Will, стр. 6

‘Will, come on! Pull the other one!’

‘No, I’m serious. Who says there even is a “we”? Who says you can trust anyone without knowing?’

‘But you, I can!’ Lode cries, giving me a sharp poke in the ribs. ‘I can trust you.’

*

Me? That’s questionable, son, and I mean it. Not that somebody like me would have been capable of betraying Lode for any reason at all. He would have risked charges, possibly deportation and then death. That sounds a bit exaggerated, but it’s anything but. Two years after that poke Lode gave me, when the Germans had really started to shit themselves, they dragged people off to concentration camps for a lot less. In any case, does someone deserve to be trusted, even if he wouldn’t do anything to harm or betray his mate? There’s an old French police film from the seventies where Alain Delon’s character says that when it comes to cops, there’s only one correct way to approach them, and that’s with a combination of ambiguity and contempt. The reason I had to laugh when I heard him make that cool pronouncement was that Delon was playing a cop himself in that film. Policeman’s a strange profession anyway. I’ll tell you later how your great-grandfather stumbled into it. Or why not now? Get it over with. I accepted the job that had been arranged for me as a way of escaping the forced labour imposed by the Germans. Do you already feel that ‘ambiguity’ turning in your stomach? Youngster becomes a cop to avoid being carted off to Germany as a worker and, as a cop, helps to pick up people who want to escape that same forced labour. But of course with the Lizke family and their kind it wasn’t about work. Which is not to say that the Germans themselves knew what they were supposed to do with those people in the winter of ’40–’41. They had to get rid of them, that was all. Worse still, back then there were plenty of people in town who were pissed off that there were still Jews walking around at all. It wasn’t going fast enough for them. It’s one or the other, they said, you can’t have it both ways. If these people are so dangerous and reprehensible, why is the city still lousy with them? How is it possible that the master race still tolerates this enemy of the people on the streets? Are they really going to wait until this riff-raff have been terrified into adjusting to our way of life? They could wait a long time. Never gonna happen. A leech can only do one thing—it doesn’t adjust. The Germans had been here since May. They’d conquered a whole country in under a fortnight as if it were nothing. Weren’t they ashamed of themselves for not finishing the job? And then, of course, the rumour went round that it came down to the sparklers, that the Jews were being allowed to stay to safeguard the city’s pride and prosperity: the diamond trade. They’re all the same, people said; even the Germans have succumbed to filthy lucre. Only a month earlier, according to a friend of my father’s who worked at the town hall, the Jews had come in to register as Jewish around the back of the town hall in Gildekamer Straat. There was an endless stream of people. Everyone at the office had to work overtime. My father’s friend said they were queued up out into the rain under big black umbrellas. They’d been ‘summoned’ to present themselves with their identity cards, a bureaucratic way of saying they’d better obey. ‘You have no idea, the things I saw there… It beggared belief. The way those fellows came in and all the documents they had with them. Don’t get me started. Poles, Germans… Family here, family there, and all those names. Some of them had been living here for years, but they still couldn’t speak a word of Dutch or even French. But the thing is, it wasn’t all beards and black overcoats. Sometimes women came in… real pin-ups. You’d fall over backwards if you saw them… Who’d have thought the tribe of Abraham included such magnificent specimens?’ My father’s friend held his glass out for a refill. Only a couple of weeks before the mass registration cafés and restaurants had been forced to post a notice on the door if the business was in Jewish hands. But all those measures weren’t enough for the old bags and drivelling fools, the bellyachers and troublemakers. And suddenly they were getting what they wanted. Loads of Jews were being put on trains to the orchard town of Saint-Trond, which they threw into a complete uproar. People moaned and whined. ‘Why do we have to take care of the foreigners? Do you know how much it costs? And what are they going to do here? Help pick the apples? It’s the bloody season for it!’ After a few months the Germans let the lot of them quietly return to the city. That’s completely forgotten now because two years after that debacle they did know what to do with them and shipped them off much further east to places where the chimneys smoked and corpse after corpse fed the fires day and night. And no, we didn’t know those details at the time. But that the Jews and others were being dispatched to places where they would be given an opportunity to earn a place in the Reich by the sweat of their brows, no, that was something none of us believed. Only gutless wonders claimed otherwise after the war, and some of them kept broadcasting their craven slave morality by weighing one thing up against the other, what they’d seen and what they hadn’t seen, with an emphasis on that ‘hadn’t’, with their sudden myopia accepted by others for the simple reason that nobody, from high to low, from