Shroud (18 page)

In those days – I am speaking now, my dear, of fifty years ago, and more – the Vander's were for me the very ideal of what a family should be: civilised, handsome, amused and amusing, at ease with themselves, knowing precisely their position in the world. I see myself moving amongst them, my face on fire with their reflected light, like a rough youth who has been invited up from the stew of groundlings to take part, in however small and passive a role, in the performance of a marvellous, sophisticated, glittering comedy of manners. If I had not exactly been spawned in an estaminet, as the poet so prettily puts it, our place – I would never have thought to call that low, dim warren an apartment – was the opposite of where the Vander's grandly resided. Our family shared no candlelit Saturday night dinners abuzz with lively dispute and multilingual jokes, enjoyed, or endured, no Sunday song recitals; shouts, shrieks and the sound of many siblings exchanging energetic blows were our weekend music. We lived an underground life; I have a sense of something torpid, brownish, exhausted; the smell is the smell of re-breathed air… But I do not intend to oppress you with reminiscences of my family. It is not that they are any longer an embarrassment to me – I have so many, more recent, things to be ashamed of – but because, because, well, I do not know. Father, mother, my older brothers and sisters, those botched prototypes along the way to producing me, and the many younger ones who were always under my feet, they have in my memory a quaint, outmoded, in some cases badly blurred, aspect, like that of the incidental figures standing about self-consciously in very old photographs, smiling worriedly and not knowing what to do with their hands. Among them I was too big, in all ways; I was the giant whose head threatened to knock a hole in their ceiling, whom they must feed and tend and humour, and encourage away from the windows lest the neighbours look in and be frightened.

I believe I would have thought better of my family, or at least more warmly, if we had been really poor, I mean ghetto poor. There was a touch of desert romance to the real shtetl people one met in the streets round about where we lived, a hint of the tent and the thorn fire and fiddle music and religious gaiety, mat we entirely lacked, or had long ago suppressed. We had our own pretensions: my father too was a merchant, although it was not jewels but second-hand clothes that he dealt in. I was, of course, accepted by the Vanders; they had assimilated me; I was Axel's friend, and therefore a special case, exempt from the general distaste – I would not put it more strongly than that – with which the Vanders regarded what in my presence were referred to delicately as
your people.
Over dinner at the apartment Axel's father liked to divert the table with a routine he had developed, involving an archetypal couple, Moses and Rahel, both of which parts he would play in turn, screwing up his eyes and bowing from the shoulders and crooning and rubbing his hands, until his wife, laughing tearfully, would flap her napkin at him and cry, "For shame, Leon, for shame, you will bring a judgment on us!" It did not occur to anyone around that table, not even to me, on the few, treasured occasions when I was invited to dine there, that I should feel insulted or humiliated by what was, after all, only a piece of good-humoured mimicry. Axel too was more than anything else amused to have for a friend a member of that very race whose pernicious influence on the body politic he claimed to reprehend. I say claimed to, because I do not believe that Axel cared in any serious way about these public matters, despite his frequent and bellicose pronouncements on them. Things that did not touch him directly could not be of true, deep, thoroughgoing consequence; it was as simple as that.

He was beautiful, was Axel. Not handsome, you understand, but beautiful. He had the smooth, sculpted, slightly cruel, faintly feminine good looks of one of those French film actors of the day. He knew it, too. He was careful of his hair and his fingernails – I suspect he visited a manicurist – and dressed with the studied negligence of the true dandy. I can see him strolling by the lake in the Nachtegalenpark in Wilrijk on a Sunday morning, in old linen slacks and an open-collared white silk shirt, a cricket pullover – they were enthusiastic Anglophiles, the Vanders – thrown over his shoulders, the arms loosely knotted on his slightly concave chest, and his sunglasses pushed up into that oiled quiff, the colour of polished wheat, the moulding of which must have taken a careful five minutes' work in front of the looking-glass. His girls… how I envied him his girls, a long line of them, beginning in early adolescence. The bright, earnest ones in particular fell for him, but he favoured shop girls, secretaries, actresses, and the like; he was always shrewd in choosing whom to allow to view him up close. Did I resent him? Of course I did. I wanted to be him, obviously.

