Will

by Jeroen Olyslaegers

  ‘He’s finally finished her off.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating, my love…’ I sound like a poet with a tooth abscess.

  Yvette raises her eyebrows while holding a burning match to her cigarette. Her parents are under no illusions as to where she picked up her new habit. ‘In his bed, of course,’ I heard her father whisper recently behind the kitchen door, which happened to be ajar. ‘That’s obvious.’ Whereupon her mother hissed a furious ‘Shhhhhh’ as if throwing a bowl of water on the fire of his paternal possessiveness. Of course, there’s no fooling her father. One look at her tells him everything. Sometimes we race to North Castle on the bikes to undress each other behind a bush. But the weather keeps getting better and there are more and more people out walking or fishing, even the odd person who’s brave enough to paddle in the water. Sometimes it’s just very brief moments at her house, which require me to slip unnoticed past the butcher’s shop. At mine it’s virtually impossible and the cellar where I write my poems and where we kept Lizke hidden is simply unthinkable for me. She’s always saying we have to hurry, there’s not much time. Sometimes I feel like she lets me inside her because otherwise I’ll get too out of control, too mad with lust. Sometimes it’s about her, and our love play is an answer to her own pitch-black restlessness, which it briefly soothes, like a piece of tender meat tossed to a vicious dog. Perhaps it’s the restlessness her father recognizes and blames me for stoking. But he hasn’t got strict with his daughter. On the contrary. After all, her father is convinced that he is now embroiled in the ultimate struggle for her heart, that things have got serious, because slow and steady Wilfried Wils is not going anywhere. He’s all smiles now, although his eyes are as hard as ever. Not once does he mention his beautiful daughter to me, let alone the fact that his son and I have let his Jewish milch cow escape. ‘I made up a story that explained it,’ Lode told me when I asked about it. Bollocks, of course. A butcher like him doesn’t fool that easily. And meanwhile—

  ‘Sweetheart! What cloud are you on?’

  ‘Excuse me. I just said you shouldn’t exaggerate.’

  ‘And I’m telling you your pal finally wore his mother down. The number of times he yelled at her… It was incredible. Sometimes he didn’t give her anything to eat all day long. Or he’d give her such a terrible fright the poor woman would clutch at her heart and start to cry. Do you think that’s normal? And he didn’t care two hoots if I knew or not. In the end I couldn’t bear the sight of him.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I say.

  ‘He hit her…’

  I nod. Why did Yvette get a death notice when I didn’t?

  They’re burying the old lady in St Andrew’s, her old parish. Late Gothic on the outside, baroque on the inside, a church for sinners with style, in sharp contrast to the down-and-outs gathered on the side entrance steps. Children, old people with trembling hands, a woman with a baby. I hurry past, running late. Yvette didn’t want to come. ‘I don’t want to see that mother-murderer’s face again!’ But I do. I want to see Meanbeard. I want him to see me, so I can read his face and judge where I stand.

  The church is much too big for the modest turnout. I stand at the back, recognizing the landlord of the White Raven, flanked by two men who could be a couple of his regulars.

  At most there are some twenty mourners, spread out over the pews. Not a single German is present, nor anyone from the Flemish SS. I can’t see any bosom friends like Omer either. A few old people and some of his sentimental drinking buddies, that’s all. Two wreaths near the coffin. I’m too far away to read who sent them. I slink a bit further to the right to get an angled view of the people at the front. Jenny is sitting next to Meanbeard, as if the funeral is suddenly doing double service as their wedding too, albeit in a minor key. Every time he rubs his eyes or lets his head hang, she routinely rests a gloved hand on his back, like someone calmly assisting a retching friend. She herself has paid attention to every last detail of her clothing, a bride in black. It’s a shame she couldn’t resist that crimson lipstick, but that’s Jenny for you. Meanbeard, still bending forward, lets out loud, echoing sobs in response to the priest’s whispered words. It sounds so grotesque it’s easy to imagine this grieving son, this newly minted orphan in his late forties, grinning like a fiend behind his turned-up collar. I wait until the time has come to pay your last respects by the coffin and join the end of the queue. We shuffle forward. It’s Jenny who sees me first. She squeezes Meanbeard’s arm. I make the sign of the cross next to the coffin, bow deeply and accept a holy card from the sexton. Before turning at one of the pillars to return to the back, I see the look on his face as he stares at me. Is that fury in his eyes or fear?

