Bart Lodewijks

Bart Lodewijks New Neighbours

English

Part 3

New Neighbours

Chalk drawings in and around a new prison in Brussels

Part 3

The man in the Kappa shirt doesn’t like the drawing in his cell anymore. I cover up all traces of it, the way the ‘white paint gang’ would. Suddenly, someone pushes the cell door shut and I am locked inside. The environmental sounds fall away, and as if on demand, the memories of what I had recorded on my lost notepad come flooding back.

Prison life

When the drawing above the kitchen is finished, the Stamper says, ‘It looks like a telephone handset, one we can’t do anything with. Or an upside-down canoe, could be that, too.’ My work has become more accessible for the inmates. I’m on good terms with the Stamper; he’s the only one who warned me about thieves. Still, I’m hesitant to confide in him about the notepad that went missing. His voice always has a mocking undertone to it. And the soap-table incident has already done enough damage to my image. Meanwhile, my increased reticence has not gone unnoticed. Even with Nicole, who tries to help with unsolicited advice, I remain noncommittal.

I start on a drawing of an orange circle near the exit of the shipping department. But similar to what happened while drawing the purple circle on my first day here, I find myself distracted. I press too hard with the pieces of chalk, so that they break and fall to the floor – not that I care; all my effort is going into recalling what I’d written down. It’s the Capo’s stories that have stuck with me the most. They’re simply too outlandish to forget. At one point he coined the term ‘whitelofication’, a play on ‘whitening’ and the street name ‘Witloofstraat’, but whether he was alluding to the white paint gang or knew I had to remove the drawings I’d done on the street is anybody’s guess. He’s mostly been avoiding me, and the flirtation between him and the woman with the shiny face has also cooled. He must have gotten his waffle iron while out on furlough, when he also took the opportunity to buy some new T-shirts, so that, for the time being at least, he doesn’t have to queue for the laundry. Having regained such a level of privilege, the Capo now looks down on his former tease. And in retribution, she has set her poisonous sights on me, as if I am evil personified, the brains behind the iron waffle.

The Stamper, though, isn’t the least concerned

about the altered dynamics on the shop floor. He’s lost contact with his son and it’s eating away at him. The boy apparently now has a beard and rarely takes advantage of the ample visiting hours. It suddenly hits me that the Stamper is closing an instructional gap by supplying an entire generation of school children with hand-stamped exercise books.

As for the man in the Kappa shirt, for reasons I do not know, he has stopped showing up for work in the Atelier. But I can manage without him. It’s not like the drawings actually need to be guarded, and I plan to fix them in any event to keep the works safe for future generations.

The Atelier has the feel of a ship’s cargo hold.

The sun sinks lower and lower, its rays punctuated on the floor.

The machine bundles the boxes in stretch wrap. The yellow turntable serves as a model for the drawing.

Now that the Kappa guy is no longer around to guard the drawing, everything falls on my shoulders. To prevent smudges and smears, I leave the space around the outlet clear.

Every now and then the elephantine gate slides open across the rearmost wall of the warehouse, whereupon the Capo transports boxes outside with the pallet jack. When the gate closes, the wall becomes unencumbered again.

‘It is a grand frame for a chalk drawing in detention,’ Nicole observes.

The loading-bay door looks like the portcullis of some medieval fortress. The sketch is based on the head of the telephone handset I drew above the kitchen.

The drawing lifts the warehouse out of its dark hole.

It’s the same colour as the peppermint pastilles.

‘I am looking forward to freedom so much right now that I even enjoy the plastic flowers,’ the Capo says.

When I show the Capo how the chalk drawing gets released, he says, ‘All the gorgeous weather passes us by without taking any notice. People on the outside don’t see us at all. Do you think we still matter?’

All the drawings have been fixed, except for the ones in the cells.

The Kappa guy doesn’t like the drawing in his cell anymore. ‘He’s complaining about silicosis. Chalk particles are floating in the air and he’s afraid he’ll choke on them in the middle of the night,’ the Capo tells me. ‘Do you think that, too?’ I ask. He smiles condescendingly and keeps mum.

It’s increasingly clear that my stay here is coming to an end. The newness has worn off for just about everybody anyway. It would be wise to get rid of the drawings in the cells and not make any new ones. But I’ll do it only under one condition. I’ll remove them à la the white paint gang: I’ll whitelofize them.

When I arrive at Mountain House, it turns out that the Kappa guy is on a work detail in the kitchen all afternoon. After some insistence, I find a recently appointed female guard willing to open his cell for me. This clearly runs counter to all the rules, but I slip inside with a pail of white paint and start on the clean-up job. I leave the door open a crack for the fresh air, except that somebody suddenly pushes it shut and I get locked inside. Though I keep on painting, I’ve lost the flow. Only the Capo and the guard know where I am. Hopefully, I won’t get thrown out of the prison as punishment. I still also have to paint over the drawing I did in the Capo’s cell.

