‘No, child. We know it’s snowing and our hero doesn’t feel like working. There’s nothing wrong with my memory.’
Yvette opens the magazine again. The cheap cover shows a drawing of a woman staring out at the reader with her eyes wide and her mouth half open. The story from Volume 9, Number 5 is called ‘The Curse of the Count’.
‘His eyes caressed the paintings on the wall and lingered on a photograph showing a medieval castle. There was a hint of discouragement in his eyes. That…’ Yvette’s voice is a little throaty. She coughs, turns back to the page.
‘Take a sip from your glass. That’s what it’s there for.’
Yvette nods, drinks a little and, after glancing past the half-dozing woman at me, resumes reading: ‘That was not an unusual feeling for Robert de Tiège. In such moments he even doubted his talent. Life seemed dead and futile, despite art, his work, the honours and accolades. Certainly, he was successful! Beautiful young women called him “maestro” with a seductive glint in their eyes. For whom were their smiles intended: the artist or the bachelor? He did not know. Now, suddenly, he remembered…’
‘The blackguard,’ Amandine Verschaffel mumbles contentedly. ‘No surprise there.’
Yvette looks at her defenceless victim, who is only seconds away from the deep sleep of innocence that only the very old can submit to, and smiles at me before reading on.
‘…that he had been invited to Madame Bressoux’s for luncheon. What should he do? Ignore the invitation? There would be postprandial dancing. The female guests would be pursuing potential husbands. Robert smirked. Good old Madame Bressoux!’
Grunts are issuing from the easy chair. Like always I have to suppress my laughter. It’s strange that Meanbeard doesn’t like to read. After all, it never lasts much longer than one or two paragraphs. Then the old woman solidifies into an object which barely has a pulse, miles away from everything, especially her own ailments: the stiff hip, the eye that sometimes lags behind the other, the trembling that makes her left arm so clumsy, her son’s blows… All gone to the sounds of the slowly read sentences of a mawkish novel printed on cheap newspaper.
‘Yes, good old Madame Bressoux…’ I whisper after the grunting has given way to deep sighs.
Nicole is in a tizzy. ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Do you really want me to read this to you? You, an educated person?’
I admit it, son: I too have a weakness for trashy novels. I used to buy them at jumble sales: musty magazines from the war years, held together with two rusty staples, dragged out of some cellar to bring shame to my bookshelf with all their tacky plots: lost lovers reunited at the very end, a cursed castle, a devout notary and a malicious coachman, giggling girls and a countess with a hacking cough who wastes away in a box bed while the priest whispers a blessing in her ear. Things like that aren’t meant for your own eyes; they have to be read aloud, the way your great-grandmother once read them with pleasure to Mrs Verschaffel for a modest remuneration.
‘Come on, Nicole…’
‘Are you losing your marbles? I’m not going to accelerate your imminent dementia with this drivel.’
I gaze at her with damp eyes until she sighs and pulls out her reading glasses and studies the shabby pages on the coffee table with her nose turned up.
‘Where have you been keeping this?’
‘Please, just read it…’
Yes, it’s a story that could almost have been written by a machine with a memory full of index cards that list everything the average person demands from their entertainment. It still grips my heart. I still surrender to it and reproach myself for never having had the talent to write stories like this, ones that are capable, even for just an hour, of transporting people to another world. Do you hear Angelo laughing? I do.
Someone is singing a song in the White Raven, a bar on België Lei. ‘When their noses, when their noses, when their noses are so hooked. By hook or crook, by hook or crook, when their noses are so hooked!’
Laughter. ‘Where’d you get that from all of a sudden, Sylvain?’
‘Come on, lad. Everyone knows that old tune.’ Sylvain winks and sips his beer.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ shouts the bar’s towering owner. ‘Now the penny drops. The giant song from the carnival in Aalst.’
‘Piss off. Dendermonde!’
‘Not at all, Aalst!’
‘Dendermonde!’
Close to the table where Meanbeard and I are sitting, someone calls out, ‘Aren’t you from round that way yourself, Sylvain?’
The barfly coughs discreetly. ‘On my mother’s side.’
‘Not born and bred,’ the man next to us laughs. ‘I knew it!’
‘Fill her up, landlord.’
‘Have one on me, Sylvain.’
‘Now he’s got his nose in the air!’
Sylvain pops up off his stool and cheerfully whacks the bar. ‘By hook or crook, by hook or crook, when their noses are so hooked!’ He waves his arms like a conductor. A few people watch with amusement and someone joins in hesitantly.
Like all bars in wartime, the White Raven is not well lit. There are a few brownish paintings on the walls, all clearly the work of the same amateur. A view of the Scheldt. The cathedral at dusk. An embarrassing ode to Breughel, with cheerful peasants raising goblets. A few illustrated proverbs, again inspired by the master. If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas. The horse that is next to the mill will carry the grist. No use crying over spilt milk.
‘Is it always this lively here?’
‘It has been known, yes.’ Meanbeard sounds distracted. I see someone coming back from the gents. The
