Will E-Book

Jeroen Olyslaegers

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

THE TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARA FINANCIAL TIMES TRANSLATED FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARAN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR __________ It is 1941, and Antwerp is in the grip of Nazi occupation. Young policeman Wilfried Wils has no intention of being a hero - but war has a way of catching up with people. When his idealistic best friend draws him into the growing resistance movement, and an SS commander tries to force him into collaborating, Wilfried's loyalties become horribly, fatally torn. As the beatings, destruction and round-ups intensify across the city, he is forced into an act that will have consequences he could never have imagined. __________ 'A vivid, complex, and captivating novel about the grubby moral compromises of life under occupation' Bart van Es, author of The Cut Out Girl'Masterful... A gripping epic, necessary and gorgeously written' Stefan Hertmans, author of War and Turpentine'Historical fiction at its best: provocative, uncomfortable and illuminating' The Times

Leseprobe

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For the Nymph & For My Son, Quinten

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATION A SUDDEN SNOWFALLA BUS TED HIP, HALF A MANGROPING THROUGH THE DUST, GASPING IN THE ICY WINTER AIR ABOUT THE PUBLISHERCOPYRIGHT

7

A SUDDEN SNOWFALL

89

A sudden snowfall. It reminds me of the war. Not because of the cold or some other inconvenience, but because of the silence that takes hold of the city. It’s coming down thick and steady now. It’s night. I hear the sounds congealing into a dull nothing. And then someone like me has to go out, no matter how old he is. I know, son, everybody thinks: He’s going to slip and break his hip. Soon he’ll be lying in a hospital bed at St Vincent’s with his legs up in the air. And that’ll be the end of him, laid low at last by the kind of bug they cultivate in hospitals. It’s odd how the elderly get infected by other people’s fear. The fear that makes them consent to being cooped up in homes, letting themselves be fed codswallop and cold porridge, going along with oh-bugger-off bingo nights and submitting to a Moroccan assistant nurse with an arsewipe in her hand. They can keep their fear. I’ve never been afraid, not really, and nobody’s going to teach this clapped-out old dog new tricks. Outside, the snow crunches under my boots. No, not fancy shoes, but the old-fashioned boots I’ve stayed true to for years, taken to the cobbler’s dozens of times and greased almost weekly, walking boots that now allow me to take a step back in time. The flakes are still drifting down. Recently I saw an enlargement of one in a newspaper in the library reading room. All one-offs, those snowflakes, beautifully 10 constructed mathematical worlds landing on my cap and coat. No, I’m not going to write a poem about it. Nobody reads them any more and I’ve run dry. The snow transforms the city, imposing not just silence, but maybe thoughtfulness too, remembering—on me, anyway. When it’s snowing I can see better. As long as the snow is falling, you know what the city really means, what it’s lost and what it’s trying to forget. The city gives up the illusion that the past is past.

