‘Bring your girl to Aunty Emma’s,’ my mother blurts, as if the day’s best thought has suddenly popped into her head.
‘Out of the question,’ I sigh.
‘But you’re hiding her from us!’
‘What I find a bit rich,’ I say, a little louder, ‘is her still living there…’
Those who call themselves my parents fall silent.
‘Now her Jewish bosses have been carted off…’ I add.
‘What kind of talk’s that?’ Father is immediately annoyed. ‘That’s none of our business.’
‘Wear your uniform, Wilfried. She’ll like that!’
Aunty Emma is in the hall and shining. She could easily pass for ten years younger, as if she spends her nights on a drip filled with the elixir of youth. There is a nip in the autumn air as she stands there in a summery floral frock with a deep neckline. She has been to the hairdresser’s and her lips are painted a vibrant red. Father’s eyes almost pop out of his head.
‘Careful. You’ll catch your death!’ Mother hisses, suddenly fifteen years older, suddenly even more grotesquely wigged. Mother did sprinkle herself with lily of the valley an hour ago, something she rarely does and which led my father to decide she was losing her marbles.
‘But our Wilfried is wearing his uniform! He looks so handsome! Come in, quick!’
We climb the wide marble stairs with our hands on a wrought-iron bannister decorated with creepers and black hearts. The first-floor doors, more like wooden gates, are wide open. A gramophone is playing. A male voice sings: ‘Einmal wirst Du wieder bei mir sein…’ Persian carpets are spread over the floor of a large room. On a side table, encircled by a chaise longue, a burgundy divan and upholstered armchairs, is a beautiful cake, topped with fresh strawberries for fuck’s sake.
‘Goodness,’ my father says, rubbing his trousers.
‘Sit down, everyone! Make yourselves at home.’
We each choose a spot and sit down on the edge of our chairs, ready to leap up at any moment if some baroness or other should rebuke us. That’s not entirely ridiculous; there are ghosts in this apartment.
‘Tea? Coffee? Or would you like to go straight to cognac?’ My aunt bares her pearly whites in a smile, as if posing for a pre-war brand of toothpaste.
Mother tries to take on the role of elder sister, she who knows when things are threatening to get out of hand, she who sees things coming while they’re still light years away. ‘Easy does it, Emmy. Coffee is fine.’
Father nods like a fish out of water.
‘Schatzi! Meine Gäste sind here.’
Aunty Emma’s German doesn’t make me want to laugh. You hear attempts like that everywhere these days and who’s to say I will ever master the language of Goethe? Through an open door at the rear we hear a hummed reply. I see my father rearrange himself in his chair, as if surreptitiously farting. I hear him swallow. Mother straightens her back.
He appears smiling, still doing up the top button of his uniform.
Big. Red hair. Mein Freund Gregor.
And yes, the officer clicks his heels, brushes my mother’s fingertips with his lips and gives my father and me robust handshakes. A textbook Prussian from head to toe. My heart is racing. I really would appreciate it if he didn’t let on that we have seen each other before in a sleazy bar on België Lei. I am also picturing the way he rages and storms in the stories Meanbeard has told me. But now we’re here together in the former residence of a wealthy Jewish family. He’s in uniform and so am I.
‘Very pleasing to meet you.’
‘Almost right, darling.’ Aunty Emma gives us a wink. ‘It’s important for him to learn our language, you know.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ says Father with forced joviality. In that very instant I think I hear him let go a quiet fart, awkwardly strangled, strained and nervous, like a child’s at a strict boarding school.
Mother coughs.
Gregor winks at my aunt, clearly infatuated and—in the experienced hands of one of our women—therefore doomed to become a lapdog. Probably with a little missus waiting for him at home. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s war. What story will he have fed Aunty Emma? Something that came to him easily no doubt. After all, this SS swindler is very plausibly acting like he really has just met me for the first time. Not even his eyes give him away. My armpits are starting to get clammy. The song finishes and the gramophone starts to crackle. He gets up immediately and turns the record over in one flowing movement, like in a film.
‘I can’t get enough of him!’ Aunty Emma laughs.
Revealing something that intimate is unheard of—it’s not our way, not the way we do things in this city. Mother almost jumps up she’s so shocked. But she suppresses it immediately. A different game is being played here, something foreign, from a different world, and everyone has to adapt.
Aunty Emma fidgets with her hair, suddenly exposed.
‘Warte mal!’ says Gregor, evidently struck by a bright idea. He lifts the stylus from the record and puts it back at the start of the song, walks over to Aunty Emma and holds out a hand.
