of johns. A papa like that thinks the prize is already his. You’d do the same if a city spread her legs for you like a cheerful slut. But this city gets bored in the end. Sometimes it takes years, but finally she’s overcome by her characteristic ennui. The rancour festering in her gall bladder takes charge. Suddenly she views everything with suspicion. The man she put her faith in most of all, the stern father, becomes a figure of fun: she laughs behind his back at first, then more and more openly in his face. Authority is nice, but not always, not when it’s unrelenting, not when it’s really serious. This city sometimes has a public love for uniforms. She gives short shrift to those who attack the cops. But that doesn’t detract from her conviction that every individual cop is probably a loser who needs a uniform to be someone, especially those who lack a sense of humour. Because much is forgiven here if dished up with humour. This city is fickle, with a tendency to hypocrisy, but a thirst for pleasure. She loves hearty, unsparing laughter, but likes to play the victim too and doesn’t feel obliged to be fair when calling others to account. A respectable person shits on someone else; this city is shameless enough to shit in her own bed and blame someone else. What’s in her heart? That’s something I’ve asked myself far too many times and sold others much too much bull about. But when I feel something, I know it too. Because that’s what this old man tells himself: after all these years there’s no barrier between his heart and his head, just like the way this city wears her heart on her sleeve and sees her feelings as thoughts or insights. Deep inside this city there is a lack of self-love, she’s just not that keen on herself. She has a split personality, it’s sometimes claimed, ready to be divided into two diametrically opposed creeds that can’t bear the sight of each other. But that’s too simple. Mainly she lets herself be divided because she doesn’t know what else to do. Put her under a new regime and she will stay calm and submit to discipline, reluctantly or gladly, grumbling quietly or rejoicing as if a new Messiah has arrived. But what really unites her is mistrust and a horror of looking in the mirror. She’d let herself be rebuilt over and over again rather than undergo that. She doesn’t love herself, not really, and neither a stern papa nor one who offers more freedom, neither gruff words nor swinging hips, neither a new broom nor a celebration of the arts can fix that. Those who don’t love themselves can’t love others, that’s what the self-help books say. Bollocks. This city can do that, it’s just that her love is always a little too sentimental or too provisional, too showy to be genuine or simply too excessive, that’s possible too.
‘Who’s excessive?’
Without any warning Nicole puts a bowl down in front of me.
‘Time for your porridge.’
And while I, despite not wanting it at all, obediently shovel down that old-fashioned stodge, I imagine you looking at me and wordlessly asking when I’m finally going to get back to the war again.
Since the night the rest of us rounded up the Jews in Terlist Straat, Lode has been shunned at the station. I’m virtually the only one who still says hello to him in the corridors. To the other policemen he’s a coward who has fouled his own nest by refusing to go on the raid. Meanwhile their doubts about me have almost completely faded. With one exception. As far as Eduard Vingerhoets is concerned, I will never belong, never ever, over his dead body, and nobody’s going to talk him round.
I’m sitting in the room that serves as our canteen. This male retreat seems completely off limits to the cleaning ladies. The heating’s buggered, the ashtrays are invariably overflowing, the tabletops are marked with sticky rings that are flecked with crumbs and ashes, and one of the windows looking out on the rear of a building on Keyser Lei doesn’t shut properly. That last bit’s not a problem; at least that way we get some fresh air, although the smell of the last shift’s cigarettes is still slow to dissipate. I’ve just started my sandwiches when the Finger comes in. He sits down at my table. It’s 2 p.m. There’s nobody else there. My physical revulsion for Mr Vingerhoets increases when I see what he’s pulled out: a fried herring wrapped in newspaper. Herring again, always herring. This year it’s on the menu in every home. A miraculous catch, people laugh scornfully, it’s the King of Fishers Himself helping us through these dark days. Although these days His ravaged body on the cross mostly torments people by making them think of a juicy steak. Take this, all of you, and eat of it.
‘Friday, fish day,’ the Finger grins to no one in particular before starting to pick at the fish. The stench would make you forget any smell of tobacco. I can’t taste my sandwiches any more, but I’m not going to give him the satisfaction. I won’t leave until I’ve eaten every last dry crumb, or no, I’ll roll a cigarette first and smoke it at my leisure. The bastard can dig into a piece of rotting blubber right next to me for all I care, I’ll never let him intimidate me. If it ever happens, in a brief moment of weakness, I’ll be finished. He’ll have me in his cage and throw away the key.
‘A penny for your thoughts, Wils.’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘Careful now, I’ve got an extra stripe on my shoulder.’ For the umpteenth time he aims his index finger at me as if it’s a pistol. He grins. Blokes like him don’t care about rank or position, that’s not what counts in their circle. The Fingers of
