‘Entschuldigung?’ Lizke squeaks.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Lode says with a contrived wink.
But we’re amateurs. We’re bunglers. We’re clowns. Our pigeon breasts are decorated with a row of silver buttons and our heads are crowned with white pisspots. We’re the start of a joke: ‘Two fools in fancy dress were walking down Keyser Lei with a Jew when…’ We’re done for, our uniforms are in danger of becoming transparent and the Jew seems to be marked with a star sewn onto the front of his coat and a target painted on the back.
At the corner of Van Ertborn Straat and Keyser Lei, close to the Rex Cinema, we stop. We can’t cross because of a demonstration. Dozens of men in the uniform of the Black Brigade are marching towards the railway station. Flags everywhere, banners everywhere. ‘One Leader, one Movement, one People’ we read on one and ‘Victory to National Socialism’ on another. They’re beating out a rhythm on drums and tambourines, singing and keeping step. But the crowd on the street aren’t cheering like they were a few years ago. Almost nobody raises their hat in the air or calls out ‘Flanders forever’. Hardly anyone even stops to watch, unless it’s the odd bumpkin in from the country, plodding around the big city for the first time and taking off his cap while staring at the ground, as if to show respect for a funeral procession. A few SS soldiers salute, that’s all. Between us we feel Lizke shudder. We’re holding him tightly but discreetly by the wrists. Finally the procession is past and we can cross over.
The Jew keeps mumbling, ‘Wir folgen den Toten.’
Following the dead, as if ghosts can dance in daylight.
We’ve almost reached the station.
It’s crawling with uniforms: SS, Wehrmacht, Field Gendarmerie, here and there one of ours. We keep saluting and stubbornly walking on at the same time. The Black Brigade turns left towards the zoo, probably for a recruitment speech full of hot air and blather, after which they’ll all salute the flag with their paws stuck up in the air. As the last of them go round the corner, I peer through the confusion—people rushing to catch a train, travellers standing at hotel entrances with their baggage, women kissing each other hello or goodbye and men patting each other on the shoulder—and see Omer and Meanbeard at an outdoor café. Like two vaudeville characters, they’re sitting there to soak up the sun. Omer raises a hand to order another. I pick up the pace, manoeuvring us away from the road and closer to the buildings, and immediately doubts rise. Did I see them sitting there or not? But I’m too scared to look back to check. I feel tainted, trapped, observed.
‘What is it?’
‘Let’s take the Pelikaan Straat entrance.’
‘Was ist los?’
‘Kein Problem,’ I bark at Lizke. ‘Calm bleiben.’
We cross the road. Lizke tries to wriggle loose.
‘Stop it…’ Lode snaps.
Trying to keep someone under control like that while hauling him to the side entrance with his feet dragging is a complete spectacle but no one in the crowd looks up. People have got used to it. They don’t want to know. Hardly anything even registers any more. Everything stays normal and will stay normal forever. I look back over my shoulder, half expecting to see Omer or Meanbeard trailing along behind, ready to collar us at the last moment.
‘Fuck!’ shouts Lode.
Lizke has taken advantage of that one movement of mine, that brief instant of inattention, to break free and is now running away from us like a madman, zigzagging between the travellers with his hat in one hand and a modest suitcase in the other. It takes a moment before Lode and I, totally stunned, have set off in pursuit. We follow him into the station and see him striding to the central hall. We push people out of the way. I reach for my whistle, but Lode shakes his head just in time and rushes to the Astrid Plein exit. I run up the wide staircase to get a better view. Sweat is trickling down my forehead. Nothing. No Lizke. Then I see Lode coming back by himself.
We’ve lost him.
*
‘Just tell us what it is…’
Mother can’t bear another second of her sister’s hand wringing. Father has taken cover behind a newspaper. I’m sitting numbly at the kitchen table, weighed down by deep sadness and not even capable of standing up and going to my room, too tired to withdraw like a sick cat under a wardrobe. How much longer must I be the son of these two?
Aunty Emma sighs. ‘I don’t want to bother you with it.’