The outside noises are muffled by the four walls and thick panes of glass, and I can hear the blood whooshing in my ears. Meanwhile, the sweet chemical smell of the paint permeates the closed space. Does confinement truly make one rethink their ways? I sit down on the cot and watch the paint dry. The only personal items I see are T-shirts stacked in a pile. The Capo had body lotion and various colognes in his cell, but here sparseness and expiation prevail. It grabs me by the throat. There’s a knock on the door and the guard appears behind the sliding window. Her face tightens when she sees me. This was clearly a violation of the rules, but

once I am freed, she doesn’t say a thing and no sanctions follow. The Capo stands there like a slouching schoolboy, as if he knows exactly what I’m up against. ‘I also have to paint in his cell,’ I say. ‘I can’t just do one and not the other; that’s not how I was raised.’

She orders him to wait in the hallway until I have painted over the drawing in his cell, standing like a human shield in the door opening. ‘That was fast,’ the Capo says, when I emerge covered in paint splatters. ‘Now, we’re done,’ the guard says to me. I turn and tell the Capo, ‘You take care of the cleaning crew and then we’re even.’

On my way home that night, I see a man with a dark complexion standing near the prison exit holding a purple polyester carrier bag. Prisoners are given a bag like that when they are released. It contains any personal property, such as a mobile phone or wallet, they had to turn in when they were incarcerated. The bags are made in the Atelier. The man comes walking toward me. We are about the same height and he has closely cropped, frizzy hair and a well-proportioned face. Despite the fact that we almost certainly passed one another in the corridors, though, I don’t recognize him. ‘Is there a bus near here?’ he asks in French. ‘There’s a stop on Haachtsesteenweg. Come with me, I’m headed that way,’ I reply.

The man moves slowly, with the bag dangling from his shoulder. It can’t contain much more than a pack of cigarettes. ‘Were you in for a long time?’ I ask. ‘I’m going to turn over a new leaf,’ he says. And I’m eager to believe him. As we walk down Witloofstraat, I notice that Laurence’s bedroom window is open a crack and there’s a light shining behind the floral-patterned curtains. She had a fear of prisoners on the run coming this way. Part of me wants to ring the doorbell and reassure her, to tell her that the man beside me has served his time and now has only good intentions. But doing so at this time of night would just scare the daylights out of the entire

family. And Fred would start moaning about the chalk on the facade, which I’m not in the mood for right now.

I point out the aerosolized drawing to the man but fail to explain that it is not mould. When we reach the birch grove, I see the orange tomcat standing guard in front of the warder’s house. ‘You have to say Hi to him. It’s good luck,’ I say. ‘Is he yours?’ the man asks. ‘He runs the show around here,’ I say. The man shrinks back momentarily but then crouches down and pets the creature between its ears.

The next day I take my leave of the Stamper and the Kappa guy, who has come to the Atelier specially for the occasion. ‘I was taken aback when I returned from my work detail. I thought the drawing was nice,’ he says. ‘I heard you almost choked on the chalk dust.’ ‘That’s not true. Someone was pulling your leg.’ ‘Where were you all that time then?’ ‘I couldn’t come work; I didn’t have any more clean clothes.’ ‘Nonsense.’ He stares down at the ground and says, ‘Now that you’ve fixed the drawings in the Atelier and painted over the others, what purpose do I have?’

Nicole shakes my hand. ‘So, I guess that’s it, huh?’ ‘Without you, I never would’ve done the blue drawing,’ I say. ‘The colour was inspired by the peppermint pastilles.’ The Capo and the woman with the shiny face come up to me, too. Apparently, they’ve patched things up. ‘Thank you for allowing me to continue washing my hands despite misusing the table,’ I say. She smiles, and for an instant I see a nice, easy-going girl in front of me and understand what the Capo sees in her. He accompanies me toward the exit. ‘Missing anything?’ he asks and hands me a purple carrier bag. ‘We get one of these as a souvenir from the management when we are discharged.’ I gratefully accept the gift and can immediately feel the familiar shape of a vial filled with peppermint pastilles through the material. ‘Those are for the home front. Take them a nice surprise for once,’ he says. There’s something

else in there, too; it’s hard and rectangular, thinner than a pack of cigarettes and slightly bigger. My heart skips a beat. Could it be…? I want to give him a giant hug but control myself. ‘I can’t do anything with it,’ he says, ‘but you can, huh… Just don’t ever mention me by name. Because I’ll track you down, my friend, and I’ll skin you alive.’

‘And, did you enjoy yourself?’ Henk asks from behind his gleaming new director’s desk. Christoff hangs up his uniform and comes to sit next to us. ‘I didn’t become a worse person, but a more complete one,’ I say, laying my notepad down on the table in evidence. ‘What does that contain?’ Christoff asks. ‘The uncensored story, as read through and approved by the inmates.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘Did you use their real names?’ I nod. ‘It’s not meant for the outside world.’

‘What was the name of that guy living down the street who wanted to come work for us?’ Henk asks. Does he mean Fred, who just started working as a parcel delivery man again? ‘There’s still a shortage of guards,’ Christoff says. I scan through the residents of Witloofstraat one by one in my head, as if I were walking past each of their houses – not to draw on them this time, but to help the inhabitants, or at least one of them, get a job. I’m brought up short at the caretaker’s quarters, the warder’s house belonging to the mutton chops in the birch grove. That cat has no name that I know of, few people know of his existence, and no one loves him. But he’s a good mouser that’s not afraid of anything and he’s amenable to petting if you approach him the right way. He is the embodiment of prison life. I look the two directors in the eyes and say, ‘There is one resident I can think of. I don’t know his name, but I’ll let him know he should apply.’

Epilogue