Will

shelter all that foreign scum in our city? Were we still living in a democracy or were we on sale to the highest bidder? Because twinkling behind everything in this city are the sparklers, the diamonds, and every new cleaver, cutter and polisher was another foreign degenerate to drag our city down, usually arriving as a refugee from a country that no longer tolerated their double-dealing. Decades later a famous cartoonist—no, not the one who did the book about the dragon—offered the city a statue of his best-known character, completely free of charge. But when he heard that the aldermen had decided to put it next to the City Park sandpit he was furious. According to him there were still too many Jews in that park. Ghosts never stop haunting you. Later he claimed to have been misquoted, if I’m not mistaken, saying it was the drugs and illicit sex that went on there that bothered him, but that was a feeble excuse because those sorts of things have always gone on and always will, especially sex. But more about that later; now I have to get back to your future great-grandmother and me for the moment of truth. Just as an aside, I hope you don’t find this annoying. I draw strength from the thought that even a modern lad like you will want to know what things were like in the old days. Dead sexy, actually, if I can be coarse about it and express myself in a somewhat pathetic contemporary style for the benefit of your impatient generation.

Anyway, what does she say as the old man disappears out of sight?

‘Come here, you.’

‘I am here.’

‘A bit closer.’

I slide over to her. Boom, boom, goes my heart.

‘I’m going to write a poem about you,’ I hear myself saying.

Angelo doesn’t say anything. I think he’s trying not to laugh.

‘That’s very sweet of you. Is that one of your talents?’

‘A doddle,’ I whisper.

Her lace glove brushes my cheek. Her face is now very close to mine.

‘Come on…’

And then her slightly flaccid lips press against mine. I gulp down my spit, and break off quickly.

‘Again…’ she says.

This time I feel a hesitant lick of her tongue. I hear a gentle growl too, that makes way for a deep sigh, because my tongue has found hers for a moment. French kissing in public, that’s looked down upon, but Yvette couldn’t care less.

‘You’re cautious…’ she whispers.

Then I take her face in my hands and kiss her again, hardly able to control the galloping horses in my heart, my tongue suddenly writhing around hers. A kiss that knits our fates together. All at once I spot a ladybird traipsing over her collar. That’s good luck, I hear my mother saying. Inside me it’s all Angelo and he’s showing me dead bodies.

A mother comes over to us. ‘Hey, come on, not in front of the children.’ But her voice sounds gentle. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it, love?’

‘Look at him nod…’ Yvette laughs.

I’m nodding like an illegal alien who’s just been stopped on the street. I form a smile and hope for a little benevolence. I am not yet a man, but I’m not a boy either. I’m a character on a postcard, the punchline of an affectionate joke.

‘You’re a handsome couple,’ the woman winks, ‘but tone it down a little.’

I gulp for breath. Angelo shows me women’s nipples and mouths closing over each other. He shows me Yvette writhing underneath me or riding me like a goddess with her eyes half closed, groaning at every thrust, every shiver. I try to dispel it all with the thought that I’m, how should I put it, in… accepted by another person, bound by what must now come.

Oof, just like that it’s snowing again. ‘Be careful on your bike,’ I tell Nicole, my nurse, glad she’s finally going and I’ll have the place to myself again. This morning she bought me a massive piece of bread pudding. ‘Don’t eat too much of it or you’ll get heartburn again.’ But a heart should burn, shouldn’t it? I take a big bite while gazing out longingly at the quiet that will soon return. I’ve spent a long time pondering that kiss I described for you. I shouldn’t have done that, because now your great-grandmother is much too young for me again, and too alive as well. That wasn’t the intention, which is to say, it’s something I hadn’t expected. The wall between my late wife and me went up years before she died. Do you know that poem by the joker who used to call himself Willem Elsschot? No, probably not. It’s called ‘The Marriage’ and it starts like this: ‘When he observed the way the creeping mists of time had dulled the sparkle in his wife’s blue eyes…’ People think it’s magnificently bitter and cynical, but of course like all cynics the author was really hopelessly sentimental. He didn’t have a clue what he was writing, whimpering in a corner about his wife’s weathered mug. You’ll probably accuse me of cynicism too; maybe you even see it in yourself, because you and other members of your generation are cynical without ever having experienced anything. It’s a pose that never grows old. Give it a little scrape with a sharpish knife, like scaling a fish, and what’s lying there? Bare-skinned passion. Without knowing it, we all reflect the things that surround us and everyone thinks that’s what makes them special and different from the rest. I see your great-grandmother dancing naked in the living room and she calls out to me to put the stylus back on the record because it’s such a beautiful song and she likes me to see her dancing like this and know that she’s happy, especially now, just after we’ve hurled all kinds of recriminations at each other. When exactly was that? I’ve forgotten. And that image of my dancing wife in the altogether makes me realize in turn that, no matter how much it annoys