‘Then go away again,’ Mother answers firmly. ‘You can’t come bursting in here with tears in your eyes and then start talking nonsense. I took our dinner off the gas just for you because I could see something was wrong.’
‘In other words, you’ve already bothered us,’ sounds from behind the newspaper. Father is hungry. He winks at me. I sigh in reply.
‘No, Father. That’s not true either. And you’re always welcome to stay for dinner. There’s not a lot though.’
‘Not like at yours, Emma,’ my father tries again. Over the last few months he’s developed an obsession with other people’s food, which in his fantasies grows more and more abundant compared to what we get at home. He mostly blames his wife for the consequences of the increasing shortages and my diminishing ability to find a way around them. She’s starving him.
‘Ah, shut up for once. I’ve bloody well had it up to here with your idiotic jabbering!’
Silence. Mother’s sudden outburst has stunned everyone. My father, who’s suddenly turned as white as a sheet, lets his newspaper sag. Aunty Emma’s mouth is hanging open. My mother has lowered her eyes, but she means it, that’s clear, she’s not taking a single word back. Father stands up, clears his throat and says he’s going out to get some fresh air. We hear the front door closing.
‘Good riddance with all his nagging,’ Mother says, still just as determined, without her voice trembling or catching. She nods in my direction and asks Aunty Emma if she should chase me off too. Then the two women burst out laughing. I stand up.
‘Not at all,’ Aunty Emma says, ‘just stay there.’
‘Has your German left you?’ Mother asks.
Aunty Emma shakes her head. ‘No, it’s because of what he just came to tell me. He’s completely distraught. I had to calm him down. I’ve never seen him like this before.’
‘Stop beating round the bush, Emma.’
Something I can’t quite place has slipped into Mother’s tone, as if her shouting just now has released something she has kept hidden from us all. Aunty Emma doesn’t notice; not that noticing things about other people is her strong suit anyway.
‘A month ago they got a new colleague from the Eastern Front, Hauptsturmführer Schmidt or something like that. Gregor and the others didn’t get along with him that well. I met him once. Very quiet, no drinker. He always looked like he was in a complete rage. Gregor said he refused to understand how they do things here, that Russia had hit him hard, he’d seen too much and been through too much, it more or less drove him mad and… It makes me sick to think of it… That fellow picked fights with everyone, especially Heinrich…’ Aunty Emma looks at me. ‘You know him. He was in the Hulstkamp once when you and your girl were there… Remember?’ Aunty Emma sees me turning pale and tells me with a stabbing glance that she won’t be digressing into how drunk I got or what happened in the toilets. ‘The Hauptsturmführer with the scar on his face, quite a jolly chap. Heinrich…’
‘I remember him vaguely.’
‘Well, this bloke from the Eastern Front shot him. Can you believe it? Germans shooting each other? This Schmidt fellow drew his pistol and shot him dead as if it was nothing. Shouting that they were all profiteers. Incredible. My Gregor works day and night.’
‘So did they lock the madman up?’
‘No,’ Aunty Emma says quietly. ‘Gregor was lucky, because that fellow started shooting at everyone in sight. In the end it was Gregor who got him. He could have been killed…’ She starts to sob.
‘Child, come now…’ My mother gently squeezes her sister’s shoulders.
‘Some… times…’ Aunty Emma has started bawling and can hardly speak. ‘Sometimes… I think… it’s all going to pot… You’re in love, you love each other so much, and you make plans… but so many things can go wrong… Sometimes I think: it’s over, it’s finished… and where does that leave me? Do you understand?’
She rubs her stomach. It’s playing up again. Back to where she started.
‘Oh, come now. Things won’t come to that,’ my mother says while looking at me, sharper than ever, perhaps seeing me sharply for the very first time.
Aunty Emma says goodbye. I hear her sobbing quietly at the front door for a moment and then she’s gone.
‘Your father’s probably found a safe haven somewhere by now, don’t you think?’
I shrug.
