‘Hell’s bells, man. I’m almost eighty.’ With the seriousness of the elderly, Willem switches from a weightlifter’s stance to one in which he’s holding Alphonse’s legs like the arms of a wheelbarrow. After it’s all over he makes no attempt to conceal his pride: man in late seventies helps far younger person out of physical predicament. Successfully, too. He runs his fingers through his grey mop and flashes Alphonse a smile. Yes, he would like some coffee.
‘Cat not awake yet?’ he calls to the kitchen, where Alphonse is pouring him a cup.
‘It’s her yoga week.’
‘So you thought: how about standing on my head for a while? I’ve always said it’s dangerous. Cat ought to give it up as well. She’s far too thin. Marie-Jeanne said the same. She had an eye for these things, that’s why she baked all those cakes for you. To think I’ll never eat them again.’
While Marie-Jeanne was alive, Willem mainly went on about how irritating she was. Because her part in any conversation was usually confined to the question: ‘That’s not true, is it?’ Or because she was unable to enjoy dining out and always started looking for her keys even before they’d paid the bill, only to find them later, at home, in places where they could only ever be located after a protracted search. He often complained of her lack of interest in the Great War library he was compiling, an indifference that verged on hostility. ‘The First World War’s over!’ Alphonse heard Marie-Jeanne wail, distraught, a week before her death. She thought garages were for cars, not books, and conservatories for vegetables. Willem believed this had to do with a lack of schooling, a disparity that had driven a wedge between them on several occasions. But he thought such things about her only while she was still around. Her death had made the newspapers, as a consequence of the sequence of bad luck that led up to it. On the way to the fishmonger’s she’d fallen victim to some geraniums that threw themselves at her along with their terracotta tank. She was taken to hospital with a fractured shoulder and toe, in an ambulance that spun out on a bend so that she had to be transferred to a second one along with two paramedics who argued and bled with equal intensity. After a gas canister explosion at the bedside of a smoking lung patient in the wing where her broken bones were set, followed by a fire and a chaotic evacuation, Marie-Jeanne Maes’s undoubtedly stout heart stopped.
They’d been neighbours for just a few months when the tragedy occurred. After the funeral, Willem shut himself up in his house until Alphonse and Cat invited him to dinner. From then on he came round at least once a week. After he’d supplied them with a crate of old soap, a harlequin the size of a seven-year-old child, a device weighing a ton that could vacuum-pack sandwiches, a polished shell casing to serve as an umbrella stand, and the painted head of a sphinx, Cat gently relieved him of the notion that he had to bring them a gift every time.
On this occasion Willem has a book with him, Alphonse notices, but it doesn’t look as if he intends it as a present.
‘There’s not one Hun, not even a doctor at the universities of Berlin or Munich, who can come close to the beauty and grandeur of a Senegalese!’ Willem pontificated, one finger in the air like a dry twig and one eye cast askance at the book. Alphonse’s raised eyebrows seem to please him. ‘Premier Clemenceau. In 1914. You can say what you like about France, and the tirailleurs sénégalais were certainly cannon fodder, but at least the French regarded their African troops as human beings. That’s one side of the story, anyhow.’
‘At least they regarded their cannon fodder as human,’ Alphonse grins.
Willem nods. Since the arrival of his new neighbour he’s been concentrating specifically on the fate of the tirailleurs sénégalais in the First World War, and since the death of his wife they’ve become an obsession.
‘To the Germans they were apes, a threat to white women, whose interest in them betokened a lack of historical awareness. That says something about attitudes to women, of course. Always a threat to the social order. They undoubtedly had a lower level of education, women in those days, but education and intelligence are two different things. Just look at Marie-Jeanne: she left school at fourteen, but think how much I learned from her.’
Alphonse leans back in the sofa. Willem has become the widower of a saint, and as such his ability to cope is increasing. His indignation at the treatment of Africans in the First World War seems to comfort him somehow, or at least to distract him from sorrows of his own. In the early weeks of mourning there were so many tears that Alphonse didn’t know what to do. They were the answer to every question, the response to every joke. This is a great improvement. Anyhow, he likes listening to the polite, West-Flanders-accented Dutch of this elderly French teacher. He never has to strain to understand, as he does when conversing with some of his clients. Willem stresses every syllable, carefully articulates every consonant, even if it’s a substitute for another.
‘The Germans had every reason to dehumanize the African troops, of course. That way they could think of the French as fighting a war by impermissible means. For their part, the French had to keep repeating how brave, strong, and loyal the tirailleurs were. “Faithful children” is how they were seen. Certainly not the image many of those black soldiers had of themselves.’
‘Would you like to join me for breakfast? I haven’t had any yet. I’ve got raisin bread.’
‘From which bakery?’
‘Moeyersons.’
‘In that case, yes. There’s not enough salt in the bread from Gaudesaboos. And the image they had of their colonizers changed too, of course, as a result; they suddenly found themselves watching the French face a more powerful foe.’ He peers past Alphonse, as if he can see it all happening right now on the fields beyond the curtains. ‘All those young lads who’d known nothing but sun, who were then made to come and get their feet frozen off in a conflict that had nothing to do with them. I know I’ve asked you before, but wouldn’t you like to take a trip with me to see the graves of the tirailleurs sénégalais? There are some on this side of the French border. If there’s one thing I want to do before I’m called to another place, it’s to make a full inventory of those graves, those names.’
‘I’d like that,’ says Alphonse. ‘But not in this weather.’
He feels like staying indoors all day. He’s moved many times, but only recently he walked through this rented house one morning and had the feeling it was a good house, handsome and sound, that without noticing he’d come home. Since then he’s been enjoying the strength and solidity of the walls, the way they keep the warmth in, the rain out.
He turns on the computer and opens Skype. His mother is online and he calls her with the kind of happy nostalgia he always feels. The sound that accompanies the request for contact is cleverly chosen: first a few expectant tones ending in a question mark and then, when someone on another continent surfaces, something like expanding bubbles of air. There’s Dakar. The inside of the ground-floor apartment where she lives now.
‘Hello, son,’ she says, in Jola, a language he speaks almost exclusively with her and his sister these days. ‘You’re getting fat.’
‘Hello mother. These are muscles.’
He ought to fend off the things clients serve up to him, especially the cakes. Her red headscarf stays neatly in place as laughter tosses her head backward. There’s a lot of noise around her, as ever.
‘Everyone in need of you again?’ he asks.
‘Some are here to ask advice, others pretend to be but just walk from the back door to the front door because it’s the quickest way from that street to this. As long as they knock first, it’s fine by me.’
‘How is everything?’
‘Aunt Agnes died.’
Her younger sister. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Three days ago. We buried her the same day. She’d been ill for some time.’
‘But you should have rung me!’