Double-Barrel (16 page)

I gave my reassuring laugh; Doctor Boomph telling the wine-merchant tactfully that he hasn't got cirrhosis of the liver just yet awhile.

‘Be reassured. This business will soon be sorted out.'

I drove out along the Koninginneweg towards a less upper-crust side street leading back towards the main street. The houses were here more scattered, and there were patches of waste ground. It was freezing now; the snow on the ground had been flattened into icy rinks here and there and I progressed with majestic leisure, gazing around at a Drentse landscape made beautiful.

Suddenly, on the far side of the road, I saw a familiar figure, that turned away from a high rusty iron gate between two stone pillars. Besançon, in his long overcoat with its old-fashioned look, and rubber overshoes. He hadn't seen me; he was walking away slowly, upright, firm, but using a rubber-tipped stick. A casual passer-by would not notice the trill of the degenerating nervous system.

I slowed the Volkswagen and stopped. I had not before noticed those gates. A disused cemetery, it looked like from across the road. There was a low wall, and a belt of trees. On the gates was some plaque or inscription. I got out, and walked across to see.

Yes, a cemetery. Old headstones among rank grass and overgrown bushes. Pretty neglected. The gate was locked with a chain and padlock which looked as if it had been unopened for ten years. A board inside invited interested persons to apply for the key to the municipal grave-digger, but there didn't seem to have been any interested persons for quite a while. A tiny cemetery in a little sleeping neglected plot of ground with trees all round it. Forgotten, it seemed, by everyone around here, except possibly Mr Besançon.

It was like his house in the disused corner of the asylum fields. Perhaps he just liked places like that. I sympathized; so did I.

Ah, that was it. An old Jewish cemetery. The capitals of the pillars in the gateway were inscribed with thick, deep Hebrew letters. Underneath was a dedication: ‘To our fellow burghers, and to all our compatriots, who disappeared, carried away into night and fog, and who never returned. 1940–45.' On the other pillar was a consoling if slightly banal text from the Book of Proverbs.

There had been Jews here once. Were there any now, besides Besançon? No community, at least. Perhaps one or two, isolated. I could always ask Miss Burger; it was the kind of thing she knew straight off.

Strange man. Says he detests Jews, never wants to see another Jew, but that does not stop him making little pilgrimages to this spot. He feels, perhaps, his essential Jewishness more than he will admit. One does not go through the camps without knowing how deep it goes, the Jewishness.

Doubtless, if questioned, he would say it made a pleasant walk, with his slight smile, in his deep level voice that still kept a German intonation. It was a kilometre from his home, along the only street in Zwinderen that had broad quiet pavements lined with trees; it did make a pleasant walk.

I got back into the auto and sat meditating. Only man of any real interest I had met or heard of around here – was that the reason why my interest in him remained so vivid? Of course there is a lot about his existence that's remarkable. A man who has survived where millions were massacred. Survived for five years, and in the innermost centre, what is more, of the Thousand Year Reich. In close communion with the nervous intellectuals like Schellenberg, the scientist soldiers like Dornberger, the weird visionaries and mad idealists like Himmler, the half-understood, misty characters like Bormann and Müller.

I knew little enough about any of them. The innermost circle – an extraordinary mixture. A few sheer gangsters –
Kaltenbrünner – and a few who remained utterly honest, scrupulous, like Berger, the
Waffen SS
chief. It was possible, even in that circle. Himmler himself had been in many ways likeable; kind, generous – no more than amiably potty, one would have thought. What impression had it all made on a Jew, in the middle there, being cynically manipulated for who knew what obscure purposes?

Some were cold and clever, merciless executants of the horrors conceived by their fearful master. But they had known – they must have known – that he was no dreadful sorcerer, but a pathetic object, mentally deluded and physically crippled by syphilitic progressive paralysis. They had known, and they had stayed true to the bitter end.

