Will, стр. 11

insurmountable problem. My French is useless according to Cyriel Goetschalckx, a teacher who reprimands me with ‘Willlllfrit’ even before I’ve lisped a French sentence to complete ruin. A failing memory makes you jump shamelessly from one thing to the next. It’s all one big movie show and you project your own reminiscences at will. That’s why I can effortlessly convince myself that I sensed how the system works right from the start of the so-called moyenne. Factory and machinery. Cogs that turn. The screw that goes through the teachers’ skulls drills deep into the students’ heads. They sell it as knowledge, but you, my beloved boy, have surely worked out by now that it comes down to acceptance more than anything else. You’re seventeen now, aren’t you? I suspect so, but I’m not sure. The things everyone believes have to be drilled into tender souls as truths. So there I am sitting at my school desk at the Royal Atheneum, like you now, and that’s why I’m telling you this. Maybe you can identify with it. I’m surprised that my fellow students, who act so free in the schoolyard, have no difficulty at all in accepting this so-called learning process. For most of them it goes in automatically and those who can’t keep up are shipped off to trades. There is a blonde boy in my class called Karel who is regularly ridiculed by the teachers because of his parents’ political inclinations. The history teacher in particular can’t resist: ‘Next week we’re going to talk about Germany again, Karel. That will make you happy, won’t it?’ Usually a few idiots laugh along in an attempt to suck up to the teacher. Karel himself remains imperturbable, which I find fascinating. He’s not top of the class, but still gets decent marks. He’s invariably obedient and eager to learn. Never once does he show any signs of feeling humiliated, not even when others laugh in his face because he’s given the correct answer to yet another question. He’ll pop up again later in the story. Anyway, as for myself, I can cope with the material, but I regularly freeze up when I have to reproduce it. I stutter and stammer and of course I get teased for that too. It’s turned into a massive scandal. The last few years I’ve lagged behind and eventually had to repeat a year. I blame it on the declining power of Angelo, the master hypnotist with the inaccessibly poetic heart of a child. Those first years he kept me above the fray and it’s maddening to not know why he’s failing me now, why he can no longer impose his will on others. Could it be that this being inside of me is no longer willing to play the game? That he, even more than Wilfried, understands that the appreciation of others is worthless? The one who calls himself my father reaches for his belt at the sight of my monthly misery, furiously annotated by my teachers: ‘A D for French grammar! An F for folklore! Algebra… it’s a bloody farce!’ He ignores the A-plus for sport. In contrast to the rest, I have no difficulty accepting gymnastics or the gymnastics teacher, who, with a beard like a biblical hero, rules over sweat, the limits of the body and the fear of failure. But that serves a higher purpose, a purpose I keep hidden from everyone else. The body that others always see as awkward is not mine. There is another body inside it, an angel’s body, that needs to be strengthened by training. But that A-plus has no value to my father. French, that’s what matters. A mastery of French would make it possible for me to rise higher and higher on the mechanical wings of acceptance so that I could finally touch down again as a civil servant in the employ of the universally reviled state, made for life, permanently appointed. My father’s belt is figurative, by the way. He never thrashed me, and anyway, a seventeen-year-old is no toddler. As a result his rage immediately collapses into melancholy. He tells me these are difficult times. It won’t be long before it’s war again. The taxi company where he works as a bookkeeper is on the verge of bankruptcy. The bills are piling up. My mother’s wealthy family have said they can’t keep lending a hand, enough is enough. And to make his suffering complete he has a son no sensible person could be proud of. ‘You’ve had it too easy.’ I can take his anger, but this sighing and groaning, the defeat he accepts without putting up any kind of fight, it’s too much. It makes me suspicious. An outsider would have thought my mother unaffected by her husband’s harping, but I see the red patches on her face, the annoyance. She’s standing at the kitchen door, drying her hands on a tea towel. Her wig looks a little crooked. A year ago a dermatologist recommended she wear her hair short so that the black ointment he’s prescribed, which smells of paraffin oil, can more easily be absorbed by her scalp. She has confided in me that she’s suffering from eczema, but also said it is gradually getting better. She says I needn’t be afraid, she’s still the same person. But the wig stays on her head and is seldom straight because the itch keeps tormenting her, which drives her husband to disgust and despair. When she insists that I immediately drink a glass of warm milk it finally knocks the legs out from under my father’s sad tirade. Everything seems to have been said. For a whole week nothing happens. But just when I’m hoping that my so-called father has convinced himself that he no longer has a son, that he’s given up on me as a lost cause, he informs me that he’s found someone to help me. He’s called Felix Verschaffel and he lives around the corner.