A holiday feeling was in the air.
Ninth Station
Suddenly my summer morning rituals included wandering past a few different newspaper stands to give myself the pleasure of seeing just how much my home town had magnetised international media outlets. Brussels adorned the front pages of all the world’s leading magazines. Not one rolled off the presses without bestowing attention on our attractions. Hot tips for gourmets, special destinations for shopping addicts, the charm of tram 44 with Het Spoorloos Café as the last stop, alternative accommodation for those who hadn’t been able to book a bed in a hotel or found the prices for the few beds that were still available totally prohibitive, establishments where you could get an authentic beer with a beautiful head on it … topics all editors everywhere were willing to throw money at. For the umpteenth time in its rich history, Time magazine put Jesus on the cover but – and this was a first – now as a visitor to Brussels’ Grand Place, which is, after all, without any blind chauvinism, one of the most beautiful squares on the whole planet. Dark and gloomy, but beautiful. As a result, the number of Americans who think of Brussels as the capital of Bulgaria must have plummeted towards zero and if anyone should have thanked Jesus for so much free publicity, it was this city’s tourist industry. Every day I bought two foreign newspapers with a Brussels monument on the front page, preferably written in a language of which I did not understand a single syllable. As souvenirs. Me, who had always found it difficult to restrain my smirks when Veronique hoarded mementoes, filling scrapbooks with concert and subway tickets, locks of hair, notes we’d left each other, boarding passes.
I was standing at our front door with the Helsingun Sanomat and the Tokyo Shimbun under one arm when the upstairs neighbour patted me on the back and said, ‘So, Dutch isn’t enough to keep yourself informed any more?’ And this in such a jovial tone that he might just as well have preceded his remark with a term of address like ‘old buddy’. What made this scene so special, however, was that my neighbour had never wearied his vocal cords on my account before. In the most favourable instances, he had jerked his chin up as a form of greeting, invariably resembling a seal in those brief moments, but whenever able to avoid eye contact, he’d refrained from that bloodless twitch as well. I only knew he was called Antoine because it was written on the doorbell, because the postman occasionally put his letters in my letterbox by mistake and because a woman had once stood on the landing at three in the morning screaming his name at the top of her voice, followed by the demand, ‘At least let me get my clothes!’
‘Potato peelings can’t read!’ I blurted. A feeble comeback, I know, but reasonably witty for me.
He then asked me if I was on holiday yet.
Yes, I was.
‘And the woman you live with too?’
Yes, Veronique too.
‘Would you like to come to dinner at my place this evening, the two of you?’
This city, like many others, was a place where you could spend years living under the same roof, clustered around the same lift shaft, without getting to know each other. If there was a gas explosion, Antoine and I would be lamented in the same book of condolence, the news of our demise would be printed on the same sheet of newspaper and the chances were high that we would remain neighbours in the municipal cemetery until the leases on our burial plots expired. But that shared fate was too insignificant to bring us together. Until then I’d only known his voice as it sounded through walls and floors, and suddenly he was addressing me, following one sentence with another and even inviting me up for a meal. These truly were mad days.
To be honest, I’d never felt disadvantaged by being able to dissolve into a crowd and I’d often preferred the straightforward anonymity of the city to the hypocritical arts villagers master to sustain their mutual greetings year after year. Perhaps it was because I was a city boy through and through – the only rabbits I’d ever seen had been skinned and had a barcode on their bum — but the prospect of a neighbour keeping tabs on my comings and goings was anything but a comfort. If I realised while preparing dinner that I’d run out of butter, I wouldn’t knock on my neighbour’s door to ask if I could borrow a pat (‘Ten grams is enough, I’ll make sure to bring it back tomorrow.’). I’d rather throw together a completely different meal from yesterday’s leftovers. If necessary, I’d make a virtue of necessity and pull on my coat to go out and treat myself to a plate somewhere – bangers and mash at Café de l’Opera, and a full glass of Gigondas. What am I saying? A carafe! And yes, I did claim earlier in this modest chronicle that, of all liquids, I only tipped beer and coffee down my gullet, but now you know that I wasn’t being entirely honest at that stage. Anyway, butter, Gigondas … Any right-minded person would start hoping they’d run out of butter again sometime very soon. But good neighbours were people who bent over backwards to make sure they hardly even existed for their neighbours – that remained my firm belief.
