Will, стр. 68
Meanwhile the place is filling up. Yvette shoots me a look of silent desperation. Aunty Emma sees it too and whispers something in Gregor’s ear.
‘Eine ausgezeichnete Idee!’ he bellows at once.
He snaps his fingers, calls out a few things to the people behind the bar, and immediately chairs and tables are being slid out of the way, the gramophone has been turned up, and he and Aunty Emma are smooching on a square metre. Before I can get up to dance with Yvette, she’s accepted an invitation from that cursed Karl. His blonde girlfriend watches them with her arms crossed.
‘Do you want to dance with me?’ I ask.
She doesn’t even answer. I’m infected with the same disease as Yvette. Her German lover turns out to be blessed with supple hips and other dance skills, so that Yvette visibly relaxes in his arms. The fact that he’s finally stopped lecturing her must help too. He keeps staring at her with his mouth half open, as if his dance-floor dexterity might send her into indecent ecstasies from one moment to the next. I knock back two glasses of jenever in quick succession and then messily pour another. The pseudo-poet is onto me. He stands up and grins while closing his eyes and pretending to play a violin, then teases me with a bow in my direction before pushing open the door that leads to the toilets.
‘Do you work for these fellows too?’ asks a little chap in glasses.
‘Do you?’
‘Dolmetscher,’ the pipsqueak pipes up at once. ‘Interpreter, in other words.’
‘I know what it fucking means.’
‘Sorry, pal.’
‘You stupid monkey, you stupid little delicate apprentice bastard, you four-eyed cocksucker. You can shove your apologies up your arse, get it?’
‘Whoa.’
‘Am I a horse or what? Are you a cowboy?’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the bespectacled interpreter says calmly.
I have no trouble standing up and moving through the dancing crowd to the toilets. Yvette doesn’t even notice me passing by. She’s letting herself be led about as if she’s in a trance. The poet is standing at the urinal shaking off his undoubtedly tiny cock one drop after the other as if suffering from an enlarged prostate. ‘Phew…’ he says when he sees me. I grab him by the neck and smash his face into the porcelain in front of him. He’s so surprised it’s almost effortless and after that he’s too stunned to resist a second blow that leaves blood on the white. ‘Ho-ho,’ he cries at last. Someone else who thinks I’m a bloody horse. For a few seconds I’m not sure what to do with him. I’m even swaying on my feet. But then I drag him into one of the bogs and kick him until he’s lying there puking next to the toilet. At least, I think so. I can’t be sure, because suddenly I’m back among the dancing couples.
‘You all right?’ Yvette mimes at me over the shoulder of her still highly diligent partner. I think I nod reassuringly. That too is something I’m not a hundred per cent certain of. I slump down on my chair and pour myself another jenever. The German has his hand on Yvette’s bum. I wave and give her the thumbs up. Everything’s fine, it’s all under control and so are you, apparently? She looks away.
Gregor comes to sit down next to me. Aunty Emma keeps her distance and hugs herself as if she’s just witnessed a terrible car accident. Big boss Heinrich is dancing with three women at once, or rather, they’re dancing around him as if he’s a heathen god standing naked on an altar. I no longer see the waiters, just the trays of drinks going from one end of the brasserie to the other, with no apparent human intervention. I go to refill my glass, but it’s still full from the last time. Gregor and I begin a conversation, I think. I say things. He listens. Then he speaks.
Suddenly I’m holding on tight to a lamp post on De Coninck Plein.
Yvette is glaring at me.
My stomach turns. I think I’m going to burp, but immediately start puking over my coat.
I think she’s crying. She says, ‘You didn’t protect me.’
‘You wanted to dance, you whore.’
‘You’re not listening to me. You’re not yourself, you drunk. You didn’t protect me.’
Another burst of vomiting; this time I’m able to bend over first. Thick green spouts out of my body. I taste bile. I desperately need to shit as well.
‘You hear me? You didn’t protect me, Wilfried!’ She wallops me on the side of the head. My ear starts ringing. I collapse and start to sob. She doesn’t look at me and starts searching her handbag for the key.
‘Don’t tell your brother—’
‘Don’t you dare. I’ll say what I bloody like. Shaming me like that.’
‘Don’t tell your brother that we… that we… went dancing in the Hulstkamp. It’s important… He mustn’t know… D’you understand? D’you understand? Sweetie, sweetie…’
Bang. The front door’s shut.
Walk home or crawl?
I get a hangover to match. The next day is a Sunday. My mother refuses to say a word to me and my father keeps just as quiet. But no sooner has she turned her back than he starts off about the puke they found in the hall early this morning.
‘The toilet was obviously too far away.’
‘I don’t remember a thing.’
‘Well it wasn’t me, you pig. You should have heard yourself coming up the stairs. You were as pissed as a whole regiment.’
With the sins of a son following in his father’s footsteps after all, I am now paying