Will, стр. 70
‘Sus… such a harmless fellow. Assistant librarian at Conscience Plein. Maybe he’s even got a permanent position there because there’s not much else he’s up to. His poems are even worse than you’d expect from a parvenu like him, a lot worse, but that’s no reason to put him in hospital.’
‘Ow.’
‘I hear he needed a lot of stitches. Gregor had his driver take him to St Elisabeth’s. Yes, pal. Go ahead and shit yourself. Sussy-Boy is a friend of the Obersturmführer’s…’
‘Help, help!’ screeches the old lady suddenly from the darkness.
‘Just ignore her. She’s up to her old tricks again…’
Meanbeard stuffs his pipe and sucks the flame into the tobacco. The old lady calls out again.
This time her son reacts immediately and especially loudly. ‘Do I have to bloody well come in there or what?’ She lets out a sigh, as if she’s a deflating balloon filled with aggravation and mismatched maternal love.
‘I’m in deep trouble…’
Meanbeard starts laughing at me. ‘Look at him sitting there, the pugilist of the sixth division. Trouble? Let’s just say you made up for it, but from the look on your face you’ve forgotten that bit because you had too much booze in you.’
Gregor looking at me, me saying things, him answering—that’s really all I know.
‘It’s very simple. You’re on our side and we help each other. Our Oberscharführer knows that, I know it and you know it too. It’s going to get interesting. There’s a lot of swindle and theft with the ration books. Omer and I have quite a lot planned for the next few weeks. We’d appreciate your help with that. Help, by the way, that you last night swore a solemn oath to provide, like a choir boy, just pissed off your face and with someone else’s blood on your knuckles. Gregor did an impression of you. We fell off our chairs laughing.’
I stand up and button my jacket.
‘Oh, you going? Don’t forget your flowers.’
‘Give them to Jenny.’
‘She’ll be over the moon. Thank you, Wilfried.’
I must have sent her seven or eight letters, all starting with, ‘My dearest darling, still no news from you. It’s what I deserve, but still…’ She’s closed all of her shutters and locked the doors. After the first couple of letters remain unanswered, I stuff my begging epistles through the butcher’s-shop letterbox myself late at night, firmly convinced that the postman is refusing all cooperation, that the universe itself will no longer bend to my ardent longing. Still her silence continues, encouraging me to bang on even more about love and pain, probably getting weepier and more tasteless with every sentence. Angelo is disgusted but holds his tongue. My inner self sounds as hollow as a cathedral after midnight. I lie down on my bed and start crying for no reason. Only the faintest echo gets through to me, nothing more. ‘I am not a bad person, I am not a bad person…’ I repeat quietly to myself, which makes the crying fits even more intense, so that I walk around the next day with puffy eyes. My so-called mother has come round and forgotten the vomit in the hall. She now looks at me the way she’d look at a suffering cat that’s crawled under a wardrobe, and at the dinner table she keeps warning me that it’ll be the death of me if I keep it up.
‘It’s like a festering wound in his head,’ she whispers to her husband in my presence.
‘He’s got to come to his senses,’ my so-called father agrees.
With Lode I don’t dare broach the subject of Yvette at all. He doesn’t give me much chance either. Our paths cross at work, we even go for the odd beer together, but our conversations are about everything except women, love and family. We have a code for Chaim Lizke’s food deliveries. ‘The potatoes are at the gate,’ Lode will say and I, as if hypnotized and still part of the family, proceed to the gate next to the butcher’s shop at dusk and deliver the bag I find there to the Jew.
All the while my thoughts are on the letter I’ve just slipped into their letterbox. Was I being too blunt? Was the end too tearful again, not manly enough, too childish? Wouldn’t it be better to simply say goodbye to her and finally behave the way men are supposed to? Does a poet like the one I want to be have any use for a woman who can’t keep up with him, who at the first slight setback decides to shun him for the rest of his life? It’s true, it really has gone on too long. I’ll put an end to it and we’ll each go our own way. But why do I suddenly feel so cold or get in such a foul mood when I imagine her being with someone else and doing the things with him that she has already let me do with her? ‘Bloody hell,’ I think, ‘she’s turned me into a mewling brat.’ And those wheels just keep turning in my head, crushing everything. The flesh and blood of my poethood is drawn through this sighing, worrying grinder and reduced to banal, petit bourgeois mince. After which self-loathing knocks on the door and asks to be let in. And still no Angelo, no nagging voice to tell me to pull myself together. Although he only exists in my mind, I can already see him in bed with her and laughing while he tells her about the minced meat in my head before giving her another… Anyway, I can’t go on like this.
Chaim Lizke smiles and nods at me again, takes the food out of the bag and, without deigning to give me another glance, sits down at the kitchen table to pick up his opened book. He really doesn’t care