Just under six hours later, for want of a decent excuse, Veronique and I crossed the doormat of someone who had shared the intimacy of his nocturnal coughing fits with us, a man we heard flush every few hours, and astonishingly I felt very pleased with myself for making the acquaintance of a neighbour, something that allowed me to go out in my slippers and drink a few glasses too many, yet remain within crawling distance of my own front door.
So, there I was. Initially I had been annoyed when people started storing their music in invisible files on iPods and other devices. It deprived me of the luxury of standing in front of a shelf full of CDs or LPs and immediately having something to talk about. ‘Oh, you into that?’ Or, ‘Great, this. I love it too. I saw her last year live with her band at the Ancien Belgique … What? You were there too? Really …’ A way of warming up the conversation. The same fate lay in store for books. Complete libraries now fitted onto a chip the size of a fingernail; increasingly, you needed to pull out a computer to follow the route of someone’s intellectual education. In my lifetime, at least during the first and most supple part of it, I had generally got to know people in front of bookcases – and CD racks – and I found it a terrible loss that new technology had deprived me of this ice-breaker, this social and intellectual point of orientation. So I went over to the window to look out at a view that was almost identical to my own. ‘We can’t complain about where we live,’ I said to have something to say, gazing out at the busy city. But Antoine picked up the thread and in two shakes we were conversing about the many blessings of our location: the cinemas, the comic shops, Joseph Niels’s excellent minced beef and the unsympathetic price he unfortunately, more than unfortunately, asked for it, the concert venues, the theatres, the art galleries, the nesting falcons on the cathedral towers, the accounts of Ohanna’s dreams we read in our newspapers, the busker who had been occupying a spot in Metro Madou for five weeks now and displayed such talent that it seemed an injustice that this man who smelt of rollmops wasn’t on stage at the Cirque Royal …
I had also been relieved to see Antoine open a bag of crisps to munch with the drinks. The whole rage of calling a chicory leaf dipped in mayonnaise an amuse-bouche was way too snooty for me: when people started talking about food in trendy, pompous terms, I always felt they were being dishonest. To me, zakuskis are and will always be open-faced sandwiches, I prefer snacks to tapas, and a smoothie is nothing more or less than a pulped cucumber. Surely? It was simply a question of sincerity: someone who already felt the urge to hide the simplicity of the pre-dinner nibbles behind buffed and polished words wouldn’t hesitate to smear a deceitful layer of language over themselves as well. As far as that went, I welcomed the jocular way our neighbour ripped open the bag of crisps as a candid declaration of a genuine wish to get to know us. Unmasked, I mean.
Plain salted crisps, no better kind.
During the meal – a forgotten classic: chicken with apple sauce, and I have to stop writing about food or the drool will drip down onto the letters of my keyboard – I found it easy to accept the idea that the purpose of C
hrist’s imminent arrival was to revive interest in His Eucharistic message. Bringing people together around a carafe of grape juice and a lump of bread – a truly noble goal and, according to my modest knowledge of the Bible, the quintessence of the New Testament. It could have been the wine (one and a half bottles a head leads to completely new insights), but suddenly I also understood the meaning of that inspirational line that sweetens children’s voices in tubercular churches: ‘For in wine and in bread, I break free of death.’ I, too, as a six-year-old communicant, had thrown all of the enthusiasm I had in me into this song in the minutes preceding the disillusionment concerning the cardboard taste of the host, yelling every letter of the missal text up into the rood loft as if my life depended on it. Of course I didn’t have the foggiest what it meant. And make no mistake: I don’t understand it now either, not at all. And I wouldn’t know what there was to understand about it. But there, at Antoine’s table, gnawing a drumstick, I did. Again, it was all that wine, you have to take that into account.
