Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  ‘Why do they call him the Finger? Just because of his surname?’

  ‘That too, but there was an incident in a bar with some floozy or other… Ah, I’m not in the mood for salacious stories.’

  He sighs and shrugs. His spirits are low. Gaspar the parrot died unexpectedly and his mother is not recovering well from an unfortunate fall down the stairs. Meanbeard has to do the shopping all of a sudden, along with the household chores. He says he has to read to her every day too, much to his annoyance.

  ‘You know anyone who’d like to earn a little on the side? Your girl perhaps? What’s her name again?’

  ‘Yvette…’

  ‘Even some cooking would help, a little cleaning… That would make life a bit easier for me. I’d like to suggest she keep my mother company with a book now and then, but knowing my mother, she won’t accept anyone but me for that.’ He sounds a little guilty. Or is that my imagination?

  ‘Yvette knows how to get along with people.’

  ‘That’s a good start… Would you do me a favour and…’

  ‘I’ll let you know this weekend.’

  ‘Ooph, it’s only just Monday. I don’t know if… But fine, I’ll be patient.’

  ‘So this Clement Bruynooghe was a friend of yours?’

  ‘It’s hard to believe… The cowards killed him like a dog. It’s provocation. They’re trying to intimidate us. But we’re ready. We’re prepared.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  Meanbeard lights his pipe. ‘Listen to Mr Silver Buttons here. You really are growing in your role as a policeman.’ He shakes the match to put it out and rubs his thighs. ‘Not the Jews in any case. They’re shitting themselves. They’re not that mad, everyone knows that.’

  ‘Apparently a few of them have been picked up.’

  ‘Of course. But I’d bet my life it was the work of a Bolshevik. One of those bastards in the resistance. Strange they use that name. In this Europe we’re the frigging resistance.’

  ‘But why?’

  Meanbeard looks at me in surprise for a moment, then starts laughing. ‘Jeune homme…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you think yourself? You saw with your own eyes how your fellow policeman, the Finger, reacted? Clement was one of us. He worked for the Sicherheitsdienst.’

  ‘I mean, why would anyone risk their life for that? There’s no point.’

  ‘A comrade is killed like a dog on the street and you start wondering what the point is? You think everyone always uses their common sense. I’m going to tell you something, my friend. These are challenging times, times in which everyone’s inner self is revealed. It’s like a striptease, and common sense is an article of clothing like any other. It gets peeled off and dropped on the floor with the rest. That’s all there is to it. In this town everyone knows everything about everyone else. They know who’s going along with the Germans. Admittedly, it’s not that difficult to find out. Only you seem to be lagging behind. You seem to be in the dark about almost everything. But it works the other way round too, doesn’t it? I can easily name a few blokes who could have blown Clement’s brains out. The Jews they picked up are gone for good, but we know where to find the real culprits. The fools didn’t stop to think about that.’

  ‘If you have strong suspicions you can always—’

  ‘What? Surely you’re not going to tell me to report it to your piss-in-the-wind police station. You’re not all there, are you? Just because you pull on a uniform now and then, you don’t have to go along with the boundless self-importance of your paymasters. Reporting something is the very last thing any of us would do. An eye for an eye, dead simple. One phone call and it’s done. But that’s another thing I’m not altogether in favour of. Not when it’s Clement. Shooting a wonderful fellow like that in the back, by God! That’s personal. That feels like losing a brother. The only retaliation for cowardice like that is getting your own hands dirty. Hey, why are you sitting there grinning like an idiot?’

  ‘Come on, don’t be like that.’

  He stands up abruptly. ‘You don’t know me well enough. Not me and not my comrades.

  It’s time that changed.’ It’s May and the sun is shining, but Meanbeard’s mother doesn’t want anything to do with it. The curtains remain drawn. From her throne, she gestures for Yvette to continue reading. My girlfriend is sitting nice and straight and clears her throat. As usual I have taken a chair behind the old woman. She tolerates my presence but when Yvette is reading I have to keep my distance. ‘From the start again, Mrs Verschaffel?’

  ‘No, child. We know it’s snowing and our hero doesn’t feel like working. There’s nothing wrong with my memory.’

  Yvette opens the magazine again. The cheap cover shows a drawing of a woman staring out at the reader with her eyes wide and her mouth half open. The story from Volume 9, Number 5 is called ‘The Curse of the Count’.

  ‘His eyes caressed the paintings on the wall and lingered on a photograph showing a medieval castle. There was a hint of discouragement in his eyes. That…’ Yvette’s voice is a little throaty. She coughs, turns back to the page.

  ‘Take a sip from your glass. That’s what it’s there for.’