In front of me City Park is shining white. I wait and close my eyes for a moment. The yellow light on the streets turns blue, as blue as the tinted glass in the old gas lamps. Picture a city with hardly any light. Faint blue light on the streets out of fear of the fire that can fall from the skies. Those of us lucky enough to have the use of a torch on night duty considered light a privilege that was no business of any Germans, war or no war. It was already dark enough, after all. I remember the Germans being furious about their inability to get it under control. They had to threaten insane fines and ultimately the death penalty before people started to be a little less casual with light. I’ve seen field gendarmes burst into spasms of rage because we were using our torches unscreened. Sabotage! And so on… and so forth. At the station our chief inspector would cock an eyebrow: ‘Come on, lads… no mucking about.’ No reprimand—we had to stop mucking about, that was all. Anyway, City Park bathed in faint blue light, that’s where we were. But I turn right. Pacing slowly, I enter Quellin Straat. Your great-grandfather is no longer looking at shop windows. I see the city as she really is, a naked woman with a white stole draped over her shoulders, the kind of woman doctors and surgeons can’t keep their paws off: a new bosom, then a 11 different face. Magnificent buildings have been razed here, office blocks put up in their place. Did you know there was a grand hotel on the Keyser Lei corner, just near the opera house? Built by a German before the First World War. Ever learnt anything about Peter Benoît at school? Probably not, and no need as far as I’m concerned. They used to teach names and dates; nowadays they act like that was a mistake. But nobody—not then, not now—gives you the smack on the side of the head that history really is. A stream of filth, bastardry that never stops, not really. It just keeps going. Peter Benoît has become a street name. When I was at school we almost had to go down on our knees for him. ‘He taught our nation to sing.’ A real hero, in other words. A statue of this once-worshipped composer stood directly opposite the opera, surrounded by what people used to call Camille’s lido, named after a mayor you’ve definitely never heard of, who I can only vaguely remember myself. So the revered artist, the man who once gave his nation singing lessons, looked out over a paddling pool that was used as a public urinal, mostly by drunks. The statue’s been relocated; the so-called lido was demolished and as for that grand hotel where smart German officers drank aperitifs with their sweethearts during the Second World War… now it’s the site of a concrete monster that towers over nothing much. So things were better in the old days, were they, Bompa? I can already hear you thinking it, and besides, if we ever get to see each other, if the family I helped create, which no longer wants anything to do with me, allows it, I am sure you will call me opa. After all, the word bompa is dying out. But of course, the old days weren’t better. They were just as bad. Imagination is everything. In the beginning there 12 wasn’t the Word and definitely not God’s. In the beginning there was an imagined darkness—remember that. I stop for a moment in the middle of the street. Two big black banners are hanging from a building that no longer exists. Each banner emblazoned with two lightning-bolt runes. I’m standing in front of the headquarters of the Flemish SS. Those uniforms used to drive us cops crazy. A mate got the book thrown at him for not saluting some cocky little bastard in black. He wasn’t even German, though he obviously wished he’d popped out into the light of day somewhere more Teutonic. Bullyboys. So many different uniforms… they made your head spin. When to salute and when not to salute? Many’s the time I had to grit my teeth. Some of those posers had absolutely no respect. For people like that I might just have well been standing there in my birthday suit. At the end of the street I turn right. It must be about four in the morning. Still absolute silence, snow falling and not a soul in sight. OK, apart from a junkie who asks me for a euro. ‘Get stuffed,’ I say. ‘Come on, grandad,’ he drivels. I look deep into his red-ringed eyes as if I’m already sinking my fangs into his soul like a wormy hellhound and tell him he’d better piss off before there’s nothing left of him. Did you know your great-grandfather eats blokes like that for breakfast? You don’t believe me? Later you will, maybe: unfortunately. Bearings. On my right, at the end of Keyser Lei, I see the railway cathedral officially called Middenstatie, a name nobody uses. On my left, on the corner of Keyser Lei and Frankrijk Lei, is Café Atlantic, with Hotel Weber above it, headquarters of German Field Command. The men in field grey swarmed around it, triumphant at first, dragging themselves from one fancy dinner to the next, where 13 they would invariably be entertained with all due respect, their boss for instance bending over a folder full of old ink drawings of our city, offered to him as a gift by our mayor, who was blinking like an owl on tranquillizers… All this trouble so that they could later, after just a few years, be reduced to a parody of their own triumph, knowing very well that by then their so-called thousand-year Reich was already in injury time. Now I turn right, towards the station and, a dozen paces later, right again, into Vesting Straat. It’s cold. I’m twenty or thereabouts. Someone behind me calls out ‘Wilfried!’ That’s not my real name, but more about that later. The person behind me—Metdepenningen, Lode by name—catches up and slaps me on the shoulder. Does that name ring any bells? It may very well. But I’m not going to lay all my cards on the table at once. Read on and all will be revealed. ‘I’m freezing my balls off.’ Lode slips, almost twisting his ankle—I manage to grab him by the elbow—and swears. We’ve just finished training together. Three months of listening to people talk bollocks at us and then we were probationary constables. What it came down to was that we had to keep our uniforms clean and always obey anyone who had an extra stripe. All through those three months I watched Lode sucking furiously on his pencil and staring intently at the blackboard. Whenever the instructor asked a question he put up his hand. A show-off, definitely, and handsome to boot. Pitch-black hair, roguish smile, son of a butcher who had a shop the other side of Astrid Plein. He was the one who got our friendship rolling. The kind of bloke who declares after just a week that you’re mates for life. ‘You teach me something new every day…’ I can still hear him saying it. Just when we’re about to 14 go up the two steps to the station, two field gendarmes come out the door. They look at us and one of them roars at us to follow them: ‘Sofort mitkommen!’ Some clichés just happen to be true. All Germans in uniform talked like that. So we went with them, immediately, because we already knew we didn’t have a choice. Normally we had to check in to get our orders, but when one of those field arseholes roared, you followed. We carry on south to Pelikaan Straat, Lode and me tagging along behind the two uniformed supermen in complete silence like a couple of schoolboys being punished for something. The Germans have only been here six or seven months and it’s like the whole place has been theirs for years. The city lay down for them and spread her legs wide. Everything is organized. Pedestrians going from the railway station to the Meir have to walk on the right-hand pavement, with people headed the other way on the opposite side, and woe betide you if go against the flow by accident. If someone had predicted something like that in the years before the war, everyone would have been rolling on the floor, spluttering out beer froth while they roared with laughter. But one squeak from the master race and everyone’s following orders. And what’s more: they like it. Discipline at last. We cross the road and go under the railway viaduct to the Kievit district. Two streets further we stop in front of a house with a flaking facade. One of the field gendarmes shakes the powdery snow off his shoulders and pounds on the door. The other one looks at us with an expression that says ‘watch and learn’. But nothing happens. The knocking only seems to have made the house quieter. He hammers on the door again with his fist. Now we hear some noise inside. Someone comes downstairs wailing in a 15 language I don’t understand. The door creaks open. Through the chink we see a sinister face with big eyes. He immediately gets a whack on the head with the front door as the two Germans shove it all the way open. ‘Chaim Lizke?’ one of them yells. We hear some mumbling. They go straight in, gesturing for us to wait outside, and shut the door behind them. ‘Another work dodger, I suppose,’ I whisper. Lode doesn’t say a word. He stamps his feet against the cold. Tough luck for him that he can’t afford the sturdy boots I’m wearing. You have to know that in those days the provision of uniforms was a complete shambles. Those who had enough money for textile coupons were better dressed than the rest. That was another thing that drove the Germans crazy. A couple of years later we all had to buy new uniforms they’d designed for us. But that rule only made things worse. By then only a few inspectors had the means to get one. Everybody tried to wear something that looked good from a distance if nothing else, hoping to avoid a bollocking from somebody or other. Meanwhile there’s a racket inside the house. People shouting and crying. We hear children screeching. A cupboard falls over. Somebody comes crashing down the stairs. More screeching. But the orders bellowed in German are far louder than anything else. The door swings open again and there they are: the Lizke family. Five half-dressed children aged four to twelve, a weeping woman with a cloth draped skew-whiff over her hair and the father of the house keeping his eyes on the ground while blood drips from his swelling ear. ‘The pride of Israel,’ Meanbeard would have sneered. He’s someone you’ll encounter later in the story. I’ll tell it like it was: I don’t have a clue what those people had been cooking up for themselves, 16 but the consequences were far from salubrious. They were rank.

To be fair, I have to add, I could also feel pretty woozy sometimes when I got too close to Lode. That lad could stink to high heaven of blood and guts. I’m sensitive to smells, always have been. My father used to say I have the olfactory capacity of a pregnant female. Hilarious, of course, but I felt like smashing his head in every time he casually let it slip, preferably at a party with lots of drunk people around.

