Free Little Caesar by Tommy Wieringa Page B

nearby hill, where they have founded a town by the name of Alburgh. Old Castrum and new Alburgh become locked in a bitter struggle for scarce means.
    December 1740 arrives. A powerful northeasterly wind has been blowing for days. It is very, very cold. The wind swells to storm velocity. Masses of water again pile up before the coast and come thundering down on the cliffs on which Castrum’s last remains are standing.
    A priest, William Mason, who led his last service in St. Paul’s a few days earlier, documented the consequences of that storm. St. Paul’s, Castrum’s largest church, is torn apart by the waves. Its eastern wall collapses. A few days later the belfry falls as well. When the sea calms at last, Mason sees that the waters have laid bare the foundations of buildings long forgotten. Old wells hidden by the soil till then rise from the ground like chimneys. What is left of the town is strewn with stones, crabs and fish. Rivulets of water race down the streets on their way back to the sea. Mud everywhere. The penetrating stench of rotting. The parade grounds are flooded, and that spring the sea asters blossom inland. Freshwater springs have turned silty. The Church of the Holy Trinity, atop the cliff, has lost its nave. The bell tower is all that remains standing. Bones stick out of the cliff, human skulls are found on the beach.
    The belfry of the Church of the Holy Trinity is a story in itself. For decades it stood miraculously alone, then sank slowly under its own weight from the cliff onto the beach, where it remained upright – a wonder documented in the annals, paintings and drawings of the day: a lone, arthritic index finger, warning of a fate that had happened long ago.
    In nasty weather they say you can still hear the bells of the Holy Trinity ringing in the waves.

    When my mother had finished doing my makeup, I would go to my room. The cloud in my chest hot and blood red. I lay down on the bed and unbuttoned my trousers. My head on the pillow I tightened the muscles in my neck – fluttering images on my retina, up to and including the spasms. The minor shame afterwards, mild as a shake of the head.
    There was a life before and a life after the discovery of sperm. I masturbated as though possessed. I ejaculated into dirty socks, towels and the insides of trouser legs, I even ate it when there were no jack-off rags to be had.
    The obscene thoughts about my mother, her role in my fantasies, ended one week after my fifteenth birthday. A postcard, with stamps from a faraway country, in a hand I did not recognize, landed in our letterbox. Addressed to me, albeit with the wrong surname. To Ludwig Schultz it read, as though the card was not written but dedicated to me. Schultz was my father’s surname; in England my mother had had it replaced with her own. The text of the postcard consisted of one line, only two words: Love me .
    I brought the card to my mother. She took it and read it. In any icy voice she said, ‘From your father.’
    My father had sent me a card! I now deciphered the scribble beneath the text as Bodo . He knew I existed, he had spoken my name! And he had given me an assignment. Love me. That was the when the shame fell like an axe. Love me , it said. Not her, his wife, but him, my father. With that barebones message Bodo Schultz had renewed his claim upon her. From far, far away he had read my filthy thoughts, he had looked into the secret chambers. With the postcard, taboo suddenly stood like a pillar of lead between me and my mother. Those two words were his warning, but with the warning also came the absolution: were I to mend my ways he would requite my love with his own. All this lay encrypted in that Love me .

    My father’s card gave me a father. A man with handwriting, a hand that wrote, an arm with which he waved to me from a distance, a torso in which beat a heart that might just have kept a place for me.
    The front of the card showed a statue of a man. A copper pirate, he had