Will, стр. 5
‘Just a piece of paper with the address of that bed store on it.’
Lode slaps the wooden desktop. ‘It’s not right, chief! Not one of those children was over fifteen. A woman and a bunch of kids? And how are we supposed to know if the father really was a work dodger? Has everyone gone mad?’
A fiasco. But what do you expect? Most people run around like headless chickens. You need to know that I had to convince Lode to make a report in the first place. It took a lot of effort on my part on the way back. He kept saying that we shouldn’t start shit-stirring. It was mainly his disgust speaking. But he had it wrong. That was exactly what we needed to do. The reasoning was pretty obvious. We could assume that those two field arseholes would go and make a report of their own once they got back to Field Command. That meant there was a reasonable chance we’d be called to account. Those fellows were thorough and may very well have taken note of our numbers. Not having given our version of the facts beforehand would put us in an even worse position. There was only one important thing that we—and this is how I emphasized it to Lode—needed to be totally clear about. I had held that field gendarme back because I was worried he was going to attack my fellow officer. That was all that mattered. The rest of it had nothing to do with us. We had to cover ourselves. In the end Lode said I was right. But I had misjudged him and, most of all, I should have spoken first. Instead of concentrating on that one fact while dictating his report, his rage began to play up and he couldn’t resist making it a complaint, emphasizing the great injustice he thought he’d witnessed… And that wasn’t all. There was something else, something I only understood later. If Lode had told me that one thing then, I wouldn’t have believed him, not even if he’d crossed his heart and hoped to die. Lode knew that foreigner. He knew the Jew Chaim Lizke, who we had helped put on a transport along with his family.
‘You do understand, Metdepenningen, that this is going to Field Command?’
‘It goes to the mayor too, doesn’t it?’
The chief inspector scratches the side of his head and puts his glasses back on.
‘So, boy, are you trying to teach me how to do my job? How long have you rookies been here anyway? Four or five weeks? What’s this got to do with the mayor?’
The chief’s patience is exhausted and Lode has finally realized it. He hesitates, uncertain.
I just described him as a Hollywood hero and I’m not taking any of that back. He was impressive and single-minded, radiating a strength people seldom see and normally associate, perhaps justifiably, with long-forgotten heroes or the terrifying beauty of gods. But more than anything else, people are pitiful, they’re not consistent and they seldom face facts. Nobody stays a hero a whole life long.
‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’
I hear Lode swallow.
‘It is a case of maintaining public order and then it falls under the, um…’
With his thumb and index finger almost touching, the chief says, ‘You are this far away from getting night duty for the rest of the winter. Is that what you want?’
He looks at Lode first and then at me, the reasonable one. ‘The word “unlawful” is not going in it. Now get out of my sight.’
When we get back outside Lode is as good as convinced that the chief is a ‘real one’, a mole in other words, who was already conniving with his fellow fascists before the war, part of a secret society dedicated to undermining city and state, or rather bending them, with or without violence, to the whims of the occupier. The way he tells it, early on that January morning in 1941, makes me picture a huddle of masked men swearing eternal loyalty to each other and their new Fatherland by flickering torchlight. By this time I already know treachery exists; I don’t need kitsch images bubbling up inside me. But they’re something I have never been able to resist.
I must have been about seven. My father told me that on my mother’s side the family once lived in a small castle. That night I had a dream: me in the middle of that castle, with my first sensation the horribly cold marble floor under my bare feet. My mother is standing at the top of a high staircase, beckoning. An enormous door swings open. I follow her, but she keeps slipping ahead. Door after door opens, all lavishly ornamented with figures carved into the wood: angels swarming over each other, eagles pecking at each other’s bodies, writhing snakes. The last door opens. My treacherous mother has disappeared. I see a countess clawing at her neck, trying to dig out something rotten. She is followed by a maid in a white bonnet spewing blood in the privy. I see a count as a knight, holding his sword high in the throne room and with churning madness in his mouth. A greybeard, dressed in rags, sticks an admonitory finger in the air while a dog licks his unshod toes. A carelessly discarded banner lies at the foot of the stairs, stinking of mould. Outside the fish in the evaporating pond gulp for air, baking in the sun. Around that stagnant pool: the mutilated bodies of men, women and children with millions of green blowflies swarming around them, crawling in and out of their wounds, laying eggs. And yes, men with torches, them too. In the morning I woke up with the flu.
‘We can’t trust anyone.’
‘Who says you can trust me?’
Visibly shocked, Lode looks at me, searching my face for mockery or sarcasm, then