  A few days later he mumbles ‘Christ almighty…’ when I appear at his front door with, tucked under my arm, various books in German that I borrowed from him for the entertainment of a certain Chaim Lizke. He scans the street in both directions before letting me in. It’s more pulling me in, hurried and embarrassed.

  ‘Who’s that, sweetness?’ Jenny calls, a little bored and clearly in the bedroom.

  ‘Were you already in bed? Sorry…’

  Meanbeard looks at me and shakes his head.

  ‘Come up to my study with me.’ He calls out to Jenny that it’s nothing, just me.

  We climb the stairs quietly. He closes the door carefully behind us, then snaps at me, ‘You’ve got some gall.’

  I put the books on one of the side tables. ‘I know. I should have brought them back long ago.’

  He looks at me in astonishment, his jaw literally dropping. ‘Who do you think you are? How did you become so bloody full of yourself?’

  ‘My innocence makes me weep…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mon innocence me ferait pleurer. La vie est la farce à mener…’

  ‘…par tous. Yes, boy, I know it too, you show-off. Are you really coming up with Rimbaud now? Not everything’s a farce. What gave you that idea? You’re not him, you’re no Rimbaud! You’re a fucking traitor or a fool who doesn’t know what kind of game he’s playing. Don’t you understand that? You should see your face! What kind of mask is that… What is it with you? How is it possible that I let myself be… Me, of all people, by you!’

  He’s trying to talk as quietly as he can, but at the word ‘you’ his anger comes rushing out loud and clear.

  ‘Sweetheart?’ sounds immediately two doors along.

  ‘It’s nothing, Jenny. I just sneezed!’

  With a quivering hand, he pours himself a liqueur and knocks it back straight away. He pours himself another. Nothing for me. I sigh and sit down in one of his reading chairs.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re bloody—’

  ‘No!’ Meanbeard stretches an arm out towards me. His eyes flame. He reminds me of a picture of the Grand Duke of Alba, the Iron Duke, Governor of the Netherlands, who burned the rebels here at the stake, an illustration in the bright colours that thrilled me as a schoolboy without my knowing why. The broken limbs of tortured bodies left out for the crows to pick, black silhouettes on gibbets, banners high in the sky, the duke’s horse lifting one of its front legs as if hesitating at the edge of an abyss its rider doesn’t even suspect, the feverish rings around Alba’s bulging eyes as he looks at the peasant scum who are so recklessly defying him with their raised pitchforks. ‘Crush this lunacy! Take them to the gallows!’

  ‘You seem to be enjoying this. Are you retarded or what?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I say, ‘but if you could tell me what—’

  ‘Come off it, you’re doing it again! You’re treating me like an imbecile. Stop the act! I know—does that make it clearer? I know about you. You’re the bastard, you’re the traitor! That silly bugger of a naive half-baked professor said so in so many words. Did you really think kneeing him in the balls would shut him up? I could tell something was fishy right away. We got it out of him before the day was over, Omer and me… Do you have any idea?…’

  Meanbeard turned back to the drinks cab
inet and poured himself another, which he knocked back as quickly as the others. ‘Do you have any idea what kind of position you put me in?’ He looked at me for a moment, shaking his head. ‘Obviously not, because otherwise you would have shown your face around here much sooner. Gutless bastard or moron, I can’t quite work out what you are, maybe both rolled into one.’

  Once I was accused of theft at secondary school. I’d stolen somebody’s pencil case, felt seriously guilty about it and then completely repressed all memory of it afterwards. When the headmaster confronted me with my deeds, I felt the injustice of a false accusation rising, but at the same time that feeling struggled with the realization of a lie that was hidden so deep it assumed a life of its own, taking charge of my memory in the moment of confrontation.

  Back then, tears came. Not now. Now I smile. I don’t know why either.

  ‘No!’ Meanbeard shouts at the sight of my grin.

  ‘Sweetheart, what’s going on there!’

