Just after the news of this collective suicide had gone on air, motorists all around me began beeping their horns joyfully and waving to each other, as if we had all been listening to the incredibly gripping radio coverage of a football game in which the Red Devils scored in the final seconds. Those were the days, the rare days when the beeping on the motorway was happy and harmonious.
*
It was bizarre, but the nuns’ suicide – their cheap and cowardly mea culpa on the eve of Christ’s coming, afraid as they were that this would be the Day of Judgment, the long-predicted Overwhelming Event – was a source of delight that unified everyone and everything, and it was a shame that the news was released before nightfall, because otherwise the sense of justice having been done would have undoubtedly led many to light up the Pleiades with a skyrocket or two.
Sure enough, at the Place Sainctelette all vehicles had to pull over and the drivers had to show their wads of documents. I had no desire to put on a show of rummaging through the glove box before adopting an expression of horror and saying, ‘Gosh, that’s funny, my papers aren’t in here.’ Policemen know that act, they see several versions of it every day. So I said straight out that I was out on the streets without any documentation. And that I’d also for gotten to take the car to the garage for the annual inspection. The officer, tormented by a monstrous birthmark on his face (if it had been a Rorschach test, I would have said: a map of Holland!), was as happy as a man in love and seemed incapable of making a fuss about anything. ‘I have no reason to doubt it. Of course your papers are in order,’ he said, and his breath stank of filthy tobacco, which caused an abrupt decline in the pity I felt because of his birthmark. ‘And as far as the inspection goes, if you’ve forgotten it, you’ve forgotten it. A bad memory is not a crime. You’ll see to it shortly, I’m sure of that.’
I thanked him for being so friendly.
‘Don’t mention it. Nowadays everyone is honest and friendly to the police. That makes it a lot easier for us to be friendly too. Soon we’ll be out of work, ha! Imagine.’
I was allowed to enter the inner city with my car. But only to park it in front of the door and not touch it again until the morning of the twenty-second of July. Until then the centre of Brussels would be car-free, just like that one Sunday in September when our children can taste the rustic pleasure of a game of football on the asphalt and we cough up the soot that has built up in our lungs over the past year and triumphantly cycle and roller-skate through the winding tunnels of the petite ceinture. After which the emergency services have so many injuries and broken limbs to deal with that they beg for the immediate reinstatement of King Automobile.
*
I drove into a city, my city, where entire neighbourhoods were profiting from the reduced traffic by organising barbecues in the middle of the avenues. Volleyball nets had been strung up across the breadth of boulevards, with the inhabitants of uneven house numbers taking on those with even numbers. Women cleaned their windows, men painted the house fronts or hung banners from the gutters: ‘Salut Jésus, Roi de Bruxelles’. The streets smelt of freesias and there weren’t any cigarette butts to be seen on the pavements. Even the rabbis from the main synagogue on the Rue de la Régence – where, according to some, new laws were passed long before the Chamber or Senate considered them – clambered up a ladder with a brush and a tin of paint, Sabbath or no Sabbath, to daub their walls with their own variant: ‘Salut Jésus, Roi des Juifs’.
At home Veronique had a cold beer ready. For all the work I’d done.
Rare days. If you’d given me a tune, I’d have whistled it for you – in counterpoint.
Twelfth Station
The twentieth of July was announced as the day on which the national record for a maximum temperature might be broken. There was even a possibility of the mercury pushing up past the magical barrier of forty degrees Celsius for the first time in our history. In the same tone with which they had cursed the winter six months earlier, the eternal malcontents now declared how much they were looking forward to November’s frozen chrysanthemums. And, of course, people were quick to put the dog-day heat down to Christ’s coming rather than blame it on pollution and global warming. Some drew an association between the soaring temperatures and the New Testament story of the Pentecostal flames, an undeniably interesting take on things, and proof positive that Jesus must already be in town. We’d overlooked Him, the Son of Man had slipped past without our noticing. He was already here. And as I explained above, since we were living in an age in which the news of every little fart was endlessly repeated without further verification, each rumour was tweeted, texted, skyped, emailed, pinged, ponged or beeped on old-fashioned car horns if the batteries were flat, and the masses swarmed back and forth through the city according to the latest rumour. If a story that Jesus was located in the topmost sphere of the Atomium had been launched at a particular hour on that day, it would have led within fifteen minutes to an unparalleled popular stampede in the direction of that monument. If someone had then shouted, ‘The Son of God is in the Marollen among His peers, the impoverished and the drunken, the lost and the weak,’ the crowd would have immediately rushed off, like air after an explosion, and there wouldn’t have been a soul left at the base of our famous collection of big steel balls.
