Will, стр. 89
Lode and I nod at each other but neither of us feels that joy.
People keep shouting and applauding. Then the house lights go on. I urgently need the gents. Yvette nods. I walk down the marble stairs. My full bladder is just an excuse. I need to be alone for a moment. There are already quite a few elated men standing at the urinals with one palm planted on the wall and their feet back a little to give their cocks free play and keep their shoes and trousers dry. I retreat to one of the cubicles and unbutton my fly. I hear Lode call my name.
‘Here!’ I answer.
‘Open up!’ He hammers on the door a couple of times. ‘Come on!’
‘I’m busy, you idiot!’
‘Come on!’
I slide the latch open and Lode immediately squeezes in. His hand goes to my throat and he pushes my head back against the wall while closing the door behind him.
‘Tell me why…’ he whispers several times. His breath smells sour. I can’t get a word out. He’s squeezing my throat shut. ‘Tell me why…’—now sounding furious—‘we haven’t been picked up yet? You’re the mole. You’re the bastard. It’s you. You’re the traitor.’
Then he tries to kiss me.
GROPING THROUGH THE DUST, GASPING IN THE ICY WINTER AIR
GROPING THROUGH THE DUST, gasping in the icy winter air, that is how your great-grandfather sees the first survivors emerge from the rubble of the Rex Cinema, people like walking corpses, with dazed expressions and blood trickling out of their ears, not knowing which hell they have left behind or what underworld they have now ended up in. The rocket, the V-2, the Germans’ second weapon of retribution, drilled deep into the packed cinema like a bolt of lightning hurled by an Aryan deity, a deity who no longer gives a shit about hitting targets, as long as he strikes terror into his enemies. Terror? You can rest assured of that. The city has been liberated but her inhabitants are quivering in cellars, desperate and famished. My parents have been camped in ours for about three months now, but although she who calls herself my mother has made up a bed for me there too, with a sad piece of material hung up between their sleeping place and what they hope will become mine, I refuse to bow to her unbearable pleading and continue to insist that I’m not cut out for cellars and would rather die if that’s what it comes down to. If the bombers and bolt-throwers have written my name on their weapons like the merciless, murderous and, above all, vindictive supreme beings they are, nothing’s going to help; lying in your own stench between your so-called parents in a cellar won’t make any difference, you’re doomed anyway, and besides, you still die, you do it every day.
Just two days after what is now two hundred and fifty dead and countless wounded, all of whom only wanted to watch Buffalo Bill on the silver screen one cold afternoon—so many dead that the Americans have decided to store the crushed and ripped bodies temporarily in the zoo as the morgues are so full they can’t even get the doors shut any more—my beautiful Yvette tells me she is pregnant, that my sperm was too fast for both of us and soon there will be a new life in a city where death is still staggering around like a stuffed but never sated, totally pissed, reckless whoremonger.
‘Hello, this is Joe.’
That’s my Aunty Emma speaking in her best English and the way she says hello sounds very ‘now’.
Standing in our best room is a great big fellow, a Canadian Indian, one of our liberators, a sergeant no less, not just a soldier without stripes or medals. Mother has finally consented to have him over. It wasn’t so much his character or race that bothered her, it was more having to leave the cellar to put the best room in order again. Temporarily leaving her fear behind and surrendering to the randomness of fate. But she’s not alone. The whole city has finally accepted that these days death can do for you between a fart and a burp, between the soup and the potatoes—both figurative at the moment seeing as there’s almost nothing left to eat, and that’s another thing my mother’s not happy about, having someone over from another continent without the requisite feast on the table. ‘When does the war start?’ goes a bitter joke. ‘When they turn off the sirens…’ It’s the truth too. There are so many winged bombs falling every day now, so many V-1s, and so many rockets, V-2s, that there’s no longer any point in even turning on the sirens, because over the last few weeks they’ve been wailing constantly. So, starting this week we don’t hear anything any more, and whatever falls from the sky falls from the sky. ‘Have another drink, José!’ ‘Gladly, André, except we’re all out. There was another bottle, but your wife just dropped it!’ I’ve never heard as many jokes as I have these last few weeks. The grimmer everything around us gets, the more people laugh. But their laughter is not what you’d call hearty, more something that’s midway between coughing and puking.
‘Hello, hello,’ my father says, trying out his English and sounding like a radio operator battling poor reception.
Joe doesn’t say much. He stands among us like a totem pole, but his eyes are gleaming. My hand disappears in his, though at least he doesn’t squeeze.
‘Emma tells me you’re a policeman.’
‘Oh, yes…’ I say and realize I sound like a vain French actor who’s pretending to have mastered the language of Shakespeare and John Wayne.