Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  I too am led through the shopping streets the same way: like an overgrown child—without a memory, without any past, without any cheerful criticism of this much-praised present. Criticism my granddaughter used to provide nonstop, to my surreptitious pleasure. Today it occurs to me that hers must have been the last intimate voice of resistance in my life, bright and merciless.

  Now there’s only silence, unless you count Nicole’s lively cackle.

  When I walk through the city alone, I tell myself I can still manage. With her next to me, the fear of stumbling again and being doomed to a wheelchair starts to rise. At times like this I’m tormented by a dream of being weightless again in the arms of a father who never convinced in that role. Back then the forces that were determined to turn everyone into a docile child instead of an independent adult were omnipresent, just like now.

  ‘Are you short of breath?’

  ‘Why should I be? Because of all the windbags round here?’

  ‘Here we go again,’ she says, laughing.

  We cross The Boulevard and I see the brightly coloured masses streaming towards me from the Meir.

  ‘Do you really need to subject me to all this?’

  She squeezes my hand and for a moment I seem to sense regret at having brought me with her, that she is scared I might fall arse over tit on the spot, inasmuch as I have any kind of arse left.

  ‘It’s not much further. And then we’ll have everything in one place: there’s a shoe shop, and we can find trousers there too, and there’s a shirt specialist for a couple of new shirts like you asked.’

  A shirt specialist. She’s said that to put me at ease. I used to prefer bespoke shirts, but in these banal times I have to make do with a shop that specializes in shirts only. It’s been a long time since I was on the Meir. Even when cars were still allowed here, this glittering shopping paradise lay with its legs spread wide. I’ve never known it any other way. I am one of the last of a generation that weighs everything against war and I can’t help but see the boisterousness of the present as a thick scab over the wounds of the past. There is much too much buried in both me and the city. In the sixties the longhairs said there was a beach under the paving stones. Idiots. It’s deception buried under those stones. Lever them up and the dead will dance. They’re already bloody dancing—there’s one over there. I see her standing next to me with an accusatory look. Who failed to protect you, Hilde, my beautiful, foolish, troubled granddaughter? Was it me or someone else? Or did we all make a mess of it together?

  ‘You’re sighing as if you’ve had another difficult night of it, Mr Wils.’

  ‘Wait until you’re old, Nicole.’

  An open maw of gold and glitter gapes on the left side of the Meir. A well-trodden red carpet extends like a forked tongue lolling out of a fancy mouth full of perfect white teeth. Through a gully flanked by promotional percentages in fluorescent colours (‘–50%’, ‘–70%’, ‘Last-Chance Renovation Sale!’) we enter an enormously wide space with people drinking champagne on a platform and tables left and right with even more shops behind them, more lighting, more tinsel. Music and loud conversations creep up to the top of the tall walls, where they are captured in a glass dome before falling back down again.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.’

  ‘This used to be the festival hall, Mr Wils. You remember that, don’t you?’

  A snake slithers through my guts and into my throat. ‘Was that here?…’

  Nicole looks worried.

  ‘Let’s go over there and sit down for a moment.’

  ‘Bit of heartburn,’ I groan, suddenly feeling like a wrungout dishcloth.

  ‘Sit down. I’ve got some lozenges somewhere. I’ll fetch you a glass of water.’

  She only has to rummage in her bag and the lozenge is lying on my wrinkled hand. I suck it and look round. She beckons a waiter who is dressed in black, with a black hole in one ear and the little hair he has left sticking straight up in stiff little wisps. I sip a glass of water while the mint taste of the lozenge makes the sour snake recoil.

  Nicole stirs her café au lait.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I stare into her candid eyes because I’m in need of some distraction. No, she doesn’t have a man. I don’t believe she ever has. Does she prefer women? The possibility can’t be excluded, but I doubt it very much. How old is that sinewy body of hers, with those frank eyes and that buzz cut with grey gleaming through it? Pushing fifty? Mid-fifties? But she must have known love, or instead of it a deep calm. Maybe she overcame herself or completely reinvented herself, going against everything others ever expected of her.