‘Dear, oh dear…’ After putting dinner back on, she sits down opposite me again. ‘So now they’re at each other’s throats. What kind of circus is this turning into? They come here stealing like magpies, sticking everything they can find in their own pockets, getting pissed off their faces, messing around with women like our Emma, who’s actually a complete ninny, no matter how much I love her, and what happens in the end? They start killing each other… All because of the money from the foreigners who settled here. You see where it leads. Those Jews have driven that whole nation mad with greed. They deserve each other.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it’s always someone else’s fault.’
‘Don’t you ever get tired of your own drivel, Wilfried?’
Shadows can talk. No clotted blood on the floor of this room, and none of the dried meat or vegetables I delivered either. Meanbeard’s German books are still here, together with a coat, some forgotten underwear and a worn sock. The rest has disappeared together with Chaim Lizke. I’m finished. Or not? It’s hard to say. Lizke’s place of hiding has become my refuge. I fill page after page here with my poems, my ‘Confessions of a Comedian’, as if there’s no end to it, as if the end itself has been abolished and everything just carries on unceasingly towards the mouth of hell, a goal that can never be reached. The only thing we’ve heard, what Lode has picked up around the place, is that the professor was locked up for a while in Begijnen Straat, then carted off to a camp. That’s all anyone knows. Everything drags on and nobody comes here to kick in the door. Nobody arrests me and drags me off, hauling me off stage like a failed actor. So I just keep listening to the shadows and writing away at what is supposed to become my first collection of poetry. The outside world has become an excuse, an intermezzo for the hours I spend here. I can still smell Lizke. I pick up the hammer he found here. Now and then I think I see him, in a dark corner with an apologetic grin on his face, or I feel him sitting next to me at the table while the ink leaks from my pen to form letters on the page. I write about treacherous bastards and not knowing the truth, about blood on the ground and blows to the face, about children who will be born with a caul, about misleading delays and ambiguous friendship. In a brightly lit room, I have two sworn enemies smile while they speak, each with a glass in his hand and a knife under the table. I have soldiers march behind protesting mothers with their flies unbuttoned. I give newspapers wheedling mouths. I make people with hunger in their eyes join long queues to shuffle past mounds of slaughtered dolls. I rub tortured bodies with honey and decorate them with sprigs of thyme while gramophones blare, ‘Another hero has been born!’ Whereupon everyone in the room sings in reply: ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, you are so still today!’ I dedicate a poem to Lode, but tear it up at once. Then I see Lode and Yvette together in an incestuous dream and the poems present themselves like street-corner sluts, obscene and clacking their tongues. I’m King Midas in reverse. My words transforming everything into shit and filth instead of gold. Sometimes I lay down my pen and reread a few poems. Is it all too monotonous? But the manic urge to write is only discouraged for a few seconds. Whenever it’s time for me to head home I hear Angelo sighing with satisfaction. Finally, finally. A son is arising here whose verse will pile scorn upon his clapped out, sentimental poetic fathers, casually annihilating their stubborn conceit.
It’s these words, O great-grandson, that abruptly catapult me back into my own study and this century, temporarily cutting me off from my story. I think they’re accurate enough, but at the same time this burgeoning poetic soul has become so strange to me, so disassociated from everything that has happened in my later life, that I feel like laughing in his face. You idiot! You arrogant piece of scum! You ignoramus! For the life of me I cannot recall the state of mind that gave rise to those words. What I do remember is that the collection was published after the war. Was there rejoicing? Probably not much. Was there scorn? Perhaps, but that’s something people forget just as quickly. Was this the rebellion of the son in the house of poetry? People need a bit of nonsense now and then—propped up by will, ambition and a vision of the future, true, but no less ridiculous for all of that. You keep a lot of your nonsense to yourself. Occasionally you bother someone close to you with it. It’s seldom ennobling. If I saw you reading all this, I’d avert my eyes and leave the room with a gracious smile. But even while closing the door behind me, I would feel my heart trembling with impatience. If you later informed me that you’d finished reading it, I would look at you with an expectant gaze like a dog that’s tried to please its master with a new trick, even if the novelty consists of a fresh turd squeezed out on the bath mat for the very first time. Vanity is what makes you share. And that vanity is ridiculous and the ridiculous makes you vulnerable. I never let Yvette read anything. I kept her away from my poetry. Outside the poems, normality ruled; in the poems, everything else. That’s how the young Wilfried would have put it.
