Will, стр. 66
‘How do you expect me to take you out dancing when one place after another’s being wrecked?’
‘I’m counting on your ingenuity. You’re not going to tell me dancing has been completely prohibited? If you’re on the right side, there are still plenty of places to go.’ She looks at me like a cat with a mouse.
‘And I’m on the right side?’
‘You know people on that side.’
She turns her back on me and bends forward.
The stylus comes down on the crackling gramophone record.
‘Plais-i-i-i-i-ir d’amour ne dure qu’u-u-u-u-un instant… Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie-e-e-e-e…’ The living room is too small for her. She whispers a line from the love song to a standard lamp, moves over to the window with her hands clasped imploringly, as if the moon will hear her, then suddenly leaps back to me with her brows in a playful frown. ‘Et pourtant notre tendre roman par ta faute… aujourd’hui vient mourir bêtement…’ Effortlessly she drapes her voice over the nightingale Rina Ketty’s, who is doing bouncy revolutions under the gramophone stylus with her tango orchestra. She emphasizes the Italian chansonnière’s un-French R even more while placing her hands on her cheeks and adopting a wide-eyed pose in an imaginary circle of light. I can’t take my eyes off her and smile. At the end of the song, Yvette does a pirouette in front of her grinning mother, who is leaning on the kitchen doorpost and winks at me. Isn’t she talented? Isn’t it patently obvious that she has the gift of making other people happy with her voice? Couldn’t she move thousands upon thousands of listeners to tears on the great European stages? Her mother and I give her a fervent round of applause. She bows deeply.
‘Your father should hear that sometime instead of all those difficult opera things you drive him up the wall with.’
‘Oh, Mum, he doesn’t like to hear me sing at all.’
‘Nothing happens of its own accord. Men need to be trained.’
As if she’s said too much, my future mother-in-law looks in my direction. ‘Isn’t that right, Wilfried?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I answer, without meeting her gaze, holding a match up to my cigarette.
Yvette sighs theatrically.
‘Fine, I’ll get back to the kitchen,’ her mother concludes abruptly.
Yvette sits down next to me on the sofa and starts to leaf furiously through a women’s magazine she has probably picked up a thousand times before. ‘It’s all right for you to call our ma “Mum”. Or “Mother”.’
‘Did she say that?’ I blow smoke out over the newspaper on the coffee table in front of me. ‘No one speaks of the peril of Bolshevism… We want to be recognized as a nation…’
‘Would that make you feel uncomfortable?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Look at me. You’re more interested in that newspaper than you are in me. What am I to you? A sack of potatoes?’
Suddenly her tongue is very sharp. I look at her.
‘You have no idea who I am, Wilfried.’
‘Nonsense.’
She squeezes my forearm. ‘Who am I? Tell me! What do I want from life? Do you know?’
Like a lover in a bad old-fashioned film where the action’s interrupted by title cards with the sighs written out instead of being spoken, I drop to my knees and seize her hand after first stubbing my half-smoked Turkish cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Happiness! Love! You want me!’
‘Sit back down. You’re making fun of me.’
I sit down again and straighten the creases in my trouser legs.
‘Can’t we lighten up sometimes?’ I sound a little too plaintive. After all, I’m the one who’s always too serious—she’s told me that dozens of times. Being with me isn’t enough fun. I’m too distant and too dark. But that last bit, the darkness, is attractive now and then—she admits that too. More than anything, it’s the betwixt and between Wilfried, neither fish nor fowl, who gets on her nerves, who gets her goat, as she puts it.
‘Do you think I want you to call our mother “Mum”?’
‘Yes.’
She gives me a hard slap on the cheek. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Ow.’
‘Yes, ow… silly little twerp.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘What I want is to sing. I want everyone to hear my voice. For them to call me the nightingale of De Coninck Plein, a woman of humble origins whose career has taken her to Milan, Paris and New York. I want…’
‘That’s what I was just thinking.’
‘What I want is to be free. I want the freedom to travel from place to place. I want you to come with me and write your poems. You shouldn’t call our mother “Mum”. Who knows, maybe we won’t get married and live in sin, never settling down. You have to do what you want, just like I want to do what I—’
‘Be who you—’
Slap on the cheek again. ‘You always interrupt me.’
I grab her tight by the wrist and say in measured tones, ‘Being who you want to be is the most difficult bloody thing there is.’
‘That’s him again. I can see it in your eyes. The bastard’s back.’
Aunty Emma waves to us, so full of expectation I regret having arranged to meet her. She’s wearing something white with puff sleeves, combined with a double string of pearls hung loosely around her neck. I wave back and lead Yvette over to her, cutting between the other tables at the Hulstkamp. My sweetheart is dressed like a well-bred Bohemian, a Gypsy girl in a wide, high-waisted, black-and-white-striped skirt with a red blouse under an equally red bolero she made herself.
‘But what a beautiful girl you are!’ my aunt cries,