Veronique didn’t speak for a long time walking home that evening, but I had a feeling one of her famous moods was brewing. She undoubtedly blamed me personally for us having stayed in Brussels this summer. Soon her holidays would be over and she wouldn’t have had an opportunity to recharge her batteries in any way at all. Now I just had to wait until the next row, undoubtedly set off by something completely banal, and she would succumb to the temptation to throw it all in my face. My idiotic idea of not going away on holiday. My idea to associate with murderous neighbours. My idea and not hers to dedicate our few days off to a supposedly transcendental experience we would share with the masses, losing ourselves in solidarity with an antisocial mob.
*
We’d taken the tram – the packed tram, because everybody had hit on the plan of getting away from the centre of the capital as quickly as possible – and it was one of the last things Veronique and I would do as a couple. We knew that. We felt it. It had been in the air for months.
The commuters’ faces were the kind of faces you’d see any day in February. Or November. A rainy day. As if we had all completed the umpteenth joyless week of work and there was no promise of any happiness in the weekend that had just started. Or as if we hadn’t completed a single day of work for the simple reason that we couldn’t get a job. Travellers gripped their bags tightly, staring out of the windows or at their own reflections. A few fled this dismalness along the usual escape route, texting moderately funny messages that might be read on another tram, in the same dismalness.
‘Il faut s’oublier pour révéler sa vraie beauté,’ a young woman had suddenly said, looking up from a book whose title I was unfortunately unable to read. She shook all those beautiful words up in her head, as if in a snowdome, then stared at them as they slowly began their descent. I think I was jealous of her, because I, like all the others, had lost the courage to say something of beauty out loud. Everyone was looking at her, but not openly, only sideways, surreptitiously, disapprovingly. Some of them employed their hairstyles the way gossips in rural hamlets use curtains. But even before the young woman’s words had time to come back to rest, she was addressed (someone was speaking to someone else!) by an odious character – a sour herring, who I won’t deign to describe further, even if he was ugly enough to make it easy for me – who growled in Flemish, ‘I don’t know if you realise it girlie, but this is Brussels, huh? Keep your French to yourself!’
She got off at Étangs Noirs, the subway station with the most beautiful name, black ponds, and I’m inclined to believe that alone was the reason she left the vehicle there. Étangs Noirs, where the escalator had been broken for months and the malcontents needed regular announcements to remind them of the possibility of lifting up their own feet for a change. It was only in my thoughts that I followed her. I was too much of a coward to live. Too chicken-shit to be the god of my own hours.
Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written.’
John 19:22
About the Author
Born in Belgium in 1972, DIMITRI VERHULST is the author of a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry and several novels, including The Misfortunates and Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill, published by Portobello Books. In 2009 he was awarded the Libris Prize in the Netherlands.
DAVID COLMER is a multi-award-winning translator whose work includes books by Cees Nooteboom, Gerbrand Bakker, Annie M.G. Schmidt and the cartoonist Gummbah. He is the recipient of the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and an IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. In 2012 he was awarded the Dutch Foundation for Literature prize for lifetime achievement in translation.
ALSO BY DIMITRI VERHULST
FROM PORTOBELLO BOOKS
Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill
The Misfortunates
Copyright
Published by Portobello Books 2014
Portobello Books
12 Addison Avenue
London
W11 4QR
Copyright © Dimitri Verhulst, 2011
English translation copyright © David Colmer, 2014
Originally published in Dutch in 2011 as De intrude van Christus in Brussel (in het jaar 2000 en oneffen ongeveer) by Uitgeverij Contact, Amsterdam.
The right of Dimitri Verhulst to be identified as the author of this work and of David Colmer to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The translation of this book is funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren – www.flemishliterature.be).
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this ebook is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84627 468 8
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Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Page 10