‘Please, Gregor… Not now…’
But her lover insists. Aunty Emma stands up, quickly tidies her hair and starts dancing with him. The two of them sway against each other, somewhat clumsily because of the difference in height. ‘Komm zurück,’ gushes the male voice. ‘Ich wa-a-a-arte auf dich, du bist für mich… mein Glück.’ They press closer together. Gregor’s right hand is resting almost on my aunt’s bottom. She has closed her eyes in the meantime, drifting off in a dream from the cinema. We sit there gawping at them. My father pats his trousers a few times uncomfortably, as if trying to tap along to the music. Completely mortified, Mother searches through her handbag, finds her embroidered hankie, buries her face in it and blows her nose. At last the song is over.
‘Soll ich?’ asks the SS officer, nodding at the cake.
‘Bitter sehr!’ his blissful flame answers.
And right away he cuts the cake delicately but without hesitating in equal pieces. Aunty Emma passes round the plates. We eat. No, it’s more like unabashed feasting. Biting into whipped cream and staying polite—not easy. To everyone’s relief none of us are required to say very much. Aunty Emma carries on with an explanation which soon descends into incomprehensibility, interrupted now and then by Gregor’s chortling.
‘Und jetzt Cognac!’
Gregor gently swirls the generously filled balloon glasses before handing them to us.
Mother refuses politely. Father pretends to hesitate briefly before accepting the glass and taking a sip. ‘French, natürlich!’
Hearty laughter from Gregor and Aunty Emma. The German slaps his uniform trousers exuberantly as if it’s the best joke he’s heard in years.
Then he looks at me and says, ‘Sie sind Polizist?’
‘Jawohl,’ I say, ‘und stolz darauf.’ Is it me or Angelo who feels compelled to claim to be proud of my job? Or is it the cognac racing through my veins?’
‘Goodness!’ cries Aunty Emma. ‘Listen to him chattering away in German!’
Mother and Father look at me as if they have just realized they have been sheltering a monster all this time.
Gregor raises his glass high and gives me a droll wink as if I’m his ventriloquist’s dummy.
‘Auf eine brillante Karriere!’
‘Cheers!’ says Father, beating me to it.
The glasses clink against each other.
It’s not long before Meanbeard lets me know how much ‘mein Freund Gregor’ enjoyed our encounter.
‘I knew he had a Mademoiselle tucked away somewhere, but her being a relative of yours… Well, that raises possibilities, possibilities for both of us.’
‘Are you mad? Maybe you’re not quite right in the head?’
‘Toutes les possibilités harmoniques et architecturales s’émouvront autour de ton siège. That’s a quote. From whom?’
‘Rimbaud…’ I guess, sick of his guessing games.
All present in the White Raven look at the lady whose chestnut curls are peeking out from beneath a jaunty yellow cap, and especially at her legs, which are cheerfully braving the cold under a houndstooth coat and end in shoes with heels you would normally only ever see on cinema screens. Jenny’s here again, her decline almost hidden under a careful layer of putty.
‘You made me a promise,’ she says to Meanbeard without greeting him first.
‘Sweetness, come now! They have Export here, your favourite beer. Isn’t that good news?’
‘Save your jokes for someone else! You know I only drink white port.’
‘Landlord! A white port.’
‘And who’s this young fellow?’
She looks like she came within an inch of pinching me on the cheek.
‘We have met on a previous occasion, Ma Dame.’
‘Get an earful of him. At least some people can still act civilified. Yes, go ahead and laugh… It’s my own private word. I don’t want to be rude, but sometimes I prefer to hear something of my own invention. Our mum had that too. After she found out our hairdresser was the goalie in his pub team she used to call him a nincompkeeper.’
We laugh. Jenny takes a big slug of the port and says she can go on for hours with all her made-up words.
‘She’s right!’ Meanbeard crowed. ‘She can go on for hours!’
‘But I’m not in the mood for that today. So, friend, what’s the story? You make me a promise and then I don’t hear a thing. Or are you too embarrassed in front of your cultured pal here?’
‘I’ll leave you alone then,’ I mutter, a little tetchy.
‘No, don’t,’ Meanbeard hurries to say, ‘no need. I promised our Jenny a little boutique, here close by, on Charlotta Lei…’
‘Boutique is not the right word, eh, lover. The shop in question is a tobacconist’s, as it says so grandly on the facade. Or would you like to turn it into a clothes shop? Then you can call it a boutique and you won’t hear me complaining. I’d much rather have something like that than a smoky hole in the wall where blokes go for their baccy.’ And, gloop, with that Jenny’s port glass is empty. Meanbeard snaps his fingers at the landlord, but that’s something you’re not allowed to do in bars like this, not even when the boss is a friend of yours. The finger-snapping is therefore ignored. But Jenny holds her glass up in the air and the landlord soon trots over with the bottle. He tops her up without a word.
‘A shop,’ I say. ‘Big plans.’
A contemptuous sigh escapes Jenny’s lips, not so very loud, but enough to keep her paramour, her no-account lover, on his toes.