Looking back I would have liked to give my granddaughter all kinds of things to read because I felt she understood me, that she knew what I was talking about even if she herself had hardly experienced anything. But when she was about nineteen, Hilde started closing herself off from me. From one day to the next I had to ascertain that the apple of my eye, my ally, the rebellious family member I saw as part of my tiny conspiracy against everything and everybody, no longer wanted anything to do with me. I lost sight of her, she let us know through her parents that even our rare family get-togethers bored her and, when I had put my pride to one side and finally dared to ring her up to ask ‘how things were going’, it was made clear to me that she was too busy with her studies to come to the phone. I heard that she was taking medicine to banish her dark dreams. In my imagination, those pills were slowly hollowing out her skull, dissolving everything that linked her to me first, before then, after reducing the rest to mush as well—banality with neither highs nor lows—what next, what next… I wept bitter tears for her. But that too brought no release, no more than the rage and resentment that came to torment me. Nothing gets you down more than fury about something you can’t understand. It wouldn’t pass, it kept smouldering away, pointless and irrational, until every memory had been scorched and charred and I was certain that it was those pills that had alienated her from me and, even worse, that that was also why she was taking them, to get away from the dark monster she recognized in me and knew as her own. How haughty, how pretentious. But the bloody thing is… I sometimes think it still.
Nicole knocks on the door.
‘Go away…’ I say.
‘I’ve run your bath,’ she answers, opening the door. ‘Oh dear, your eyes are all red.’
‘From the cigars,’ I say.
‘You haven’t had any for months, Mr Wils. I gave them all away. Have you forgotten?’
With a firm grip on my arm, she leads me to the bathroom.
She undresses me, ordering me to stick this arm in the air and then that one, lift my foot while leaning on her shoulder, in other words, not to make it too difficult for her. With every manoeuvre she says, ‘So… that’s right’ or, ‘There you go… excellent.’ Her little encouragements comfort me, I’ll admit that honestly. I lift my arms up high, hold on to her shoulder, catch a whiff of th
at peculiar, neutral-smelling skin lotion nurses are so crazy about, and whisper urgently, ‘Careful, careful’ when she helps me into the bath a little too fast for my liking.
‘Let me do that…’ I say as she reaches for the soap.
‘I need to do your back,’ she sighs.
‘What’s been happening, Nicole? What do the newspapers say?’
She washes my back and rattles off her overview: ‘The soldiers are still in the streets, the refugees keep coming, stocks are about to crash as per usual and the European Union is a lie.’
‘Spare me your cynicism, Nicole.’
‘I wouldn’t dare, Mr Wils. And just give me a second. You can’t get out of that bath alone.’
‘As if I don’t know that,’ I say, almost relaxed in the water whose temperature she has decided, almost back in the delusion of the beginning, with me as a baby and her as my mother.
‘No more pocket money for me,’ Yvette says laconically.
She hands me the letter with the black border in the middle of one of my panic attacks. I’m picturing myself stripped naked on a parade ground with club-wielding executioners approaching from all sides. ‘You’re disgracing yourself in front of everyone!’ an SS officer roars while the shit runs out of me and I quiver and weep in the presence of those who call themselves my parents and are now staring at me with their noses turned up. ‘Haven’t you learnt anything from us at all?’ That could be the finale for that one poem I’m—
‘Sweetheart… The letter. You’re not even looking at it.’
Meanbeard’s mother has apparently kicked the bucket. Verschaffel, Amandine, née Leyers: born in the days when people rode in coaches and the streets stank of horseshit, died with aeroplanes flying overhead, their bellies full of bombs, like dragon mothers about to give birth. Did she suffer? No, it says she was called to God in her sleep, undoubtedly with a linen bonnet stretched over her head and swathed in several layers of nightwear, dreaming perhaps of an adulterous count, a willing kitchen maid and an artist with a wounded heart, a world full of rakes and whores, without a son in sight.
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