Will, стр. 84

abolished and everything just carries on unceasingly towards the mouth of hell, a goal that can never be reached. The only thing we’ve heard, what Lode has picked up around the place, is that the professor was locked up for a while in Begijnen Straat, then carted off to a camp. That’s all anyone knows. Everything drags on and nobody comes here to kick in the door. Nobody arrests me and drags  me off, hauling me off stage like a failed actor. So I just keep listening to the shadows and writing away at what is supposed to become my first collection of poetry. The outside world has become an excuse, an intermezzo for the hours I spend here. I can still smell Lizke. I pick up the hammer he found here. Now and then I think I see him, in a dark corner with an apologetic grin on his face, or I feel him sitting next to me at the table while the ink leaks from my pen to form letters on the page. I write about treacherous bastards and not knowing the truth, about blood on the ground and blows to the face, about children who will be born with a caul, about misleading delays and ambiguous friendship. In a brightly lit room, I have two sworn enemies smile while they speak, each with a glass in his hand and a knife under the table. I have soldiers march behind protesting mothers with their flies unbuttoned. I give newspapers wheedling mouths. I make people with hunger in their eyes join long queues to shuffle past mounds of slaughtered dolls. I rub tortured bodies with honey and decorate them with sprigs of thyme while gramophones blare, ‘Another hero has been born!’ Whereupon everyone in the room sings in reply: ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, you are so still today!’ I dedicate a poem to Lode, but tear it up at once. Then I see Lode and Yvette together in an incestuous dream and the poems present themselves like street-corner sluts, obscene and clacking their tongues. I’m King Midas in reverse. My words transforming everything into shit and filth instead of gold. Sometimes I lay down my pen and reread a few poems. Is it all too monotonous? But the manic urge to write is only discouraged for a few seconds. Whenever it’s time for me to head home I hear Angelo sighing with satisfaction. Finally, finally. A son is arising here whose verse will pile scorn upon his clapped out, sentimental poetic fathers, casually annihilating their stubborn conceit.

It’s these words, O great-grandson, that abruptly catapult me back into my own study and this century, temporarily cutting me off from my story. I think they’re accurate enough, but at the same time this burgeoning poetic soul has become so strange to me, so disassociated from everything that has happened in my later life, that I feel like laughing in his face. You idiot! You arrogant piece of scum! You ignoramus! For the life of me I cannot recall the state of mind that gave rise to those words. What I do remember is that the collection was published after the war. Was there rejoicing? Probably not much. Was there scorn? Perhaps, but that’s something people forget just as quickly. Was this the rebellion of the son in the house of poetry? People need a bit of nonsense now and then—propped up by will, ambition and a vision of the future, true, but no less ridiculous for all of that. You keep a lot of your nonsense to yourself. Occasionally you bother someone close to you with it. It’s seldom ennobling. If I saw you reading all this, I’d avert my eyes and leave the room with a gracious smile. But even while closing the door behind me, I would feel my heart trembling with impatience. If you later informed me that you’d finished reading it, I would look at you with an expectant gaze like a dog that’s tried to please its master with a new trick, even if the novelty consists of a fresh turd squeezed out on the bath mat for the very first time. Vanity is what makes you share. And that vanity is ridiculous and the ridiculous makes you vulnerable. I never let Yvette read anything. I kept her away from my poetry. Outside the poems, normality ruled; in the poems, everything else. That’s how the young Wilfried would have put it.

Looking back I would have liked to give my granddaughter all kinds of things to read because I felt she understood me, that she knew what I was talking about even if she herself had hardly experienced anything. But when she was about nineteen, Hilde started closing herself off from me. From one day to the next I had to ascertain that the apple of my eye, my ally, the rebellious family member I saw as part of my tiny conspiracy against everything and everybody, no longer wanted anything to do with me. I lost sight of her, she let us know through her parents that even our rare family get-togethers bored her and, when I had put my pride to one side and finally dared to ring her up to ask ‘how things were going’, it was made clear to me that she was too busy with her studies to come to the phone. I heard that she was taking medicine to banish her dark dreams. In my imagination, those pills were slowly hollowing out her skull, dissolving everything that linked her to me first, before then, after reducing the rest to mush as well—banality with neither highs nor lows—what next, what next… I wept bitter tears for her. But that too brought no release, no more than the rage and resentment that came to torment me. Nothing gets you down more than fury about something you can’t understand. It wouldn’t pass, it kept smouldering away, pointless and irrational, until every memory had been