And yet, I despised him, too, a little. Underneath the sparkling talk, the charm, the lavish good looks, there was an entire area inside him that was vacant, vapid, entirely lacking in intellectual conviction and certainty. At moments a wary, almost a frightened, look would register in his eyes. It was the look of a limited being who knows that at any moment his limits might be reached and his narrowness revealed. He was, I am afraid, a dabbler, an opportunist of ideas, in short a dilettante, though no one, especially not I, would have dared to say so. Since I have started along this line I may as well continue: he did not have a first-rate mind, as he and so many others would claim. He was gifted; he was precocious; he could talk, in that allusive, lazy, uninterruptible way of his, but that is what it was, talk, and not much more than that. Nevertheless, great things were forecast for him, he was going to make a great noise in the world, I joined in proclaiming it myself, but I am sure that in my heart I knew better. He was a bright boy who could read fast and had a good memory; ideas, genuine thought, foundered in the shallows of his intellect. He was especially vulnerable to teasing, or anything that smacked of mockery, no matter how fond, and was constantly on the alert for slights of any kind. If in company he thought a joke that everyone was laughing at might have been made at his expense something would thicken in his face, his brow would darken, his gaze turn muddy, and he would fall upon the one who had offended him with the crushing weight and force of a school-yard bully whom a weakling has unwisely dared to cross. These flashes of vengefulness were dispiriting to witness, especially as one's urge to protest and protect sprang instinctively to the defence of Axel and not of his squirming victim. He was one of those people, the beautiful, the vivid ones, whose sense of themselves must be preserved above everything else, so that the rest of us shall not be undone, in ways we cannot quite specify. So his parents spoiled him, the poor relations flattered him, and the rest of us endured without complaint his bright disdain, content if only something of his luminence should reflect on us, and from us. I know, I know, it is not convincing, this patronising tone that I put on when speaking of him. I can still feel the envy and the bitterness, the peculiar, unassuageable, objectless yearning, the anxious and always vain scramble for self-justification, all there, boiling and muddily bubbling inside me, all still there, after so long.

I do not know, or cannot remember, or have suppressed, who it was that approached him to write those newspaper articles. It is scarcely possible that I was the go-between; although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the
Vlaamsche Gazet
was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbour to the east. In the early hours, when work was over for the night and the presses were rolling, he would hold court for his writing staff, knuckle-duster nationalists to a man, in the Stoof, next door to the
Gazet
offices on the Nationalestraat, a fine old tavern, still going strong, I am told, although the air must surely be polluted even yet by the lingering vapours of Hendriks and his gang. There he would squat, in his special corner, banging his special pewter stein, sharing gossip and telling jokes and spitting when he laughed, his womanly bosom wobbling. It was Axel who brought me there. I suppose he was curious to see how I would fare, how I would defend myself, among that feral gathering. For the most part I was kept firmly off at the outer edge of things, where I circled, hungry as a hyena, always on the watch for an opening through which I might dart and get my head, too, into the smoking innards of the times. I would catch Axel glancing at me now and then, with that charmingly crooked half-smile of his, amused at my avidity, my glittering eagerness. My presence did nothing to tone down the rabid talk or curb Hendriks's yid jokes; it was all in fun, we were all hearty fellows here, thick of skin and merciless of purpose, and besides, to pay special consideration to those of us whose origins were… different, would have been really to offer insult, surely? As Hendriks was fond of repeating, his eyes skittering sideways, the issue was not Race, but Culture, our Great European Heritage. Now, isn't that so? yes? yes? the pewter stein banging, those fat bubs bobbing. And Axel would nod along with the others, and look at me sidelong again from under his pale lashes, and smile, and faintly shrug.

