Will
For the Nymph &
For My Son, Quinten
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
A SUDDEN SNOWFALL
A BUS TED HIP, HALF A MAN
GROPING THROUGH THE DUST, GASPING IN THE ICY WINTER AIR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
COPYRIGHT
A SUDDEN SNOWFALL
A SUDDEN SNOWFALL. It reminds me of the war. Not because of the cold or some other inconvenience, but because of the silence that takes hold of the city. It’s coming down thick and steady now. It’s night. I hear the sounds congealing into a dull nothing. And then someone like me has to go out, no matter how old he is. I know, son, everybody thinks: He’s going to slip and break his hip. Soon he’ll be lying in a hospital bed at St Vincent’s with his legs up in the air. And that’ll be the end of him, laid low at last by the kind of bug they cultivate in hospitals. It’s odd how the elderly get infected by other people’s fear. The fear that makes them consent to being cooped up in homes, letting themselves be fed codswallop and cold porridge, going along with oh-bugger-off bingo nights and submitting to a Moroccan assistant nurse with an arsewipe in her hand. They can keep their fear. I’ve never been afraid, not really, and nobody’s going to teach this clapped-out old dog new tricks. Outside, the snow crunches under my boots. No, not fancy shoes, but the old-fashioned boots I’ve stayed true to for years, taken to the cobbler’s dozens of times and greased almost weekly, walking boots that now allow me to take a step back in time. The flakes are still drifting down. Recently I saw an enlargement of one in a newspaper in the library reading room. All one-offs, those snowflakes, beautifully constructed mathematical worlds landing on my cap and coat. No, I’m not going to write a poem about it. Nobody reads them any more and I’ve run dry. The snow transforms the city, imposing not just silence, but maybe thoughtfulness too, remembering—on me, anyway. When it’s snowing I can see better. As long as the snow is falling, you know what the city really means, what it’s lost and what it’s trying to forget. The city gives up the illusion that the past is past.
In front of me City Park is shining white. I wait and close my eyes for a moment. The yellow light on the streets turns blue, as blue as the tinted glass in the old gas lamps. Picture a city with hardly any light. Faint blue light on the streets out of fear of the fire that can fall from the skies. Those of us lucky enough to have the use of a torch on night duty considered light a privilege that was no business of any Germans, war or no war. It was already dark enough, after all. I remember the Germans being furious about their inability to get it under control. They had to threaten insane fines and ultimately the death penalty before people started to be a little less casual with light. I’ve seen field gendarmes burst into spasms of rage because we were using our torches unscreened. Sabotage! And so on… and so forth. At the station our chief inspector would cock an eyebrow: ‘Come on, lads… no mucking about.’ No reprimand—we had to stop mucking about, that was all. Anyway, City Park bathed in faint blue light, that’s where we were. But I turn right. Pacing slowly, I enter Quellin Straat. Your great-grandfather is no longer looking at shop windows. I see the city as she really is, a naked woman with a white stole draped over her shoulders, the kind of woman doctors and surgeons can’t keep their paws off: a new bosom, then a different face. Magnificent buildings have been razed here, office blocks put up in their place. Did you know there was a grand hotel on the Keyser Lei corner, just near the opera house? Built by a German before the First World War. Ever learnt anything about Peter Benoît at school? Probably not, and no need as far as I’m concerned. They used to teach names and dates; nowadays they act like that was a mistake. But nobody—not then, not now—gives you the smack on the side of the head that history really is. A stream of filth, bastardry that never stops, not really. It just keeps going. Peter Benoît has become a street name. When I was at school we almost had to go down on our knees for him. ‘He taught our nation to sing.’ A real hero, in other words. A statue of this once-worshipped composer stood directly opposite the opera, surrounded by what people used to call Camille’s lido, named after a mayor you’ve definitely never heard of, who I can only vaguely remember myself. So the revered artist, the man who once gave his nation singing lessons, looked out over a paddling pool that was used as a public urinal, mostly by drunks. The statue’s been relocated; the so-called lido was demolished and as for that grand hotel where smart German officers drank aperitifs with their sweethearts during the Second World War… now it’s the site of a concrete monster that towers over nothing much. So things were better in the old days, were they, Bompa? I can already hear you thinking it, and besides, if we ever get to see each other, if the family I helped create, which no longer wants anything to do with me, allows it, I am sure you will call me opa. After all, the word bompa is dying out. But of course, the old days weren’t better. They were just as bad. Imagination is everything. In the beginning there wasn’t the Word and definitely not God’s. In the beginning there was an imagined darkness—remember that. I stop for a moment in the middle of the street. Two big black banners are hanging from a building that no longer