  Yvette nods, drinks a little and, after glancing past the half-dozing woman at me, resumes reading: ‘That was not an unusual feeling for Robert de Tiège. In such moments he even doubted his talent. Life seemed dead and futile, despite art, his work, the honours and accolades. Certainly, he was successful! Beautiful young women called him “maestro” with a seductive glint in their eyes. For whom were their smiles intended: the artist or the bachelor? He did not know. Now, suddenly, he remembered…’

  ‘The blackguard,’ Amandine Verschaffel mumbles contentedly. ‘No surprise there.’

  Yvette looks at her defenceless victim, who is only seconds away from the deep sleep of innocence that only the very old can submit to, and smiles at me before reading on.

  ‘…that he had been invited to Madame Bressoux’s for luncheon. What should he do? Ignore the invitation? There would be postprandial dancing. The female guests would be pursuing potential husbands. Robert smirked. Good old Madame Bressoux!’

  Grunts are issuing from the easy chair. Like always I have to suppress my laughter. It’s strange that Meanbeard doesn’t like to read. After all, it never lasts much longer than one or two paragraphs. Then the old woman solidifies into an object which barely has a pulse, miles away from everything, especially her own ailments: the stiff hip, the eye that sometimes lags behind the other, the trembling that makes her left arm so clumsy, her son’s blows… All gone to the sounds of the slowly read sentences of a mawkish novel printed on cheap newspaper.

  ‘Yes, good old Madame Bressoux…’ I whisper after the grunting has given way to deep sighs.

  Nicole is in a tizzy. ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Do you really want me to read this to you? You, an educated person?’

  I admit it, son: I too have a weakness for trashy novels. I used to buy them at jumble sales: musty magazines from the war years, held together with two rusty staples, dragged out of some cellar to bring shame to my bookshelf with all their tacky plots: lost lovers reunited at the very end, a cursed castle, a devout notary and a malicious coachman, giggling girls and a countess with a hacking cough who wastes away in a box bed while the priest whispers a blessing in her ear. Things like that aren’t meant for your own eyes; they have to be read aloud, the way your great-grandmother once read them with pleasure to Mrs Verschaffel for a modest remuneration.

  ‘Come on, Nicole…’

  ‘Are you losing your marbles? I’m not going to accelerate your imminent dementia with this drivel.’

  I gaze at her with damp eyes until she sighs and pulls out her reading glasses and studies the shabby pages on the coffee table with her nose turned up.

  ‘Where have you been keeping this?’

  ‘Please, just read it…’

  Yes, it’s a story that could almost have been written by a ma
chine with a memory full of index cards that list everything the average person demands from their entertainment. It still grips my heart. I still surrender to it and reproach myself for never having had the talent to write stories like this, ones that are capable, even for just an hour, of transporting people to another world. Do you hear Angelo laughing? I do.

  Someone is singing a song in the White Raven, a bar on België Lei. ‘When their noses, when their noses, when their noses are so hooked. By hook or crook, by hook or crook, when their noses are so hooked!’

  Laughter. ‘Where’d you get that from all of a sudden, Sylvain?’

  ‘Come on, lad. Everyone knows that old tune.’ Sylvain winks and sips his beer.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ shouts the bar’s towering owner. ‘Now the penny drops. The giant song from the carnival in Aalst.’

  ‘Piss off. Dendermonde!’

  ‘Not at all, Aalst!’

  ‘Dendermonde!’

  Close to the table where Meanbeard and I are sitting, someone calls out, ‘Aren’t you from round that way yourself, Sylvain?’

  The barfly coughs discreetly. ‘On my mother’s side.’

  ‘Not born and bred,’ the man next to us laughs. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘Fill her up, landlord.’

  ‘Have one on me, Sylvain.’

  ‘Now he’s got his nose in the air!’

  Sylvain pops up off his stool and cheerfully whacks the bar. ‘By hook or crook, by hook or crook, when their noses are so hooked!’ He waves his arms like a conductor. A few people watch with amusement and someone joins in hesitantly.

  Like all bars in wartime, the White Raven is not well lit. There are a few brownish paintings on the walls, all clearly the work of the same amateur. A view of the Scheldt. The cathedral at dusk. An embarrassing ode to Breughel, with cheerful peasants raising goblets. A few illustrated proverbs, again inspired by the master. If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas. The horse that is next to the mill will carry the grist. No use crying over spilt milk.

  ‘Is it always this lively here?’

  ‘It has been known, yes.’ Meanbeard sounds distracted. I see someone coming back from the gents. The dim lamp above the bar shines on his nose. Meanbeard raises a hand to greet him. Eduard ‘the Finger’ Vingerhoets grins and strides over to our table. He forms a revolver with his thumb and index finger and points it at me.