One of the field gendarmes waves us over and points a gloved finger at a sheet of paper, using it to underline an address in Van Diepenbeek Straat. That’s where we have to go, and apparently they don’t know how to get there. Lode avoids my gaze as if he’s not even here. It’s not too far from my place. Follow the railway, then cross back under on Van de Nest Lei? I give the Germans a nod. The address is not in our division; it’s in the seventh, but I’m not crazy enough to tell them that. And off we go. Us in front with one of the Germans beside us, behind us the foreigners with the other field arsehole. The woman won’t stop crying. Her husband whispers quietly, trying to keep her spirits up. In Polish, I think, but it could be Hebrew or God knows what. The field gendarme hisses something and we hear him give the man a whack. Right away the children start sobbing again. I would have gone about it differently. Lode too, I suspect, but who are we? Tourist guides in the dead of night. It’s got slippery. The snow has lost its crunch, turning the streets into a skating rink. The Germans are trying to force a pace that a family with small children can’t match. 17 One after the other goes arse over. Another stop, more bawling, more blows, even more crying. Lode still hasn’t said a word. I see his face tensing. Looking back on it, I have to think of the seaside. At that stage I’d never been there, but when I went later and was lying on the beach nibbling a waffle and pretending it was worth all the bother, I saw a large family in full retreat with their bags and chairs and parasols and all their children with faces as red as tomatoes and completely overexcited. The father exploded: he dragged one of the youngest roughly over the sand while carrying one of his daughters in his other arm, and his mortified wife had to undergo the furious glares of the bystanders while pulling a child along with each hand too. I swear I saw it snowing then too in the scorching heat. And I can assure you just as firmly that I also heard someone bellowing in German. ‘Nicht far jetzt,’ I told one of the field gendarmes. Broken German, I know, but by now I’m so sick of the ridiculous situation I’ve resorted to their language for the very first time, if only to temper the rising fury a little, because that’s not going to get us anywhere. It’s hardly going to scare the Jews into suddenly skating along like lunatics. It’s true, too: it’s not far now. We just turned into Van Diepenbeek Straat. ‘This lady and her children are work-shy too, are they?’ Lode whispers, his voice trembling. ‘Fuck this bullshit. Is this any way to behave?’ I don’t say a word. What am I supposed to say? He hasn’t told me anything that’s not already obvious. But we’re a part of it, we’re walking along, we’re being obedient and respectable and accompanying the stinking gang to an address on a scrap of paper. The moon comes out and the ice on the streets starts gleaming like silverwork. And then it happens. One of the children, a boy of 18 about twelve, lets go of his father’s hand and shoots off ahead, rushing past us. I don’t know why. We hear the father yell. For a moment or two the field gendarme in front with us doesn’t do anything. He’s as surprised as we are by the little fellow racing over the ice with his skinny legs wobbling like a newborn foal’s. It only takes about five seconds until he slips over again. Before he can get back up onto his feet the field gendarme has caught up to him and given that little boy a kick up the arse… unbelievable. We see him literally sliding over the ice like a sled until he slams headfirst into a lamp post and lies there motionless. The Germans crack up and it would be a funny sight if not for the mother shrieking as if somebody’s twisting a jagged-edged knife into her guts. She collapses on the spot. Her crying husband puts his hands together and raises them up, as if the Almighty might descend on his request to re-establish order with his flaming sword, or at least rise from his slumber to see what’s going on. ‘Aufstehen!’ the Germans shout, at both the mother and the boy a little further along. The lead German starts to stride towards him, but Lode beats him to it. It’s like he’s wearing skates, he’s that fast. He reaches the little fellow, goes down on his knees and curls his whole body around him like a cocoon, like a shell of muscle. He doesn’t let him go, not even when prodded by the still-smiling gendarme, who now says, ‘Schon gut,’ a little more quietly. The German pokes him again, and then kicks at Lode’s backside almost playfully. Lode roars, ‘Fuck off, you bastard!’ From his voice I can hear that he too is now crying. I see part of his red cheek, his handsome, brilliantined hair falling in black arrows over the boy’s face, his white helmet a little further along, lying upside down in the snow like a gaping thunder pot. The 19 German loses his sense of humour, swears and reaches for his rubber truncheon. Before I’ve even realized it, my own hand has shot forward and clamped the field gendarme’s wrist in a vice-like grip. We look at each other, me and the German. What saved me, son, was the momentary astonishment on that field arsehole’s face. He can’t believe this is happening in this ridiculous country they have occupied almost effortlessly. For a few seconds he can’t quite process it: in this city they’ve plonked their fat arses down on so easily. A stupid toerag like me in my ridiculous uniform grabbing him by the wrist and staring him straight in his arrogant mug is a scene that feels like it’s taking place on another planet. Anyway, I let go and he doesn’t do a thing. He keeps staring while his mate jerks the mother up onto her feet while keeping the children at bay. The father too is watching Lode and me, seeing how I pick the helmet up out of the snow, put my hand on Lode’s shoulder and gently help him up with the boy in his arms. He watches while I pat the snow off Lode’s back and sees Lode, still crying, wipe the blood from his son’s forehead and use his thumb and index finger to purse the boy’s half-open lips, as if he’s fished him out of the water and is about to save him by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then the boy half opens his eyes and Lode sighs deeply while hugging that skinny body closer to his own. He doesn’t want his helmet. Without saying a word or giving us a second glance, he walks on with the boy in his arms and his head held high and we follow him in silence, the Germans too, like after a family row that has suddenly cleared the drunken father’s boisterous head, struck him dumb and left him to quietly appraise the havoc he’s created. The two policemen on watch at the entrance to the old army bed 20 depot, final destination of this wild walk, don’t speak either. They haven’t seen any of it, though they might have heard the shouting. They stand there pale and rigid at the sight of a helmetless Lode with a child in his arms, like an embodiment of the now probably almost forgotten Hollywood hero Errol Flynn, even forgetting to salute the Germans. Before being dragged inside with his family, the father carefully takes his son out of Lode’s arms, looks in my friend’s eyes and mutters something. And then they’re gone, swallowed up by the hollow darkness inside the building as if they’d never existed. We stay outside, Lode and I. It would be wisest for us to make ourselves scarce, but my mate doesn’t feel like it yet. He swallows, tidies his hair, takes his helmet back, and then calmly asks the sentries if they have any cigarettes on them. We smoke while the snow makes a half-hearted attempt to start falling again. One of the sentries, a cop in his thirties with a walrus moustache who’s known to everyone as Gus Skew because his eyes start turning in all directions once he’s had five stouts, says that the whole pack of them, everyone they’ve got locked up inside, is going on the train to Limburg tomorrow, Saint-Trond to be precise. Nobody asks what they’re going to do with them there. ‘And I have to go on the train with them,’ Gus Skew adds. ‘Fun and games. Anyway, there’s a bonus in it, so I’m not complaining.’ Lode sucks the smoke deep into his lungs and asks how much. ‘Forty-five francs,’ Gus replies. ‘Not bad,’ says Lode, flicking his butt into the snow.

