Will

my hair while my tongue looks after her other nipple. It feels like she is lost in thought, as if her head were turned away to look out through the window into the endless distance, consumed by a dream. But am I that dream? Who says it’s not some film star? When I reach higher to press a kiss on her lips, her eyes welcome mine. Gently she pushes me off the sofa and forces me to kneel. She hikes up her skirt and spreads her legs, welcoming there too. My mouth goes from nipple to nipple while I press myself closer against her. As I lick, I surreptitiously look up at her and see her head tilted back. I feel a trembling pass through her. She wraps her legs around me. The shoes she is still wearing press against my back and I hound myself with questions: now? Already? Here, like this, without so much as a word? I lick her throat and want to breathe in her scent there too, but she pushes my head back down to her nipples. Again I feel that her attention is drifting as I suck, that she is letting me have my way, allowing me to do as I please with something that in her heart is reserved for someone else, someone unattainable. A short groan makes that suspicion ebb away again. But my thumb on her inner thigh, on the thin strip of naked skin I find there, meets with a reprimand, if friendly and patient. Only her breasts and mouth are available; the rest must remain a promise. As excited as I am, for all that my head is spinning, and despite the painful, straining desire in my trousers, I can accept it. More than that: maybe it comes as a relief that I still have to limit myself to those areolae, now wet and warm, still half imprisoned in her brassiere, and those hard, deepred nipples that are begging to be bitten, not hard, but hard enough for us to imagine ourselves as animals that don’t know where lust ends and hunger begins.

Then she takes a sudden sharp breath and says, ‘Oops.’

I hear Lode’s voice behind me.

‘Come on, you two…’ he sighs.

21st March 1942. According to my diary this is the day I see my first dead body. Early on a Saturday morning Gaston and I are at the end of Ommeganck Straat. We’re not making a fuss about it. That’s Gaston’s favourite expression, which he applies to virtually everything that can happen during a day’s work. He also said it when they informed him that from now on he would be walking the beat with me. Early this morning, before we’d started our round, he came back from the toilets with the announcement that he’d just pissed blood. But that too was nothing to make a fuss about. My hesitant expression of concern didn’t throw him. He’d been expecting it, he told me calmly. It was no surprise. ‘They work us to death. One more year of this misery and I can retire. Let’s not make a fuss about it, Wilfried. Someone like me making it past fifty is incredible enough as it is. The missus is always telling me I’m grinding myself down. Know what I say? “What about you?” I say. If I kicked up a fuss about things like that, I’d never even get out of bed. It’s my kidneys. They’re stuffed. Too much piss: going in and coming out.’

His words linger. We hear a police whistle. In Lente Straat somebody’s sprawled half over the pavement. Judging by his wounds, murdered. Two other constables are making a half-hearted attempt to block the body from view while gesturing to the people staring out of the windows and shouting for them to go back inside. One of the policemen shrugs uneasily, as though it’s an accident he’s unwittingly caused. The other is staring straight ahead as if he’d like to strangle the murderer on the spot with a length of piano wire. Cursing, he comes up to us. He looks wooden, as if walking on stilts, and, despite his fury, his eyes are dead.

‘The fucking bastards!’

He shakes Gaston’s hand and nods at me.

‘Someone you know?’ Gaston asks cautiously.

The stilt-walker nods and sniffs, then holds a hankie up to his impressive nose as if we too are cadavers.

‘My deepest condolences, Eduard,’ Gaston growls.

Eduard shakes his head and goes back to the body.

It’s a cold, dark morning, even if the blackbirds are trying to outdo each other in song. I rub my eyelids with my thumb and little finger and look again, hoping my sight has improved. The shock of the new clouds everything. A first dead body feels like a revelation from another world, as if a god or a demon has reduced this man to a bag of blood and guts, bone and flesh, cutting the thread of his life for no reason, without leaving a single clue. As if that god has left his rubbish behind with supercilious indifference to all rules and customs. It feels like something that had to happen. After all, nothing is normal any more; it hasn’t been for a long time. The man is lying on his right side. His mouth is half open. One of his eyes is staring dully into the void. His hat is on the street two steps away, an exclamation mark after a long sentence. Look at me lying here. One of his arms is stretched out, palm up, as if there was one last thing he was supposed to receive from the heavens before dying. His straight right leg is under his left and forms, almost playfully, the numeral 4. A red flower has formed around his heart. The back of his head looks like someone has stamped on it, turning it into a gory crater filled with blood clots and the vulnerable pink flesh of his brain. His shoes are worn, but