‘Nothing’s clean enough for the Germans. All prostitutes have to register for a medical check-up. So now you know, my friend. If you feel your blood racing, always ask to see their little book first. You don’t want to pick up one of those diseases. Remember now.’
‘Yes, sure,’ I say, looking away.
Jenny comes back. Her make-up has run a little, but she really does seem to have perked up. She pushes a sailor who tries to grab her out of the way without even looking at him and stops at our table.
‘Listen, you bastard…’
He looks up, smiling. ‘It was just for a laugh…’
‘Really?’
‘I was just playing the fool.’ All at once Meanbeard doesn’t seem quite as drunk. It’s like the racket is dying down, the glasses no longer clinking, no more slurred orders at the bar. He reaches for her hand. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
She bats him away. ‘Get your paws off of me. I’ve had it with you.’
Resolutely she shoves her way out through the tightly packed sailors.
‘Jenny?’
She doesn’t look back. He raises himself up off his chair, sticks a hand in the air.
‘Jenny!’
The door closes behind her. Almost despairing, he sits down again.
‘She’ll come back,’ he coughs.
I see moisture gleaming on his big, bulging eyes.
Meanbeard tries to order a round of what we call ‘headbutts’: jenever shots with beer chasers. I refuse politely. I’ve already seen what jenever can do to you. My father is what you call ‘a mean drunk’. I also know that I still have to get home. It’s almost ten o’clock and soon the curfew will be in place for everyone who doesn’t have a special exemption.
It takes quite some effort to convince Meanbeard to come with me.
‘Ich habe eine shpezial exemption!’ he crows, visibly pleased with his German.
‘Ich nicht,’ I say.
Laughter with melancholy quick on its heels. I recognize that too: jenever.
‘I don’t open my book for just anyone, Wilfried!’
‘No.’
‘I’m no book tart.’
‘Far from it.’
‘Our Jenny,’ he said mournfully, ‘where’s she got to? Where is that book tart?’
‘Come on, we’re going home.’
‘Piss off. Suck my book!’
With the help of a few sailors, who are just as drunk as he is, I get Meanbeard up onto his feet. Together we lurch along The Boulevard. He holds his face pressed against my lapel and lets his tears and snot flow free. Now and then he yelps something incomprehensible, finger in the air. Somewhere halfway up Keyser Lei, where he’s not the only drunk trying to make it back home, he pulls himself more or less together. He runs his hands over his slicked-back hair, straightens his dicky, and no longer needs my help to walk.
‘You’re a fine fellow. You are… someone a chap can count on, you know that? Someone you can count on.’
At long last we’ve followed the railway viaduct, walked through the Kievits quarter and made it onto Plantin en Moretus Lei. At his front door he puts both hands on my shoulders.
‘I’ll arrange something,’ he says, suddenly firm. ‘I’ll arrange a job for you. Police. Get it? I’ll get you in. Me and my contacts, me!’
He searches for his keys. I help him get his door open. He falls straight through it into the hall and before I’ve stepped in after him, he’s kicked the door shut behind him with an almighty bang.
I turn to go and hear his mother bellowing, ‘You lush!’
The demon alcohol suddenly rushes to my head too.
Everything starts to spin and I throw up all over my shoes.
Stroll with us, son. It’s a Sunday afternoon, 22nd June 1941, according to the neat handwriting on the back of the photo I’m holding. Your future great-grandmother is walking down Keyser Lei between her brother Lode and me. She has hooked her arms through ours. We are a harmonious trio. It’s beautiful weather, not a cloud in the sky. Hook your arm into mine and we’ll be a quartet of delight. Do you see how the city’s residents are smiling and nodding to each other? Beautiful weather makes you forget everything. People even accept the totally insane food prices. On the black market you now pay six times as much for things you could buy in ordinary shops two years ago: butter, milk, eggs, meat. Last week my fellow officers and I picked up another black-marketeer. Without so much as a word, we took care of it the way we’ve been doing it since the winter: sharing the spoils between us and letting the offender go. What we used to see as the law has been replaced by unspoken agreements, rackets, with calculated risk on both sides. Everyone estimates what they can get out of it, weighing the pros and cons. Those who consider it dishonourable lose out. Those who pooh-pooh it learn better. You understand that it’s not without risk. The Germans want strict punishments and we too would be shown no mercy. The days follow one after the other and at the end of each day your future great-grandfather nods to himself in the mirror, that’s all. It’s every man for himself. We’re plundering at the gates of hell; these are dramatic times and we act like everything’s normal. And meanwhile, everyone wants to dance, dance, dance. Under the Farmers’ Tower, at the end of the Meir, is a jazz club you can hardly squeeze into on a Saturday night. Before the war they played swing there and they still do, even if the lyrics are sometimes in German and band leader Stan Brenders announces a song like Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ in Dutch as ‘In een Purperen Stemming’ to outsmart the Reich Chamber of Culture, the still fairly naive censorship body. Nobody minds as long as they get to dance. Today there’s a particularly cheerful atmosphere in the air, it’s all ‘Seize the day’ and ‘Let’s have another round’. This morning on Radio Brussels, in what we call