The chief looks at us from behind his desk and sighs. He pulls out the incident log, a thick book with blue horizontal lines and a big red line down one side, and dips his pen in the ink. 21 Together with him, I listen while Lode tells the story, his rage flaring as he progresses, which makes me, in turn, more and more nervous. Finally the chief lays down his pen, takes off his goggles and gives me a weary look.

‘Do you agree with what your chum here has to say?’

I tell him it’s true that the Germans never once said what the Lizke family was accused of.

‘Your mate here says they were unlawfully accused of something. That’s a totally different thing. Did those men show you any documents?’

‘Just a piece of paper with the address of that bed store on it.’

Lode slaps the wooden desktop. ‘It’s not right, chief! Not one of those children was over fifteen. A woman and a bunch of kids? And how are we supposed to know if the father really was a work dodger? Has everyone gone mad?’

A fiasco. But what do you expect? Most people run around like headless chickens. You need to know that I had to convince Lode to make a report in the first place. It took a lot of effort on my part on the way back. He kept saying that we shouldn’t start shit-stirring. It was mainly his disgust speaking. But he had it wrong. That was exactly what we needed to do. The reasoning was pretty obvious. We could assume that those two field arseholes would go and make a report of their own once they got back to Field Command. That meant there was a reasonable chance we’d be called to account. Those fellows were thorough and may very well have taken note of our numbers. Not having given our version of the facts beforehand would put us in an even worse position. There was only one important thing that we—and this is how I emphasized it to 22 Lode—needed to be totally clear about. I had held that field gendarme back because I was worried he was going to attack my fellow officer. That was all that mattered. The rest of it had nothing to do with us. We had to cover ourselves. In the end Lode said I was right. But I had misjudged him and, most of all, I should have spoken first. Instead of concentrating on that one fact while dictating his report, his rage began to play up and he couldn’t resist making it a complaint, emphasizing the great injustice he thought he’d witnessed… And that wasn’t all. There was something else, something I only understood later. If Lode had told me that one thing then, I wouldn’t have believed him, not even if he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die. Lode knew that foreigner. He knew the Jew Chaim Lizke, who we had helped put on a transport along with his family.

‘You do understand, Metdepenningen, that this is going to Field Command?’

‘It goes to the mayor too, doesn’t it?’

The chief inspector scratches the side of his head and puts his glasses back on.

‘So, boy, are you trying to teach me how to do my job? How long have you rookies been here anyway? Four or five weeks? What’s this got to do with the mayor?’

The chief’s patience is exhausted and Lode has finally realized it. He hesitates, uncertain.

I just described him as a Hollywood hero and I’m not taking any of that back. He was impressive and single-minded, radiating a strength people seldom see and normally associate, perhaps justifiably, with long-forgotten heroes or the terrifying beauty of gods. But more than anything else, people are pitiful, they’re 23 not consistent and they seldom face facts. Nobody stays a hero a whole life long.

‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’

I hear Lode swallow.

‘It is a case of maintaining public order and then it falls under the, um…’

With his thumb and index finger almost touching, the chief says, ‘You are this far away from getting night duty for the rest of the winter. Is that what you want?’

He looks at Lode first and then at me, the reasonable one. ‘The word “unlawful” is not going in it. Now get out of my sight.’

When we get back outside Lode is as good as convinced that the chief is a ‘real one’, a mole in other words, who was already conniving with his fellow fascists before the war, part of a secret society dedicated to undermining city and state, or rather bending them, with or without violence, to the whims of the occupier. The way he tells it, early on that January morning in 1941, makes me picture a huddle of masked men swearing eternal loyalty to each other and their new Fatherland by flickering torchlight. By this time I already know treachery exists; I don’t need kitsch images bubbling up inside me. But they’re something I have never been able to resist.

I must have been about seven. My father told me that on my mother’s side the family once lived in a small castle. That night I had a dream: me in the middle of that castle, with my first sensation the horribly cold marble floor under my bare 24 feet. My mother is standing at the top of a high staircase, beckoning. An enormous door swings open. I follow her, but she keeps slipping ahead. Door after door opens, all lavishly ornamented with figures carved into the wood: angels swarming over each other, eagles pecking at each other’s bodies, writhing snakes. The last door opens. My treacherous mother has disappeared. I see a countess clawing at her neck, trying to dig out something rotten. She is followed by a maid in a white bonnet spewing blood in the privy. I see a count as a knight, holding his sword high in the throne room and with churning madness in his mouth. A greybeard, dressed in rags, sticks an admonitory finger in the air while a dog licks his unshod toes. A carelessly discarded banner lies at the foot of the stairs, stinking of mould. Outside the fish in the evaporating pond gulp for air, baking in the sun. Around that stagnant pool: the mutilated bodies of men, women and children with millions of green blowflies swarming around them, crawling in and out of their wounds, laying eggs. And yes, men with torches, them too. In the morning I woke up with the flu.