  Meanbeard opens the door for a moment and makes placatory noises in the direction of the bedroom.

  ‘Leave it to us. I’ll be there soon. Promise!’

  He closes the door and raises his hand to me. I stand up. He pushes me back into the armchair.

  ‘I vouched for you,’ he whispers, ‘personally… If they figure out what you were up to at their headquarters… they’ll come for me too. Do you understand? Then the leather coats will be at both our houses and they’ll put us up against the wall without mercy, whether your aunty’s fucking Gregor or not.’

  He grabs me by my lapels and pulls me half up out of the chair.

  ‘Do you have any idea what I had to do to get Omer to keep his trap shut?’

  ‘Let go of me.’

  Meanbeard freezes. Suddenly he looks old and shabby, a hermit in a threadbare dressing gown, surrounded by vermin. ‘Omer got the keys to all the Jew houses I had left. That was my nest egg. Those furnishings were the crème de la crème…’ He lets go of me. ‘It’s just a game to you, you bastard. But it’s people like me who pay the price. We’ve brought the Jews in this city to their knees. The parasites who tormented us for so long are almost all gone. That was a promise we kept. That was partly my achievement, despite the hypocrisy of people like you, despite the never-ending opposition you expect from truly everyone, but not from the people you see as allies. When you start thinking you’re being cynical about every last thing, that’s when you walk into a trap and let people take you for a ride. You’re living on borrowed time, you bastard, and I’m the one who’s taken out the loan on behalf of both of us. Do you understand? No, you don’t get it. I can see it in your face…’ Another glass. Now he’s stuttering while drunken tears run down his cheeks. ‘But not even that will stop me… Rest assured… Not even that will ruin things… All I want… a tobacconist’s together with Jenny… where we can take it easy… without a Yid in sight, in a city that can breathe again and is grateful to people like me for the sacrifices I’ve borne, the deceit I’ve had to endure, the betrayal by bastards, the betrayal by you. Now get—’

  The door swings open. There’s Jenny in a lime-green negligee.

  ‘That’s enough boozing now, you hear me?’

  Her breasts dance under the flimsy fabric.

  The zoo’s grand reception hall is packed. Lode got the tickets and now he’s predicting that Stan Brenders and his big band are going to ‘tear the place down’.

  ‘This place is full of zazous!’ Yvette whispers excitedly.

  ‘Bleeding heck, all that Brylcreem,’ Lode mocks, although he uses pomade too. But these zazou upstarts go a lot further with their hair than Lode and I would even consider. The grease really is dripping out of the locks hanging down in long threads over their high shirt collars. They’re wearing trousers that are just that little too short and their scrawny chests are wrapped in outsized double-breasted coats with lots of extra pockets that most of them refuse to take off in the hall. Because in times of scarcity you have to live big, you have to act like textile coupons are easy to get, even if you can tell from the majority’s hollow-eyed faces that they only just get enough to eat. They all have umbrellas with them because that’s what they do: use umbrellas as walking sticks and refuse to open them even when it’s pouring. They’re sitting spread throughout the hall. The zazou girls lay their heads on their boyfriends’ narrow shoulders or wrap a dominant arm around the narrow span of their bony backs as if those young swingers are in danger of falling apart at any moment. The women are mostly in pleated skirts that come down to just above the knee and they have a clear preference for curling their hair. They are all made up to look pale, with here and there a little mauve under their cheekbones. Yvette loves their square shoulders and the fact that a lot of them keep their round, black sunglasses on inside, as if the hall is lit with the blazing sun of the Côte d’Azur.

  ‘Get an eyeful of that,’ says Lode. ‘What a bunch of posers.’