  ‘You have a scoundrel’s eyes, Mr Wils.’

  ‘I’m just looking at you.’

  ‘We’re not going to start acting silly, are we?’

  ‘To my eternal shame I have to admit that I don’t know a thing about you, that I’ve never even asked. I suddenly felt a bit embarrassed about it.’ I take another sip of my water.

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘Just tell me something.’

  She comes from a wealthy family. Her mother has been dead for ages, apparently from the misery of an unhappy marriage. Her father, unfortunately, still only has one foot in the grave, her own words. She visits him now and then, but doesn’t really look after him, although that was once her plan. But the old man refuses to go along with all of that and pretends he doesn’t recognize her any more. She was a rebel as a child. I believe that at once. She didn’t give a stuff about money. Her father’s friends were all well-to-do and decadent. The things he put her through. She’ll tell me about it some other time, if stories like that amuse me. Holidays in Spain on some mountain somewhere, unbelievable. Madness. But anyway, she chose her own path and emerged the stronger for it. Caring for others has become her life, it’s her passion, but… And then she starts off about all kinds of fuss and bother at work, cutbacks, gossip, inspections, superiors who don’t know what caring for others is all about, all of the palaver involved, and so on. I nod encouragingly in the hope that her story might take another turn, if necessary the women she’s been to bed with who turned out to be no good after all, for instance, but my nods don’t help, no amount of self-hypnosis can help me any more.

  Her voice keeps getting thinner and her stories impossible to follow.

  I give up. I sigh. I lose myself in the festival hall of yesteryear and the events that once took place in this monstrous, golden, consumerism-steeped shithole.

  On the corner of Brialmont Lei, where it’s already hard to imagine that not so long ago Jewish children with yellow stars sewn onto their coats walked past on their way to school, Omer Verschueren is waiting for us. The lawyer I witnessed in all his glory when he was smashing the windows of the Oosten Straat synagogue with an iron bar doesn’t recognize me. The puffed-up bastard needs to be crushed one day. It would be a shame if he got to draw his last breath peacefully in bed.

  ‘Call me Omer,’ he booms. This time, thank God, Meanbeard skips the song and dance about introducing me as his great literary friend. Instead he asks his mate with a wink if he has ‘everything’ with him.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ the lawyer answers, patting the left side of his chest.

  I turn my collar up against the biting wind, rub my hands to warm them and ask what we’re going to do.

  ‘Play detectives!’ Meanbeard giggles.

  ‘That’s right, young friend,’ the bear growls just as cheerfully. ‘He’s Sherlock Holmes and I’m his Doctor… what’s-his-name…’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson!’

  *

  The doors are wide open. A long queue starts out on the Meir and winds into the building, past the wainscoting, under a yellowish light, deep into the broad lobby where it branches out to five neatly lined-up tables, with two civil servants at each with lists of names in front of them, stacks of ration books and an array of stamps next to open inking pads. People used to come here
to dance; now it’s a distribution centre for ration books. We turn down a side street and go through a door that opens onto a corridor at the back. Meanbeard whispers something to a caretaker, a little fellow with tufts of hair growing out of both ears and little shaving cuts above a greyish collar. Startled, he jumps to his feet and leads us to a small room in the belly of the building. No windows. Nothing on the walls. A bare bulb. Two simple chairs and a steel table. Without a word he leaves us there.

  ‘What time is it, Omer?’

  ‘Dead on ten o’clock.’

  Omer stretches and tosses his overcoat at the table. Something heavy falls out of his jacket onto the chair. Omer reaches for it and puts it on the table.

  ‘You acting in a gangster film?’

  ‘You’re right,’ the lawyer says, putting the pistol back in a deep inside pocket.

  ‘He has a permit,’ Meanbeard winks. ‘Me too, by the way…’ And he flashes his inside pocket with a butt sticking up out of it.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I say.

  The two of them look at me. Meanbeard gives a paternal shake of his head.

