In the first year of the new millennium, a book came into my hands from which I learned that for twenty years I had lived in the house of a former SS man. Not that I hadn’t received any signals; even the notary, the day I visited the house with him, had mentioned the previous occupants in passing, but at the time my thoughts were elsewhere. And maybe I repressed the knowledge, saturated as I had been for years with the harrowing poems of Paul Celan, the testimonies of Primo Levi, the countless books and documentaries that leave you speechless, the inability of a whole generation to describe the unthinkable. Now I saw my intimate memories invaded by a reality I could scarcely imagine, but could push away no longer. It was as if phantoms haunted the rooms I’d known so well; I had questions for them, but they walked straight through me. There was nothing I was so loath to do as write about the kind of person who now began wandering the corridors of my life like a ghost.
I recalled the day I noticed the house for the first time. It must have been in the late summer of 1979. I was walking through a dusty city park bordered by a row of old houses; through the gaps between the fence posts I glimpsed the backyards. Winding through the rusty rails of one of these fences were the thick, near-black branches of a wisteria. A few late clusters of flowers hung low, sprinkled with dust, but their fragrance touched a deep place, taking me back to the overgrown garden of my childhood; curious, I stopped for a better look through the fence. What I saw was a small, neglected urban garden where a slender maple shot up among nondescript clutter; a coal shed with a little leftover firewood under a layer of black dust; some sixteen feet away, the broken window of a rundown annex; and next to that a porch with a high arched window offering a view of the interior, all the way to the other side. I stared straight through the dark, empty rooms. The front windows gleamed with vague light from afar.
A strange excitement ran through me; I walked out of the park and made a U-turn onto a small, dark street in an old part of town. There I found it: a large town house with a pockmarked front, into which moisture had eaten its way over time. With its high windows and flaking front door, the building had known better days; it was obvious it had been vacant for some years. In one window hung a sign, for sale, wrinkled from the damp. It began to drizzle as it can only drizzle in old cities; the copper flap of the mail slot gave a brief, gloomy rattle in a gust of wind.
The district is called Patershol, named after the narrow canal that gave access to the monastery in the Middle Ages, through which the
paters, the monks, would bring in stocks of food and, as the story goes, smuggle whores inside. The area once belonged to the Counts of Flanders; this historic district is next to a twelfth-century fortress and was for centuries the home of the city’s leading dynasties and the haute bourgeoisie. With the rise of the proletariat in the nineteenth century, many stately buildings were replaced with working-class housing. Poverty set in, and over the years the district developed a bad reputation. The narrow alleyways and cul-de-sacs fell into decay until the student revolt of the late 1960s, when bohemian artists settled there. The house I was looking at was on the northeastern edge of the district, on a side street called Drongenhof, not far from where the slow, dark Leie River—the Belgian section of the Lys—flows past the damp old houses.
Copyright © 2023 by Stefan Hertmans. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
