Afterwards the rabbi lodges a complaint. This destruction of property cannot go unpunished. He argues that the city has to reimburse the costs. The court accepts his reasoning and holds the city council liable. But the Germans are implacable. Compensation is out of the question. What the city does do—saddling us with the task—is station a permanent guard at every synagogue for the duration. Anything that is threatened and could cost the city money if destroyed must be protected. This seems normal enough to everyone; it’s the law.
My nurse says I’m gloomy and there’s no reason for it. She gives me a cup of herbal tea and a biscuit, then goes over to my bookcase and I see her searching. Finally she pulls out a massive volume and hands it to me.
‘Here,’ she says, ‘this always cheers you up.’
I recognize the book and can’t help but smile.
‘See? I knew it.’
She gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze, then disappears back into the kitchen. I hear her singing and, thank God, not ‘La bohème’. Lying on my lap is a weighty tome titled Overview of Dutch and Flemish Literature. I take the book out of the box and look up my name. Wilfried Wils, there I am, pen name: Angelo. And this is there too: ‘One reads the work of Wilfried Wils, better known under the name Angelo, with some degree of bemusement, yet also pleasure.’ That sounds as if my poetry needs to be tasted like an exotic dish, doesn’t it? With some degree of bemusement, yet also pleasure. How did they come up with that? Or rather, how did ‘one’ come up with it, because that ‘one’ in the entry gives it that little cachet of additional authority, as if nobody else can now do anything but read my poetry ‘with some degree of bemusement, yet also pleasure’. An anonymous god who tolerates no dissent is speaking here. My fire is given equal praise: ‘Wilfried Wils has an idiosyncratic quality, a certain recalcitrance, which manages to unite post-war existentialism with dark romanticism in the most authentic sense of the word, arousing the suspicion that he has found a deep well not only for his poetry but for his private life as well.’
So, for once it’s not just me blowing my own trumpet. Nicole is a she-devil with a perfect understanding of how I fit together. That is to say, she deploys what she knows about me perfectly. Yes, I am proud, always have been. But that’s not all, and with a little extra explanation you might be able to imagine what that brief entry means to me. The world of literature and poetry is, after all, a closed one. It’s not easy to penetrate, definitely not when you’re a cop, and especially when you don’t know any other poets. It’s a world of one good turn deserves another, praise and be praised, with all the clannishness of a crew of dockworkers or, if you like, a squad of policemen. I never showed this entry to Lode, though I often felt like it. When he heard from his sister that I wrote poetry, he began to see me in a different light. Poetry was clearly something he associated with weakness. Had he misjudged me? Could he really trust me? I had one face for some people and another for others.
After the war I peddled my poems to the little magazines. There were quite a few of them at the time, printed on cheap paper, but they almost all proclaimed the same thing: after five years of misery the world had to start over again, as if it had been given a second chance. For me it was the other way round. It never stops, nothing ever stops. It all keeps going and it never goes away, no matter how much everyone wants to draw lines in the sand that say ‘this far and no further’. If time exists at all it is a rapidly spinning spiral to nowhere, not a line from A to B. It always makes me think of a malfunctioning toilet where you press the flush and see the water swirling and gurgling all the way up to the rim, where it comes to a halt just before it overflows. Get an earful of me, the philosophical fuck-you-too poet! Anyway, I didn’t quite realize all of that at that stage. I wanted my truth in verse on paper, but first I had to convince the people who produced those magazines that a copper could write poems too. Of course, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by not telling them I was in the police in the first place, but Angelo, who was obliged to go through life as Wilfried Wils, thought my uniform would make me irresistible to the pack of schoolteachers, newspaper hacks and inspired idlers who accounted for most of the poetry written in this country at that stage. And when I finally managed to convince them to read my poems, they considered them far too sombre, gloomy even, and therefore unsuited to this new age in which nihilistic filth would be consigned to the past forever. One of those newly purged souls who rejected me—his name was Achiel Punt and he died long ago from complications after bowel surgery—hadn’t expected me to visit him at his downstairs flat on Paarden Markt, and yes: on duty and therefore in uniform.
Completely bewildered he looks me up and down one beautiful spring morning in the year of peace 1946. In his letter addressed to me he felt like he was really something, but now I’m standing before him as large as life, he treats me to a nervous joke about not feeling entirely safe knowing there’s a policeman walking round town who spends his free time jotting down such morbid thoughts. Admittedly that is gratifying. So much so that I accept Achiel’s nervous, hypocritical promise
