Will, стр. 92
Behind the bars of the visiting room, Meanbeard coughs.
Everything smells of carbolic acid, the disinfectant they use in hospitals and morgues, but also of piss and shit, despair and unshakeable belief, rotting away like a lump of meat teeming with the maggots of misunderstanding.
‘No one comes to see me,’ he says.
‘Thanks,’ I say. He looks up, laughs on the wrong side of his face. ‘Yes, you…’
‘Better than nothing.’
‘Have you heard about Omer? A couple of bastards smashed his head in. They found him on The Boulevard. Apparently it took a while before they could identify him. You hardly hear anything here, but news like that gets through. The jackals come and whisper it in your ear first chance they get. I thought he’d managed to get away. Spain, I hoped… But no, just beaten to death. Such a beautiful human being, so cultured, so much class. He knew Ancient Greek. Long bits of the Iliad off by heart. And then, for no reason… like…’
Meanbeard starts to sob. His bulging eyes give birth to big tears. He looks away, wipes his cheeks, blows his nose into a rag he immediately puts back in his pocket.
‘But they’re not going to get me. Non! Non, à present je me révolte contre la mort! Le travail paraît trop léger à mon orgueil: ma trahison au monde serait un supplice trop court. Do you understand? They can’t take away my pride. I didn’t betray my principles. I will continue to resist death. Like…’
‘Like Rimbaud.’
‘C’est ça… Although that big-mouthed genius poet might have looked down on me for still being alive, for not having been put up against a wall and shot. That would have been honourable, that—’
‘Come on.’
Meanbeard sniffs. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To see you, of course.’
‘Maybe it’s so you can laugh at me. Have a good look. Feast your eyes. Were you there when I was sentenced?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘I looked them all straight in the eye. I didn’t bow my head or deny anything I’d done. “I did it for everyone”—that’s what I said. They almost exploded with indignation! The gall of the man! I should be ashamed! My comrades sitting next to me in the dock all looked away. A few hid their faces. They were ashamed of me, of the things they’d all done. One of them hissed that I’d lost my mind and had to shut up. But then I cried even louder, “I’m no lackey of the plutocracy and I will never become one! I have always served my country, my people and my king by fighting the Jews!” And then it went quiet. The prosecutor clutched his heart. He was so furious he couldn’t speak. The judge looked at me and said, almost with respect, “I believe you, Mr Verschaffel, but the facts are still the facts. You broke the law.” And then I shouted, “Which law?!” I got life.’
‘A few years inside and, who knows, maybe they’ll let you off.’
Meanbeard brushes my sentence aside as irrelevant. Suddenly he’s almost cheerful, as if he’s found a subject that will perk him up again. ‘How’s the tobacconist’s? How’s our Jenny doing?’
I don’t know what to say to that. When the city was liberated Meanbeard was one of the first they picked up. A furious mob dragged ‘our Jenny’ out of the tobacconist’s, shaved her head and painted a swastika on her forehead before taking a photo of her together with a few other women, surrounded by an elated throng. Meanbeard must know that, or he must have heard rumours at least. Yeah, what’s a Jenny going to do after something like that? Where can she go? Back on the game, I suppose.
‘She doesn’t even write to me. Well, she doesn’t really have a gift for words.’
‘I’ve lost touch with her.’
He looks at me and I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
‘And the shop?’
‘Someone else is running it…’
‘But what the… That shop’s mine. Signed and all! I have the papers!’
‘Just let it go.’
Meanbeard suffered a major heart attack five years later. The story goes that they left him to die like a dog, that it took a whole hour for a doctor to get there. That’s what someone told me, anyway. I’ve long forgotten who.
I DUG OUT THE POETRY collection again, great-grandson. I searched and finally found it. What was once a promise on the page, as fresh as that morning’s bread, now looks as old and forgotten as the person who wrote it, locked up in the past. The coarse, rationed paper has turned brown and feels almost like cardboard. The sad little picture of a woodcut under the name ‘Angelo’ on the cover and the greasy letters that form my poems on the inside pages can’t even be called old-fashioned any more; instead they seem to come from a world as lost as Atlantis. Confessions of a Comedian—even then, the ironic intent of the title was overshadowed by the grim design, universally accepted as the norm in a period that was still suffering the aftershocks of a grim era. MCMXLVI, it says, printed in 1946 in other words, by Advance Publishing, which was run by a magazine publisher who was always a little scared of me after I paid a visit to his home on Paarden Markt to let him know how presumptuous it