  ‘I know you. Wilfried Wils.’

  ‘Wilfried’s a pal of mine, Eduard.’

  ‘Yeah, of yours…’ the Finger says scornfully.

  ‘What’s the matter? We’re both policemen, aren’t we? We’ve seen each other around,’ I say.

  The Finger snaps back at me, ‘You, a policeman? You’re a mole. I don’t count you as a policeman.’ His squinty eyes are close-set. He keeps staring at me as if he can see right through me, like a surgeon who’s just opened me up to see which bits are rotten. I don’t belong here, maybe not anywhere, and he knows I know it.

  ‘What’s got into you, Eduard?’ Meanbeard says, trying to rescue what’s beyond rescuing. The Finger and I continue to stare at each other.

  ‘What’s got into me? Nothing. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Leave the lad alone.’

  The Finger winks at me. ‘Shall I leave you alone? Seeing as your pal’s asking so nicely.’

  I shrug and sip my beer.

  ‘Come on, Eduard, change the subject.’

  ‘Fine by me… Have you heard the latest? We got him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The bloke who killed Clement like a dog…’ Again he looks at me and hisses, ‘You were there, weren’t you, when we found our Clement?’

  I nod. The Finger’s nose really is a distraction. It’s like you’re being studied by an anteater, as if his snout is constantly slapping you in the face. Only now do I notice that he has a moustache as well, more a pencil sketch or something that’s been applied with charcoal, a smudge above his little gall-spewing mouth. His lips form new words, revealing stained, rodent incisors: ‘We beat the shit out of the murdering bastard. We beat him until all he could do was blow little bubbles of blood.’ Again that look at me. ‘Off duty, of course. I wouldn’t want you thinking I give people beatings when I’m in uniform.’ Big grin, yellow teeth.

  Meanbeard grins along. ‘You handed him over to our friends afterwards, I hope.’

  The Finger gave a short shake of his head. ‘No, not this time. The Germans don’t need to be in on everything. We chucked him in the harbour with everything he had on him, Bonaparte Dock. Blub, blub. He went down like a stone. We won’t see him again. By the way, speaking of Germans…’

  Meanbeard looked at his watch. ‘Yes, he should have been here by now. But he’s a busy man. We’ll have to be patient. Landlord, another round!’

  The giant puts three foaming beers down on the table and wipes his paws off on his apron.

  ‘Lucien, this is my young friend Wilfried.’

  ‘Welcome to my robbers’ den.’

  The landlord leans on the table with his fists and asks what’s keeping ‘Red’.

  ‘I was just telling them. He’s coming,’ Meanbeard replies.

  Then the door swings open and a redhead walks in.

  ‘Speak of the devil and his German appears,’ Lucien laughs. The two exchange nods. The German is as big as the landlord.

  Meanbeard is up on his feet right away to shake hands. ‘Mein Freund Gregor, Wilfried. Gregor, hier ist der junge Freund.’

  I nod and shake his hand.

  Without releasing my hand, Meanbeard’s friend Gregor looks at him, ‘Ist er der Polizist?’

  ‘Ja, ja,’ Meanbeard laughs, ‘police.’

  Gregor slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Krieg macht aus uns allen Polizisten, nicht wahr?’

  ‘You’re exaggerating, Gregor,’ the Finger says, again looking at me. ‘Even war doesn’t turn us all into policemen!’

  ‘Schon gut, Eduard. Just joking.’

  Gregor nods to Lucien, who goes to pour another round.

