Will, стр. 73

I too am led through the shopping streets the same way: like an overgrown child—without a memory, without any past, without any cheerful criticism of this much-praised present. Criticism my granddaughter used to provide nonstop, to my surreptitious pleasure. Today it occurs to me that hers must have been the last intimate voice of resistance in my life, bright and merciless.

Now there’s only silence, unless you count Nicole’s lively cackle.

When I walk through the city alone, I tell myself I can still manage. With her next to me, the fear of stumbling again and being doomed to a wheelchair starts to rise. At times like this I’m tormented by a dream of being weightless again in the arms of a father who never convinced in that role. Back then the forces that were determined to turn everyone into a docile child instead of an independent adult were omnipresent, just like now.

‘Are you short of breath?’

‘Why should I be? Because of all the windbags round here?’

‘Here we go again,’ she says, laughing.

We cross The Boulevard and I see the brightly coloured masses streaming towards me from the Meir.

‘Do you really need to subject me to all this?’

She squeezes my hand and for a moment I seem to sense regret at having brought me with her, that she is scared I might fall arse over tit on the spot, inasmuch as I have any kind of arse left.

‘It’s not much further. And then we’ll have everything in one place: there’s a shoe shop, and we can find trousers there too, and there’s a shirt specialist for a couple of new shirts like you asked.’

A shirt specialist. She’s said that to put me at ease. I used to prefer bespoke shirts, but in these banal times I have to make do with a shop that specializes in shirts only. It’s been a long time since I was on the Meir. Even when cars were still allowed here, this glittering shopping paradise lay with its legs spread wide. I’ve never known it any other way. I am one of the last of a generation that weighs everything against war and I can’t help but see the boisterousness of the present as a thick scab over the wounds of the past. There is much too much buried in both me and the city. In the sixties the longhairs said there was a beach under the paving stones. Idiots. It’s deception buried under those stones. Lever them up and the dead will dance. They’re already bloody dancing—there’s one over there. I see her standing next to me with an accusatory look. Who failed to protect you, Hilde, my beautiful, foolish, troubled granddaughter? Was it me or someone else? Or did we all make a mess of it together?

‘You’re sighing as if you’ve had another difficult night of it, Mr Wils.’

‘Wait until you’re old, Nicole.’

An open maw of gold and glitter gapes on the left side of the Meir. A well-trodden red carpet extends like a forked tongue lolling out of a fancy mouth full of perfect white teeth. Through a gully flanked by promotional percentages in fluorescent colours (‘–50%’, ‘–70%’, ‘Last-Chance Renovation Sale!’) we enter an enormously wide space with people drinking champagne on a platform and tables left and right with even more shops behind them, more lighting, more tinsel. Music and loud conversations creep up to the top of the tall walls, where they are captured in a glass dome before falling back down again.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.’

‘This used to be the festival hall, Mr Wils. You remember that, don’t you?’

A snake slithers through my guts and into my throat. ‘Was that here?…’

Nicole looks worried.

‘Let’s go over there and sit down for a moment.’

‘Bit of heartburn,’ I groan, suddenly feeling like a wrungout dishcloth.

‘Sit down. I’ve got some lozenges somewhere. I’ll fetch you a glass of water.’

She only has to rummage in her bag and the lozenge is lying on my wrinkled hand. I suck it and look round. She beckons a waiter who is dressed in black, with a black hole in one ear and the little hair he has left sticking straight up in stiff little wisps. I sip a glass of water while the mint taste of the lozenge makes the sour snake recoil.

Nicole stirs her café au lait.

‘Are you all right?’

I stare into her candid eyes because I’m in need of some distraction. No, she doesn’t have a man. I don’t believe she ever has. Does she prefer women? The possibility can’t be excluded, but I doubt it very much. How old is that sinewy body of hers, with those frank eyes and that buzz cut with grey gleaming through it? Pushing fifty? Mid-fifties? But she must have known love, or instead of it a deep calm. Maybe she overcame herself or completely reinvented herself, going against everything others ever expected of her.

‘You have a scoundrel’s eyes, Mr Wils.’

‘I’m just looking at you.’

‘We’re not going to start acting silly, are we?’

‘To my eternal shame I have to admit that I don’t know a thing about you, that I’ve never even asked. I suddenly felt a bit embarrassed about it.’ I take another sip of my water.

‘What would you like to know?’

‘Just tell me something.’

She comes from a wealthy family. Her mother has been dead for ages, apparently from the misery of an unhappy marriage. Her father, unfortunately, still only has one foot in the grave, her own words. She visits him now and then, but doesn’t really look after him, although that was once her plan. But the old man refuses to go along with all of that and pretends he doesn’t recognize her any more. She was a rebel as a child. I believe that at once. She didn’t give a stuff about money. Her father’s friends were all well-to-do and decadent. The things he put her through. She’ll tell me