My faithful boots back on and we’re off. Instead of just crossing the road, I prefer to take a circuitous approach to City Park’s green triangle, now covered with white, stalking it like a puma with worn hips. I start by shuffling patiently and cautiously to the end of the street, where Quinten Matsijs Lei begins and where there is now a large police station. In my day, the police were not yet housed in this imposing building with its facade full of Freemasonry symbols. The police cars and vans in front of it are covered with snow. I cross over and go round the corner. Standing on the edge of City Park is a statue of a ‘socialist leader’ they plumped down there sometime in the late eighties. I see it and burst out laughing for the first time in ages. The snow has given the sculpted leader a dunce cap. The sculptor provided the smirk on his face. He stands there eternally relaxed. His right hand is resting casually in the pocket of his waistcoat and his raised left hand (he is a socialist after all) is pointing ahead. If you follow the direction of that finger it seems to be aimed mockingly at the church on Loos Plaats, which has now been taken over by Orthodox Russians. You can almost hear him thinking: ‘Just look at that, look at the faithful thronging together in that building to pray to God and whatever. It’s so primitive.’ At the same time he seems to be trying to distract attention from what’s going on behind his back, as if what happens in City Park doesn’t count. Yes, that’s how I read him: ‘Follow my socialist-leader finger and, whatever you do, don’t look at the park.’ I told you about the cartoonist who thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah, didn’t I? He seemed to be suggesting that it used to be different, that in the old days, homosexuals didn’t go there to grope each other in the moonlight or that the park never used to accommodate other forms of carnality. Total bullshit, of course. I can tell you this: during the war a lot of policemen avoided that park like the plague once it got dark. People were having it off there all the time, both men and women and blokes together.
Was it the autumn of 1941? I’m not entirely sure. I’m standing on the edge of City Park with my older partner, Jean. In earlier days he might have been a Viking, the kind who leaps out of his longship feet first into the swash to plunder a port at a hundred miles an hour, ravaging women, setting houses on fire, then sailing further up the Loire deep into the heart of ninth-century Franconia. There’s no point trying to calm someone like that down. You trudge along behind and hope the damage won’t end up being too disastrous. His wife runs a bar on the Waag that doesn’t have a single respectable customer and that’s thanks to Jean’s reputation. The place is full of riff-raff: gangsters, pimps and seriously disturbed womanizers with political connections. Jean knows them all by name. They hardly make a profit. ‘Zulma, give us another round!’ is one of his favourite exclamations. But anyone who runs his tab up too much and then lets it slide for weeks on end is dicing with danger because Jean is just as likely to pull out his truncheon and beat the miscreant within an inch of his life. He’s had a few opportunities of promotion and has always turned them down. Since then his superiors, too, have treated him with some degree of caution. Or is it because he knows so many people around town, a lot of people, and doesn’t use those connections openly, so you never know for sure? He’s told me straight out he’s in the lodge, an organization of freethinkers the Germans dissolved some time ago. If anyone with bad intentions had found out, he’d have been picked up long ago. But he trusts me. At this stage everyone still seems to trust me.
I say, ‘Jean, just go by yourself.’ It’s about 10 p.m. and Jean is bored. There’s not enough happening. The streets are quiet and we have at least four hours to go.
‘Don’t be so gutless. We’ll just walk through the park, that’s all. Are we in charge here or not?’
I’m better off not answering that question.
‘We’re just going to have a look to see who’s skulking around in here with his pants down around his ankles. And you’re coming with me.’
We walk over the iron suspension bridge. Nothing to see. But further along in the bushes, as expected, we hear the drunken laughter of German men, coupled with giggling in our own language.
‘See, told you so…’ Jean whispers.
‘Come on, this is ridiculous.’
‘Public indecency ridiculous? I don’t think so.’
Jean creeps over to the bushes the noise is coming from and says loudly and clearly, ‘Polizei! Papiere, bitte!’
Two stupefied Luftwaffe officers push the shrubbery aside. They have two women with them, clearly locals, completely sloshed and with their tits out.
‘Have you no shame?’ one of them slurs.
‘You too, ma’am. Papers, please!’
One of the officers recovers from his astonishment and
