‘Give us a bit of space…’ I say. To avoid saying out loud, ‘You’re almost swinging your seriously engorged cock in my face as it is.’
It’s over. The mood turns, everything deflates like a balloon. No more frog in my throat, no racing heartbeat, no slow movements. Lode turns his back immediately, forces his dick into his underpants and gets dressed.
Is it possible to regret not having done something you didn’t want to do? Regretting something that couldn’t be, yet somehow makes you feel guilty? Regretting it because you are who you are and the other is who he is? Regretting it because your heart is pounding all the same?
Lode stretches, gives an unconvincing smile. We smoke cigarettes, but can’t find any more words for each other.
Yvette calls. I go downstairs.
On De Coninck Plein we walk hand in hand.
Behind the thick, fortress-like walls of the Atheneum I pull her up against me. We kiss. I run my tongue over hers. She sighs, ‘Alone at last.’
Aunty Emma has slipped a note in our letterbox inviting us over for coffee at her house in Van den Nest Lei on Sunday: ‘I hope everyone’s well. You’re all invited at four in the afternoon. It has been so long and so much has happened!’
‘It’s clean here,’ my mother says, ‘couldn’t she come up? A letter, of all things. She gets fancier by the minute.’ Mother runs her fingers over the paper. ‘She does have a beautiful hand. Always has.’
‘I hope her German fancy man’s not there,’ Father growls, though he’s unable to hide his curiosity.
‘Maybe he prefers to spend his time at the Hulstkamp,’ I laugh. Because that detail of her love story won’t let go of me: the German stole her heart in Café Hulstkamp on Keyser Lei, once a place where poets and artists bought each other beers and attempted to bend the world to their will over a game of dominoes. You could find Crazy Paulie there before he succumbed to consumption in some faraway rural village. Crazy Paulie with his bearskin hat and his bold artistic flair who died so very young. I never met him but I pick up stories about him here and there. He went to the same school as me, where he once, at the start of the previous war, gave a speech that no one could follow because of his weak, reedy voice. Were his festering lungs already playing tricks on him even then? As a poet he was an example to many, but on me, his craziness was wasted. Or actually, it wasn’t, but my love for him is of the kind that is so typical of this city, where admiration is always mixed with profound envy. Because nobody who comes after Crazy Paulie can compete with his playful spirit, his flight to Berlin and the adventures he had there, his rebelliousness, his boundless originality, his—yes, I admit it—pioneering, maybe even the ailment that made him cough and splutter till the end: he could hardly be more romantic. To think that Paul van Ostaijen, Crazy Paulie, drank and flirted in the Hulstkamp, that his spirit might even linger there yet, where Jerries now buy drinks for local girls in the hope they’ll spread their legs… Why there, of all fucking places? It’s like gobbing in the face of the Muse. At the same time, and I’m sorry to say so, but it’s just as likely that if Crazy Paulie’s lungs hadn’t let him down and he’d been alive and well, he would have been pleased as Punch to see the master race marching into his city for the second time, when they would even demand a place in his own local. Sorry, but it’s just as likely he would have stood there in a black shirt with his arm up, taking a supercilious delight in brushing aside his own anti-war poems as juvenilia. You never know. Who am I to hurl gobs of saliva at the Muse? Just as likely and sorry to say, but nothing is holy, everything is in motion and nothing at all is true. It’s death that makes the artist’s life orderly, nestled in his now secure body of work, his immediately legendary preferences and whatever his friends choose to say about him. Death spares you embarrassments, choices that may prove regrettable. And when death fells a young poet, it’s showing a hunger for beauty more than anything else. Those who live too long run a serious chance of ending up bunglers or bastards in other people’s eyes. Angelo says, ‘Lay that lily-white throat of yours on history’s chopping block.’ Unfortunately, to do that, to even feel the desire to be snuffed out by a premature death, you need the poems that raise your whole being over the threshold of obscurity. And I don’t have them yet, and lately my hopes that they will one day find their way onto the page have been few and far between. My diary is a litany of woe, and a poem I recently squeezed out of my pen while half drunk caused me days of embarrassment. It was about ‘gulls burning in the inferno’ and the ‘discipline of senselessness’. Where do I get that kitsch? That’s no glorious copulation with the Muse—it’s spilling your seed in an already crispy handkerchief. And as an aside, how is it even possible? With all the things I experience every day, the bastards I see, the threats I receive, life on a razor’s edge in an occupied city, my poems should read like they’ve been written in my lifeblood. They should give hardened poetry connoisseurs a coronary. But what I’ve written up till now would leave even a schoolmistress from the la-di-da Lady’s Academy in Lange Nieuw Straat pissing herself laughing before giving me a big wink and telling me I certainly have a lot to learn. ‘Give me something lethal God I want to live.’ Who wrote that?