Another theory that was suddenly being whispered from ear to ear on that particular twentieth of July was that, just yesterday, Jesus had attended an open meeting in the masonic lodge Les Vrais Amis de l’Union et du Progrès Réunis, something He had enjoyed tremendously and which had given Him a more positive view of humanity. Afterwards a ballot for His election as a member was held. Of all the electronic tittle-tattle that did the rounds that day, my personal favourite was the report that, for some time now, Jesus had been staying in Stoclet Palace on the Avenue de Tervueren – often described as the Jugendstil Taj Mahal, it had a history of offering temporary lodgings to members of the beautiful people – and that, what’s more, He had been enjoying the company there of His revered colleague Mohammed, with whom He passed the time playing Risk. Stories like this were completely crazy, even for people who believed in miracles, but that didn’t stop the Avenue de Tervueren from being swamped by so many autograph hounds that the caretaker of that architectural pearl could only fear for the safety of his building.
Someone who could undoubtedly have contributed a paragraph or two on the dangers of mass hysteria was the young guy on the Rue du Marché aux Herbes, a fourth-generation hippie, coincidentally strolling out of the Galerie Agora, where he had just purchased a hash pipe. Of course, his sandals, poncho and wispy beard were the long-time staples of children’s Bible illustration – that makes it partly understandable. And the moment the first person recognised the poor drip as the Saviour and expressed this recognition with a shriek of delight, the queues in front of the waffle stands dissolved and the Rue du Marché aux Herbes was engulfed by his admirers. It made no difference that the young man denied being the Son of God. He could shout whatever he liked and however loudly – ‘I come from Hamme. I’m a qualified social worker …’ – it couldn’t avert his fate. From the St Hubert arcade, the Rue de la Montagne, the Rue de la Madeleine, the Rue des Eperonniers, followers came from all directions, hurling themselves at the unfortunate, grabbing him and tearing at him with all their might, shredding his Bob Marley T-shirt and ripping the sandals off his feet. Why? To use them in amulets! And only when he was completely butt-naked did the mob come half to its senses and disperse, resuming the search for the Messiah in other quarters, leaving the poor wretch behind without a word of apology, lying there in his birthday suit on that summery square with its undiminished aroma of sugar and vanilla.
I have been told that the unlucky hippie switched to hard drugs soon after this unpleasant experience, taking to them with such a vengeance that he snorted his brains to mush and now spends the majority of his days in the garden of a psychiatric institution, on the swing, convinced of his own divinity.
The
incident showed very clearly, I thought, that the officials responsible for law and order were not ready for this event and unable to guarantee the safety of Christ Our Saviour or those who happened to resemble him. On top of this, the Minister of Defence in our permanent provisional government for business in hand was stuck abroad because the military aircraft on which he was travelling (for private purposes, according to some), a C130, had broken down and was unable to be repaired in time. You couldn’t help but wonder who was going to coordinate it all, who would be there to make a decision if things went wrong. For the first time, I felt a creeping sense of doubt. Was it sensible to be physically present along the route tomorrow? Even with the ceremonies taking place a hair’s breadth away from my front door, it might be more advisable to follow it all on TV. A commercial channel had acquired the exclusive rights. Every fifteen minutes you’d have to sit through ads for deodorants, lady shaves or car insurance, but if it meant avoiding having someone rip the clothes off your back, an afternoon in front of the telly was worth considering. When I stopped to think about it, it was no wonder that the commotion in our streets – good-natured still, for now – had been giving me increasingly frequent flashbacks to that balmy spring day in 1985. We were young and proud that our city had been given the privilege of organising the final of the then European Cup. But the collection of dead football fans alongside the pitch, 39 in total, blue, suffocated, trampled, limp sacks that no longer jumped up when Michel Platini kicked his team into the lead … Those images have left their mark on the history of Brussels and often come to mind, especially when the masses fill our avenues. I’ve smelt death in every crowd since.
*
The midday news showed helicopter footage shot around the palace. The fire brigade constantly spraying the crowd. The Red Cross volunteers doing battle with the symptoms of dehydration. Food packages being dropped from a hot-air balloon. In some neighbourhoods people had been crammed together for so long that the weaker ones were already fainting. A fitness guru on top of the statue Venus with Doves barked exercise instructions into a megaphone to keep the patient spectators’ blood circulating, while a small orchestra in the Vauxhall bandstand fiddled modified keep-fit tunes.
To illustrate just how much the capital had been overtaken by pilgrims, the producers had dispatched camera crews to Belgian holiday destinations as well. The country was deserted. In Bruges the chocolates were going to waste in the window displays, the coachmen’s horses were enjoying an unexpected break, the abandoned squares and canals seemed to have been plucked straight from a Fernand Khnopff print. There were no skateboarders or rollerbladers hurtling along the otherwise so busy sea dykes of Blankenberge and Middelkerke; no kites performing arabesques on the breeze, no children glaring at their fallen ice-cream cones, and no customers in the restaurants, despite the heavily discounted seafood menus. The same scenes in the east, where no canoes were scraping their bellies over the rocks of the Amblève and the trout could gulp at the treats the river brought them without fear of fishing lines. The grass in the campgrounds was not being smothered by tents, the people who rented out cottages were suffering losses. And for days now, Théodore Géricault’s wonderful Portrait of a Kleptomaniac in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent had not been visited by a single admirer. The country was empty, and that emptiness suited it wonderfully.