Some, anyway. Himmler one couldn't count; he was split right down the centre. Schellenberg the Intelligence chief had played both ends against the middle, one might even say idealistically. And Müller, according anyway to shadowy and inconclusive witness, including Besançon's, had played a game with the Russians. Perhaps a double game? Perhaps a triple game? Who knew? Nobody. A Jew hadn't lived alongside people like this without learning remarkable things.

I thought, as I often had, about that perplexed phrase left on the report by the State Recherche officer. ‘As though he possessed some terrible secret.' Mm, the deaths of a million Jews, and the lives of a handful of the real werewolves – there were terrible secrets there. Did Besançon believe in God? And in the Devil? Very likely, but hardly in the same manner as these people here, the calvinists, the anti-revolutionaries.

This town; village; whatever you call it. It is like Besançon. There is something different and alien overlaying centuries of history. You will get throwbacks peeping through: old beliefs and old loyalties; deep distrusts and inborn, ingrained fears, suspicions, superstitions. The peasants here were rather like Jews, come to that. They
asked to be left alone, allowed to have their beliefs and practices in peace. But the government, uneasy at anything that departs from the sacred norm, never can leave them in peace. Some busybody bureaucrat would be for ever fiddling at them. The German bureaucrats had simply been unable to stop fiddling at Jews.

Even now there was a certain power in these places. They were strong in their faith and their fanaticism. In Staphorst, the stranger got his camera broken, and the wrongdoer was judged their way, according to grim rules, and given what they found in the Book, to be the God-ordained punishment. Just as in Salem, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The Book said, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'.

Here in Zwinderen they would like to hang witches too. And bundle the bureaucrats about their business. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible, in Holland, to bundle senior functionaries. Burgomasters, say, or inspectors of police.

At home the vegetables were in the pea-soup, and a smoked sausage, and the perfume was filling the house. We would be allowed to eat some tonight, but only tomorrow would it reach its real glory; Arlette says it has to stand overnight before the flavour really comes out. She fishes the bone out then, and the piece of pickled pork. This she cuts in slices and puts on pumpernickel with lots of mustard – sacred accompaniment to pea-soup; it isn't just soup, it's a meal, like a bouillabaisse. I like a calves-foot in it – I enjoy that sticky gelatinous feel, and a soup you can really jump up and down on – but she says a beef bone gives a better flavour.

I gave a loud greedy sniff.

‘Much too early yet,' she said reprovingly. She was sitting on top of the fire – ‘behind the stove' as the Dutch call it – reading
Match
.

‘You're not to eat biscuits either; you'll spoil your appetite.'

On a day like this all Holland makes pea-soup. Perhaps Besançon's housekeeper would make it for him too, and he would sit in his little room listening to the gramophone or reading, and perhaps he would feel something of the same content I was feeling. He had had a wife – gone up the chimney, one of the very first. Did the man think often of the soup she used to make? What could it be like to have no one left? No one at all.

I felt more bored with my problem than ever. It was so unimportant, so downright trivial. An outcrop of peasant
superstition and puritan resentment. A kind of sabotage. Whoever the person was, it was somebody pathetic and potty. It had caused, yes, two deaths, and even that was failing to get me excited. Neither Will Reinders nor the milkman looked to me very tragic.

But it was important; it was my job, my duty, my dedicated work. But I had to keep reminding myself of that. I couldn't help it; I felt bored with it that evening. I had the report on the affair in the Mimosastraat in my pocket – damn it; I could read it just as well tomorrow. It was an evening on which in Amsterdam I would have taken Arlette to the cinema. But not in Zwinderen, where the local pleasure palace catered for rustic youths; science fiction and ten-year-old American musicals. Tonight there was a comedy, the English kind with eccentric dukes, farcical burglars, a chase in their beloved old-fashioned autos, and an elderly haughty dowager who clonked insubordinate policemen with her handbag.

‘What are you doing tonight?' asked Arlette lazily.

‘I was just going to ask you the same.'

‘Lovely Europa Cup football. Appeals – or are you going out?'

I didn't feel in the mood, oddly; usually the Europa Cup fills me with passion.

