Italians call on each other to unite in cohorts, ready for death. Armenians bellow that death is the same for everyone, but only he who dies for his country is happy. The Cypriots like to compare themselves to a sword that makes everyone who sees it tremble. It casts the formal parts of international sporting events in a particularly sombre light. Give me that friendly la la la of ours anytime, at least it doesn’t reek of war.
La la la, a pint at the bar.
As a result I was all the more horrified when, a few years ago, this country’s northerners suddenly remembered the words of their regional song and began seizing every opportunity to sing it. Check it yourself sometime: whenever there’s an increase in the chanting of a national anthem in this or that history, mankind is once again about to demonstrate that its level of civilisation is far from praiseworthy. Wars have begun more often with a song than a bang. I just couldn’t believe that those prosperous people in the north with all their luxuries and mod cons had embraced a dated composer heart and soul and were now blaring the heroic deeds of a metaphorical lion. A lion that ripped, destroyed and smashed apart, got drenched with gore and mud, and then, in triumph, grinned upon its dead foe’s flowing blood. Beautiful lines, bravo. But more and more political parties were concluding their congresses or electoral speeches with this song. I could only feel vicarious shame at the sight of grown people – contemporaries and compatriots – losing themselves in this folkloric rhetoric. And given half a chance, they completed the patriotic kitsch by waving their flag, which was an ugly flag, designed by someone who was colour-blind, in glaring yellow and black, showing a furious lion lashing out with the claws with which the self-satisfied part of the population, ready to tear themselves away as a nation of the self-satisfied alone, apparently identified. Someone seeing this flag for the first time would have sworn it was a pirate’s flag made by children who had not yet outgrown this kind of whimpering heroism and needed to defend their tree huts and secret encampments with the symbols boys’ own adventure stories use to exorcise the boredom of a long summer’s day. I was staggered by the speed with which something so ridiculous could become generally accepted. Hardly anyone seemed disturbed by this viral Blut und Boden cult, hardly anyone was visibly scared. And those who were disturbed and scared were labelled quislings in letters to editors and all kinds of virtual cesspits for Internet opinions, people who had fouled their own nest and should be tarred and feathered. Woe on him, in other words, and I will now sing the whole farce, that false and faithless foe, who strokes the Flemish Lion, then aims a traitor’s blow …
A nation beating its chest in front of the mirror.
The whole mechanism, perfect for pitting large groups of people against each other, had been set in motion. You could see the wheels turning.
I have to admit that the squabbling between the different communities had dropped off a little in this period. Until, that is, the question was spoken out loud: which hymn should be used to welcome Christ on the tarmac (because everyone still assumed that He would land at either Zaventem or Melsbroek airport, if only to honour Belgian industry by dragging His sandals over five hundred metres of locally produced red carpet)? As far as anyone knew, heaven did not have an official anthem. But the Flemish militants, with memories trained by countless TV quizzes, immediately recalled the third verse of their lion song, a verse that recounted how for thousands of years the king of the beasts had fought for land, liberty and God – and God, exactly – and proposed welcoming Him with the bombastic tones of this paean to their own willingness to serve.
Of course, singing your own praises isn’t the most hospitable way of welcoming someone, and fortunately the organisers in the Val-Duchesse nerve centre soon came to that realisation.
Under time pressure and tormented by their long-cultivated disdain for all things literary, the committee felt obliged to turn to the public for help. An appeal went out to the amateur poets of all provinces asking them to glue their backsides to their office chairs and come up with some lines that could serve as a singable greeting to the Lord. Professional authors were allowed to display their talents as well, of course, inasmuch as they might prove useful to society for a change. But many among them, godless almost by definition, had expressed themselves so often with such subversive nonsense in the past that the conclave of ministers was much more sympathetic to the idea of handing the pen to the man or woman in the street. It was not only more sympathetic, it was more appropriate to the occasion. But – and this they wanted to emphasise – the competition was open to everyone, every citizen of this country, regardless of language, colour, religion or anything at all. A statement whose chief purpose was avoiding a close encounter with the lawyers of the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism. Anyway, the welcome song … Contestants had to bear the guest’s dignity in mind and make sure to use appropriate language. Given the festive nature of the song, a verse-chorus structure was recommended. The masses, generally short on wisdom, also needed to be taken into account. In other words, the lyrics needed to be designed to encourage a spontaneous sing-along and should remain comprehensible for Mother Nature’s cerebrally challenged specimens. When choosing their words, authors could consider the timbre – some vowels being easier to sing than others; an ee, for instance, is more injurious to the vocal cords than something like an ah – but should realise at the same time that much would be lost in translation. Because that too had already been decided: the song would be translated into all of Belgium’s national languages plus Latin and Aramaic by the Catholic University’s brightest students, which meant that aficionados of neologisms could forget about it immediately. The poem was allowed to be of a reasonable length – there was no reason to test Christ’s patience with a sonnet cycle, but a haiku might give the impression that we didn’t have so very much to say to Him. All entries had to be submitted under pseudonyms, the copyright would be vested in the State, there would be no correspondence of any kind with the jury (which still had to be cobbled together) and all verses needed to reach the letterbox of the Royal Albert Library by the fifteenth of July at the latest (the postmark would be taken as proof, so it was to be hoped that the postal services didn’t institute yet another round of savage restructuring that exhausted the staff even more for even less money, because then their employees would go on strike and the contestants would have to take their letters to Brussels themselves). The winner would be announced immediately on all public channels during the evening news of the seventeenth of July and, besides the honour and the TV fame, they would also have a street in Brussels named after them. Conveniently, there was one left that they’d forgotten to name until now, a narrow cobbled side street off the Rue de la Révolution that didn’t lead anywhere and was particularly popular with adulterous sneaks and men with tiny bladders.
