Gaston and I are given a reprimand for having kicked in the wrong door.
‘Straight from the mayor, men. He’s furious.’
We shrug. The things that happened in Terlist Straat are still eating away at me. Am I the only one? We will forget it together, presumably. Together we will forget it, because all at once I’m one of them again, after what we have been forced to do together.
Lode gets a reprimand too, also straight from the mayor.
‘You know why he’s not being sent to Breendonk?’ Gaston’s voice is dripping with venom. ‘Because we did what had to be done. We did the dirty work without him. The Germans have got what they wanted. You see that, don’t you? That’s why he’s still home.’ He spits on the station floor. ‘I need a beer.’ He throws down the cigarette he’s only just started smoking.
‘Keep it respectable, Gaston,’ the chief inspector shouts.
Yeah, keep it respectable.
A BUS TED HIP, HALF A MAN
A BUSTED HIP, HALF A MAN. Yes, that’s the reason it’s taken me months to take up my pen again, dear great-grandson. I feel like I’ve let you down, as if you’ve been waiting in vain for the continuation of my story. That’s total rubbish, of course, as so far you haven’t seen a word of what I’ve written. I spent late winter and early spring in hospital and it felt like I had jinxed myself. How many times had I refused to worry about slipping and breaking something? I always pictured it out on the street in front of everyone, causing pain and deep humiliation. But it happened inside. I was completely alone and the humiliation went deeper than I could have ever imagined.
As usual I was looking for something. Nicole had long since gone home. I was reading through the last pages of what I had just written and I was stuck. Or rather, I was digressing. That was it. I know what else I have to tell you, it’s not that, but suddenly I felt overcome by revulsion. I was sick of myself. I saw my life as a careless pencil line and suddenly longed for some Supreme Being to pick up a rubber and rub me out. I saw that Being blowing on the page. Pfff, and I was gone. It had been a long time since I’d felt like that. Enough. That was the word. And the older you get, the more you feel obliged to fight against that one word and the longing it contains. You know that I survived your grandfather, my son. Emaciated, he lay in bed, locked in a wrestling match with time. Not to live longer, more the reverse. He was counting down the seconds, filling the time that creeps by between the moment you’ve had enough and death. Watching my own son suffer like that was perverse, a punishment invented by a vile God. Despite their mistrust, they’d let me in to see him, with dirty looks from all sides, his too, but I insisted and he no longer had the strength to show me the door of his hospital room. ‘Son,’ I said, ‘son…’ He shook his head, long since a father himself, of course, and stared at me defiantly. ‘I’ve had enough. They can come and get me.’ That hit me so deep, as if I alone had subjected him to this life, personally sowing the seeds of his cancer, poisoning him from the very beginning, and his only act of resistance to me was his own complete surrender. I’ve had enough… ‘What about me?’ I thought in that instant. He was overtaking his own father with his longing. Some fathers would say, ‘I’ve had my fill, take me instead.’ But not me. Only after his death did I too sometimes feel like I’d had enough and I’d pronounce that word as if at a dress rehearsal, without consequences, an echo of the curse my own son had called down on himself, infecting me in the process.
I still knew what to do when I felt that revulsion. I needed to pick myself up again immediately. But melancholy and other sombre feelings are not easy to shake. That was when I remembered a purple envelope filled with family photos. I thought it might console me, although afterwards you always realize that photos are more likely to deepen the gloom. After all, darkness craves more darkness. I searched my whole library, even looking behind the rows of books, shaking some in the hope that the little treasure might be hidden between the pages, but to no avail. Exhausted after several hours of searching, I lowered myself into my recliner, my easy chair, clicked it back and, in that instant, saw at the very top of the bookcase the protruding corner of a purple envelope. How stupid would you have to be to keep something like that in such an impossible spot, exposed, gathering dust and, above all, so high up? Sometimes, often even, people fall victim to their own duplicity. To ask the question was to answer it. I’d put that envelope so high up to stop myself from throwing it away because that was something I couldn’t bear the thought of. Now it happens that years ago I had one of those wooden library ladders made to order and… You see where I’m headed, don’t you? That’s right, this doddery old fool, with, in that instant, nothing but dog food for brains, clambered up like a young buck, didn’t dare go any further than the second-last step, reached up ineffectively, ventured a quivering step higher after all, lost his balance and fell down arse and all. Right on my left hip. Crack, said the bone. Unbelievable pain shot through my body from my big toe to the back of my head. It was like a big fat Japanese wrestler had jumped on top of me with his full weight and snapped my