And the coming of the Supreme Being was affecting everyday life in the surrounding countries too: for a week now the Eiffel Tower had been forced to get by with a serious reduction in the number of visitors, extremely serious actually, and the tour-boat companies in Amsterdam’s canals were taking advantage of the lull in custom to repair their boats and fish Coke cans out of the water.
Brussels was suffocating. Once this human sea had finally receded, an unsurveyable mass of filth would drive our council workers to despair. You didn’t have to be a visionary to see that. All the roads to Brussels Park stank of overripe armpits. Already. Soon we would be hoping for wind, a brisk breeze to blow the sour stench out of our avenues, just as our nineteenth-century predecessors had hoped that the wind would blow cholera away from the streets. But for the time being, all diaries remained blank from the twenty-first of July on. We were totally and single-mindedly focused on that one glorious moment, and that was forgivable.
*
As I mentioned earlier, cars hadn’t been allowed into the centre for quite a few hours and the authorities had decided that they should make public transport free as a concession to the countless masses trying to gain access by pressing forward against the hastily erected city walls – that is, the contemporary barbed-wire version of city walls. The Autonomous Train Drivers’ Union couldn’t have hoped for better news, because if there was one choice moment to make a clear statement that their members were under too much pressure, that for some time now there had been no new colleagues appointed to compensate for natural wastage and that the railway security systems were hopelessly obsolete … If there was one day when they could scream out loud that there were exasperating staff shortages and the authorities’ cost-cutting was undermining both the quality of the railways and the safety of the passengers, it was now. God Himself as a bargaining chip, a work force didn’t get that added to their trade-unionist arsenal every day of the week. It couldn’t have been simpler: they called a strike, only their fourth that year.
Unfortunately, inasmuch as the railway staff believed that their demands would be met immediately, given the circumstances, they were badly mistaken. The truth was that everyone, not least of all the mayor, was over the moon that they had called a halt to all that transportation of people. The city needed to be shut off. From now on, only one person was going to be allowed in, and that was the Son of God. Hopefully we’d recognise Him.
Everyone else would just have to do what they’d done without protest their whole life long: put their feet up on a pouffe, arrange a bowl of crisps on their track-suited lap, and watch events in complete relaxation on TV.
As it grew darker that evening, an unusual calm descended over the city. Those who believed they had occupied a good viewing spot stuck to their paving stone and refused to budge; the atmosphere around the Grand Place and the Place de la Bourse was subdued. Although the tables in the magically lit Rue des Bouchers were set and there were rumbling stomachs afoot, the hospitality touts from the various restaurants refrained from the folkloristic street theatre they usually deployed to filch each other’s customers with rock-bottom prices or the enticement of a free dessert. They looked at the crabs and lobster, caught fresh that morning in the clean waters of the North Sea, or so they claimed at least, and thought perhaps of the parable of the multiplication of the fishes or the water turning into wine. If that miracle happened again, it would surely put a smile back on the accountant’s face. As if it would have been inappropriate in the hours preceding an exalted visitation, there was no music to be heard anywhere: you heard cutlery scraping over plates, and hushed tones were no longer reserved for gossip. A silent torchlight procession arose spontaneously on the Place de Brouckère. Well, it wasn’t just torches, there were also devout people who joined in with nightlights, a candle stub, a smouldering cigar butt … scenes that were more usual when yet another filthy murder had forced our society to assuage its impotence with a march. Was this an act of desperation by god-fearing souls who had left it too late to mend their ways? I didn’t know how else to interpret it.
That night, for the first time since moving to the city centre, Veronique and I slept with the windows open and I didn’t have to lie there watching the red light on the billboard flash over our ceiling at exhausting intervals. I would have sworn that it was a bucolic world, free of exhaust fumes and as quiet as the days before the birth of Henry Ford. (By the way, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a siren.)
After this night everything would be different; it was impossible to close your bedroom door with any other thought. Christ was going to reveal Himself to us and we still didn’t know why. Maybe t
o present us with the bill for our lives. Maybe for some other reason. But it seemed obvious that He had plans for us. At the very least, He would have a message for us, and it was highly questionable whether we – genetically only slightly modified apes, after all – were ready for it.
My conscience kept me awake longer than the mosquitoes. I wanted to say ‘I love you’ to Veronique, because I thought it was what I should say, because I was in a hurry to salvage something. But I didn’t believe myself.
(‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’)
Thirteenth Station
The afternoon of the twenty-first of July, the day of days, around 2 pm. A more-than-favourable moment to carry out break-ins here and there around the country. Even if that was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. With all means of telecommunication at our disposal, we were trying to get an update on the current situation. Not one reliable source could confirm that the Messiah had already arrived in Brussels, but we realised that it was completely out of the question that Christ’s precise location at this crucial juncture in the history of Belgium and all of mankind would be released to the general public. On the whole planet, there were at most three or four people who were fully briefed at this moment in time. At least that’s what I thought, influenced perhaps by a few overly exciting spy films.
Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Page 8
