After the music your future great-grandmother suggests a little walk in City Park.
The sun is still doing its best. We saunter. Pigeons take wing, blackbirds are singing. A lot of people are out enjoying the weather. All in their Sunday best, of course. It’s their park or, rather, the park is there for every citizen who has a right to a free day and wants to show, with wife and sprogs, that he is master of his own destiny and life is smiling on him. She’s taken my hand. It feels cautious and I allow it. My heartbeat does shoot up a little, true.
‘Don’t you mind us being almost the same height?’
‘No,’ I say, slightly thrown.
‘Most men prefer being a little taller.’
She’s making me nervous. Next thing you know she’ll be talking about where we’re going to live and how many children would I like to have. Slowly we climb the hill because she wants to cross the bridge over the pond.
‘What for?’
‘No reason. It’s beautiful up there.’
She hugs herself while leaning forward. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing at our reflection in the calm water. ‘There we are.’
‘Made for each other,’ I hear myself say to my own, instantaneous horror. Yes, laugh at my naivety. Just when it seems necessary to weigh every word, people are doomed to use phrases they haven’t got a clue about, that have already been used all too often.
She smiles and says, ‘What would you know about it?’
An uncomfortable heat rises from my arse up. I’m not good at this game. I’m an oaf. I hear Angelo sighing inside of me. Does it have to be this sentimental? Why not a poem? In the post next week? A poem full of words I’ve chosen myself can be warm, controlled and supple, but still have scope for some concealed darkness, sensual suggestions of things only soulmates can understand, a secret language evoking an abyss. We wander off the iron suspension bridge and head to the right, still strolling, drawing out the time.
‘Are you happy, Wilfried?’
She doesn’t even look at me while asking. It’s not a particularly unusual question, but it’s something I’ve never thought about. It’s not even a word I have ever used in relation to myself—it would never have occurred to me. Now that she’s asked me, I suddenly know why. It’s a trap. It calls out for other words, for a future, for a life like everyone else’s, a single path you will have to stick to forever.
‘Should I not have asked?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘If it takes that long, I already know the answer,’ she says, thoroughly piqued. She hasn’t let go of my hand just yet, but that probably won’t take long. We reach the monument for the fallen with the king as a knight on horseback looking heroic on a plinth while heroes lie below him and someone holds up a flag. It used to be somewhere else, as if heroism can never settle down. I was ten when the king himself came to unveil it. Afterwards my father said: ‘The bastard, the bloody bastard… All the things he promised us, and he gave us nothing.’ When I cried in indignation that the king was a hero and his wife a saint, he gave me a whack over the back of the head and sent me to bed without any tea. ‘Your father doesn’t like to be interrupted,’ my mother told me the next morning.
‘Oh, you poor boy…’ Yvette laughs. My deceitful story has done the job. Angelo breaks into a teasing refrain inside of me: ‘He does it now, he did it then, he’s conned them all again…’
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I want to sit down somewhere. Preferably in the sun.’
We leave heroism behind and move deeper into the park.
‘There, a bit further along,’ she points, ‘near the sandpit. I like watching children play.’
People nod as they pass. We look like we’re engaged.
I brush some sand off the bench. She waits patiently, then settles down.
There are a few foreigners present, their children yelling and horsing about.
‘Busy, here. Nice, isn’t it?’
‘No surprise with weather like this.’
‘Can you believe that?’ says an old man who’s seen us looking at the children. He leans on his walking stick and hopes we’ve understood, that we too see the decline, the defilement.
Yvette doesn’t answer, which says enough.
‘Stupid old git,’ I whisper.
‘You mustn’t say that, Wilfried.’ But she’s smiling.
Anyway, it’s only a question of time, dear boy, before the old grouch has it his way. By the end of that summer Jews aren’t allowed in parks or swimming pools anywhere. Even before the war there were conflicts about it. People kept complaining about the Jew-loving mayor we had at that time, who didn’t do a thing to stop our parks from being overrun. How could he, they cried, how could he simply decide to
