Will, стр. 90

What am I supposed to say? Yvette has gone to work with needle and thread to patch up the worst bits of my uniform so many times there’s almost nothing left of it. The English, the Americans and the Canadians, like this heathen idol in our own home, couldn’t care less about the dignity of our uniform, let alone what it’s supposed to represent now the occupier has left the city and is taking a beating in his own country. We’re the butt of jokes, good-natured ones, but jokes all the same. In their eyes we don’t seem entirely real, with our white helmets and worn black capes and the holes in our boots. They tell us to stay back when another bomb has hit, looking at us as if we’re children who are getting in the way. They burst out in unabashed laughter when I blow my whistle after seeing yet another dead body. They tolerate us, that’s all, and even that only within strict limits. As far as they’re concerned it would be better if we just stayed home for a while. That’s not something they’d ever say out loud, these jovial, relaxed liberators of ours, but you see them thinking it. We’re the clowns, they’re the heroes. And what’s more, they’re never sure where our sympathies lie. Don’t a lot of us still secretly stand in front of a portrait of the Führer with our right hand stuck up in the air when no one’s looking?

Sergeant Joe sits down to drink some weak tea.

Aunty Emma’s beaming. During the chaos of liberation she moved as fast as she could to the other side of town: a small flat near Schilder Straat, behind the Museum of Fine Arts. We didn’t hear a peep out of her after that, not even when the first V-1s wiped out lots of her new neighbours and silenced the wild joy of liberation forever. Mother was at her wits’ end, even though Aunty Emma wasn’t on any of the lists of dead and wounded. A few weeks later we heard from her after all. But it wasn’t until winter that we saw her again, after Christmas and New Year, and immediately in the company of Sergeant Joe.

‘We met at the Hulstkamp.’

‘Don’t you need to speak English?’ Mother asks. ‘You can’t, can you? Even our Wilfried, the genius of the family, can hardly manage that. Or am I wrong?’

‘I’m a fast learner…’ I say and slurp my tea.

‘Hey, Joe,’ my father chuckles. ‘Everything wonderful?’

‘The best is yet to come,’ the Indian nods.

My so-called sire has had to sweat it for a while, but now everything really is ‘wonderful’. Despite his membership of the ‘movement’ he has been able simply to continue working at the town hall. ‘They’re going to track me down,’ was his frightened comment when the Allied tanks were rolling through the streets. But they didn’t track him anywhere. Typical of my father, happy as a sandboy to have never meant anything, to have remained so insignificant that nobody bothered to look into him. He gives Joe the thumbs-up. Joe replies in kind and suddenly he laughs, baring his gleaming white teeth for the first time, like a coconut that’s been cracked opened to expose its insides.

Mother recoils. ‘They can’t conceal their savage origins.’

‘Excuse me!’ says Aunty Emma.

‘I’m smiling too,’ my mother replies, and it’s true.

Sergeant Joe isn’t like most of the Canadians, who seduce the women of this city with stories about the enormous ranches they own back home or drive them wild with voluptuous tales of wealth. All those supposed landowners go back home, sometimes with a woman they’ve knocked up, mostly like thieves in the night. Joe stays and opens a bar with his Emma. After a while they rechristen it the Cheyenne, because Joe has figured out that people here like being served by ‘a real Indian’. A feather headdress hangs on the wall behind the bar and there’s a tomahawk above the glasses. A real one, according to Joe, once used to scalp whites. The bar is a success, Emma’s marriage to Joe less so. But ‘married is married’ as my mother says after each of her sister’s crying fits. Twenty years later Aunty Emma goes mad, shouting and seeing ghosts. Dementia, they say. In the end, just before they cart her off to some institution or other, she roars that ‘that nigger’ in her bed isn’t her real man, then lisps the name of her German lover (‘Ach Gregor, mein Liebchen!’), who she hasn’t seen since the summer of ’44 and who, in that wartime autumn, ordered some fifty men machine-gunned in the Netherlands and either ended up in a ditch with a bullet in his own head as a result, or has been relaxing beside a swimming pool in South America ever since, but has remained, in her glaucomatous eyes, her one and only. She dies and Joe looks down on her coffin with tearless eyes. A year later, the war catches up with him after all and he too dies, silent and far from all other Indians.

‘I SAVED YOUR LIFE,’ Omer says. ‘Yours and your mate’s, Lode Metdepenningen.’ He sighs and growls like a declawed circus bear. ‘I even knew where you were keeping that Jew. I fucking knew it all. Why do you think I’m here now? I’ve been keeping my eye on you. What are you doing here? I know about the storeroom they’ve got in here. Didn’t your mate tell you I was his father’s lawyer? I’m a patriot and they’re after my blood. They call me a collaborator! Can you believe it? Ungrateful bastards. Hunted like an animal.’

We’re in Van Maerlant Straat, where I was just about to open the front door. Omer steps out of the shadows and grabs me by the lapels of my overcoat. He stares deep into my eyes. It’s been days since he’s had a shave. You can smell the desperation on