might just as well have given me a kick in the balls. ‘No,’ I say, looking away. In that instant I notice that a man at a table on the other side of the room is meeting my gaze through his thick glasses, completely unembarrassed. Balding and badly shaved, he’s looking at me as if I’m an exotic rat in the nocturnal house at the zoo. I think I recognize him, but that’s impossible. The last time I saw him I was a cop of about twenty-two and he—and this makes my hair stand on end—just like now, was in his mid-forties. I’m sitting in one of the corridors of the SS Intelligence headquarters—at the time they were still housed in an enormous mansion on Della Faille Laan—waiting for some document I have to pass on to my inspector. It’s unusual because we don’t have much to do with the Gestapo. They run a regime within the regime. Still, around this time they have started to interfere more and more with ordinary policing. Field arseholes aren’t easy, but these plainclothesmen in leather coats are something else, one step up in the theatre of gross violence, where we have front-row seats and will later claim to have seen almost nothing. An office door is ajar. I see Four-Eyes standing there in a black uniform, his cap slanted on a bronze bust on his oak desk. I see him and I hear him, although I turn my head away now and then, just as I also turn away from him here in this café. He’s shouting and hurling papers at a woman, a Jew or a Jew’s wife. Yes, that’s it: she’s married to a refugee from Austria. I see her regularly at the baker’s in Jacob Jacobs Straat, where she buys cheese cakes and I sometimes queue up for my father because he’s so crazy about rugelachs. I recognize her profile immediately. She looks away from his black-uniformed spitting and yelling. He screams that she’s arranged it all very nicely, that every Jew out there knows somebody who’ll lend a hand in an emergency, and here, here are your papers, you lackey to a Christ-killer, here are the papers, and now your bloke can carry on profiteering, he won’t be put on a train to a work camp, relax, shouts Four-Eyes, rest assured… She stands straight and proud, even thanking him while picking the coveted papers up off the floor. She doesn’t look at me on her way out, but he does. Four-Eyes stares straight at me. Just like now, in 1993. He hasn’t changed a bit. Not as well groomed, perhaps, but the expression behind those convex glasses is exactly the same. He stares at me through a rip in the curtain of time, then folds a piece of card and uses it to push bits of food caught between his teeth back onto his tongue before swallowing them. ‘Look at me here,’ he says soundlessly, ‘and know that I recognize you, and that you were once witness to an incident that almost cost me my head, or rather saved it, because in the end the bitch I treated with such disdain was willing to testify on my behalf when I was locked up with my comrades in the Harmonie. I had saved her husband, after all. Against my wishes, but still, I saved him, and in the end that saved me too.’
While Leo shouts that Richard is a first-class cheat because he keeps on winning and the others boisterously back him up, Four-Eyes stands, buttons his coat and nods his fucking head at me before leaving.
Richard, who’s sick of all the malarkey about his dumb luck, looks over to the bar and calls out, ‘What’s today’s special?’
According to the waiter, who knows his customers, it’s something light and easily digestible. I raise a hand, order a Duvel to go with it, and hope for the best yet again. Since retiring, I’ve had enough of excessive dinners. My stomach can’t cope and I go for the lighter things on the menu, but I keep getting it wrong and ending up with indigestion from a chicken salad that some twerp in a chef’s hat has drenched in balsamico or some other foreign vinegar. And bam, I’ve fallen for it again. A salmon lasagne. Unbelievable! Surely this is the last thing you’d want to eat between twelve and two? So there I am… burping in the toilet with visions of Four-Eyes every time the strong beer and the so-called light salmon lasagne repeat on me. When I get back from the gents there’s another Duvel on the table. I drink it and then I drink another. With my head spinning and an unsteady hand, I finally say goodbye to my friends, explaining that I still have to go to the butcher’s. ‘The missus wants duck rillettes.’
At home your great-grandmother is still lying on the bedspread with that old, clapped-out body of hers, and still crying. It’s deteriorated into something that’s closer to a soft whimpering and to my not entirely sober ears it sounds almost melodious. In the old days she used to sing along to the operetta music pealing through our modest flat. She was the daughter of a peculiar butcher who had accepted me fairly quickly as a future son-in-law, but could no longer bring himself to trust me once we were actually married. Your great-grandmother had always wanted to be a nightingale of the stage, deploying her lungs in the service of Franz Lehar’s ‘Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiß’ or giving a rendition of something risqué by Offenbach with lots of feathers. But her father had never allowed it. ‘You can make a whore of her yet,’ he snapped at me just a few years after our marriage when the subject came up again over Christmas dinner, where he was tucking into the turkey rissoles daughter-dear had prepared with love, the very first since the