‘We can’t trust anyone.’

‘Who says you can trust me?’

Visibly shocked, Lode looks at me, searching my face for mockery or sarcasm, then decides to burst out laughing anyway.

‘Will, come on! Pull the other one!’

‘No, I’m serious. Who says there even is a “we”? Who says you can trust anyone without knowing?’

‘But you, I can!’ Lode cries, giving me a sharp poke in the ribs. ‘I can trust you.’

*

25 Me? That’s questionable, son, and I mean it. Not that somebody like me would have been capable of betraying Lode for any reason at all. He would have risked charges, possibly deportation and then death. That sounds a bit exaggerated, but it’s anything but. Two years after that poke Lode gave me, when the Germans had really started to shit themselves, they dragged people off to concentration camps for a lot less. In any case, does someone deserve to be trusted, even if he wouldn’t do anything to harm or betray his mate? There’s an old French police film from the seventies where Alain Delon’s character says that when it comes to cops, there’s only one correct way to approach them, and that’s with a combination of ambiguity and contempt. The reason I had to laugh when I heard him make that cool pronouncement was that Delon was playing a cop himself in that film. Policeman’s a strange profession anyway. I’ll tell you later how your great-grandfather stumbled into it. Or why not now? Get it over with. I accepted the job that had been arranged for me as a way of escaping the forced labour imposed by the Germans. Do you already feel that ‘ambiguity’ turning in your stomach? Youngster becomes a cop to avoid being carted off to Germany as a worker and, as a cop, helps to pick up people who want to escape that same forced labour. But of course with the Lizke family and their kind it wasn’t about work. Which is not to say that the Germans themselves knew what they were supposed to do with those people in the winter of ’40–’41. They had to get rid of them, that was all. Worse still, back then there were plenty of people in town who were pissed off that there were still Jews walking around at all. It wasn’t going fast enough for them. It’s one or the other, they said, you can’t have it both ways. If these people are so 26 dangerous and reprehensible, why is the city still lousy with them? How is it possible that the master race still tolerates this enemy of the people on the streets? Are they really going to wait until this riff-raff have been terrified into adjusting to our way of life? They could wait a long time. Never gonna happen. A leech can only do one thing—it doesn’t adjust. The Germans had been here since May. They’d conquered a whole country in under a fortnight as if it were nothing. Weren’t they ashamed of themselves for not finishing the job? And then, of course, the rumour went round that it came down to the sparklers, that the Jews were being allowed to stay to safeguard the city’s pride and prosperity: the diamond trade. They’re all the same, people said; even the Germans have succumbed to filthy lucre. Only a month earlier, according to a friend of my father’s who worked at the town hall, the Jews had come in to register as Jewish around the back of the town hall in Gildekamer Straat. There was an endless stream of people. Everyone at the office had to work overtime. My father’s friend said they were queued up out into the rain under big black umbrellas. They’d been ‘summoned’ to present themselves with their identity cards, a bureaucratic way of saying they’d better obey. ‘You have no idea, the things I saw there… It beggared belief. The way those fellows came in and all the documents they had with them. Don’t get me started. Poles, Germans… Family here, family there, and all those names. Some of them had been living here for years, but they still couldn’t speak a word of Dutch or even French. But the thing is, it wasn’t all beards and black overcoats. Sometimes women came in… real pin-ups. You’d fall over backwards if you saw them… Who’d have thought the tribe of Abraham included such magnificent 27 specimens?’ My father’s friend held his glass out for a refill. Only a couple of weeks before the mass registration cafés and restaurants had been forced to post a notice on the door if the business was in Jewish hands. But all those measures weren’t enough for the old bags and drivelling fools, the bellyachers and troublemakers. And suddenly they were getting what they wanted. Loads of Jews were being put on trains to the orchard town of Saint-Trond, which they threw into a complete uproar. People moaned and whined. ‘Why do we have to take care of the foreigners? Do you know how much it costs? And what are they going to do here? Help pick the apples? It’s the bloody season for it!’ After a few months the Germans let the lot of them quietly return to the city. That’s completely forgotten now because two years after that debacle they did know what to do with them and shipped them off much further east to places where the chimneys smoked and corpse after corpse fed the fires day and night. And no, we didn’t know those details at the time. But that the Jews and others were being dispatched to places where they would be given an opportunity to earn a place in the Reich by the sweat of their brows, no, that was something none of us believed. Only gutless wonders claimed otherwise after the war, and some of them kept broadcasting their craven slave morality by weighing one thing up against the other, what they’d seen and what they hadn’t seen, with an emphasis on that ‘hadn’t’, with their sudden myopia accepted by others for the simple reason that nobody, from high to low, from the permanent secretary to the provincial governor, from the mayor to a rookie in uniform like me, was free of blame. Difficult times—you’ll still hear people saying that today and also that you have to see everything in context. I’m with 28 Alain Delon—I say his view of cops applies to everyone: they were times of ambiguity and contempt, and in that they’re no different from any other times. In other words, they never ended, they’re still haunting us now.