  ‘Yes,’ I nod. I see him staring at all those peacocks like a bird of prey, all those skeletons wrapped in cheerful colours. Faced with all this fresh energy, only five or so years younger than the two of us, I feel Father Time pushing me along the road to nowhere. None of these dandies is anywhere near as cold-blooded as Lode and me. It’s almost unbelievable that neither of us has had a nervous breakdown and we haven’t said a word to each other about the sword hanging over our heads. Lode doesn’t need to tell me he’s still cooperating with his friends in the resistance. One glance at him is enough. He seems to have a constant smirk on his face, as if he could detonate a hidden bomb at any moment. It’s like he’s defying the whole world with that expression, more and more recklessly. But so far the world seems insufficiently interested. And I have my nightmares, my periods of swaggering confidence followed by panic attacks, my this and my that. What really does my head in is that the zazous seem completely indifferent. They really don’t give a shit. Music is all that counts. They want to dance and do as they please. Sitting there slumped on those seats like babies with their eyes half shut and their lips puckered, waiting for their girl’s maternal teat. No, I feel it. It’s over. I’m already too old. And nothing’s even started yet.

  ‘At least there’s hardly any Jerries here…’ Yvette laughs and her teeth gleam too white for words.

  ‘It’s true. Finally no Hunnish in our ears.’

  ‘Hun-what?’ Yvette laughs.

  ‘They’ve been here for years and you’ve never heard that? The Hun doesn’t speak German, he speaks Hunnish.’

  It’s something my father says. He’s had enough. No decent food, having to queue much too long for coupons and not a decent summer coat or pair of new shoes to be found in the whole city. According to him the clothes left in his wardrobe aren’t fit to go out in.

  We hear some rustling up the front—musicians taking position behind the curtain—and the buzz stops almost immediately. The curtain rises.

  There’s Stan Brenders, bowing to the audience, together with some fifteen musicians, greeted by whistling and furious applause. Stan Brenders is God. He bows again and gives us a little wave. The musicians sit down. Stan turns to face them and it’s like the sky comes blaring down on top of us. His baton conjures up one ecstatic dance fiend after the other. Right from the first melody you see the women moving on their seats and the men clicking their fingers.

  ‘Go, Stan, go!’ a few shout after yet another number, when the applause dies down for a moment. Brenders looks over his shoulders and winks shyly.

  ‘What a nice man!’ Yvette sighs.

  ‘Boom, head over heels,’ Lode laughs and looks at me. In his eyes I don’t see any real happiness, only darkness.

  Meanwhile the horns are all standing up and it’s as if we’re taking off with them. A lot of people have got up on their feet too to cheer them on. ‘Go! Go!’ The ushers are having trouble getting them to sit back down again. Some of the zazous are not so easily tamed. A tenor sax starts a high-speed solo while the other horns sit down again.
His notes swerve around countless curves at a million miles an hour. When he is finally playing the refrain together with the rest, he too gives us a little nod while we clap until our hands are almost shredded. Lode is going wild. He whistles loudly with his fingers in his mouth and shouts at the top of his lungs, almost impossible to understand. Then the trombonist stands up while fanning ever longer notes out over us with his damper.

  ‘Drink?’ Lode asks, holding a hip flask up in front of my face.

  I nod and take a slug. The jenever burns. Unable to keep her eyes off the stage, Yvette hasn’t noticed our little tête-à-tête.

  After I’ve passed the flask back, she turns her head and tells me urgently that we have to keep our eyes on the drummer. The drummer, the drummer!

  ‘Jos,’ Lode explains, ‘a local lad.’

  The rest of the band backs off while the drummer starts a solo. He looks out through his round specs and nods encouragingly and we all start tapping out the beat, louder and louder. People keep jumping up and the ushers are having an even harder time of it. Jos gives a roll on his snare drum, makes his cymbals sing, sends thunder into the hall with the pedal on his bass drum. Suddenly he stands up and starts dancing around his drum kit without losing the beat. People cheer. Again he looks at us and nods to the rhythm of the clapping. Then he abandons his drum kit altogether and starts playing on the boards of the stage, on the bannister leading down to the auditorium. We’re still clapping along, but softer so we can hear the drumsticks, now tapping his horn rims. He keeps it up, drumming his way deeper and deeper into the hall, following the armrests of the seats until he reaches a young woman, who jumps up in front of him. From the armrest his drumsticks go to her enormous belt. Now we’re all holding our breath and clapping along almost inaudibly. The tips of the drumsticks keep tapping out the beat in perfect time on the metal buckle, as if under it, in the young woman’s belly, a new accelerated time is about to be born while she proudly plants her fists on her waist and lets the drummer have his way.