I feel uncomfortable raking up the memory of that moment and would prefer to ignore the event completely. But if I kept silent about it, I wouldn’t be properly conveying that period that was so full of expectation. So here it comes: I couldn’t resist speaking that particular sentence at my neighbour’s dinner table. Out loud, yes indeed. Like that woman in the tram who had spoken a sentence out loud a few days earlier. I can still hear myself saying ‘For in wine and in bread, I break free of my death.’ Pleased with myself for having managed to wrest a line of a hymn out of the grip of oblivion. Veronique laid down her fork and looked at me. I could be grateful that no-one had choked on their apple sauce. But before I had time to bemoan my own impulsivity, even before I had readied myself to be the brunt of Veronique’s scornful laughter, she took up the baton for me. ‘…God in Heaven extends us His hand.’ And the next thing, all three of us were sitting around the carcass of a chicken singing the whole song. And by singing, I mean at the top of our lungs. ‘Lord, Lord, take this gift, take my self, all my dreams, all I’ve planned.’ It was a cheerful song, really. Or at least, the melody was written by a carefree composer. Whether they were still ramming it into the heads of the latest batch of lambs to be Christianised, I didn’t know. But Belgians my age, who learnt the Hail Mary before the alphabet, know this song. More than that, it’s a musical milestone in their existence. The more I think about it, the less plausible I find it that I sat there singing cheerful hymns with the neighbour I had, until very recently, never said a word to. Like fanatical Catholic teenagers who merrily psalmodise the sunset at religious camps, united in their pride at having renounced sex before marriage. That was us. Never will I be able to eat chicken with apple sauce again without thinking back on that mad moment.
If Veronique and I had followed the regular rhythm of our calendar, we would have been somewhere very far away, with or without a mosquito net draped over us, in a country that made us feel like travellers, not tourists. As always, we would have been glad to leave the commercial belt around the hotel as quickly as possible to immerse ourselves in the lives of what are generally known as the common people. The price of our plane tickets was wasted money unless we spent at least one evening of our stay in the company of a local, someone who didn’t have a thing to do with the tourist industry. Like every other cocky globetrotter and purchaser of so-called alternative travel guides, we had no greater goal than getting off the beaten track. But what right had we had to dedicate all that summertime travelling to the pursuit of authenticity? Weren’t we guilty of a form of snobbery when we supported our story addiction in Kenya with the tales of an anonymous basket weaver but hadn’t even said hello to our very own neighbour back home?
See: we’d stayed home and we had our authenticity. We were listening to a man, an IT specialist as it turned out, a card-carrying member of a squash club, a keen chess player and, as such, regularly to be found bent over a board in the famous Greenwich Taverne, romantically unattached, and a murderer.
Assuming that he had just told a joke and wanting to hide my failure to get it, I laughed.
It was time, he said, that he confessed the black stain on his soul. Of course, it was the coming of the Almighty that had got him thinking. He’d been bothered by remorse before, true, often, but this time he couldn’t postpone his confession any longer. He had to let it out! He’d lost his faith in the Church, no surprise there, so he’d decided to confess his terrible sin to a neighbour. For God, that would be as good as a priest.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I murdered my wife!’
‘The one who was on the stairs once without any clothes …’
‘You don’t know her. The offence dates from some time ago, plus I was living somewhere else at the time … She got on my nerves, it’s true, but that’s what divorce is for, to counteract murder. Anyway, this is my confession: I murdered someone, laid her in the bath and then set fire to the house. Until now I have unjustly enjoyed the pity of friends and family who grieve with me because I lost my wife in tragic circumstances. I still get weekly phone calls from my then parents-in-law, lamenting the fact that their daughter died before leaving them the consolation of a troop of grandchildren …’
*
You can expect many things when you’re invited to a meal somewhere for the first time, but this scenario – ‘dinner by artificial light in the home of a repentant Judas’ was beyond my powers of imagination. I regretted not having any serious transgressions of my own to make things a little more mutual. Really, having something to confess to would have been very convenient. If not a murder, at least a carjacking or something like that. Unfortunately my last theft only involved a Raider chocolate bar. And I’d already confessed that forty years earlier – when it had never occurred to anyone that the brand Raider would one day cease to exist – in the Notre-Dame du Finistère confessional to a priest who seemed to have dozed off. So all we could do was thank our neighbour for his candour and the faith he’d shown in us.