A few years before you were born I had already considered writing down my experiences. I’ll tell you how that came about. It’s 1993. I’m sitting in my study, which looks out over City Park, and sorting out my papers. Not really. I’m actually just pretending to sort them out. In the next room your great-grandmother is lying on our bedspread, crying. I’m finding it an enormous strain. Powerlessness is exhausting. It cuts someone like me off from everything. Of course, I know why she’s crying. I just don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to think about it. And more than anything else, her tears make this the last place in the world I want to be. Anyway, it’s almost noon. There’s no food in the house. I’m hungry and my wife is definitely not planning on doing anything about it, even if I had the gall to ask her. I feel like some potted meat, duck rillettes to be precise, and I know a good butcher’s in Carnot Straat. The main thing is to get away from here, because I can’t bear another second of her wailing. The city has let itself be crowned European Capital of Culture and posters everywhere are celebrating the fact. If anyone had asked my opinion regarding which image to use, I would have pleaded the case for Mad Meg. It’s a miracle you can see this extraordinary painting by Breughel the Elder here in a small room in a small gallery. That alone shows who we are in this city and the painting itself is just as revealing: naked terror in plain sight, plunder at the mouth of hell. Having it right in front of your face doesn’t make a 29 revelation any less a revelation. Mad Meg rages and rants through an insane landscape full of war and memories, rendered in bright reds, blacks and browns. Eyes wide to see everything and nothing. Has she caused this horror or is she just caught up in the general bastardry and going along with it? You should go to that art gallery one sunny Saturday and take it all in. True, you can see it on the Internet and kids of your generation always find more than they search for. Go and see the painting itself and then look up how this revelation came to be hanging here. Maybe then, with your own brain-power alone, you’ll work out why it says so much about this city. But fine, back to 1993, when a poster with a photo of Laurel and Hardy as jailbirds was thought enough to herald a year of culture. They look crestfallen, as only they can. It’s obvious that they’ve just tried to dig a tunnel only to end up back in their own cell. I look at them and recognize myself. Blazoned above their daft faces is the question ‘Can art save the world?’ Get stuffed, I think. I want toast with duck rillettes. But at the end of Quellin Straat I don’t turn right towards Carnot Straat. I’m suddenly thirstier than I am hungry and keep going to the Geuzen Gardens, the square that only gets called that by the city’s most elderly residents, where there used to be four public gardens, each with a handsome statue of a renowned painter or notorious mayor in the middle and surrounded by trees that once shaded infatuated couples, who sat under them to hold hands. Now it’s always full of choking buses waiting to get a mass of day-trippers back home as fast as possible. There on the corner, on one side of the opera, is a large café with pillars that flaunt its faded elegance, a place I sometimes go to meet my old friends. It’s around 11 a.m. 30 I’ve hardly set foot in the place before somebody’s calling, ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in.’ A few old mates of mine are sitting in the middle of the dining room playing cards. I’m glad to see them, glad that I won’t have to sit at a table by myself like some kind of sad pot plant while I drink and reduce beer mats to little molehills of torn cardboard out of sheer boredom. Richard—built like a brick shithouse and a pal of mine, who, little over a year later, would be discharged from hospital with a plastic bag on the outside of his body instead of a stomach, and then carry it round with him like a walking skeleton for another six months before taking it with him into his grave—beckoned. Another one of the card players is called Leo. Since finding out that I’m a poet, the twerp has been addressing me as ‘Maestro’, half surly and half serious. He’s actually only known for a year or two, after I’ve been publishing for forty bloody years, but his attitude is typical of this city, as typical as it gets. I only vaguely know the other two. I sit down at their table and order a beer. They’re playing whist, a game I’ve never really understood. I sip my beer and look around. ‘Diamonds trumps!’ Richard shouts and winks at me while wiping the froth out of the tash that has won him honorary membership of the local Moustache Club, something he prides himself on. At that moment I’m already over seventy, but the salutary proximity of these card players reduces me to a child. It doesn’t last long. Between tricks Richard asks if I’ve seen Lode. He might just as well have given me a kick in the balls. ‘No,’ I say, looking away. In that instant I notice that a man at a table on the other side of the room is meeting my gaze through his thick glasses, completely unembarrassed. Balding and badly shaved, he’s looking at me as if I’m an exotic rat in 31 the nocturnal house at the zoo. I think I recognize him, but that’s impossible. The last time I saw him I was a cop of about twenty-two and he—and this makes my hair stand on end—just like now, was in his mid-forties. I’m sitting in one of the corridors of the SS Intelligence headquarters—at the time they were still housed in an enormous mansion on Della Faille Laan—waiting for some document I have to pass on to my inspector. It’s unusual because we don’t have much to do with the Gestapo. They run a regime within the regime. Still, around this time they have started to interfere more and more with ordinary policing. Field arseholes aren’t easy, but these plainclothesmen in leather coats are something else, one step up in the theatre of gross violence, where we have front-row seats and will later claim to have seen almost nothing. An office door is ajar. I see Four-Eyes standing there in a black uniform, his cap slanted on a bronze bust on his oak desk. I see him and I hear him, although I turn my head away now and then, just as I also turn away from him here in this café. He’s shouting and hurling papers at a woman, a Jew or a Jew’s wife. Yes, that’s it: she’s married to a refugee from Austria. I see her regularly at the baker’s in Jacob Jacobs Straat, where she buys cheese cakes and I sometimes queue up for my father because he’s so crazy about rugelachs. I recognize her profile immediately. She looks away from his black-uniformed spitting and yelling. He screams that she’s arranged it all very nicely, that every Jew out there knows somebody who’ll lend a hand in an emergency, and here, here are your papers, you lackey to a Christ-killer, here are the papers, and now your bloke can carry on profiteering, he won’t be put on a train to a work camp, relax, shouts Four-Eyes, rest assured… She stands 32 straight and proud, even thanking him while picking the coveted papers up off the floor. She doesn’t look at me on her way out, but he does. Four-Eyes stares straight at me. Just like now, in 1993. He hasn’t changed a bit. Not as well groomed, perhaps, but the expression behind those convex glasses is exactly the same. He stares at me through a rip in the curtain of time, then folds a piece of card and uses it to push bits of food caught between his teeth back onto his tongue before swallowing them. ‘Look at me here,’ he says soundlessly, ‘and know that I recognize you, and that you were once witness to an incident that almost cost me my head, or rather saved it, because in the end the bitch I treated with such disdain was willing to testify on my behalf when I was locked up with my comrades in the Harmonie. I had saved her husband, after all. Against my wishes, but still, I saved him, and in the end that saved me too.’

