Making a pretence of geniality, he perched on the corner of his desk and waited patiently until we had all stored away our exercise books. Then he got up and crossed to the blackboard. He let out an exaggerated sigh as he picked a piece of chalk from the ridge and wrote in capital letters GOD IS OUR BEST FRIEND. He turned round to face us and rubbed his hands while a plaster smile peeled from his lips.
*
During midday break I saw Roland again. He was sitting at the far end of the refectory with five of his mates, close to the podium where Father Deceuster had appeared a moment before to make the sign of the cross and wish us “a pleasant meal”, whereupon the clatter of spoons in soup bowls took over and I wrenched the lid off my sandwich box.
Willem had gone home. I was surrounded by boys I had no inclination to get to know any better. They were chattering away, undaunted by Mr Bouillie, who was on the prowl among the tables for irregularities of behaviour.
Here too, seniors and juniors were kept apart. The hall was divided down the middle by a step. From the lower section the deep voices of the older boys floated up to me, and I wondered whether I would ever thrive in these surroundings like they did, quite uninhibited by the sense that it was all a farce.
At half-past one we went outside. Basketballs bounced out of the shed into the school yard. A boy asked me if I wanted to join in, but I declined the offer. I wanted to be invisible, to blend into the brick and concrete background like a chameleon, and later on, when the bell rang to signal that it was time to go home, to take on the colour of grass and trees again. But effacement was impossible. No matter how hard I tried to avoid being noticed, I kept feeling Mr Bouillie’s eyes boring into my shoulders.
Still, there were certain places that seemed to elude his omnipresence. Blind corners at the back of the bike shed, by the gymnasium wall, where hastily stubbed-out ciggies, sweet wrappers and general litter suggested clandestine delights, quick, urgent and sweet.
On the far side of the yard, where it adjoined the monastery, Roland and his mates huddled together by an overgrown laurel bush. Mr Bouillie was at the opposite end, working his beat with the assurance that is the preserve of the truly mighty. His movements were predictable, like the passage of a comet or a shower of meteors, and for the moment he was well out of range.
A frivolous curl of smoke rose from the leafy bush. A few boys on the lookout gestured a warning, taking care not to attract too much attention. By the time Mr Bouillie came round again, they had dispersed into pairs or threesomes, conversing casually as if nothing had happened.
I hoped Willem would be back soon, but yet another bell rang out, this time for us to return to the refectory. When we had all taken our places at the tables, which had been cleared in the meantime, Mr Bouillie snapped his fingers to signal the start of an hour of silent study.
Once I had written my name down on the covers of my exercise books I couldn’t think of anything else to do. The smell of soup still lingered in the air over the tables, and the only sounds intruding on the silence were Mr Bouillie’s steady footfalls and the odd slap of a ruler being brought down too brusquely.
The other boys at my table were busy doing sums. I took as long as I could to write my name down, after which I opened my R.E. exercise book and reread what Mr Vaneenooghe had made us write down about God, Whose hand was ever on our shoulders, either in encouragement or in fatherly reproof.
We had been told to draw a circle. “If you take the dot in the middle to be God,” Mr Vaneenooghe had said, “you can add another dot to indicate your own position.”
I would have preferred to put myself somewhere outside the circle, but had the feeling that this wouldn’t be considered right.
“Aha, a marginal position yet again,” Mr Vaneenooghe had said with a glance at my drawing, while his beard crinkled around a threadbare smile.
I was interrupted in my musings by the clatter of a pen falling on the floor and the scrape of a chair. I turned round and saw Mr Bouillie grabbing one of the new boys by the nape of the neck and holding him out in front of him like a rag.
“No fidgeting during study hour!” he scolded, pushing the boy up the steps to the podium, where he had to stand with his back to the rest of us and “think things over”.
Stifled sobs could be heard in the refectory. Mr Bouillie adjusted the cuffs of his jacket and went about his business.
I sat there wishing I could erect a sort of electric fence all around me, the way they did in the science-fiction comics I was addicted to. An invisible, impenetrable dome, inside which I could seal myself off from the surrounding moonscape and at the same time prevent the hatred that was oozing from all my pores from being noticed by everyone. I clenched my teeth and put little pencil marks in the margins of my exercise book.
The afternoon dragged on. Lessons started again at half-past two. The clouds lifted briefly, and the most excruciating boredom I had ever experienced came pouring in through the tall windows.
A man wearing a wide tie and pebble glasses opened his briefcase. He instructed me to say what my name was in French: “Je m’appelle Antoine.” “Et vous?” he inquired, turning to Willem. “Mon nom est Guillaume,” he replied. He was obliged to add “J’ai aussi une petite soeur. Elle s’appelle Kathérine.” He glanced at me sheepishly.
The wide tie was followed by a skinny fellow wearing a foul-smelling jumper. He unrolled a miserable little map against the blackboard showing Belgium’s major concentrations of industry, all the sectors of which he proceeded to enumerate in the humdrum drone of a fly buzzing aimlessly around a lamp.
Willem sprawled at his desk. “I could just do with a good kip.”
He cracked his knuckles.
“De Vries, sit up straight. No slouching or slacking in my class,” came the voice from the blackboard.
Willem drew himself up slowly, drummed his fingers on the top of his desk and puffed out his cheeks.
“Moron,” I heard him whisper.
*
The four o’clock bell unleashed anarchy. Mr Bouillie stood in the flurry of departing bicycles, flailing his arms as if he were trying to net a school of herrings and hated to see any escape.
Roland was cycling way ahead of me and Willem. He was in a team with his mates, talking and shouting, but they fell silent at a stroke when they spotted a bunch of fluttery schoolgirls in blue uniforms starting off home on their bikes.
The girls stopped en masse by the bandstand on the square, dismounted and tied their jerseys around their hips to shorten their skirts. They were like wading birds on the shore of a lake, chattering away, darting looks at the boys dawdling by the cafés on the edge of the square, bouncing the frames of their bikes against their thighs as they talked.
“Do you want to hang about for a bit?” Willem asked, hunched nonchalantly over his handlebars.
“My father said I should stick with my cousin over there,” I said.
Roland did not seem to be in the slightest hurry. He had tied his jacket on his luggage carrier and had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was now deep in discussion with some other boys.
The atmosphere was tense. Surreptitious looks flashed to and fro. Racy comments ricocheted off the pavement. The girls would be flapping their wings and taking off next.
“You’ll be taking the road through the wood, won’t you?” Willem said. “We can wait for him there.”
We crossed the market square on our way out of Ruizele and cycled uphill, not stopping until we reached the point where the road plunged in among the trees.