‘Verschwinden, los!’
Jean remains imperturbable.
‘Papiere, bitte.’
‘Arschloch!’ spits the other officer.
He bends and pulls his pistol out of its holster in a single movement. The women laugh, leaning on each other for support. They see me looking at them and one calls out, ‘Fancy a bit too, do you?’ She rubs her nipples and grunts like a pig.
‘Ich scheiße auf die belgische Polizei!’
The officer points the pistol at us. We ourselves do not have firearms, only truncheons.
But Jean just looks at the weapon as if someone is offering him some grimy candy floss.
‘Ich frage noch einmal…’
‘Wie dumm bist du?’
How he comes up with it I don’t know, but Jean proves he’s not dumb at all by very calmly and very menacingly saying all kinds of things in German, from which I pick up regular mention of ‘Field Command’ combined with several other terms. I can’t follow most of it, but in the end the man with the pistol lowers his arm. The other fellow pulls his trousers back up. And the women, too, who probably understood just as little, fall silent and get dressed. The men hand over their papers, and so do the women. I write down their names and ranks.
‘Können wir das nicht einfach vergessen?’
Jean shrugs. Maybe he could forget it. One of the officers takes him aside. I can’t make out the conversation, but I see Jean nodding patiently. Finally, I see the officer fish something up out of his inside pocket, which Jean secretes away.
‘Friends for life,’ he laughs cheerfully. One of the women blows us a kiss.
Sing, oh Muse, of resentment. I smile while writing this, son, because how ridiculous is it that all of our literature arose from this opening sentence from Homer’s Iliad, without our really understanding it after more than 2,800 years? We remember a procession of heroes, take it for granted that there was great valour on those Trojan battlefields and have a vague knowledge of a ten-year war. Before we can appreciate the value of literature, our minds turn to kitsch: it happens automatically. But that doesn’t detract from all of our literature being born in a tent where a hero by the name of Achilles was sulking because he, the greatest of them all, had missed out on a pretty girl he’d seen as his prize. He’d had to relinquish that honour to his tactless boss, Agamemnon, who grabbed everything for himself regardless of who he was dealing with. It starts with resentment, Achilles sulking about a great injustice that’s been inflicted on him and isn’t recognized as devastating by anyone else. Worse still: nobody even knows about his resentment because he keeps it to himself. The pettiness of it all should be beating us about the head. Something is wrong here. This isn’t an account of yet another battlefield, this is not just a paean to a hero. That first line holds up a mirror. More than that: maybe Homer is giving us a warning right from the word go. Watch out for resentment, watch out for the pettiness that is inside all of us. No, everybody would rather know about that ridiculous wooden horse the Greeks used to outsmart the Trojans—a scene you won’t, by the way, find in the Iliad. Everyone prefers to forget about the resentment, the whining banality that won’t go away and tugs on your trouser leg like a bothersome child. And yet the resentment everyone feels is much mightier, much more powerful than pride, much more tragic too for the very reason that nobody likes to admit to it and everyone continues to hypocritically deny it even when the facts are out in the open and plain to see; resentment is the only thing that can consume the soul of a person, city or nation and the hypocrisy that comes with it is what’s worst of all. Resentment? Nobody can shake it off. Far too many warnings have been ignored, too much blindness has been permitted, too much viciousness has been tolerated for it to ever be wiped out for good. Hypocrisy has a different flavour in each country, accompanied by a different crime of omission, sneaking in an ambiguity peculiar to each mother tongue. And afterwards—in those cases where an afterwards exists—everyone keeps silent about it in their own highly specific, culturally and regionally determined way. So tell me more, Muse, about resentment and how it seethed in this city and still does. And tell me about how money sometimes soothes it, Angelo adds.
In my wartime diary I wrote poems, scribbled down a few revenge fantasies, kept note of my weight-lifting and other physical exercises, and jotted down jokes I then learnt off by heart to amuse my fellow policemen. Sometimes, but not that often, I find something that refers to the war itself. Towards the end of October 1941 it suddenly says ‘White Brigade’ followed by a question mark. I vaguely remember that it was around then that I first encountered the term. It was the name of a resistance movement that was supposed to be active in our city and elsewhere at the time. In my album there’s a clipping of an article from Nation and State, a paper my father sometimes read. I’ll copy it out for you here: ‘Against the “White Brigade” we deploy our manly comrades of the Black Brigade. Every day new recruits rush to join our militia. If the blood of one of our comrades should stain the cobbles, woe betide those responsible, high or low.’ Beware resentment.
Anonymous letters come pouring in. The words ‘White Brigade’ have scarcely reached the ears of the public before the denunciations begin. ‘The above-mentioned X, my in-laws’ next-door neighbour, is definitely a member of the White Brigade. He is constantly being
