Will, стр. 13
‘He didn’t say a word to me about it.’
‘Anyway, it got late and we had to catch the last train. So a whole crowd of us are hiking it to the station when suddenly I spot something on the ground. Just like a train ticket. I pick it up and… Wait, I’ll show you.’
Meanbeard hops up off his chaise longue, reaches for a piece of paper and hands it to me. From a distance it really does look like a train ticket, except it’s printed on a different kind of paper. In messy letters it says, ‘All Hitler lackeys to Berlin in fourth-class cattle-trucks!’
He stares at me, waiting for me to catch on.
His voice goes down an octave. ‘The whole platform was covered with the things. Can you believe it? In our own country? Those bastards had them printed just for our night out because they, of course, are not short of money. Read it again. “All Hitler lackeys to Berlin in fourth-class cattle-trucks!” Enough said, eh? That’s what they want to do with us. That’s what all the Freemasons, Bolsheviks and hook-nosed sons of Judah would like to see happen. Do they ever mention freedom of speech at that school of yours? Well, around here it’s dead.’
He presses hard on the piece of paper in my hand with his index finger. ‘It won’t be us. You’ll see. Not us.’
Who are the people around us? And most importantly, what role will they play in our lives? I can imagine that’s a question you haven’t yet asked yourself. At your age friends grow on trees. They’re there. That’s all. At least, I hope so. I hope you celebrate life with your friends, even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing. But my circle of friends has been seriously depleted, almost all dead and buried, and my family, as you know all too well, sees me as a curse. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is shouting at Wilfried Wils that there is no place for him any more, that I should just die. But I admit that those feelings mostly rise after I’ve been at the Calvados. No old folks’ home for me, you know that too. But before you start thinking I’ve been abandoned to my fate, let me reassure you. Your sire twice removed has a nurse at his disposal. ‘Homecare’ they call it, and she herself is called Nicole, a strapping lass in her fifties. No, I don’t need her to wipe my arse or help me into the tub. The woman’s a good cook, she does the weekly shop, and if I don’t snap at her the moment she comes in, she’s liable to start singing in the kitchen. That might lead to me slamming the door of my study or shouting ‘Give us a break!’ because an old bastard like me is expected to be bitter and bad-tempered, and it’s best to live up to that expectation. But last week, when there was still no sign of snow, and rain was lashing the windows, I heard her singing and for the first time I wasn’t annoyed. In a soothing voice that wasn’t sad at all, she sang Charles Aznavour’s ‘La bohème’. That name doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? Don’t look it up, it’s old tosh you wouldn’t like anyway. The song is supposedly about Aznavour himself when he was flat broke in Paris but oh-so-happy. He sings about him and his mates being young and crazy together. On the telly Yvette and I had acquired not that long before, we saw him singing the song with one clenched fist and a white hankie in the other hand. Anyway, hearing that song I asked myself for the first time what Nicole was going to mean to me besides being someone who throws the clothes in the machine and does the washing-up and plonks a cup of herbal tea down in front of my nose every morning. That question thrilled me, son. Because there’s a fair chance she’s going to be the last person to play an unexpected role in my life. I have long since figured out all the other people who have crossed my path, placing them on the chessboard one after the other over the last few years, like a former chess maniac setting up the pieces to relive the games that once meant so much to him. His playing days are over, only the memories are left, by which I’m trying to say that my life is no longer that complicated. But her singing about those artistic Bohemians made me realize that there is still a game in play after all, albeit a much simpler one. Something with dice, maybe, and two counters on a snakes-and-ladders board. That’s enough for me. When you’re playing a game, time’s claws aren’t in you quite so deep.
That Aznavour record came out in the mid-sixties. I was ‘on tram four’, as we used to say here—in my forties. The first time I hear the song I’m not with Yvette, but playing chess with Lode. We’re in the Terminus, as we often are, on Statie Straat, close to Koningin Astrid Plein. They have a jukebox. One person after the other drops a coin into it to listen to ‘La bohème’. Everyone knows it inside-out and there’s always somebody who’ll stand up and bellow: ‘Je vous parle d’un temps que les moins de vingt ans ne peuvent pas connaître!’ Whereupon everyone, either drunk already or well on their way, joins in with, ‘Ca voulait dire on est heureux… La bohème, la bohème. Nous ne mangions qu’un jour sur deux…’ I know I just described it