Will, стр. 87
Once I was accused of theft at secondary school. I’d stolen somebody’s pencil case, felt seriously guilty about it and then completely repressed all memory of it afterwards. When the headmaster confronted me with my deeds, I felt the injustice of a false accusation rising, but at the same time that feeling struggled with the realization of a lie that was hidden so deep it assumed a life of its own, taking charge of my memory in the moment of confrontation.
Back then, tears came. Not now. Now I smile. I don’t know why either.
‘No!’ Meanbeard shouts at the sight of my grin.
‘Sweetheart, what’s going on there!’
Meanbeard opens the door for a moment and makes placatory noises in the direction of the bedroom.
‘Leave it to us. I’ll be there soon. Promise!’
He closes the door and raises his hand to me. I stand up. He pushes me back into the armchair.
‘I vouched for you,’ he whispers, ‘personally… If they figure out what you were up to at their headquarters… they’ll come for me too. Do you understand? Then the leather coats will be at both our houses and they’ll put us up against the wall without mercy, whether your aunty’s fucking Gregor or not.’
He grabs me by my lapels and pulls me half up out of the chair.
‘Do you have any idea what I had to do to get Omer to keep his trap shut?’
‘Let go of me.’
Meanbeard freezes. Suddenly he looks old and shabby, a hermit in a threadbare dressing gown, surrounded by vermin. ‘Omer got the keys to all the Jew houses I had left. That was my nest egg. Those furnishings were the crème de la crème…’ He lets go of me. ‘It’s just a game to you, you bastard. But it’s people like me who pay the price. We’ve brought the Jews in this city to their knees. The parasites who tormented us for so long are almost all gone. That was a promise we kept. That was partly my achievement, despite the hypocrisy of people like you, despite the never-ending opposition you expect from truly everyone, but not from the people you see as allies. When you start thinking you’re being cynical about every last thing, that’s when you walk into a trap and let people take you for a ride. You’re living on borrowed time, you bastard, and I’m the one who’s taken out the loan on behalf of both of us. Do you understand? No, you don’t get it. I can see it in your face…’ Another glass. Now he’s stuttering while drunken tears run down his cheeks. ‘But not even that will stop me… Rest assured… Not even that will ruin things… All I want… a tobacconist’s together with Jenny… where we can take it easy… without a Yid in sight, in a city that can breathe again and is grateful to people like me for the sacrifices I’ve borne, the deceit I’ve had to endure, the betrayal by bastards, the betrayal by you. Now get—’
The door swings open. There’s Jenny in a lime-green negligee.
‘That’s enough boozing now, you hear me?’
Her breasts dance under the flimsy fabric.
The zoo’s grand reception hall is packed. Lode got the tickets and now he’s predicting that Stan Brenders and his big band are going to ‘tear the place down’.
‘This place is full of zazous!’ Yvette whispers excitedly.
‘Bleeding heck, all that Brylcreem,’ Lode mocks, although he uses pomade too. But these zazou upstarts go a lot further with their hair than Lode and I would even consider. The grease really is dripping out of the locks hanging down in long threads over their high shirt collars. They’re wearing trousers that are just that little too short and their scrawny chests are wrapped in outsized double-breasted coats with lots of extra pockets that most of them refuse to take off in the hall. Because in times of scarcity you have to live big, you have to act like textile coupons are easy to get, even if you can tell from the majority’s hollow-eyed faces that they only just get enough to eat. They all have umbrellas with them because that’s what they do: use umbrellas as walking sticks and refuse to open them even when it’s pouring. They’re sitting spread throughout the hall. The zazou girls lay their heads on their boyfriends’ narrow shoulders or wrap a dominant arm around the narrow span of their bony backs as if those young swingers are in danger of falling apart at any moment. The women are mostly in pleated skirts that come down to just above the knee and they have a clear preference for curling their hair. They are all made up to look pale, with here and there a little mauve under their cheekbones. Yvette loves their square shoulders and the fact that a lot of them keep their round, black sunglasses on inside, as if the hall is lit with the blazing sun of the Côte d’Azur.
‘Get an eyeful of that,’ says Lode. ‘What a bunch of posers.’
‘Yes,’ I nod. I see him staring at all those peacocks like a bird of prey, all those skeletons wrapped in cheerful colours. Faced with all this fresh energy, only five or so years younger than the two of us, I feel Father Time pushing me along the road to nowhere. None of these dandies is anywhere near as cold-blooded as Lode and me. It’s almost unbelievable that neither of us has had a nervous breakdown and we haven’t said a word to each other about the sword