‘Das sind nicht meine Bücher…’ I try.
Lizke looks up and smiles again. ‘Danke schön. Sehr freundlich…’ His chin juts forward a little, his eyes screw up and combine with that frozen smile to form a mask of gratitude and appreciation. ‘Very pleased,’ he adds, nodding now too, while his eyes return to the printed page.
I sigh and suddenly think it doesn’t matter. I have an idea these books will never be going back to their owner. Or maybe they will, but when Meanbeard won’t be able to do anything except shrug his shoulders because of other, much more pressing, worries. All at once it strikes me that everything is temporary. I’ve never thought about it before but now Chaim Lizke’s reading in seclusion has driven it home.
But even that realization doesn’t make me want to sit in the lotus position under a tree with a gently babbling stream in the background and the teachings of Buddha draped round my bare neck like a comfy silk shawl. Yes, everything is temporary, but the disquiet Lizke evokes in me seems to have broken free of time. It is deep and unpredictable. I can’t have him staying here much longer. He’s started appearing in my dreams, sometimes wordless, but very present. Yesterday he held the door open for me and whispered like a butler, ‘Allow me, sir,’ after which he stuck his fingers in his mouth to whistle and a coach appeared out of the fog of Victorian London, in slow motion with two unruly black stallions foaming at the corners of their mouths. Lizke has to go. He’s getting under my skin, without me being able to work out why. Lately Lode has been relying more and more on me to provide him with food. It’s clear that he’s busy doing other things, acts of resistance probably, maybe sabotage. We all notice the increasing tension, as if everything is about to come to a head. Bollocks, of course. Life in this city drags on from incident to incident. One thing leads to another. Occupation or not, that’s all it is. Sometimes, when everything seems normal, I suddenly shiver and clutch at my stomach. It never lasts long, a minute at most, as if a robot inside of me has received a communication from a mastermind with a cynical plan to destroy the world.
At our front door in Kruik Straat I’m reaching in my pocket for the key when someone puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me to come with him. Before I realize what’s happening, I’m in the back of a car between two men in leather coats. The man who is slowly manoeuvring the car along België Lei has one hand loosely draped over the wheel and is holding his cigarette half out of the open window with the other. Nobody says a word. At Harmonie Park the car turns left into Karel Ooms Straat. The man on my right makes a show of coughing.
‘Can’t you give us a break from those filthy cigarettes? I haven’t got over that bronchitis yet.’
‘Kiss my arse,’ says the driver.
Nobody says a word to me. I’m cargo that has to be transported from point A to point B. I try to concentrate on my breathing and think of the Jew whose hand I shook in farewell just half an hour ago. I put my hands together on my lap. Here comes the reckoning. Here comes the moment I haven’t wanted to picture in detail, but have sometimes imagined on a rare restless night. We reach a residential neighbourhood and the car turns right. What was I thinking? I see Lode warning me, Yvette smiling at me, my mother crying in the kitchen, and I see myself, alone and abandoned, eating sandwiches in Vesting Straat’s dirty canteen. I feel my way through possibilities, possible retorts and alternative interpretations, things that have the ring of truth about them, explanations of suspicious behaviour. Here comes your big scene. This is your moment, Wilfried Wils. Don’t try to tell yourself otherwise. Start jumping on the spot to warm up in the wings. Make sure you don’t shit yourself. Be prepared for anything, especially the pain of truncheons raining down and beating you until you’re tender and bloody like an exquisite steak, the kind they used to serve up before the war in Hotel Weber on Keyser Lei, still bleeding and awash in thick brown gravy you could stand a fork up in, bleeding like Christ on the cross. Fear is what keeps you alive, fear is what keeps you alive. This sentence forms a refrain in my head.
We park in Della Faille Laan, headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst.
There’s an enormous commotion on the ground floor with people rushing in and out. I see men in uniform dragging other men between them whose faces are no longer recognizably human. Some mumble something while being carted downstairs. A door opens, letting out a cry of trapped terror before it closes again. Fear is what keeps you alive, fear is what keeps you alive. The men in leather think I’m climbing the stairs a little too slowly and lend a hand so that my feet hardly touch the marble. I struggle not to lose control of my bladder. They plonk me down on a bench in a high-ceilinged corridor like a little child and tell me to wait. A Waffen-SS sentry is posted at a door with a sub-machine gun. One of the men accompanying me knocks and enters. Time for the oral exam, I tell
