Meanbeard is clearly delighted by my enthusiasm.
‘I am pleased, very pleased. Giving someone like you a taste of a different world is gratifying, even if your schooldays are over—temporarily, I hope. Did you know, by the way, that I also knew your father’s father? Had I told you that? I can still see him sitting in the Old Dutch, rubbing his moustache and watching the billiards. Not cultured at all, if you don’t mind my saying so. But consider the leaps your paternal line has made. Never forget your origins. Your grandfather a peasant, your father a bookkeeper and look at you now, a true intellectual, for whom French holds almost no secrets. Realize that you represent modernity. That’s the odd thing about progress: it’s internalized through the bloodline. We’re not serfs any more, understand? There is a slumbering…’—Meanbeard rubs his thumb over his index finger, searching for the right arrow to shoot at the bull’s eye of my heart—‘…poetry in edification. Think of Rimbaud, whom you admire as deeply as I do. His father? An infantry captain who didn’t give a tinker’s about his offspring. Mother? A farmer’s daughter. He called her La Mother. Priceless, don’t you think? And then a young man like that ascends to the very top by willpower alone. His talent cuts through all that hereditary ballast like a razor. “Arrière ces superstitions, ces anciens corps, ces ménages et ces âges. C’est cette époque-ci qui a sombré!” What is Rimbaud saying in these lines? That all that feeble blather is outdated, that the era in which he lives has swept it all away. We too live in an era like that, Wilfried. An age of acceleration, of radical choices. You feel it, don’t you? This is no esoteric waffle: you smell it, a sensitive lad like you breathes it in with every gulp of air.’
Gaspar lets out another piercing screech. ‘Now I’ve had it!’ I hear Meanbeard’s mother shouting in a voice that is anything but refined. Silence. Maybe she’s hung a cloth over the cage.
‘Are you doing anything on Easter Monday?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I’ve got the day off.’
‘Come to the Rex on Keyser Lei. Ten o’clock. I’ll get the tickets.’
14th April 1941. For the time being the longing for spring remains unanswered and that makes some people gruff. In warm weather a city seems less occupied. It’s the morning of Easter Monday and hardly anyone is out on the street, just a group of people in front of the cinema with Meanbeard among them, decked out in his very best clothes and apparently impervious to the cold. His bulging eyes grow even bigger when he sees me approaching.
‘Wilfried! Glad you could make it. I’m going to introduce you to someone. Mr Verschueren? This is Wilfried Wils, the young fellow I was telling you about earlier.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Verschueren, who turns out to be a lawyer. ‘Call me Omer.’ He has short arms, a massive gut and a bald head. The deep voice issuing from his mouth seems to arise from the very bottom of that dense body as if echoing up out of a crypt. His fingernails gleam and he smells vaguely of jasmine. The people around him all seem to look up to him. The group turns into a crowd. Hardly any women; the majority are men with determined expressions, though some have clearly been celebrating Easter to excess. Many are well dressed, à la town-hall middle management or the better class of Sunday-suit merchant. But I also recognize a few I’ve arrested. One, for example, smashed up a bar close to Carnot Straat because he thought a whore had laughed at him. It took three of us to get him off her. Now he’s looking skittishly in my direction. A big change from the mouthful of cheek he gave me a month ago, when he insisted he knew people and wasn’t going to leave it at that. My fellow officers didn’t lift a finger to stop me when I pounded my fist into his face until he let go of the woman beneath him and started whimpering. Despite her loud protestations we had her carted off to hospital straight away; with him we waited a little longer. The stitches above his eye are already out, I see. I should have hit him a bit harder. I had definitely expected a reprimand, maybe even worse, but the others backed me up at the station and that was that. ‘You’re a little too excitable,’ my older colleague Jean told me. ‘You should save your energy with scum like that. He was already down on the floor with his arse in the air. In a situation like that a boot in the balls is more than enough.’ From him, I accept that. The man is a bruiser with tactical insight. I’ll tell you more about him later.
‘My friend here tells me you’re a literary man…’ Omer peers at me through his puffy eyes and quickly rubs his thumb over his fingertips as if to make clear that a predilection for literature is always accompanied by a hunger for money. But he means something else. He’s referring to sensitivity, a sense of subtlety, being a man of the world. ‘I’m a great reader myself too. Greek tragedies—I read them in the original.’
‘Impressive, Mr Verschueren. That’s well beyond me.’
‘You’re still young, so you never know. And it’s Omer. Don’t make me say it a third time.’
*
Afterwards everyone will say the cinema was full. That’s not entirely true. Two-thirds of the seats are occupied. The atmosphere is strangely distracted. Years later I will be invited to the premiere of a local cinematic production and notice a similar mood—expectation that is not really related to the film but has more to do with what will follow: a magnificent reception with plenty to drink. And here, too, as with that other
