E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Olyslaegers Will
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78227-442-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Available on Netflix
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-442-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Jeroen Olyslaegers (b. 1967) is a Flemish author and playwright. Will won four major prizes in the Netherlands and Flanders and is being translated into eight languages. He lives in Antwerp, on the Kruikstraat, where police helped the Nazis round up Jews during the Second World War.
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A busted hip, half a man. Yes, that’s the reason it’s taken me months to take up my pen again, dear great-grandson. I feel like I’ve let you down, as if you’ve been waiting in vain for the continuation of my story. That’s total rubbish, of course, as so far you haven’t seen a word of what I’ve written. I spent late winter and early spring in hospital and it felt like I had jinxed myself. How many times had I refused to worry about slipping and breaking something? I always pictured it out on the street in front of everyone, causing pain and deep humiliation. But it happened inside. I was completely alone and the humiliation went deeper than I could have ever imagined.
As usual I was looking for something. Nicole had long since gone home. I was reading through the last pages of what I had just written and I was stuck. Or rather, I was digressing. That was it. I know what else I have to tell you, it’s not that, but suddenly I felt overcome by revulsion. I was sick of myself. I saw my life as a careless pencil line and suddenly longed for some Supreme Being to pick up a rubber and rub me out. I saw that Being blowing on the page. Pfff, and I was gone. It had been a long time since I’d felt like that. Enough. That was the word. And the older you get, the more you feel obliged to fight against that one word and the longing it contains. You know that I survived your grandfather, my son. Emaciated, he lay in bed, locked in a wrestling match with time. Not to live longer, more the reverse. He was counting down the seconds, filling the time that creeps by between the moment you’ve had enough and death. Watching my own son suffer like that was perverse, a punishment invented by a vile God. Despite their mistrust, they’d let me in to see him, with dirty looks from all sides, his too, but I insisted and he no longer had the strength to show me the door of his hospital room. ‘Son,’ I said, ‘son…’ He shook his head, long since a father himself, of course, and stared at me defiantly. ‘I’ve had enough. They can come and get me.’ That hit me so deep, as if I alone had subjected him to this life, personally sowing the seeds of his cancer, poisoning him from the very beginning, and his only act of resistance to me was his own complete surrender. I’ve had enough… ‘What about me?’ I thought in that instant. He was overtaking his own father with his longing. Some fathers would say, ‘I’ve had my fill, take me instead.’ But not me. Only after his death did I too sometimes feel like I’d had enough and I’d pronounce that word as if at a dress rehearsal, without consequences, an echo of the curse my own son had called down on himself, infecting me in the process.
I still knew what to do when I felt that revulsion. I needed to pick myself up again immediately. But melancholy and other sombre feelings are not easy to shake. That was when I remembered a purple envelope filled with family photos. I thought it might console me, although afterwards you always realize that photos are more likely to deepen the gloom. After all, darkness craves more darkness. I searched my whole library, even looking behind the rows of books, shaking some in the hope that the little treasure might be hidden between the pages, but to no avail. Exhausted after several hours of searching, I lowered myself into my recliner, my easy chair, clicked it back and, in that instant, saw at the very top of the bookcase the protruding corner of a purple envelope. How stupid would you have to be to keep something like that in such an impossible spot, exposed, gathering dust and, above all, so high up? Sometimes, often even, people fall victim to their own duplicity. To ask the question was to answer it. I’d put that envelope so high up to stop myself from throwing it away because that was something I couldn’t bear the thought of. Now it happens that years ago I had one of those wooden library ladders made to order and… You see where I’m headed, don’t you? That’s right, this doddery old fool, with, in that instant, nothing but dog food for brains, clambered up like a young buck, didn’t dare go any further than the second-last step, reached up ineffectively, ventured a quivering step higher after all, lost his balance and fell down arse and all. Right on my left hip. Crack, said the bone. Unbelievable pain shot through my body from my big toe to the back of my head. It was like a big fat Japanese wrestler had jumped on top of me with his full weight and snapped my bones like so many twigs. For the first time in my adult life I called out for my mother. It came of its own accord and the pain was so immense I wasn’t even surprised. I won’t spare you the details, as I’ve resolved to never do that on these pages, and that’s why I will now inform you that your poor great-grandfather shat himself completely and lost all control over his bladder. I lay there totally helpless and nowhere near a telephone all evening, all night and through the early morning until Nicole arrived. She walked in with her nose turned up—that’s something I’ll never forget. The stench must have been unbearable. My throat was too hoarse to cry any more, but I did it anyway.