  ‘What you’re going to do is very simple. Go and join the queue. That’s all.’

  ‘My mother’s already picked up our books.’

  ‘All you have to do is keep your eyes open. There’s a big chance all hell’s going to break loose. Some people are going to try to slip away. It’s very likely there’ll be people you know amongst them, people from your station, but in civvies. Just keep your eyes peeled. We’ll do the rest.’

  ‘And what if I’m recognized?’

  Omer laughs. ‘Nobody’s going to want to see anything or recognize anyone. You get me?’

  Someone knocks discreetly on the door.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come in.’

  The caretaker with the tufty ears nods timidly in the doorway.

  ‘I’ve told the men inside you’re here. I had to come and tell you that somebody’s presented three books. Two of them with names on the list you provided.’

  Meanbeard rubs his hands together theatrically. ‘Tell them to take him aside for now.’ The caretaker nods timidly again and closes the door behind him.

  ‘What kind of list?’ I hear myself asking.

  ‘Our friend Wilfried doesn’t quite get it.’

  Omer shrugs and scratches one of his armpits. ‘Not everyone knows the tricks of the trade…’

  ‘It’s actually very simple. First of all we’re not rid of the Jews yet. That’s because, second, there are still idiots who believe they should help them. And third, we’ve found out that those idiots are so idiotic they think it’s enough simply to queue up with the Yids’ ration books and then provide them with food. How crass can you get? And now get out of here, Wilfried. This isn’t your place. Go and join the queue.’

  I go back out through the corridor and emerge in the narrow side street, where a removals truck is now parked together with an army truck from the Field Gendarmerie and a car in which I recognize the Oberscharführer, dressed in civvies and sitting in the front next to the driver. He gives me a vague smile when he sees me. I hide my red face deep in my collar. It’s the first time our paths have crossed since the commotion in the Hulstkamp. I think: ‘It’s a game, stay calm, this is manageable.’ But of course, I don’t know anything for sure.

