Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  The look in my eyes makes her blink for a second in confusion. I tell her not to worry.

  Karel is back at the table, rubbing his hands.

  ‘Another dance?’

  ‘Later perhaps,’ Yvette says. ‘Wilfried just asked me.’

  And that’s it as far as Karel is concerned. Never in a hundred years could I have predicted the transformation of goody-goody Karel into a self-assured member of the master race. If the Germans had never set foot in this country, he would have long since followed in the footsteps of his father the notary, bending over deeds of title and other documents. Instead he went off to the Eastern Front and came back a year later with a piece of shrapnel in his skull. He let them patch him up a little, then hurried back to his white hell. Immediately after the war I heard that he had been sentenced in absentia to death for high treason. But then he popped up again six months later, just when the first unsteady skeletons were returning from the camps and everyone was getting furious all over again, or at least pretending they were. They arrested him at Liège railway station, somewhat thinner, and definitely dishevelled, I assume, thanks to the Russian steppes and the horde of subhumans out for his blood, who had chased him and his SS buddies all the way from Ukraine right up the arse of his beloved Germany. His father set a bunch of lawyers to work: death was commuted to life, and in the end life was reduced to some thirty months after a couple of rounds of pardons. After that, clean and tidy Karel led the life of an accountant. His clientele was made up for the most part of former brothers-in-arms who he, as part of our never-ending national rebirth, was delighted to assist in scamming the state that had once tried to extinguish the eternal flame of their heroic courage. He died three decades later and left a bunch of sons behind, accountants to a man. Men like Karel never stop saying that they were the true idealists. Death to the Bolsheviks! There there, it’s OK, you idealist, you… They want you to forget the insignificant fact that before the war their lives were mapped out from the cradle to the grave. Escape was once nothing but an impossible dream, a task for a demigod like Hercules and not a shorn sheep called Karel. And then suddenly it was war, and life became a game again instead of a trap. Hidden under the white camouflage of idealism was boredom, a life sentence that didn’t even require a post-war court case.

  After the music your future great-grandmother suggests a little walk in City Park.

  The sun is still doing its best. We saunter. Pigeons take wing, blackbirds are singing. A lot of people are out enjoying the weather. All in their Sunday best, of course. It’s their park or, rather, the park is there for every citizen who has a right to a free day and wants to show, with wife and sprogs, that he is master of his own destiny and life is smiling on him. She’s taken my hand. It feels cautious and I allow it. My heartbeat does shoot up a little, true.

  ‘Don’t you mind us being almost the same height?’

  ‘No,’ I say, slightly thrown.

  ‘Most men prefer being a little taller.’

  She’s making me nervous. Next thing you know she’ll be talking about where we’re going to live and how many children would I like to have. Slowly we climb the hill because she wants to cross the bridge over the pond.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘No reason. It’s beautiful up there.’

  She hugs herself while leaning forward. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing at our reflection in the calm water. ‘There we are.’

  ‘Made for each other,’ I hear myself say to my own, instantaneous horror. Yes, laugh at my naivety. Just when it seems necessary to weigh every word, people are doomed to use phrases they haven’t got a clue about, that have already been used all too often.

  She smiles and says, ‘What would you know about it?’

  An uncomfortable heat rises from my arse up. I’m not good at this game. I’m an oaf. I hear Angelo sighing inside of me. Does it have to be this sentimental? Why not a poem? In the post next week? A poem full of words I’ve chosen myself can be warm, controlled and supple, but still have scope for some concealed darkness, sensual suggestions of things only soulmates can understand, a secret language evoking an abyss. We wander off the iron suspension bridge and head to the right, still strolling, drawing out the time.

  ‘Are you happy, Wilfried?’

  She doesn’t even look at me while asking. It’s not a particularly unusual question, but it’s something I’ve never thought about. It’s not even a word I have ever used in relation to myself—it would never have occurred to me. Now that she’s asked me, I suddenly know why. It’s a trap. It calls out for other words, for a future, for a life like everyone else’s, a single path you will have to stick to forever.