‘You’ve never thought of going to the police?’ – Veronique with a brave but pertinent question.
‘The prisons are full, you know that as well as I do. Here in Brussels you can empty the magazine of a pistol into a passing bus and get away with an ankle bracelet and some psychotherapy. And what if the judges do prove willing to honour my crime with a camp bed in a cell? Would it make me a better man? Every jailer admits it: you go into prison a criminal and come out a gangster. My Righteous Judge lies ahead. I’m ready for Him. Sooner or later God’s going to cut you down.’
And because he declaimed that last bit solemnly in an American accent, I unquestioningly assumed he had it from some song or other.
Crazy days, I can’t say that enough.
Tenth Station
One can safely assume that not a single embryo has a say in its place of birth. My hailing from Brussels and Belgium is no achievement and if I’m honest there’s never been any love lost between me and those who flaunt their nationality as a mark of distinction, a status they obtained simply by being lucky enough to see the light of day in a place with superior geographical coordinates. I’m the harmless loon who dreams quietly of a world without nationalities, without flags. Of a world without passports, like the one that existed before the First World War. Or a world without money … that too. And if I take it to its logical conclusion, I’m afraid I have to admit that in the broadest sense, I dream of a world without people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m comfortable in my fabulous Belgian biotope, surrounded by things and values I love: meatballs à la Liégeoise, the right to journalistic and artistic freedom, asparagus with butter and boiled eggs in May, the fact that not a single woman here has to abort her unwanted child over a toilet bowl with a dirty knitting needle, the cycling obsession on all sides when the spring races are coming up, the existence of a financial safety net for the unemployed … But I’m not beyond the influence of my upbringing and I’m not beyond the influence of my culture. If I’
d been born in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I’d praise the convenience of a penis gourd! I think. And for that matter, if I had to prove my credentials as a Brusselaar by tucking into a piece of authentic Brussels no-fat cheese, also known as ettekeis (stinking gunge if you ask me, fresh puke from a diseased and dying dog – but a delicacy according to others), well, I’d fail the test. I could tell my examiners that this so-called cheese, an imitation of a washed-up jellyfish, is manufactured in the Galgstraat, a street named after a gallows, of all things, and I could easily dig up various other pieces of information concerning this product of culinary sadomasochism, but spooning even the slightest bit into my mouth to prove my origins: never! It’s the kind of thing people call an acquired taste. And that generally says it all.
But my aversion to origin-claiming, barricade-manning loudmouths is the reason I’ve always appreciated being Belgian. Because through the country’s whole tricoloured history it’s been possible to be an enthusiastic Belgian without having to make a show of it. A country where you never have to be a proud singer of the national anthem. Where I’ve never known anyone who was really interested in producing a faultless rendition of the country’s chosen ditty. Maybe our three official languages get in the way. There is such a tendency for it to descend into a cacophony when the members of a crowd begin simultaneously praising the fatherland in their own mother tongues. With the exception of a few oddballs, I have never heard a soul warble the complete lyrics of our anthem, and that’s fabulous. On the increasingly rare occasions that our national football team manages to qualify for a championship, the ceremonial section preceding the defeat makes it clear that neither the players nor the supporters are able to do any better than sly humming. Or they simply replace the words with ‘la, la, la’. Yes, we la-la-la the Brabançonne en masse and it has always struck me as absolutely logical for us to talk about ourselves in those same Dadaistic terms. Believe me, I’ve always counted myself lucky to be a resident of a realmlet that has ‘la la la la la la la la la la la … la la la …’ as the unofficial lyrics of its national anthem. It could hardly be more cheerful. And you can’t say that about yodelling that our fatherland has an inalienable right to the blood flowing through our veins, as required by the actual libretto.
Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Page 6