While Leo shouts that Richard is a first-class cheat because he keeps on winning and the others boisterously back him up, Four-Eyes stands, buttons his coat and nods his fucking head at me before leaving.

Richard, who’s sick of all the malarkey about his dumb luck, looks over to the bar and calls out, ‘What’s today’s special?’

According to the waiter, who knows his customers, it’s something light and easily digestible. I raise a hand, order a Duvel to go with it, and hope for the best yet again. Since retiring, I’ve had enough of excessive dinners. My stomach can’t cope and I go for the lighter things on the menu, but I keep getting it wrong and ending up with indigestion from a chicken salad that some twerp in a chef’s hat has drenched in balsamico or some other foreign vinegar. And bam, I’ve fallen for it again. 33 A salmon lasagne. Unbelievable! Surely this is the last thing you’d want to eat between twelve and two? So there I am… burping in the toilet with visions of Four-Eyes every time the strong beer and the so-called light salmon lasagne repeat on me. When I get back from the gents there’s another Duvel on the table. I drink it and then I drink another. With my head spinning and an unsteady hand, I finally say goodbye to my friends, explaining that I still have to go to the butcher’s. ‘The missus wants duck rillettes.’

At home your great-grandmother is still lying on the bedspread with that old, clapped-out body of hers, and still crying. It’s deteriorated into something that’s closer to a soft whimpering and to my not entirely sober ears it sounds almost melodious. In the old days she used to sing along to the operetta music pealing through our modest flat. She was the daughter of a peculiar butcher who had accepted me fairly quickly as a future son-in-law, but could no longer bring himself to trust me once we were actually married. Your great-grandmother had always wanted to be a nightingale of the stage, deploying her lungs in the service of Franz Lehar’s ‘Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiß’ or giving a rendition of something risqué by Offenbach with lots of feathers. But her father had never allowed it. ‘You can make a whore of her yet,’ he snapped at me just a few years after our marriage when the subject came up again over Christmas dinner, where he was tucking into the turkey rissoles daughter-dear had prepared with love, the very first since the wartime shortages. But it turned out to be too late. She already had her arms up to the elbows in suds washing our son’s nappies and shook her head the next day when I 34 suggested she could still go to the conservatory. ‘How would you cope?’ she’d asked and shrugged before I could answer.

I knock on the bedroom door. She’s finally let our cat out of the room and now the creature refuses to budge. I push her out of the way and, holding a plate of toast on which I have painstakingly spread duck rillettes, address the closed door. ‘Come on, you have to eat something.’ The sobbing stops for a moment.

She says, ‘Leave me alone. You have no heart, never have.’ She sounds like someone has forced a wad of fabric into her mouth.

I demand she open the door.

No answer.

‘It can’t go on like this.’

No answer. I hear her sucking in breath for a new round of tears. The cat yowls around my feet, then hooks her claws into my trousers, already angling for the delicatessen on the plate. The all-too-seldom-celebrated poet and once-capable cop just stands there.

‘I’ve got toast with duck rillettes. From the butcher’s on Carnot Straat.’

‘Give it to that filthy cat!’ she shrieks. I clench my fist.

‘I will do if you don’t open this door!’ No answer.

A marriage, dear boy, is an exercise in humiliation till death do us part. What people call ‘living together’ is a many-headed monster. If I strung those moments together, it would look like a cannibal’s trophy. The Hindus understand that too. You should look up their depictions of the goddess Kali some time. 35 She pokes out her red tongue and her blue neck is hung with hollow-eyed skulls that represent the humiliating moments both husband and wife know are best kept private. The only thing that keeps people going is the thought that this union has an unmistakeable purpose: everyone thinks you are part of it. I secretly hated your great-grandmother with a passion, but now I miss her like a typical loner whose life has crumbled away.

‘Here, kitty,’ I say. ‘Mother’s not hungry.’

The cat’s going berserk. She yowls as if she’s going to drop a litter any moment and follows me into the kitchen. Oh, by the way, are you a cat lover? If so, it might be better to skip the next bit. I scrape the meat off the toast and dump it on her saucer. She eats it with relish. I ask if it’s tasty. With a sigh, I plonk myself down. The supermarket vouchers my wife has clipped out of the newspaper are on the table. Ammonia: two for the price of one. Spare ribs on special. Free suntan lotion with the purchase of a deckchair. The washing-up on the worktop is from the day before yesterday. Unheard of. A smell of burnt bacon in the kitchen we haven’t renovated since the sixties, despite your grandfather’s complaints. ‘This is so out of date… How can Mum get anything done in here?’ Nothing doing, money’s money and what works works. The cat has hardly finished her saucer full of the most succulent meat you can buy before she’s started begging and butting my leg again. More, more, more. It’s never enough. Don’t, she’s had enough. And yes, she’s sinking her claws into my trousers again. Meow, meow. Then suddenly she’s sitting on her arse and scratching furiously under her chin. They’re back again: fleas. I reach for my ankle where a stubborn fleabite kept me 36 awake just last week. My wife has resumed her blubbering. Soon she’ll have cried her throat raw. I close the door. The cat won’t stop scratching. I take a bucket out from under the sink and fill it with tepid water. I take an unopened jar of full-cream yogurt and slop two big spoonfuls into a small bowl. ‘Here,’ I say, ‘you bloody fleabag.’