  ‘Should I not have asked?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘If it takes that long, I already know the answer,’ she says, thoroughly piqued. She hasn’t let go of my hand just yet, but that probably won’t take long. We reach the monument for the fallen with the king as a knight on horseback looking heroic on a plinth while heroes lie below him and someone holds up a flag. It used to be somewhere else, as if heroism can never settle down. I was ten when the king himself came to unveil it. Afterwards my father said: ‘The bastard, the bloody bastard… All the things he promised us, and he gave us nothing.’ When I cried in indignation that the king was a hero and his wife a saint, he gave me a whack over the back of the head and sent me to bed without any tea. ‘Your father doesn’t like to be interrupted,’ my mother told me the next morning.

  ‘Oh, you poor boy…’ Yvette laughs. My deceitful story has done the job. Angelo breaks into a teasing refrain inside of me: ‘He does it now, he did it then, he’s conned them all again…’

  ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I want to sit down somewhere. Preferably in the sun.’

  We leave heroism behind and move deeper into the park.

  ‘There, a bit further along,’ she points, ‘near the sandpit. I like watching children play.’

  People nod as they pass. We look like we’re engaged.

  I brush some sand off the bench. She waits patiently, then settles down.

  There are a few foreigners present, their children yelling and horsing about.

  ‘Busy, here. Nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘No surprise with weather like this.’

  ‘Can you believe that?’ says an old man who’s seen us looking at the children. He leans on his walking stick and hopes we’ve understood, that we too see the decline, the defilement.

  Yvette doesn’t answer, which says enough.

  ‘Stupid old git,’ I whisper.

  ‘You mustn’t say that, Wilfried.’ But she’s smiling.

  Anyway, it’s only a question of time, dear boy, before the old grouch has it his way. By the end of that summer Jews aren’t allowed in parks or swimming pools anywhere. Even before the war there were conflicts about it. People kept complaining about the Jew-loving mayor we had at that time, who didn’t do a thing to stop our parks from being overrun. How could he, they cried, how could he simply decide to shelter all that foreign scum in our city? Were we still living in a democracy or were we on sale to the highest bidder? Because twinkling behind everything in this city are the sparklers, the diamonds, and every new cleaver, cutter and polisher was another foreign degenerate to drag our city down, usually arriving as a refugee from a country that no longer tolerated their double-dealing. Decades later a famous cartoonist—no, not the one who did the book about the dragon—offered the city a statue of his best-known character, completely free of charge. But when he heard that the aldermen had decided to put it next to the City Park sandpit he was furious. According to him there were still too many Jews in that park. Ghosts never stop haunting you. Later he claimed to have been misquoted, if I’m not mistaken, saying it was the drugs and illicit sex that went on there that bothered him, but that was a feeble excuse because those sorts of things have always gone on and always will, especially sex. But more about that later; now I have to get back to your future great-grandmo
ther and me for the moment of truth. Just as an aside, I hope you don’t find this annoying. I draw strength from the thought that even a modern lad like you will want to know what things were like in the old days. Dead sexy, actually, if I can be coarse about it and express myself in a somewhat pathetic contemporary style for the benefit of your impatient generation.

  Anyway, what does she say as the old man disappears out of sight?

  ‘Come here, you.’

  ‘I am here.’

  ‘A bit closer.’

  I slide over to her. Boom, boom, goes my heart.

  ‘I’m going to write a poem about you,’ I hear myself saying.

  Angelo doesn’t say anything. I think he’s trying not to laugh.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you. Is that one of your talents?’

  ‘A doddle,’ I whisper.

  Her lace glove brushes my cheek. Her face is now very close to mine.

  ‘Come on…’

  And then her slightly flaccid lips press against mine. I gulp down my spit, and break off quickly.