They patched me up in hospital, St Vincent’s, of course, and you’re supposed to talk about how dedicated and loving the nursing staff were, but that’s not something I can bring myself to say, no matter how true it is according to Nicole. People who empty your bedpan, stick a tube up your dick and wash your body from arse to nostril while constantly trying to strike up a conversation are nothing but a plague. I can’t see them any other way. From the first day to the last, almost all I said was, ‘I want to get out of here, this is hell.’ There was only one solace: morphine. I had never been on a pain pump before and, those first few days in particular, I was very pleased to make its acquaintance. Your generation and your father’s are not averse to drugs, I know that, I wasn’t born yesterday. But if you ask me, your wacky baccy and the powder some of you snort up your nose don’t come close to the fabulous haze called morphine. God, the pleasure of it! It wasn’t long before I was insisting that I suffered from a particularly low pain threshold and they just went along with it, probably to be done with my whinging. Morphine dreams pack a punch and it’s not even much of a problem when the dream and so-called reality start to bleed into each other as if a gentle rain is merging the colours of a painting left out by an amateur painter who went inside for a hearty dinner with a glass of wine when the sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky and has only noticed hours later that the weather is no longer particularly summery and his landscape has taken on another form. Suddenly naked women were parading around me inviting me to snuffle up the smells of their bodies, especially between their legs. Feelings I thought I had lost forever rose up inside me. Your great-grandmother was alive again and looking gorgeous under a parasol, sipping a cup of tea, while watching happily and with undisguised pleasure as I abandoned all restraint in a forest of nymphs. My pubic hair was garlanded with a daisy chain, my proud member stood firm, wild boar grunted contentedly in the sun, and two warm mothering mouths were sucking my nipples. I was French kissing like a champion and comparing the saliva of these mythic females like a connoisseur of sweet wine. Love? To be sure, it was an overwhelming love without pain or sorrow, guilt or jealousy. Everything had become one, like those crazy Hindus once wrote in their Kama Sutra. At the same time I experienced the ecstasy Lucretius must have felt while writing his long poem about the building blocks of life, a book I had devoured not that long before with some admiration and even a certain sense of loneliness. All atoms, all one. After a while there was also darkness, I don’t mind admitting it, but that didn’t stop me from pressing the pain pump again to forget my hip and the bedpan under my bum. The darkness took the form of a work of art under construction, a kind of temple on a piece of waste ground where hippyish youngsters were doing the building work while performing strange rituals to usher in the end of days. A granny took me by the hand and led me deeper into that artwork. Most of the hippies turned out to speak German, but there was also English and I even heard some Dutch. The old lady showed unsuspected vigour and resolution and dragged me deeper into the musty-smelling dark. I heard singing and the sound of someone digging. ‘There he is,’ the old dear said, and I made out the shape of a young lad, seventeen or thereabouts, just like you, or have you turned eighteen by now, or even nineteen? ‘Hello, friend. Everything OK?’ I asked. The digging stopped. The boy turned his face towards me and something cold took hold of me. ‘My name is Wilfried,’ I said, suddenly trembling. The boy gave an impassive smile, as if wearing a mask that had suddenly come to life, and said, ‘I know. And you know who I am too…’ Behind me I heard the old woman...