  Close together, whispering to each other, I hear the mumbling of the people who are waiting. Nobody looks at me. Some of the women have small children with them. A four- or five-year-old whines that he’s tired. His mother tries to hush him with a teddy bear. ‘I can’t believe they couldn’t organize this better,’ mutters someone. ‘Typical town hall,’ says someone else. ‘If the Germans arranged it, it’d be a lot better. You can take that from me,’ says yet another. The last voice is a little louder, but no one reacts. Other conversations are about the bloody wind that keeps blowing, the falling leaves, or that aunt with phlebitis in her leg who can’t get a proper doctor and yes, then you have to lend a hand, of course, even though she’s a right bitch, excuse my French, and it would be nice if it wasn’t always my side of the family doing the dirty work. Inside the building, people fall silent as if they’ve entered a cathedral with a dozen priests giving Communion at the front. Many keep their heads bowed, ready to receive some kind of blessing. I see Meanbeard appear at one of the tables. With a short bow he asks a man to come this way. I’m not close, but I can still make out his sarcastic smirk. Without hesitating the man follows him. By now I’m in the long second queue on the left. Time stretches out. I try to make out people I know from the countless backs in front of me, picking out one neighbour effortlessly because of the flamboyant wedge-shaped hat that marks her in my mother’s eyes as a woman of questionable morals. Then my attention is drawn by the ear of a man in the queue on the far left, four or five places ahead of me. Something tells me I know him, that I must know him, that it’s crucial I identify him. Discreetly I go up on tiptoes but still can’t see more than an ear and some black hair under a hat. You’d almost think… But that’s impossible. Then the hall stiffens. A sound comes from the room Meanbeard just led someone into. Everything goes quiet, only the imperturbable sound of the stamping of books continues. Something is hurled. A fist smashes down on a table. Now we can hear someone crying. The officials look at each other and promptly resume their name-checking and book-stamping. More crying and a loud ‘No!’ Now the crowd is getting restless. ‘What’s going on in there?’ People hiss, ‘Gestapo, Gestapo…’ Somebody curses. The curse moves quietly from line to line. ‘Bastards.’ ‘They’re at it again.’ ‘Is this really necessary?’ An official stands up, then sits down again immediately. Meanbeard comes back into the hall. His eye falls on a book that another official has slid to one side. Then he looks at the man at the very front who has just been wordlessly asked to move to one side. Again that sarcastic bow and a hand gesture in the direction of that small room. But this man, a giant of a fellow, an ex-military type with his hair shaved at the back and sides and a bulging bull’s neck, stands his ground. Meanbeard hardly comes up to his shoulders. The bull’s neck lets his vocal cords rip in the hall where bands played before the war, where the mayor gave his annual ball, where people waltzed and laughed, and men harassed women at the end of a drunken night. ‘Who’s asking? I’m not taking a step without seeing your papers! The idea of it.’ The man crosses his arms. Meanwhile I notice that the man in the hat I can’t quite place is unobtrusively letting others go first and taking stealthy steps back that bring him closer and closer to me. Meanbeard pulls his pistol. Everyone recoils. Some people, as far away from the weapon as they are, drop down with their hands over their heads. The people hiss. ‘Unbelievable… This is too much.’ ‘Who is that bastard?’ ‘Gestapo, Gestapo!’ A young chap in knickerbockers and a short leather jacket swears at the top of his voice, says, ‘I’m not having this!’ and tears back out through the doors to the Meir. By now the queues are swaying backwards and forwards as if on a ship in a storm. The confusion increases when Meanbeard points his pistol at the bull neck’s chest. ‘Now come with me, damn it!’ People crane their necks to see what’s happening up the front. The lines, previously neatly separated, are now jumbled together. Someone shouts, ‘Coward!’ A little old man tries to calm Meanbeard down, holding his hands out in front of him. I see the fist with the pistol go up into the air and come back down again. Cries of horror pass through the hall. Then I finally recognize the shadow on my left as he takes advantage of the confusion to make himself scarce. For less than a second our eyes meet. Chaim Lizke. I don’t know if he recognizes me and before I’ve had a chance to let it sink in, he’s gone. It’s almost incomprehensible. Then police whistles are blowing and two constables rush in, followed by the youth in knickerbockers, who seems to still believe that in emergencies you’re supposed to call in one of our boys in uniform. And as if someone up above is playing cards and laying down their trumps, I see that Lode is one of the constables, his face red with rage. Peopl
e are shoving and pushing. Children screech. Lode and his partner’s whistles are answered by orders in German. As if in a bad melodrama, mein Freund Gregor appears from behind the curtains, a mob of field gendarmes in his wake, all with guns raised. Lode is immediately surrounded and carted off. Meanbeard has disappeared. Everyone’s shoving their way to the exit. Children fall over, people yell and I, like a bungler who’s accidentally stumbled through the gates of hell, fight my way out too.

  It’s not till early evening that I summon up the courage to go to the butcher’s shop. By that time Yvette and her parents are probably worried sick. I’ve been sitting next to the pond in City Park for hours thinking about it, weighing up the different possibilities as if I, fool that I am, can save myself from the mess I’ve got myself into with a few masterful brainwaves.

  Yvette opens the door. Her eyes are red and the look she gives me is far from welcoming.

  ‘Oh dear, what now?’ I hear myself say bravely. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She wipes away tears and leads me upstairs. Her mother glances at me, but doesn’t say a word. She too has been crying. As usual her father is in his chair behind a newspaper.

  ‘This is bad for my ticker, people,’ I say. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Our hero’s barricaded himself in his room,’ the father says tartly without lowering his paper. ‘Ask him yourself! It’s not as if I didn’t tell him. Steer clear of that uniform. But the know-it-all wouldn’t listen. You see what bloody comes of it!’

  ‘Oh, Father, you’ve made your point,’ his wife whimpers.

  I go up a floor and knock on the bedroom door.

  ‘Lode, it’s me, Will.’

  No answer. I go into the room.

  Lode is sitting on the bed with his back turned.