  ‘Again…’ she says.

  This time I feel a hesitant lick of her tongue. I hear a gentle growl too, that makes way for a deep sigh, because my tongue has found hers for a moment. French kissing in public, that’s looked down upon, but Yvette couldn’t care less.

  ‘You’re cautious…’ she whispers.

  Then I take her face in my hands and kiss her again, hardly able to control the galloping horses in my heart, my tongue suddenly writhing around hers. A kiss that knits our fates together. All at once I spot a ladybird traipsing over her collar. That’s good luck, I hear my mother saying. Inside me it’s all Angelo and he’s showing me dead bodies.

  A mother comes over to us. ‘Hey, come on, not in front of the children.’ But her voice sounds gentle. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it, love?’

  ‘Look at him nod…’ Yvette laughs.

  I’m nodding like an illegal alien who’s just been stopped on the street. I form a smile and hope for a little benevolence. I am not yet a man, but I’m not a boy either. I’m a character on a postcard, the punchline of an affectionate joke.

  ‘You’re a handsome couple,’ the woman winks, ‘but tone it down a little.’

  I gulp for breath. Angelo shows me women’s nipples and mouths closing over each other. He shows me Yvette writhing underneath me or riding me like a goddess with her eyes half closed, groaning at every thrust, every shiver. I try to dispel it all with the thought that I’m, how should I put it, in… accepted by another person, bound by what must now come.

  Oof, just like that it’s snowing again. ‘Be careful on your bike,’ I tell Nicole, my nurse, glad she’s finally going and I’ll have the place to myself again. This morning she bought me a massive piece of bread pudding. ‘Don’t eat too much of it or you’ll get heartburn again.’ But a heart should burn, shouldn’t it? I take a big bite while gazing out longingly at the quiet that will soon return. I’ve spent a long time pondering that kiss I described for you. I shouldn’t have done that, because now your great-grandmother is much too young for me again, and too alive as well. That wasn’t the intention, which is to say, it’s something I hadn’t expected. The wall between my late wife and me went up years before she died. Do you know that poem by the joker who used to call himself Willem Elsschot? No, probably not. It’s called ‘The Marriage’ and it starts like this: ‘When he observed the way the creeping mists of time had dulled the sparkle in his wife’s blue eyes…’ People think it’s magnificently bitter and cynical, but of course like all cynics the author was really hopelessly sentimental. He didn’t have a clue what he was writing, whimpering in a corner about his wife’s weathered mug. You’ll probably accuse me of cynicism too; maybe you even see it in yourself, because you and other members of your generation are cynical without ever having experienced anything. It’s a pose that never grows old. Give it a little scrape with a sharpish knife, like scaling a fish, and what’s lying there? Bare-skinned passion. Without knowing it, we all reflect the things that surround us and everyone thinks that’s what makes them special and different from the rest. I see your great-grandmother dancing naked in the living room and she calls out to me to put the stylus back on the record because it’s such a beautiful song and she likes me to see her dancing like this and know that she’s happy, especially now, just after we’ve hurled all kinds of recriminations at each other. When exactly was that? I’ve forgotten. And that image of my dancing wife in the altogether makes me realize in turn that, no matter how much it annoys me, I mustn’t keep anything from you, not even things that happened between us as man and woman. It is still much too common for people to skirt around all those things as if they don’t have anything to do with what matters, what’s really serious, but all at once I’m struck by the conviction that that’s complete tommyrot, as we used to say, nonsense, and that the flesh mustn’t be avoided, and I have to stop feeling unsolicited embarrassment or worse on your behalf: all those memories of her body I summoned up to treat myself to a little melancholy, like an ex-smoker suddenly getting nostalgic about the days he spent rotting his lungs away one drag at a time.

