‘Ah, my young friend, a wise man once told me that it’s better to believe you chose your parents than the other way round. It is better to assume that the soul itself decided to reincarnate here, surrounded by these very people. That way everyone has made his own fate and only has to answer to himself.’
‘Do you really believe that old tosh?’
Meanbeard nods triumphantly. ‘What you call old tosh comes from the Orient, where our race arose many thousands of years ago. Don’t let yourself be distracted by the treacherous teachings of Christianity or by overestimating the importance of rationality, which is just as bad. Your glass is empty. Would you like another liqueur?’
Without waiting for an answer, he tops me up.
‘I’m glad I can come by every now and then to blow off steam.’
‘You’re always welcome here, as you know. But the things you say about your parents… There’s nothing terrible about any of that, surely? And those letters from your girl… She actually seems very charming to me. Don’t take it to heart so much. What shines through all of this is your poetic sensibility and that’s what matters. You mustn’t forget that.’
He raises his glass and we toast what he calls the ‘new era’ and the role I will play in it. Below us the parrot is making a hellish racket yet again. For the first time I hear his mother swear loudly. As if stung by a wasp, Meanbeard jumps up, throws open the door of his study and roars, ‘Don’t you bloody dare touch Gaspar or I’ll tan your hide! Do you hear me? Or do I need to come downstairs?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ is the quick and fearful reply from the depths.
Sighing, Meanbeard closes the door.
‘She is going mad and getting cruel, mon ami. She really is, and between you and me, sometimes she needs to be disciplined. But what can I do? C’est la vie.’
I don’t say anything else and leave the rest of the liqueur untouched.
From Monday I’m on afternoons. I check in at the desk at Vesting Straat. There is a strange tension in the station. At first the chief inspector hardly looks at me. Then he says that Gaston, a much older colleague, will be going on patrol with me.
‘Why’s that? Is Jean sick?’
A couple of the others look up.
After a long silence in which everyone stares at me, the chief says that the Sicherheitsdienst picked Jean up yesterday.
‘What for?’
‘I should ask you that, Wils. Did something happen last Saturday, perhaps? Neither of you reported anything unusual.’
‘Nothing I know of.’
The chief looks over his shoulder at the rest of them and asks if everyone’s heard me clearly. The temperature sinks to way below freezing. Someone spits on the floor.
‘Are you sure? Wasn’t there something to do with paint that night? Something at the National bloody Bank.’
‘Oh, that,’ I say quietly.
‘Hop it, lad. I’m sick of the sight of you right now.’
They beat Jean half to death. At least that’s what people said, usually adding, three of them at once, because you don’t beat someone like Jean half to death easily or on your own. Apparently he was only locked up in Begijnen Straat for a little while. After that nobody heard anything else about him. After the war he showed up again, which was something nobody had expected. He came back as one of those walking skeletons. Neuengamme. That was where he’d been. A concentration camp. I heard that he never really recovered. He didn’t want to be a cop any more and sent back the medal they offered him. No longer a Viking, but a ghost who spent the rest of his days sitting at a table in his wife’s bar, close to the stove. An old man of just over forty and—according to the stories—an object of ridicule once the war had finally been banished from everyone’s memories, something that hardly took any time at all, of course, much too little.
*
Have you ever had the feeling of suddenly being cut off from all kinds of things at once? Jean being carted off was one of those moments for me. I read my wartime diary and can picture it immediately. It’s clear that, at the time, no matter how superior I acted with my high-flown poetic fantasies, I had still drawn confidence from belonging somewhere. After Jean, that was over. Without a word of explanation, the other policemen avoided me. All support was withdrawn and I had to manage on my own. At the same time I felt observed and under suspicion. Conversations died when I stepped into the station. The chief watched me mistrustfully from behind his logbook while I gave my report at the end of each shift, as if every word was a trap, as if some malicious force had me in its power. ‘Are you sure, Wils? That’s how it has to be phrased, is it?’ I gave up going to bars with the other policemen. There was no point any more. Lode was all I had left. But he didn’t say a word about what the others thought of me and I didn’t insist. And many years later Lode would betray me too.
‘Checkmate.’
‘No, it’s not. I can take that knight with my bishop.’
‘I should have said, double checkmate. Take the knight, you’ll still be checkmated by the rook.’
‘Does that even exist, double checkmate?’
Lode shrugs. ‘Whatever it is, you can’t do anything about it.’
We’re in Café Terminus, back in that horrible year of 1993, the year of the wet bedspread with my wife lying on it.
Lode and I look at the board. Neither of us makes a move to put the pieces back in place.
‘Oh, mate,’ Lode says finally.
‘I know…’
‘Where did they find her?’
‘In one of those old bunkers near the park on Della Faille Laan.’
My granddaughter, the rebellious apple of my eye, is dead. Two