‘I might, if you can bear to do without me.'

‘I'll be so excited cheering that I can do without you easily. Hup Racing Club. I'm going to yell “Foul” and “Offside” with the best of them.'

I looked for something crushing to say.

‘You don't know offside from a hole in the wall.'

‘The wall – lovely – where they line up like chorus girls and the other tries to get a cunning kick in over the heads.' Arlette has never seen a football match in her life and doesn't know the first thing about it, but is a total addict of television games.

‘Something perverted about women watching football; all those sweaty jockstraps.'

She just looked disdainful.

The soup was wonderful; I had the greatest difficulty in not overeating.

‘What it is you find of interest in a boring old man with the shakes escapes me, I confess.'

‘What I find of interest in the rest of Zwinderen, I must confess escapes me.'

I was beginning by now to feel at home a little in this house; I had found the position in which to be comfortable in the creaky cane arm-chair, where to find the ash-tray, how to get the right amount of light. The old man was accustomed to solitude, not used to repeated visits – and none at all at night – but had seemed glad to see me.

He was sitting as always in the upright chair behind the desk. Heaven knew what junk shop he had found it in; enormous ugly Victorian thing of mahogany upholstered in black leather, but they had understood comfort in those days. One could sit bolt upright, back supported, at a proper level for writing, without fatigue; I have never found a modern chair that allows this. His desk lamp put light on the working top, where he wanted it, but the standard lamp lit the whole room just enough; a pleasant, affectionate gleam upon the books and the face. That extremely tough face, that had survived, like the Abbé Sieyès. He had been reading when I came in, one of his shabby books that gave such vitality to the room. I looked at it.

‘Memoirs of the Baron de Marbot – heard of but never read – like so many others.'

‘Remarkable enough; full of good stories. Perhaps the
only sympathetic cavalry officer there has ever been. The Napoleonic period is full of interest. But I incline more and more towards the thought that the world was more interesting before the Revolution.'

He seemed in the mood for conversation; I had never known him so forthcoming. I had been afraid that he would shut up and refuse to talk.

‘More interesting, or better?' Van der Valk quite ready to rush to the defence of the Republic.

‘Better if you like. People's minds were less filled with demagogue sentiments. Kings bled their subjects white building grandiose copies of Versailles and everybody found it quite natural – even approved.'

‘And we are now grateful for Dresden and Darmstadt.'

‘Indeed. And even the idiotic castles built by Ludwig of Bavaria. The enlightened despot is something we need. There is nothing worse than the sentimental sobbing over the common man made fashionable in the last century. I detest the common man.'

I was greatly astonished. Still, I had to keep my end up.

‘But the tyrant who all too frequently takes the place of your enlightened despot can only be overthrown by revolution – by your despised common man.'

‘An aristocratic conspiracy,' said Besançon calmly, ‘was cheaper, easier, and did less damage. Aristocrats might feel their privileges threatened by an abuse of power, but they protected the principle of monarchy, because in doing so they protected themselves.'

‘One cannot reverse history.'

‘Recent history is very dull. Recent history will only become interesting in another hundred years.'

‘When Hitler and Stalin are no longer emotional figures?'

‘And when democracy, perhaps, is out of date.'

‘I was thinking today, oddly, in connexion with my work here, that perhaps the local people here would agree with you. They have a strong conservative sentiment, opposed to
nineteenth-century liberalism. Based perhaps on puritan religion, which wasn't opposed to monarchy at all.'

‘Perhaps that is why I find this countryside sympathetic. The people here may be superstitious, but they are more tolerant of an elderly eccentric than your precious government. Which cannot tolerate anything but the proclamation of the universal godhead of their infernal common man.'

‘You're a reactionary,' I said, grinning. ‘I have been thinking that my letter-writer has – dimly – this sort of feeling. Someone who also detests the government, bureaucracy, the all-powerful authority of the common man. Perhaps you're right at that. More servitude in those days, but more individual liberty too.'

Besançon gave his slow deliberate smile.