  My faithful boots back on and we’re off. Instead of just crossing the road, I prefer to take a circuitous approach to City Park’s green triangle, now covered with white, stalking it like a puma with worn hips. I start by shuffling patiently and cautiously to the end of the street, where Quinten Matsijs Lei begins and where there is now a large police station. In my day, the police were not yet housed in this imposing building with its facade full of Freemasonry symbols. The police cars and vans in front of it are covered with snow. I cross over and go round the corner. Standing on the edge of City Park is a statue of a ‘socialist leader’ they plumped down there sometime in the late eighties. I see it and burst out laughing for the first time in ages. The snow has given the sculpted leader a dunce cap. The sculptor provided the smirk on his face. He stands there eternally relaxed. His right hand is resting casually in the pocket of his waistcoat and his raised left hand (he is a socialist after all) is pointing ahead. If you follow the direction of that finger it seems to be aimed mockingly at the church on Loos Plaats, which has now been taken over by Orthodox Russians. You can almost hear him thinking: ‘Just look at that, look at the faithful thronging together in that building to pray to God and whatever. It’s so primitive.’ At the same time he seems to be trying to distract attention from what’s going on behind his back, as if what happens in City Park doesn’t count. Yes, that’s how I read him: ‘Follow my socialist-leader finger and, whatever you do, don’t look at the park.’ I told you about the cartoonist who thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah, didn’t I? He seemed to be suggesting that it used to be different, that in the old days, homosexuals didn’t go there to grope each other in the moonlight or that the park never used to accommodate other forms of carnality. Total bullshit, of course. I can tell you this: during the war a lot of policemen avoided that park like the plague once it got dark. People were having it off there all the time, both men and women and blokes together.

  Was it the autumn of 1941? I’m not entirely sure. I’m standing on the edge of City Park with my older partner, Jean. In earlier days he might have been a Viking, the kind who leaps out of his longship feet first into the swash to plunder a port at a hundred miles an hour, ravaging women, setting houses on fire, then sailing further up the Loire deep into the heart of ninth-century Franconia. There’s no point trying to calm someone like that down. You trudge along behind and hope the damage won’t end up being too disastrous. His wife runs a bar on the Waag that doesn’t have a single respectable customer and that’s thanks to Jean’s reputation. The place is full of riff-raff: gangsters, pimps and seriously disturbed womanizers with political connections. Jean knows them all by name. They hardly make a profit. ‘Zulma, give us another round!’ is one of his favourite exclamations. But anyone who runs his tab up too much and then lets it slide for weeks on end is dicing with danger because Je
an is just as likely to pull out his truncheon and beat the miscreant within an inch of his life. He’s had a few opportunities of promotion and has always turned them down. Since then his superiors, too, have treated him with some degree of caution. Or is it because he knows so many people around town, a lot of people, and doesn’t use those connections openly, so you never know for sure? He’s told me straight out he’s in the lodge, an organization of freethinkers the Germans dissolved some time ago. If anyone with bad intentions had found out, he’d have been picked up long ago. But he trusts me. At this stage everyone still seems to trust me.

  I say, ‘Jean, just go by yourself.’ It’s about 10 p.m. and Jean is bored. There’s not enough happening. The streets are quiet and we have at least four hours to go.

  ‘Don’t be so gutless. We’ll just walk through the park, that’s all. Are we in charge here or not?’

  I’m better off not answering that question.

  ‘We’re just going to have a look to see who’s skulking around in here with his pants down around his ankles. And you’re coming with me.’

  We walk over the iron suspension bridge. Nothing to see. But further along in the bushes, as expected, we hear the drunken laughter of German men, coupled with giggling in our own language.

  ‘See, told you so…’ Jean whispers.

  ‘Come on, this is ridiculous.’

  ‘Public indecency ridiculous? I don’t think so.’

  Jean creeps over to the bushes the noise is coming from and says loudly and clearly, ‘Polizei! Papiere, bitte!’

  Two stupefied Luftwaffe officers push the shrubbery aside. They have two women with them, clearly locals, completely sloshed and with their tits out.