The soldier handed me my identity card and told me I could go. I walked past the van, where several women were now sitting on the benches. An old woman carrying a brown blanket was climbing in awkwardly, but the man behind her gave her a push. Somewhere a door was being pounded and a window was slammed shut.

When I reached Roetersstraat, I broke into a run and kept running until I was home.

‘That was fast!’ said my mother. ‘Didn’t you go to the butcher’s shop?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Was it closed?’ asked my mother.

‘No,’ I said, ‘Lepelstraat was blocked off.’

The next morning I walked through Lepelstraat again. Papers were scattered everywhere and doors were standing wide open. A grey cat was sitting on the steps of a dark stairwell. When I stopped, it ran to the top of the stairs and glared at me with its back arched. A child’s glove lay on one of the steps. A few houses away a door with a splintered panel hung out of its hinges, and the mailbox was suspended crookedly from a nail with the mail sticking out of it. I couldn’t tell whether it was printed matter or letters. Curtains fluttered out of a number of windows. Somewhere a flowerpot lay upturned, on the edge of a windowsill. Behind another window I saw a table that had already been set: a piece of bread on a plate and a slab of butter with a knife stuck in it. The butcher’s shop where I was supposed to get meat the day before was empty. A plank had been hammered across the door, so that no one could enter. Someone must have done that early in the day. The butcher’s shop looked nice and clean from the outside, as if the butcher had first given it a thorough cleaning. The shutter in front of the tiny pickle seller’s shop was closed, though the vinegary smell of the pickle barrels was still in the air. From under the shutter a trail of pickle juice ran across the pavement into the gutter, most likely from barrels that had toppled. A sudden gust of wind sent papers whirling across the asphalt and slamming against the houses. Right next to me a door fell shut, though no one came out. A shutter banged back and forth. And it was not yet evening.

Just as I was about to turn the corner, I saw something on a doorpost – the red eye on the enamelled plate of the night security service.

The door was standing wide open.

The men

The men

The evening the men came I fled through the garden gate. It had been a mild spring day. In the afternoon we had lounged in the garden in deckchairs, and in the evening I noticed that my face was a bit sunburned.