The landlord looks at Lode in fury. ‘Aren’t you the son of the butcher here on the square? You’re in the police, aren’t you? And you stay sitting on your fucking arse while they smash up my business! They’re trying to ruin me and you and your mate don’t do a thing!’
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ his wife sobs at Lode.
‘We’re not allowed to do anything,’ Lode answers as calmly as possible.
‘Spineless bastards! We’ll find your kind after the war. Get out of my bar! Now, damn it!’
Meanbeard is off on ‘an excursion’, as he whispered to me himself an hour ago, which means he’s gone to see Jenny or some other prostitute, leaving Yvette and me alone with his mother, who only relaxes once her darling son has left the house. She has long since stopped noticing me. Yvette is the one who matters, Yvette with the gentle nurse’s voice, who is still, as if it’s an almost never-ending story stretched over countless leather-bound tomes, reading ‘The Curse of the Count’, published in a periodical—Volume 9, Number 5—and consisting of some thirty miserable pages held together by two staples.
‘Read on, child. I’m sitting comfortably.’
‘But excessive contemplation withers the spirit. Happy are those—so Robert de Tiège told himself—who are lucky enough to awaken in a soft bed without having to ascertain that they have betrayed themselves. The guilty party was none other than he himself! No one else could be blamed for this betrayal. Forever he would deny himself sleep. His suffocating sense of guilt would not allow it. No, Robert de Tiège himself would forbid it. He would prop his swollen eyelids open with splinters of wood! At dawn they would find him bolt upright, as if he…’
A gentle snoring fills the room. The old lady is sound asleep again, like an elderly squirrel that has just consumed an extralarge nut to start its hibernation—her head crooked, a fine thread of saliva connecting her mouth to the shawl wrapped around her shoulders… convinced she’s in safe hands.
‘That didn’t take long,’ Yvette whispers cheerfully. Today she has a tic that’s driving me crazy. Every now and then, not often, she presses the tip of her tongue firmly against the left corner of her painted mouth. Then the bottom of her tongue is like a little animal, wet and pink, rapidly carrying out some repairs on the gates of lust. She looks at me over her shoulder and gets an inkling.
‘I want to kiss you,’ I whisper, trying not to pant too much.
She shrugs, but raises one of her eyebrows coquettishly at the same time. A wave of gratitude passes through me. The clips that keep her hair up and reveal her delicate ears; thank you. The lipstick that makes her lips look so passionate; thank you. The way her eyes sparkle through that mascara; thank you very much! That smell of lily of the valley escaping from her fairly decent neckline; a thousand thanks, O universe, for all these things that make my heart consent so gratefully to being ground to dust.
‘What say you now, Robert de Tiège, traitor to your own heart?…’ she whispers in a mocking voice, still with that raised eyebrow.
Slowly I pull her up from her reading chair and lead her out of the old lady’s sitting room. As usual she doesn’t notice a thing. I lead Yvette down a few steps to a landing with a vestibule that doesn’t go anywhere but is taken up with coats hung neatly on hooks and shoes and hats on shelves on either side. There we stand under the arch of the entrance, lit by a yellow light and surrounded by clothes, worthy of Hollywood, the start of a happily ever after, just before the volume of the music shoots up and the final credits start to roll.
I reach for the light cord. Kiss in the dark?
But her lips have already found mine and we kiss in the light, surrounded by the smells of beeswax, mothballs and shoe polish. I sometimes think of myself as an aroused beast, but her mouth is always there to teach me it’s nothing compared to what’s going on inside her: a storm of lust, which she resists and lets rage at the same time. A gentle kiss suddenly becomes devouring and the gasps she lets out now and then move me to a level of excitement I could never reach alone, as if the entire universe is roaring its willingness. At the same time it’s all just in my head and I can never fully match her surrender. When my kisses intensify, she calms me down, only to send me soaring once more with a subtle lick of her tongue. I think too much, I suspect, while she simply follows the fire in her belly, sometimes gentle, sometimes overwhelming. What we do with our mouths is a story in itself. Then, and this always happens when my lips are starting to feel raw, she forces me to look deep into her eyes. If I try to compel her to do something like that, she always looks away first. But if her eyes seek mine, she fixes her