  It was your father, long ago and before you were born, who ranted to me about the war in Yugoslavia. Everything he knew about it he’d heard on the telly or been spoon-fed by some newspaper or other that made a show of serving up your father’s favourite brand of truth in the hope that he and all the other outraged readers would hold out their bowls for another helping of indignation the next day. He was talking about the occupied city of Sarajevo, about the white trucks of the United Nazis (his words) that the furious residents of the city painted all the colours of the rainbow because they considered neutrality such a massive lie, an excuse for complete inaction. I let him rave on because it seemed to do him good and, what’s more, he seemed to think that I, his grandfather, was the perfect person to condemn a dirty war from the comfort of an armchair. I could tell that was a factor—that he hoped that I, with my past, would reach out to him, the grandson who had and would experience bugger all his whole life, and lend my blessing to his anger, in other words, tell him it was only normal for him to feel like that, that all war was the work of bastards, and he and I were slurping from the same spoon. He started telling me about the snipers in this current civil war, some place that was apparently called sniper’s alley with tall buildings where men with precision rifles lay in wait for a lady trying to do her shopping or a kid that had escaped the attention of its parents. He said everyone had become a target for those murderers and he wanted to know if I could understand that, if I knew how low people could sink and if I’d experienced things like that ‘in my day’. And writing this down for you, I think of the same things I thought about back then when I tried to answer him. Of course I’ve seen people who have been reduced to targets, ready to be destroyed because their time had come—no, actually because there happened to be a demand for it. And now, presumably, I’m supposed to tell you about June 1942, the month that all Jewish men, women and children in this city were ordered to sew a yellow star with a capital J on their coats. In the s
econd week of June I saw a long queue outside the school building in Grote Hond Straat, the very building where I did my democratic duty for years by lining up every now and then with my ID and my polling card to spin the wheel called ‘elections’ until I was sick to death of it, until I no longer felt like making a fool of myself in the eyes of the powers that be, who, because of their bureaucratic zeal can never be trusted and have always been occupiers, and always ready to lie flat on their backs as soon as some other power takes over. That same school building was where the Jews had to buy their stars of David (three stars for one franc), get a battery of stamps on their identity cards and sign neatly for receipt. Spit on the grave of Napoleon, who apparently introduced the scourge of bureaucracy to these parts, ‘for the greater good’ as they say, but in reality for the benefit of a civil service that one and a half centuries later was easily seduced into cannibalism. Our leaders are lackeys, son. That’s the tragicomedy: inside every ruler there’s an underling trembling in terror. Meanwhile the streets were full of people wearing stars. Some of them seemed ashamed, as if they’d contracted a foul illness for all to see. Others held their noses in the air proudly, prouder than ever of what we may as well call their origins. And we, non-Jewish residents of this city that prides itself on its roll-out-the-barrel and pull-the-other-one sense of humour, thought at first that it was a joke on the part of those ridiculously thorough Germans. But no, the whole city became a vile playground where bullying was encouraged instead of penalized. It was utterly disgraceful and it all happened in broad daylight. Of course, there were also those who casually let slip that only now could we really see how much filth there was out on the streets. Others thought they were being neutral by saying that the badges had the advantage of clarifying things. But once it was obvious that the stars were on people’s coats to stay, they were seen as normal and another effect came into play. The Jews’ timidity gradually increased because they knew that their stars had turned even more people into assistant tormentors, as nothing invites blows as much as vulnerability. Yes, mein Freund Gregor, war turns us all into policemen. Of course, so-called reasonable people never even mentioned this schizophrenia. Those kinds of feelings had to be hidden away. In circumstances like that, people inevitably think: ‘It’s them or us.’ Either become a possible target, or be a possible sniper. The last covering people pull over themselves is the white sheet of their own vulnerability, their being a victim too, no star on their coat of course, but threatened all the same, falling asleep under that sheet in the hope that when they wake up it will all be over. No, it’s not right to look down on something like that. A little recognition of that eternal ambiguity would be more honest. Listen to me blathering on, son, cackling like a chicken on its way to the chopping block. Back then, though, I just went along with your father about the filthiness of war, which meant I might just as well have said nothing at all. How do you explain what defencelessness is and what people can be capable of, if the person you’re talking to has never felt what it’s like to be a potential bastard himself? How do you tell him that to have never felt that way is both a blessing and a curse, and that armchair indignation is nothing more than blind hypocrisy? Sometimes people say you have to stand in someone else’s shoes to really understand their situation. But that’s hypocritical too, because when they talk about those other shoes, they always mean the victim’s. They never say a word about the shoes of those who might have felt stirred to join the persecutors. Before you denounce the bloodthirstiness of someone else, someone you don’t even know, who you’ve only seen on the telly or read about, you should be obliged to experience what it means to have a secret bloodthirst yourself, one that’s encouraged by the string-pullers, whose game you’re playing whether you want to or not—the bloodthirst, in other words, that is inside everyone. Your world, son, is full of screens, all they’ve offered your generation, your father’s and even your late grandfather’s is indignation on command, whimpering along at a safe distance in sympathy with the oppressed and the mangled bodies they describe in such sombre tones. None of you know what it means to be in the midst of violence, to really feel it, and most of the time I think it’s a blessing to have never experienced war at first hand. But when I hear yet another epistle from some self-proclaimed expert, I start to doubt that so-called blessing and see myself as a hypocrite, a traitor who has chewed over his heritage until there’s nothing left but a bland mush. Denying things, like how they started to say at our station: ‘If it’s a Jew, what’s it to you?’ But now I’m sorry. I never told your father all this because I just assumed he wouldn’t understand. His sister was burdened by the same questions. But I’m telling you now and now that’s all that matters. You.