The melody would be entrusted to … Well, that hadn’t been fully decided yet, but in any case, it would be a professional, someone who was up to producing a composition suitable for choirs, carillons, bombardons and street organs in less than three days.
A street name, an illusion of immortality, that was all it took to get half the population writing doggerel. Vanity – Pope Gregory I may have seen it as one of the cardinal vices, but my timorously concealed ambition to one day weld a few unforgettable sentences together let itself be lured out of the corner where it had been hidden for years. Veronique too suddenly recalled that at school she’d always got her best marks for composition and happily gave herself a sporting chance. According to the website she consulted, possible rhymes for Jesus included cheeses, diseases, sneezes, tweezers and geezers. She scribbled the words down on a bread bag and tried out a few sentences.
And by the way: was that our neighbour we could hear, the murderer, clacking away on an old typewriter? The romantic!
It would have shown a lack of self-criticism if I’d begun preparing myself for a literary triumph, but so many surprises had rained down recently that one more wouldn’t have shocked me. So ye
s, despite my greeting-card rhymes, I was, in all my naivety, still counting on a more-than-miraculous outcome and, come the seventeenth of July, hanging on every word Ophélie Fontana, the news reader on duty, said. I heard the neighbour turn up his television too, and when I looked out of the window I was struck by how quiet the street was. The winning poem of welcome for the Lord, said Ophélie, after a report on the thirteenth stage of the Tour de France and an item on a football transfer, paid attention to subjects that meant a lot to Christ himself. The weak. The rejected. The lame. It appealed for charity and solidarity, cohabitation, love and justice. So much so that the expert snoopers of the investigation brigade smelt a rat. And, apparently, not without reason. The winning poem, submitted under the pseudonym Freddie Freeloader, was a plagiarism. More precisely, it was nothing but a series of snippets copied from reference books in Aurora, the socialist library on the Avenue Jean Volders. To avoid further offence, a decision had now been made to abandon this poetic appeal to the populace – with sincere apologies for all the pointless effort people had put in – and simply welcome Christ with the words He Himself had taught His apostles: the Our Father, a prayer that was thankful, beseeching, professing and welcoming all at once, sung by a select group of virtuoso sacristans, with the support of the complete lung capacity of the Cramique Brass Band.
‘Involving the people in the festivities? My fucking arse!’ I heard echoing through our stairwell. And it occurred to me that it had been days, if not weeks, since I had heard someone swear. And how I had missed that hearty beauty.
Eleventh Station
Clearing out my mother’s apartment was much more daunting than I’d imagined. The mere thought of rummaging through her drawers and opening her wardrobes to decide what was ready for the tip and what deserved a delay of execution felt extremely rude. I dreaded having to bag her underwear and pick up each of her hats while asking myself out of politeness and politeness alone whether I shouldn’t keep one of them as a souvenir. Because obviously I already knew that I didn’t like any of those hats. And I didn’t have a trunk full of fancy dress articles back home that needed restocking.
A chansonnier once sang himself into the Top Ten with the words ‘I won’t be dead until you’ve forgotten me’ and at the time everyone said, ‘You have to play this later at my funeral!’ Perhaps my sudden recollection of that particular song had something to do with my discomfort, because although none of those material mementoes could bring my mother back, I still felt like each object I threw into the rubbish bin would make her deader than she already was.
I removed the batteries from her four wall clocks, not so much as a symbolic act, but because the ticking was getting me down.
My mother’s drawers: filled with lace tablecloths for the guests she hadn’t had for a good twenty years, spare batteries for all her click-clacking clocks, envelopes, the sugar cubes and individually wrapped biscuits she’d smuggled out of coffee shops in her handbag like the impoverished wretch in a yet-to-be-discovered manuscript by Charles Dickens, a box of stamps dating from the days when the Belgian franc still existed; filled with Sunday-best handkerchiefs, telegrams announcing the deaths of people nobody had thought about for years. In her kitchen cupboards I found some thirty glasses all told, whereas she always drank out of one and the same glass: the simplest one, stained with scale from the tap water.
Maybe there were some beers left in the fridge? Ultimately the refrigerator needed emptying too, didn’t it? This clearing out of mine had to start somewhere. And it was good that I’d hit on this thirst-quenching notion now and not three or so weeks later. The mould on the cheeses was already a horrific sight. Blue, green, woolly. In other words: just the thing for gourmets of the kind you’d find among the ranks of ettekeis fanatics.