‘It’s a question of timing, not money,’ Meanbeard continues quickly. ‘Mein Freund Gregor and I have to visit the fellow sometime. It seems he has a Jewish shop assistant who doesn’t always wear her star. She has to go, of course. That’s easily fixed, probably next week. And then it’s up to our Jenny, with her beautiful eyes and fine figure, to go in and ask sweetly if the shopkeeper doesn’t happen to have a job for her.’
Jenny raises a gloved hand. ‘The idea is still that I’ll take over, isn’t it? I’ve had enough of all these blokes telling me what to do. I want to be able to stand on my own two feet. I’ve really had enough of it. The things I’ve seen and had to put up with.’
‘Not so fast, butterfly,’ Meanbeard hushes her with pursed lips. ‘One step at a time. Patience.’
I close the door of the White Raven behind me, well sloshed after a few too many beers. At the corner of Charlotta Lei and België Lei, a strong autumn wind lifts a stencilled sheet up from the cobbles, pushes it against my trouser legs, then deposits it next to a puddle full of rotting leaves. I plant my foot on it, read the heading and look round before picking it up and quickly secreting it away, because having this kind of publication in your possession is severely punished, maybe even with death if you’re unlucky. Killed for the possession of clandestine words! Angelo grins. Everything counts now and everything is dangerous. I wrote it before, son, this is life on the razor’s edge. Sometimes, like during a walk I just described in ever stiller streets with hardly anyone on them as dusk approaches, I see dramatic letters appearing on a screen, accompanied by stirring music, like posters for a film from a Germany that has long since disappeared and is already almost forgotten, although it’s only ten years or so since German films like that were screening here too. ‘Fear in the Metropolis!’ ‘Around Every Corner: Danger!’ ‘Terror on the Streets!’ In retrospect they were dress rehearsals, films like drill sergeants shouting that the end is nigh, that the world could expect a criminal mastermind to emerge, that we would soon change into a bloodthirsty mob or a gang of indistinguishable slaves with downturned eyes and hanging heads, undergoing the scourge of a dictatorship propped up by our own leaders. Films like that have now been banned. Now shivers run down my spine when I read the leaflets produced at risk of their makers’ lives. For years before the war, films and books depicted fear as if enticing us to one day create a real occupied city where fear and all the rest of it are completely normal.
I pull the piece of paper out of my pocket and look at it again. The underground press’s block letters are messy and smudged: ‘First the Jews, now us!’ No, it would be better to tear it up immediately instead of holding on to it as a keepsake. The wind carries the pieces of paper off one after the other. Then I see someone waving at me from the far side of the crossroads. It’s Meanbeard. He calls my name.
‘What did you say?’ I shout back and start giggling because I sound so silly, so drunk, so pissed off my face. He keeps waving and gesturing for me to come towards him. He meets me on the corner of Lange Leem Straat.
‘I saw you still standing there,’ he pants. ‘It’s a bloody… It’s…’
‘What?’
‘They just found him. The whole bar’s in an uproar. It’s un—’
‘Who?’
‘Didn’t you hear the shot? Someone must have… How can we have not—’
‘Please, calm down.’
Further along people are standing in a circle on the pavement in front of the White Raven. I see Jenny hurrying back into the bar, a gloved hand over her mouth. Meanbeard takes me by the arm. The circle grows a little wider. Eduard Vingerhoets is lying there. Something, probably a bullet, has turned the back of his skull to mush. His right arm is pointing at the door of the bar, his fingers curled as if he could almost reach the handle. It’s like the Finger was put down just before the finishing line, just before a cold beer and a whore’s warm bosom, put down just before it and therefore just in time. Lying next to him is a sheet of paper with letters stuck to it to form the sentence ‘An eye for an eye.’
Meanbeard drops to his knees in the mud and rotting leaves. He bows his head and starts to sob quietly like a little boy who’s pooed his pants and has nowhere to hide.
It seems the funeral was only sparsely attended. Meanbeard went, of course. Not me—I had to work. Every day the Finger’s widow shows up at our door. The first time she was granted a meeting with the commissioner, who no doubt told her he had every available man on the case and it was only a matter of time before the culprit was caught. Rumour has it that one of the Finger’s friends who works as a guard in the prison camp at Breendonk took revenge by clubbing three Communists to death, one after the other, in the middle of the inner courtyard with every prisoner—man, woman and child—forced to watch. But one story was immediately contradicted by another. For instance, that the three misfortunates wer
e slaughtered by a whole gang in a night of fear and terror. Or not—or perhaps they were after all, but there was more to it, because first they cut off their balls. But we are also told that the friend, whose name no one knows, has had to take sick leave because of a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile the Finger’s wife perseveres. With photos of her children in one hand and a wet hankie scrunched up in the other as a grieving aid, she has buttonholed every last one of us. Including me.
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