how many eggs were laid in Europe today. So they’ll know how many Holocaust survivors are still alive in Europe. Kassándra, please make the request and we’ll talk again when we’ve got the answer.
Kassándra wrote “Eurostat” on her notepad and looked at Martin: I’m not being funny, but why do you want a number, statistical information about people who themselves were turned into numbers?
She undid the button on the sleeve of her blouse, pushed up the sleeve, wrote 171185 on her forearm and held it out to Martin.
What . . .? What’s that?
My date of birth, Kassándra said.
Martin Susman often worked until seven o’clock or half past, so he didn’t have a bad conscience when he left the office at half past four that day. There was nothing urgent left to do, and any routine matters that might still crop up in the next hour or so could be dealt with tomorrow morning. He had nothing to eat at home, but he wasn’t hungry. He decided to stop for a beer on the way to the Metro, at the James Joyce pub on rue Archimède. Tanks were making their way down the street. He went on a bit further, to Charlemagne, but there too, and in rue de la Loi, military vehicles were on the move, their greenish-brown lacquered steel appearing to consume the evening sun. Soldiers patrolled, police officers diverted cars and directed pedestrians into narrow corridors between barriers, which led to the Metro station. Direct access to the Council building was closed off.
The scene reminded Martin of a film he’d once seen, Z or Missing, or of television documentaries. He rarely watched T.V. But whenever he channel surfed on sleepless nights, he always ended up on historical documentaries. History interested him more than stories, and he was especially fascinated by historical footage, old weekly newsreels and amateur films dug out and used in documentaries, while a sonorous voice talked momentously of a bygone era. These were the pictures he had in his head: the tanks in Wenceslas Square after the crushing of the Prague Spring; the armoured vehicles driving through the streets of Santiago de Chile after the Pinochet putsch; the military presence on the streets of Athens after the Obrist putsch; shaky, amateur Super 8 films and black-and-white scenes from old television news bulletins. To Martin it was as if this historical material were being projected onto the street he was walking down, creating a virtual reality for which he lacked the console. The tanks moved through the car-free streets like giant beetles, the few pedestrians squeezed themselves past houses and railings, and were swallowed up in the entrance to the Metro.
Martin was not scared; he remembered there was a Council summit of European heads of state and government. These were the accompanying security measures. He went into the James Joyce pub, where men stood chatting in suits, their ties loosened. It was happy hour.
On his way home he bought a six pack of Jupiler at the shop on the corner of rue Sainte-Catherine.
Goedenavond.
Bonsoir, Monsieur.
Au revoir!
Tot ziens.
Once home he took off his trousers, they were tight on him, he was putting on weight. He hated himself for it, but he made no resolutions; in Brussels you counted the time in kilos rather than years. In his shirt and underpants he smoked a cigarette at the open window, then sat in the armchair by the fireplace where the old books were lined up and lit the candle. Why? Because it was there. He drank beer and watched insects flutter into the room through the open window, seek the light of the candle, fly into the flame and burn to death.
For him this was the proof that there was no God, no purpose to creation. For what was the purpose of creating a species that only becomes active at night, but then looks for the light, only to burn to a crisp in it? What use are these creatures, what contribution to the purported or hoped-for harmony of nature do they make? Maybe they have reproduced beforehand, set progeny into the world which, like them, will spend all day in a slumber somewhere before emerging at the onset of night and seeking the light they have slept through, only to end their lives because of some grotesque death drive. The flight to death begins at twilight. They cling to windows where there is light, as if the glass offered sustenance, they buzz around lamps and lanterns, as if so close to the light there were something to find apart from being blinded, and on discovering a candle or an open fire they meet their fate, instant death into which they plunge, into the darkness from which they came.
On the spur of the moment, Inspector Brunfaut got out at Schuman station instead of continuing on to Merode. Between these two Metro stops lay the Parc du Cinquantenaire, commonly known as “Jubilee Park”, where he was now going to take a pleasant stroll on this beautifully sunny day. He prescribed himself this walk, eaten up by the cold fear that had assailed him on the underground, fear of the tube they would insert into him in hospital. He had plenty of time; in his anxiety he had left home far too early.
The Justus Lipsius exit was closed and he was carried along by the throng to the Berlaymont exit, where there was a crush because the up escalator wasn’t working. People diverted to the stairs, but kept coming to a standstill and had to move to the side to make room for the passengers coming down. At the same time they were jostled by those coming up behind them with their wheelie cases and rucksacks. Brunfaut clutched his small travel bag to his body, he heard yelling reverberating from the exit, shrill whistling, a few passengers climbing the stairs turned around, more and more people were now heading down. Brunfaut had no idea what was happening, but he let himself be moved along and swam with the flow of the crowd back to the platform. A train pulled in, Brunfaut got on and went one more stop to Merode.
Right beside the Metro exit on avenue des Celtes was Brasserie La Terrasse. This was where he intended to fill the time until his appointment, over a beer. The terrace had plenty of custom, but there was a free table and although the brasserie was on a busy main road, Émile Brunfaut felt as if he were in a peaceful oasis behind a wall of green plants. Peace. To be able to think in peace. What? About what? He ought to make a life decision. It sounded so melodramatic: a life decision. And just then he felt overwhelmed. Although it had been a little while now since he’d been dismissed – not formally, but effectively dismissed from his life – it still felt so “sudden” to him. Strange how long “sudden” could last.
At the same time he wondered what point there would be in making a life decision just because he had this notion in his head, and he didn’t even know . . .
The waiter. Brunfaut ordered a beer.
Would he like anything to eat?
No, he said. He just wanted a beer.
. . . and he didn’t even know how much time he had left to live.
The waiter brought his beer, put the bill next to it and a note that said: “Reserved 12.30”. He asked Brunfaut to pay immediat
ely. 12.30, that was in ten minutes. The waiter must be looking to free up the table again, for somebody who wanted to order food as well.
Brunfaut had always been a formidable man. But now it was if he had been anaesthetised. How small and woolly he felt as he looked up at the waiter.
He got to his feet, took a deep breath and puffed himself up. You ought to have told me straight away that this table was reserved! I have no wish to guzzle my beer in such a hurry! You shove this “Reserved” note under my nose after I order. I find that cynical and humiliating. Goodbye!
But . . . Monsieur! You can’t . . . Wait! You can’t just go! You have to pay for your beer.
Why? I’m not going to drink it.
Then I’ll have to call the police.
Here’s my I.D. I’ve come right on cue!
Oh! Excuse me, Inspector! Of course you can stay at this table for as long as you like. I’ll change the reservation, Inspector!
I don’t want it anymore!
This was no more than a brief fantasy which, childish as it was, only served to humiliate him further. In reality he paid, said, No problem, I have to go in ten minutes anyway. I’ve got an appointment and —
And what? He left an excessively large tip.
He spent a few minutes staring into the distance, looked at the beer, how could he have forgotten that . . .? He got up and left, without having taken a single sip.
Émile Brunfaut crossed avenue des Celtes and walked up rue de Linthout. He had forgotten the number but walked on, imagining he would recognise the hospital anyway.
He didn’t. He walked far too far. At some point this dawned on him and he turned back. Instead of arriving too early, he almost managed to get there late. He was sweating. He would give the worst possible impression on admission and during the initial consultation.
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