Will, стр. 85
Nicole knocks on the door.
‘Go away…’ I say.
‘I’ve run your bath,’ she answers, opening the door. ‘Oh dear, your eyes are all red.’
‘From the cigars,’ I say.
‘You haven’t had any for months, Mr Wils. I gave them all away. Have you forgotten?’
With a firm grip on my arm, she leads me to the bathroom.
She undresses me, ordering me to stick this arm in the air and then that one, lift my foot while leaning on her shoulder, in other words, not to make it too difficult for her. With every manoeuvre she says, ‘So… that’s right’ or, ‘There you go… excellent.’ Her little encouragements comfort me, I’ll admit that honestly. I lift my arms up high, hold on to her shoulder, catch a whiff of that peculiar, neutral-smelling skin lotion nurses are so crazy about, and whisper urgently, ‘Careful, careful’ when she helps me into the bath a little too fast for my liking.
‘Let me do that…’ I say as she reaches for the soap.
‘I need to do your back,’ she sighs.
‘What’s been happening, Nicole? What do the newspapers say?’
She washes my back and rattles off her overview: ‘The soldiers are still in the streets, the refugees keep coming, stocks are about to crash as per usual and the European Union is a lie.’
‘Spare me your cynicism, Nicole.’
‘I wouldn’t dare, Mr Wils. And just give me a second. You can’t get out of that bath alone.’
‘As if I don’t know that,’ I say, almost relaxed in the water whose temperature she has decided, almost back in the delusion of the beginning, with me as a baby and her as my mother.
‘No more pocket money for me,’ Yvette says laconically.
She hands me the letter with the black border in the middle of one of my panic attacks. I’m picturing myself stripped naked on a parade ground with club-wielding executioners approaching from all sides. ‘You’re disgracing yourself in front of everyone!’ an SS officer roars while the shit runs out of me and I quiver and weep in the presence of those who call themselves my parents and are now staring at me with their noses turned up. ‘Haven’t you learnt anything from us at all?’ That could be the finale for that one poem I’m—
‘Sweetheart… The letter. You’re not even looking at it.’
Meanbeard’s mother has apparently kicked the bucket. Verschaffel, Amandine, née Leyers: born in the days when people rode in coaches and the streets stank of horseshit, died with aeroplanes flying overhead, their bellies full of bombs, like dragon mothers about to give birth. Did she suffer? No, it says she was called to God in her sleep, undoubtedly with a linen bonnet stretched over her head and swathed in several layers of nightwear, dreaming perhaps of an adulterous count, a willing kitchen maid and an artist with a wounded heart, a world full of rakes and whores, without a son in sight.
‘He’s finally finished her off.’
‘You’re exaggerating, my love…’ I sound like a poet with a tooth abscess.
Yvette raises her eyebrows while holding a burning match to her cigarette. Her parents are under no illusions as to where she picked up her new habit. ‘In his bed, of course,’ I heard her father whisper recently behind the kitchen door, which happened to be ajar. ‘That’s obvious.’ Whereupon her mother hissed a furious ‘Shhhhhh’ as if throwing a bowl of water on the fire of his paternal possessiveness. Of course, there’s no fooling her father. One look at her tells him everything. Sometimes we race to North Castle on the bikes to undress each other behind a bush. But the weather keeps getting better and there are more and more people out walking or fishing, even the odd person who’s brave enough to paddle in the water. Sometimes it’s just very brief moments at her house, which require me to slip unnoticed past the butcher’s shop. At mine it’s virtually impossible and the cellar where I write my poems and where we kept Lizke hidden is simply unthinkable for me. She’s always saying we have to hurry, there’s not much time. Sometimes I feel like she lets me inside her because otherwise I’ll get too out of control, too mad with lust. Sometimes it’s about her, and our love play is an answer to her own pitch-black restlessness, which it briefly soothes, like a piece of tender meat tossed to a vicious dog. Perhaps it’s the restlessness her father recognizes and blames me for stoking. But he hasn’t got strict with his daughter. On the contrary. After all, her father is convinced that he is now embroiled in the ultimate struggle for her heart, that things have got serious, because slow and steady Wilfried Wils is not going anywhere. He’s all smiles now, although his eyes are as hard as ever. Not once does he mention his beautiful daughter to me, let alone the fact that his son and I have let his Jewish milch cow escape. ‘I made up a story that explained it,’ Lode told me when I asked about it. Bollocks, of course. A butcher like him doesn’t fool that easily. And meanwhile—
‘Sweetheart! What cloud are you on?’
‘Excuse me. I just said you shouldn’t exaggerate.’
‘And I’m telling you your pal finally wore his mother down. The number of times he yelled at her… It was incredible. Sometimes he didn’t give her anything to eat all day long. Or he’d give her such a terrible fright the poor woman would clutch at her heart and start to cry. Do you think that’s normal? And he didn’t care two hoots if I knew or not. In the