When those articles of his began to be published I was jealous, I will not deny it. Why had Hendriks not invited me to write for his paper, instead of Axel? I would have been far fiercer on the threat to our – their! – culture that my people were supposed to represent, if it had been asked of me. Yes, I would! I was tougher than Axel, more relentless, more daring, more vicious. I would have sold my soul, I would have sold
my people,
for one sustained moment of the public's attention, even if it was only in a rag like the
Gazet.
Why did they turn to him, to Ariel, when in me they had a more than willing Caliban? Those half-dozen articles he wrote were much too elaborated and opaque for what was required of them. But that was how it was: people like Hendriks, even brutes like him, were mesmerised by that mixture of self-esteem and false diffidence that Axel displayed, by that remote, amused, knowing air that enveloped him and into which he would retreat, like Zarathustra into his cloud, leaving only a soft laugh behind him. To me the last piece of the six that he wrote was the sharpest refinement of the insult, the blob of poison smeared on the sharp end of the series. It was cast in the form of an interview with me – with
me!
– as a typical specimen of dissatisfied intellectual youth. He wrote not only the questions but most of the answers, and freely modified the few opinions that he did allow me to express. Why did I let him do it, why did I let him put words into my mouth? Abject, abject, abject; how they rankle, these old self-betrayals. When the so-called interview appeared, and I saw our photographs accompanying it, printed side by side, I was shamefully, chokingly, unconfessably, proud, although at the same time childishly gratified that Axel's picture was a bad one – he could look quite peaky and anxious in certain lights – and his name underneath it misprinted.

For all my protests, though, I am compelled, in bitter spite of myself, to admit that he did a more successful job as a polemicist than I would have done. It was his very restraint, his scrupulousness, what one might call his insistent tact, that gave
those feuilletons
their force. I would have ranted, mocked, hurled abuse, amid shrill peals of forced Mephistophelean laughter. The poise and studied distance of Axel's style, with its high patrician burnish and flashes of covert wit – it could take two or more readings to get one of Axel's jokes – the attitude of aristocratic weariness, the sense that he was writing only because world-historical duty had dragged him to his desk and thrust the pen into his hand, these were the things that made him so effective, or would have, had he been addressing a serious audience and not the rabblement who read the
Gazet,
moving their lips as they did so. What can they have made,'for instance, of his call for the
aestheticisation of national life,
or his suggestion to them that they might
escape the plight of the self by sublimation in the totalitarian ethic?
Music to their thick ears, though, simple and rousing as a marching tune, must have been his suggestion – one could hear one of Axel's studiedly otiose sighs rustling amid the words like a breeze in the grass – that nothing of consequence would be lost to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe, really, nothing at all, if certain supposedly assimilated, oriental elements were to be removed and settled somewhere far away, in the steppes of Central Asia, perhaps, or on one of Africa's more clement coasts.

Mama Vander's pill-box was the first thing I ever stole – a surprisingly intense little thrill – although of course I did not think of it as stealing, only borrowing. I saw it there, in a drape-hung anteroom in the Vander apartment, resting on the edge of a pedestal that bore a bust of Goethe, where Mama Vander had put it down in passing and forgotten it; the silver glint of it was as inviting as a wink. I pocketed it without thinking, without breaking my stride. I needed money, and quickly, for there were books I was anxious to buy while there was still time, before they were banned from the shops, or consigned to the pyre. I intended to tell Axel what I had done, after I had redeemed the box, thinking it would surely amuse him, but I never did, tell him, I mean. What kept me silent was a sense of gravity, not the gravity of my misdemeanour, but of the thing itself: the stolen object, I discovered, takes on a mysterious weight, becomes far heavier than the sum of the materials of which it is made. That little box – all it contained was a few of the sugared violet pastilles that its owner, its former owner, was addicted to – was so ponderous in my pocket it made me feel I must list to that side as I hurried away with my purloined prize. I did not delay in getting rid of it. It turned out to be a valuable piece, French, early eighteenth century; old Wassermann was reluctant to part with it, I could see, when I came back to redeem it. After that I kept it, for many years, through all manner of vicissitude and loss, and although in time it ceased to be as emblematic as once it had been, it never quite shed that unaccountable, undue weighti-ness. Now it has disappeared, made off stealthily without my noticing, in that mysterious way that objects have of escaping one's disregardant grasp.