One moment everything is still clear: your opponent is standing there, well within range, ready to raise his weapon and step forward. But won’t he get too close? How could he still land a hit at that distance? Where’s the logic? It would make more sense if he … Too late! Too much thinking. Von Bötticher insisted there was no point in trusting your eyes, in wasting time passing images to your brain. There was something stronger, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. A vague, melancholy memory of long-lost forces that growled in the pit of your stomach and rushed to your nose … or what was left of it. In animals, smell took pride of place, but in us humans it had sunk to the bottom of the brain. That’s what walking upright did for you. First see, then grab, we’d been doing it for millions of years. But what fencer had not been ambushed by euphoria as his weapon, seemingly of its own accord and without the least resistance, hit his opponent’s body in less than the blink of an eye?
‘A dog bites the hand that feeds him before he has a chance to regret it,’ said von Bötticher. ‘Just as animals smell their prey, you can sense an attack hanging in the air. The only question is: whose attack? Let emotion drive your fencing, only then will you know what speed is. Instinctive motivation works too. The sense of reward or punishment is swift as an arrow. Fear, pleasure, hunger, thirst: they all take the shortest route. Do you even want to hit me? Do I frighten or please you?’
I feigned an attack on his scarred cheek and then caught him full between the ribs. He staggered, quickly resumed his train of thought, limping as he advanced. ‘Fine. Bravo. You were riled and you attacked. But beware. Fencing on intuition does not mean you can simply forget your technique. First the patterns have to work their way under your skin.’
With both hands, he pulled on an imaginary set of reins. ‘Have you ever ridden a horse?’
I nodded and shook my head at the same time. My grandmother had an old carthorse with the kind of fuzzy grey coat that makes old animals so endearing. It tolerated my legs dangling at its sides but had no intention of being spurred on by them. Few experiences were as calming as those journeys from farmyard to farmyard, borne by a mute creature that had been clopping along for far longer than I had been drawing breath.
‘I’ll ask Leni to lay out some riding clothes for you,’ said von Bötticher. ‘Breakfast is in half an hour, after that I want to see you ride. No need to be frightened. I’ll give you the most docile horse and put her on the longe. You’ll learn a lot from it. Everything I have told you today will fall into place. Now off you go.’
Five nights I had spent at Raeren. The maître had already dispensed with formalities and my life lay entirely in his hands. My bed was under his roof and he was the one who determined when I had to attend to my ‘personal hygiene’: thirty minutes before I put his food in my mouth. Obediently, I stood at the attic window with my feet in a basin. Heinz had fitted a screen and on the other side of the mesh a wood pigeon was nodding off. It opened a beady yellow eye when I poured the water. On waking up, I had gone to the washroom, filled a jug with water and left it standing in the sun. Leni was adamant I should wash downstairs with warm water from the boiler, but that made me feel uneasy. I would rather be up here being leered at by a pigeon. My moment of triumph was enough to keep me warm. A shivering heat flowed down from my navel as I thought of the tip of my foil making firm contact with von Bötticher’s jacket. An immaculately executed feint below his weapon. He had wanted to maintain appearances, feign indifference, but one half of his face had refused to cooperate.
How long does the triumph of the crippled war veteran last? Six months at most. By then his mutilation no longer inspires admiration but pity, and a surfeit of pity becomes an irritant. When I was younger, a blind Belgian used to beg on Market Square; both his legs had been amputated. He accepted money from passers-by without so much as a word and you immediately understood that, however much you gave, it would never be enough. Here was a debt that would remain unsettled. When it became clear that every contact would be rebuffed by his empty eyes and bare stumps, people began avoiding him. He became a war monument no one had asked for in a country tired of looking on from the sidelines. True, those few cents could never weigh up against the millions of guilders the Netherlands had demanded from Belgium after the war for housing its refugees, while handing Kaiser Wilhelm a castle for his trouble. But everyone was relieved when the veteran disappeared from the square. About time, said Uncle Sjefke, good riddance. The war had been over for ten years and it was about time those Belgians stopped their whining. After all, everyone in Maastricht remembered those dodgy characters with plenty of money, those so-called refugees who drove up the rents in 1914 and undercut local workers by accepting low wages to top up their government handouts. For all we knew, that blind misery guts had been one of those ungrateful sods, always complaining about the food served up by their host family, one of those drunks who out of sheer boredom ended up back at the front playing the hero. And who’s to say he was a hero at all? He could just as easily have been a common smuggler who had crawled under the Wire of Death and survived the two-thousand-volt shock while his legs went up like charcoal. It wouldn’t have been the first time. My mother hissed between her teeth, there were children present, but Uncle Sjefke just snorted and crossed his arms. He had said his piece. He wasn’t planning to sympathize with anyone, no matter what. You had to watch out for sympathy, before you knew it people thought you owed them something.
I crouched down in the basin until my bottom touched the soft soap suds. Von Bötticher didn’t frighten me. Of course, he didn’t please me either, what did he take me for? I could try to pity him but pity is a worthless emotion for a fencer. Feel pity when you are ten points ahead and you can end up losing 15–10 as a result, only to have your opponent triumphantly pull the mask from his face without a trace of remorse and thank you cordially. But if pity was out, what else was there? I had to find a way out of this impasse. And now there was a riding lesson to cap it all. If half an hour of next to no personal hygiene wasn’t enough to strip me of my dignity, a spell on the back of a horse tethered to the longe held firmly in his hand was sure to do the trick. To start with, that docile horse of his was anything but. It was a brownish-grey Barb, one of those arrogant desert mares. Von Bötticher had fallen for the breed’s warlike reputation. ‘Many a battle has been won astride a Barb horse,’ he said as we walked out to the meadow. My heart sank into my hand-me-down riding boots, two sizes too big.
‘The Prophet Muhammad, King Richard II and Napoleon swore by them. Napoleon was forced to give up Marengo at Waterloo. That horse was already pushing thirty, but went on to gallop for the enemy for years to come. Even in death he was pressed into service: his hoof was a tobacco box on General Angerstein’s smoking stand.’
Von Bötticher only had to point and she trotted over to him. She wasn’t big, that was some consolation, but she took one sniff and turned her backside toward me.
‘Loubna, be good now,’ said von Bötticher in a sugary voice.
She pricked up her ears and leered at her owner with one eye. If a human being treated you that way you wouldn’t stand for it, but von Bötticher had all the patience in the world. ‘Come now.’
With a grand sweep of her tail, she relented at last. He laid his cheek against her head as he offered her the bit. Then he slid his fingers under the noseband to make sure it was loose enough and lowered the saddle onto her back with such circumspect precision that I began to wonder whether this young madam would deign to carry me at all. As he tightened the girth, I saw myself reflected in her eye. Embarrassed by my round, pasty face, I looked the other way.
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’
‘I don’t think she’s going to let me mount her.’
‘Never talk like that in the presence of a horse. You’ll ruin your relationship before you’ve even started.’
I burst out laughing, but von Bötticher was in earnest. ‘What did I tell you this morning? They understand everything. Even before