Who would have looked the most disgusting at that moment: my mother or the cheeses she’d left her son and heir?
Listlessness threatened. I slumped down in my mother’s armchair and stared out at the cow. It stood there as alone as my mum had been sitting here, as alone as many elderly people are in big cities. Remembering – that was all I had to do in these rooms. Until I had emptied them and could hand the keys over to the landlord, close this door behind me for ever and go out into the world as an orphan for the time that was left me. And though I made an effort to round off my mother’s life by hauling up as many beautiful moments as possible out of the well of forgetting, nothing came.
Incapable of making a selection of her possessions (no vase or scarf I could become attached to), I decided not to make a selection at all. Everything had to go. Every last thing. A short, sharp shock. And I hurried out onto the pavement – where everyone smiled at me and said hello, where nobody pretended to be in a hurry or feared I might be a murderer when I spoke to them – and asked if anyone was interested in a kitchen cupboard, totally free of charge, a mattress, a saucepan, a coffeepot …
Birds chirp an alert to their fellow birds when they spot bread crumbs in a garden and people have been signalling each other for a while now by text message. In no time it was open house at my mother’s. A to-and-fro of families who had been forced to struggle that little bit harder to make ends meet – often because they had reproduced that little bit more – and were still grateful for second-hand towels or a dilapidated side table. Women tried on dressing gowns in the bathroom, handymen took the bed apart, disconnected the chandeliers and helped each other carry the heavier pieces down the stairs. If only she’d known, my old mum, that her clothes would one day be worn by Moroccans, Congolese, Uzbeks, Afghanis; her sheets slept on by couples who had fled distant regions but still missed them deeply! And as I tried to imagine my mother’s face as she watched her furnishings being shared out among all those who had terrified her during her life, I couldn’t stop my gob from taking on an amused smile. Men and women I had known only as silent sliding figures in our shared asphalt landscape now offered me their sincerest condolences. They thanked me for my generosity and invited me to drop by for tea.
Fruitful are the days on which one makes friends.
*
Despite having anticipated several afternoons’ worth of lifting and lugging, a backbone that reminded me how old I was and innumerable drives to the city’s rubbish processers with the debris from smashed-up wardrobes and cupboards, I had hardly one full trailer to drive to the tip in the Rue du Rupel. I had unexpectedly taken care of this horrible job in just a couple of hours while making quite a few families happier at the same time.
The apartment was empty, a chapter was closed.
How many chapters did I have left?
Veronique called. How far had I got? And had I been listening to the radio?
‘How far? Wait for it!’ I whooped. ‘You won’t believe your ears, but the whole place is empty. The landlord has the keys, the deposit’s been refunded, it’s all taken care of. At this very moment, my mother’s curtains are probably in a hard-working housewife’s sewing machine being transformed into cushion covers. Her paintings are probably being removed from their frames to be replaced by photos of dark-skinned children. Fantastic, isn’t it!’
‘Have you been listening to the radio?’ she repeated.
‘What’s on the radio?’
‘The news. Early this evening the authorities are going to start sealing off the inner city. After that no cars will be allowed in or out. It’s a security measure. Keeping the city free of traffic will make it easier and they want to guard against car bombs too. So make sure you’re back on time otherwise they might not let you into your own neighbourhood …’
‘Why not? I’m from Brussels, it says so on my ID.’
‘That’s just it, you left your wallet on the table. You’re out on the road without any papers, darling.’
She said darling, an atrociously ugly word, and it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable.
‘What’s more, we’ve been bopping all over town in the car without a valid inspection certificate for more than a month!’
I turned on the car radio and heard someone working their way through a long list of approach roads to the centre of town, in the tone you could hear every workday peak hour on Radio Vivacité. The newsreader then bent over a report that had just come in, a grisly discovery in Courtrai, where a group of nuns had hung themselves in the convent attic. You could just picture it: all those wobbling black skirts containing freshly decomposing nuns, dangling from the rafters. It was the kind of scene that cried out to be painted. Still life with dead nuns.
Of course, the nuns in this news item were members of an order that had come in for some fierce criticism in the recent past. Their lace wimples had inspired many a cartoonist when it was revealed that, several decades earlier, these brides of Christ had sexually abused the orphans who had been entrusted to their care. Testimonies of boys, now damaged men, who were forced to creep under a Mother Superior’s musty skirts and lick her hairy gash until she stopped trembling. Eight-year-old girls who were roughly deflowered by the fingers that Sister Clementia had just unclasped from pious prayer, and severely punished if they cried while she was at it. The statement of one person who had been marked for life gave someone else who had also been mistreated the courage to drag their past out from under the carpet too. That got the shitball rolling. An avalanche of horror stories thundered down into the valley of milk and honey, briefly relieving the tabloids of their need to grub around in the sex lives of TV celebrities.
Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Page 7