The cat can’t believe her luck and throws herself on the yogurt. The bucket is full. I push the spout out of the way, open the bottom drawer of the cupboard where I keep the gardening tools and pull out my gloves. They’ve hardly been used. Gardening is not for me and since the time she put her back out, it hasn’t appealed to your great-grandmother either. Did you ever meet her? No, you can’t have. Anyway, I pull on the gloves and bend over the cat, who doesn’t look up, of course, lapping and slurping as she is. If she could scratch herself while scoffing food, she would. Gripped by the scruff of the neck, she’s scarcely able to move. She growls, claws the air, then suddenly stiffens with her pupils wide. In a single movement I’ve plunged her deep into the bucket of lukewarm water. She thrashes like mad. Both hands push her deeper. The water goes in all directions. I press her down against the bottom as best I can and wait. Air bubbles rise and burst. I feel my old strength, no longer garnished with rage perhaps, but still. And then it’s like the cat swells up. Immediately afterwards she shoots up out of the water like a rocket, hissing and spluttering like crazy. All my squeezing in vain. Sopping wet, hair on end, she hurls herself against the closed kitchen door like a thing possessed, letting out a growl that no longer sounds like a cat’s. Thump! And again. And bang! Once more. I stare at my wet work gloves. 37

I hear her calling from the bedroom, ‘What is all that?’

Not a sign of sobbing in her voice. My hand on the doorknob. The cat takes a swipe at my ankle, her claw going through my sock. I make a failed attempt to boot her through the room, then finally open the door. The cat shoots under a wardrobe in the hall, still growling and spitting. An avenging demon has been born. ‘Proud of ourselves, are we?’ I hear her meowing viciously, ‘Very proud.’

That same evening I started writing. The heartburn wasn’t going away and I couldn’t get over Four-Eyes and how he’d kept staring at me. I never finished the manuscript and you can tell from the opening sentences how I was feeling at the time:

Listen to me. I am a legion of voices, most of which you detest, few of which I cherish. I am still breathing—of necessity—but all of you, if you knew this story, would begrudge me every breath I take. And that’s something I understand, because really knowing someone in the long term is not in your nature and I—unfortunately—am nothing but long-term. It has turned me into an avenging angel, anchored in the wrong, cowardly era. For me it’s truth that counts, for you the opposite: living day to day.

Can you sense my arrogant rage? It’s strange for someone like me, who was already at a ripe old age back then, to get the chance to reread something like this years later and recognize how silly it is. Also important: at that stage I still considered myself a great yet misunderstood poet. I felt that what you could call devils, if you like, had grabbed me by the hair and 38 were dragging me back into history after all those years to show me what I now consider the truth: it never ends. It’s also a fact that back then I felt too superior to even imagine that there wouldn’t be any readers for a book like that or realize that I wouldn’t have been able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion anyway. I had to wait more than twenty years to realize finally that my story is only suitable for one person, and that’s you, my great-grandson. Something else—and I know how grotesque this is, as if an aged prostitute is running through her old tricks one last time in the hope of outwitting her wrinkles, but I have to be honest with you and own up to it. I wasn’t planning on publishing that book under the name Wilfried Wils. I feel what little shame I have left rising, but I won’t back out now. I was going to publish the book under the name Angelo, my secret name, which now, unfortunately, in contrast to the old days, when I often used it as a nom de plume, suits these worn-out old bones like lipstick suits a pig.

It was in a wrought-iron bed, my mother had told me, a bed once made by my grandfather, a child’s bed made to pass the time, that I fell ill. I was wasting away. I was five and hope was fading with every hour that let itself be mustered into days that became weeks and finally months. But not a tear ran down my father’s cheeks. He had always known that his son, his only child, would survive him. My mother, less self-assured, convinced that she was and would remain a victim from the cradle to the grave, was already picturing herself walking beside a tiny coffin with a permanently smoking crater in her chest where her heart had been. The doctor—‘Geerschouwers by name,’ my mother said emphatically, as if a name 39 added even more gravity to this inauspicious story, and by the way, ‘long dead, son, stumbled in the street and broke his neck just like that’—well, the doctor had said that the trouble was inside my head. Meningitis. Whereupon years later my father still added ‘but the man-ain’t-rightus’, as if that daft claim possessed a magic to make people laugh the story off. Meningitis. And it was no laughing matter. It was 1925 and I had one foot in the grave. I can’t remember it at all myself, neither the illness nor the period that preceded it. The first thing I do remember, after four months in coma, is looking up at a strange man and a strange woman, and the woman being unable to stop crying because I’d opened my eyes. The man shouted, ‘Wilfried, Wilfried, you’re alive! You’re cured!’ but I didn’t have the faintest who this Wilfried could be. If my head hadn’t hurt so much I would have turned around to see if somebody behind me was answering to that name with a smile. They called Dr Geerschouwers, afraid that my illness had robbed me of my senses, and he explained that things like this did happen. And so this physician introduced me to my father, my mother and myself. ‘Your name is Wilfried, Will-Freed.’ They had to teach me everything all over again. I had to take them at their word. Believe that this funny man was my father and this bleating sheep my mum. I was five. I repeat: it was 1925. And after a while I worked out that it was better to act like I believed everything they told me. But it took more than a year before I automatically looked up at the sound of my twice-given name. Recognizing my mother and father and addressing them as such was easy, but the name Wilfried always chafed at a spot in my head where there already was a name, maybe one I had chosen myself or one that had been 40 whispered to me during my ‘man-ain’t-rightus’ period. Later, during catechism, I began to suspect that an angel had given me my true name: Angelo. That’s what I’m really called. Deep inside I’m Angelo. Maybe this Angelo was really a demon sent to deceive me, but in that respect, he differed little from the two I was forced to call my parents from the age of five, who also forced me to act like I was called Wilfried. No. No. No. Wilfried doesn’t have a story. Angelo does.

I’m more or less halfway through the moyenne, which is now called secondary school but also translates as average. I am a very average student and the time has come for everyone to see that as an insurmountable problem. My French is useless according to Cyriel Goetschalckx, a teacher who reprimands me with ‘Willlllfrit’ even before I’ve lisped a French sentence to complete ruin. A failing memory makes you jump shamelessly from one thing to the next. It’s all one big movie show and you project your own reminiscences at will. That’s why I can effortlessly convince myself that I sensed how the system works right from the start of the so-called moyenne