Will

the facade of the town hall, where the mayor acts like he’s in charge, one can admire two statues that represent the virtues of this city. On the left, fashioned after the delusions of ancient Greece, we have Justitia, and on the right, equally classical and therefore harking back to our unquestionably glorious past, Prudentia. In wartime, if not generally, justice is at most a pious afterthought, or something to work on when there happens to be time left over after the real challenges, and that gives more scope for the virtue of prudence. Prudentia is depicted with a mirror in one hand and a snake coiled around the other. The mirror presumably stands for self-knowledge rather than vanity and the snake refers to her ability to maintain control at all times. Prudentia is about making the right decision at the right time. The painter Breughel was working in this city when the town hall was built and his print representing prudence shows food being harvested and salted while Prudentia herself stands on the rungs of a ladder that is lying on the ground with her right arm wrapped around a coffin. At the bottom it says in Latin: ‘If you want to be prudent, keep your mind on the future and think of everything that might happen.’ Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you understand how much this city was wedded to the virtue of prudence and has, by the way, continued to practise it to this day through a long line of mayors? What the people saw as a new era with new masters and customs had already turned stale in the eyes of the city’s administrators. They, dear great-grandson, had undoubtedly caught a whiff of fresher bread to come, yet another new normality with new rulers. As for me, I couldn’t smell a thing. I was in the middle of it. I weighed up one side, then the other. I let what one person had told me collide with someone else’s confidences. Inside of me Angelo couldn’t see any normality; instead they were all opportunities to give life a spin, a mighty spin that would unhinge everything and send the horses on the merry-go-round galloping out into the streets with foam on their lips, all following the big black horse I saw myself astride with my truth hidden behind a sneering mask. That’s the truth of the young, who never want to go along with what older people consider normal.

‘I need your help.’

Lode’s standing at the Vesting Straat exit with a large gunny sack at his feet. It’s 6 p.m. and I’ve just gone off duty.

‘Have you been waiting for me?’

‘I need your help.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

He swings the sack over one shoulder and I follow him. We don’t speak. We go up Vesting Straat and cross Keyser Lei in the direction of the Geuzen Gardens, past my old school, the Atheneum, and into Van Maerlant Straat. At one of its imposing homes Lode pulls out a bunch of keys. The building has two front doors: one with a row of doorbells and letterboxes, the other without any. That’s the door he opens. We step into a hallway. Lode flicks a switch and a dim bulb starts to glow. There is another door in the semi-darkness at the end of the hall.

‘Give me a bit of light…’

Lode passes back his torch and I raise it up above his shoulders and aim it down. The key goes into the lock and the door creaks open. We’re in a roofed courtyard that stinks of shit.

‘Your father’s not fattening up some animal here, is he?’

‘Not too loud,’ Lode whispers, pointing up. ‘There are people living up there and you hear everything. Screen that light.’

On the left of the courtyard there is a green, padlocked door. Lode unlocks it and pushes it open. He gropes around for a light switch and suddenly we’re in a high-ceilinged storeroom about ten metres long. Completely empty except for two cages at the end of the room. I hear a pig and some piglets.

‘I knew it…’

Lode reaches into his big gunny sack and tosses potato peel and vegetable scraps into the cages. ‘That’s not what I need you for.’

He takes a broom and sweeps the straw between the cages to one side, revealing a trapdoor. More jingling of keys, more fumbling with a big lock. Lode opens the trapdoor and shines his torch down into the cellar.

‘Let me go first.’

With the gunny sack in one hand and the torch in the other he goes down a rickety staircase and turns on a light.

‘Come down and close the door behind you.’

Now we’re in a dry and fairly lofty cellar, about four metres high by my estimate. Cardboard boxes are stacked left and right almost to the ceiling with a narrow path between them leading to some pallets.

‘Can you give me a hand?’

I help him slide the pallets out of the way. They aren’t very dusty. Then Lode knocks three times in quick succession on a door and then twice more. Someone on the other side knocks in reply.

Lode pushes the door open and all at once we’re in a drawing room, fully furnished, with lamps here and there, a kitchen stove, an armchair and a table with two chairs, a reasonably sized bed and heavy drapes.

‘Haben Sie einen Freund mitgebracht?’

A smiling Chaim Lizke is standing there to welcome us while drying his hands on a tea towel, a tub of dishwater at his feet.

Lode puts the gunny sack on the table and says he has brought him some bread.

We’re in Betty’s Tavern in Rotterdam Straat.

Lode looks at me. ‘Because you’re practically family… That’s why.’

So simply because my naive hands have found Lode’s sister’s? Anyway, wasn’t it more the other way round? Didn’t she grab mine first? Because her father now greets me with more than a snarl and doesn’t take quite so long to offer me a seat? Because their mother now occasionally