Will, стр. 93

It’s sometime in November 1946. We’re in Betty’s Tavern in Rotterdam Straat and the publisher is busy demonstrating how shy he is. Not that long ago gramophone records were being smashed on the floor in here. We’re still drinking pathetic, watery beer because the shortages aren’t over yet. With just a few other people, I’m celebrating my collection finally seeing the light of day. I’m glowing because I’m kidding myself that I’ll soon be a full-time writer, one who’ll never have to wear a uniform again. My wife Yvette is not by my side. She preferred to stay at home with our son, your future grandfather, who is almost two and coughs himself silly at night in his cot. I know she’s long stopped kidding herself about anything. She knows she’ll never become a singer, never be a nightingale of the international stage, but simply a mother and a housewife like so many others, though at least one who makes her own clothes and draws jealous glances all over the neighbourhood for her style and class. It’s cold comfort when pushing a pram or boiling nappies, I know that too, but at least it’s something. We don’t talk about it. She’s grateful and even looks like she’s in love when I pull back in time and don’t run the risk of making her pregnant again. That’s our unspoken agreement. One child is more than enough, but neither of us would say so to anyone else, or even each other. The moment we did, it would become a scandal.

Standing there in Betty’s, waiting for more friends to arrive, I’m not thinking about any of that. On the contrary, I’m luxuriating in the thrill of it all. I hear a loud ‘Ding! Ding! Ding!’ in my head, the sound of a hammer beating an anvil to shape the glowing metal of my will into something useful, four horseshoes, for instance, to nail steaming hot to hooves so I can ride the Muse. Yes, that’s what I’m telling myself in that instant. I can’t imagine that in the next few years the Muse will hardly emerge from the stable, at most to graze a little in a paddock, but never to gallop away with me on her back and that I will stay a policeman for the rest of my life and never become the poet I dreamt of being. Yes, I will continue to write and I will be published, by publishers increasingly more prestigious than that poor joker from Advance Publishing. In the end I’ll even be included in the Overview of Dutch and Flemish Literature, where they will describe me as ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘recalcitrant’, as I wrote at the start of this story, but that’s as far as it will ever go.

The door opens and I think, ‘Not him, surely?’ No, it’s not Chaim Lizke. Just some wanker who looks like him. He’s been swallowed whole by history and then discreetly puked up in a corner as a ghost. He sometimes appears here in this bar, on other occasions, somewhere else. Sometimes his spirit demands atonement, sometimes he’s melancholy. Sometimes he seems to belong, mostly not at all. That’s no way to find peace, anyone could tell him that. But having a wandering ghost that terrifies everyone now and then is preferable to being forced to admit that he was ever real.

Around me they’re not talking about ghosts. Gaston, who’s still on the force, is talking about politics because it’s almost that time again: elections are coming up.

‘I don’t want to make a fuss, but it’s just like before,’ Gaston spits. He pulls a newspaper out of his inside pocket and unfolds it at a cartoon showing the pre-war mayor—who is running for election again in this post-war era—as a whore on a chaise longue above a caption saying, ‘Whose mistress?’, because he is surrounded by coarsely drawn, hook-nosed, cigar-smoking Jews waving wads of cash.

‘What do you mean like before?’ someone asks.

‘The Jews pulling the strings again, of course.’

‘What do you expect?’ asks another. ‘This city runs on diamonds.’

‘I meant that as a joke,’ Gaston says. ‘Look up the word sarcasm sometime.’

‘Gaston, the Jew-lover… That we’d live to see the day.’

‘Come on, lads…’ says Gaston.

‘Let’s not make a fuss,’ I say. ‘Who wants another beer?’

The landlord has overheard and shakes his head furiously.

‘I’ve got something much better! I’ve still got two crates of stout in my cellar from before the war. What if I donate them? On the house, of course! For the city’s finest who always helped us in such difficult circumstances!’

He descends to his cellar to the sound of cheers.

‘If Lode heard that…’ I say, almost out loud.

Just then he comes in with an older man, one whose neck is too scrawny for any collar size at all.

‘Your timing couldn’t have been better!’ I call.

Lode nods, but doesn’t join in the laughter. Here and there along the way, he pats one of the others on the shoulder. I get a measured ‘Congratulations on your book’.

The professor shakes my hand and looks into my eyes. That makes me realize that I once kneed this man in the balls as hard as I could in the Sicherheitsdienst torture cellar.

He shrugs when he sees me turning pale. ‘We all have to carry on. Life just keeps going.’

I swallow, curse under my breath and think, how are you supposed to do that? How do you explain? Where do you start? Or do you just say, sorry, it was by accident, or not entirely, but anyway, you know what I’m trying to say?

The professor accepts the glass of stout I offer him and calmly leafs through my Confessions of a Comedian, looking up now and then with a friendly smile and glugging down beer. ‘To the start of a literary career!’ he asserts firmly in the end, promptly holding out his empty glass.

‘Landlord, another stout for the professor!’ I shout