I close the door of the White Raven behind me, well sloshed after a few too many beers. At the corner of Charlotta Lei and België Lei, a strong autumn wind lifts a stencilled sheet up from the cobbles, pushes it against my trouser legs, then deposits it next to a puddle full of rotting leaves. I plant my foot on it, read the heading and look round before picking it up and quickly secreting it away, because having this kind of publication in your possession is severely punished, maybe even with death if you’re unlucky. Killed for the possession of clandestine words! Angelo grins. Everything counts now and everything is dangerous. I wrote it before, son, this is life on the razor’s edge. Sometimes, like during a walk I just described in ever stiller streets with hardly anyone on them as dusk approaches, I see dramatic letters appearing on a screen, accompanied by stirring music, like posters for a film from a Germany that has long since disappeared and is already almost forgotten, although it’s only ten years or so since German films like that were screening here too. ‘Fear in the Metropolis!’ ‘Around Every Corner: Danger!’ ‘Terror on the Streets!’ In retrospect they were dress rehearsals, films like drill sergeants shouting that the end is nigh, that the world could expect a criminal mastermind to emerge, that we would soon change into a bloodthirsty mob or a gang of indistinguishable slaves with downturned eyes and hanging heads, undergoing the scourge of a dictatorship propped up by our own leaders. Films like that have now been banned. Now shivers run down my spine when I read the leaflets produced at risk of their makers’ lives. For years before the war, films and books depicted fear as if enticing us to one day create a real occupied city where fear and all the rest of it are completely normal.
I pull the piece of paper out of my pocket and look at it again. The underground press’s block letters are messy and smudged: ‘First the Jews, now us!’ No, it would be better to tear it up immediately instead of holding on to it as a keepsake. The wind carries the pieces of paper off one after the other. Then I see someone waving at me from the far side of the crossroads. It’s Meanbeard. He calls my name.
‘What did you say?’ I shout back and start giggling because I sound so silly, so drunk, so pissed off my face. He keeps waving and gesturing for me to come towards him. He meets me on the corner of Lange Leem Straat.
‘I saw you still standing there,’ he pants. ‘It’s a bloody… It’s…’
‘What?’
‘They just found him. The whole bar’s in an uproar. It’s un—’
‘Who?’
‘Didn’t you hear the shot? Someone must have… How can we have not—’
‘Please, calm down.’
Further along people are standing in a circle on the pavement in front of the White Raven. I see Jenny hurrying back into the bar, a gloved hand over her mouth. Meanbeard takes me by the arm. The circle grows a little wider. Eduard Vingerhoets is lying there. Something, probably a bullet, has turned the back of his skull to mush. His right arm is pointing at the door of the bar, his fingers curled as if he could almost reach the handle. It’s like the Finger was put down just before the finishing line, just before a cold beer and a whore’s warm bosom, put down just before it and therefore just in time. Lying next to him is a sheet of paper with letters stuck to it to form the sentence ‘An eye for an eye.’
Meanbeard drops to his knees in the mud and rotting leaves. He bows his head and starts to sob quietly like a little boy who’s pooed his pants and has nowhere to hide.
It seems the funeral was only sparsely attended. Meanbeard went, of course. Not me—I had to work. Every day the Finger’s widow shows up at our door. The first time she was granted a meeting with the commissioner, who no doubt told her he had every available man on the case and it was only a matter of time before the culprit was caught. Rumour has it that one of the Finger’s friends who works as a guard in the prison camp at Breendonk took revenge by clubbing three Communists to death, one after the other, in the middle of the inner courtyard with every prisoner—man, woman and child—forced to watch. But one story was immediately contradicted by another. For instance, that the three misfortunates were slaughtered by a whole gang in a night of fear and terror. Or not—or perhaps they were after all, but there was more to it, because first they cut off their balls. But we are also told that the friend, whose name no one knows, has had to take sick leave because of a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile the Finger’s wife perseveres. With photos of her children in one hand and a wet hankie scrunched up in the other as a grieving aid, she has buttonholed every last one of us. Including me.
‘He was so honest. Did you know him?’
‘A man who always told it like it was, Mrs Vingerhoets. Absolutely.’
‘The best father you could imagine. The children come first, that’s what he always said.’
‘It’s so sad.’
‘When are you going to pick those bastards up? They’re terrorists! Sewer rats! Out on the street, when he was on duty… Have they no shame?’
Evidently nobody has had the heart to tell her that her late husband was discovered one step away from his favourite bar. Everybody knows what goes on in the White Raven, where the ladies let themselves be pleasured between beers. ‘That finger of his,’ someone told me just after his death, ‘he knew how to use it on those floozies.’ Typical that somebody’s dirty side only really becomes
