Will, стр. 67
After all the kissing, Aunty Emma settles back down cautiously like a goose trying to keep her freshly hatched goslings warm. ‘I always come early to get this table. It has the best view.’
‘Yvette wants to dance.’
Aunty Emma looks at Yvette with a twinkle in her eyes. ‘Oh, that will come, definitely. Don’t worry. The moment my Gregor walks in with his all his friends, this place explodes.’
Between the two women’s heads, I see a peculiar figure drinking jenever at a table at the back. He has pitch-black eyes, wears his hair as if it’s stuck to his head with wallpaper paste, and is clad in a black velvet suit with a red bow tie and waistcoat, over a white shirt with cuffs that come down almost to his fingertips and are trimmed with lace.
‘Have you seen that joker there, next to the door to the loos?’
‘Oh,’ sighs my aunt without looking over her shoulder, ‘do you know him? That’s Sus. He thinks he’s some poet who used to hang around here like a bad smell.’
‘Crazy Paulie,’ I say, almost boiling over without letting the others notice.
‘Keep your distance, lad. Sus is seriously gabby and before you know it, he’ll have invited himself to our table and our whole evening will be ruined.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Yvette whispers.
‘Nothing,’ I say hastily with a forced smile, ‘nothing.’ Sometimes this city and her poets can drive you completely mad. How many fakes, how much verbal diarrhoea? Acting like you’re Paul van Ostaijen, how low can a pseudo-bard sink? You can’t compel great talent into being by a change of bloody wardrobe. It takes work and living on the edge, not ambition, a pose or clothing you’ve borrowed from someone else, especially not that. ‘So,’ I say, ‘what would the ladies like to drink?’
Aunty Emma laughs boldly. ‘Later it will be champagne, but make mine a cold beer for now.’
Yvette would like some wine. I raise a hand and give my order. ‘And for me, a beer with a jenever.’
‘Oh my, jenever. Watch out you don’t get in trouble.’
‘This place is known for its jenever, darling.’
‘Make sure you don’t get a reputation here too, darling.’
Yvette and I smile at each other, but I can tell from her eyes that she’s serious.
Aunty Emma claps her hands together exuberantly. ‘What a nice couple you make. You’ve got spirit, Yvette. Exactly what this one here needs. You wouldn’t believe the mouth he had even as a little boy. Do you remember, Wilfried?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Really?’ Yvette teases.
‘The lungs on him too. He was hardly taller than this table when he started acting up with his mother and father. “You’re not my father!” I can still hear him saying it. And just the same to his mother. We could hardly stop laughing. It was priceless.’
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
‘Extase sans phrases, adieu la raison…’ sings the gramophone not all that loudly amid the conversations at a dozen tables.
A cheerful Yvette sticks one finger up in the air, ‘“La java du clair de lune” by Suzy Solidor!’
‘Goodness, child. You know your music.’
‘She wants to be a singer, Aunty Emma.’
‘I can believe it. She’s got the figure for it.’
‘Suzy Solidor has one of those short blonde hairdos with a fringe just over her eyes. I’d like one like that too.’
‘Child, mistreating your hair like that! What an idea. Anyway, that butch look is totally out of fashion.’
‘I thought you wanted to sing in the opera, darling.’
‘As long as it’s on a stage, dear.’
Here are the Germans. Suddenly the place is teeming with uniforms, black and field grey, and my Aunty Emma is in the warm embrace of the city’s Oberscharführer and Jewish Affairs Officer. His comrades-in-arms are already three sheets to the wind and hanging off their women out of necessity. They murmur their surnames almost incomprehensibly. Gregor himself is friendliness incarnate, greeting Yvette and me with charm and promptly ordering champagne and a bottle of jenever. Oberscharführer Karl is with a blonde, who has a thick head of curls pinned half up and a dazzling set of teeth. In contrast to Gregor, Karl is a typical SS officer, the kind who only ever deigns to look down on us natives from a great height, but making an exception, of course, for beautiful women like Yvette, who he immediately treats as if she’s been waiting demurely for years to be educated by a know-it-all like him. Without her asking for it and even before an ice bucket has been placed on the table, he provides her with an account of the choice champagne houses and which varieties of grape they use to obtain their excellent results. Karl’s girlfriend flashes Yvette a smile that would have King Kong blubbering like a sissy. Hauptsturmführer Heinrich refuses to be addressed as befits his lofty rank; after all, he’s much too drunk for that, and anyway these officers don’t seem to set much store by formalities once the sun has gone down and waiters in livery are surrounding them like nurses with trays full of alcoholic medicine. The Hauptsturmführer has a deep scar on his left cheek and a drowsy eye. He doesn’t notice us. Instead he is bestowing his complete attention on the two women he has brought with him, who claim to be sisters. In no time, even more women have gathered around him and he seems to know them all, even if I don’t catch him using any first names, preferring to apply ‘Schatzi’ and ‘Mausi’ by turn as he addresses them.
Ever since the SS settled around us with Wehrmacht officers and hangers-on in their wake,