She giggles. The filly giggles.
I’m wearing my leather jacket, my floppy hat, and my dark glasses. A little chill in the September air; I see her sitting hunched over. When will she grow tired of the bullshit I’m feeding her? I resort to silence.
She clears her throat. “Drees, you know . . . I’m also into painting. I would be very flattered if you would . . . ” Oh God. So that explains her patience with my oafish tales. Look at that: poignant hesitation, fluttering eyes, the works. “Would you care to see them and give me some pointers?”
“Where’s your studio?”
“I don’t have a studio yet . . . but I paint every day!”
Every day. Christ Jesus.
* * *
She owns an MG. Fiery red.
“Did you drink much?”
“Only a Campari or two.” Let’s see how observant she is. The bottle stood between us on the table. Empty.
“Care to drive?”
“My pleasure.”
When I’m drunk, I remain lucid. I take risks though. They make my tummy tingle.
I’m fucking Stirling Moss, that’s who I am. Gitte shrieks in delight in the MG’s small, leather-clad cabin while I skid along the road. Her pert butt quivers along with the hard suspension of the small sports car.
“I got stuff in my apartment. Want some?”
Hadn’t expected anything else.
“Dux femina facti.”
“What did you say?” She puts her left hand on my knee. Just a tiny moment, but the hand was there.
“Latin wisdom. Look it up. What kind of stuff you got?”
“Cocaine. Gift from my boyfriend. Market’s best.”
I push down on the accelerator.
* * *
Her student apartment in a stately nineteenth-century town house, built in French neo-Renaissance style, on rue des Moines, is a bit petit bourgeois, in spite of the old radio casing, now serving as a planter, and the oversized xylophone in a corner. In another: a balloon with a lipstick heart on it, tied to a broom.
“Conceptual art?”
She shrugs and then rummages through a drawer of the fairly unclean small kitchen. “Just a joke. It was meant for my boyfriend, but he left it here.”
“Being disrespected is manna for the artist’s soul.”
She looks up swiftly, as if frightened by something. That curtain of coal-black hair reminds me of Eliath.
“Where are your paintings?”
“Later. I don’t have them here.”
“I thought that Eliath’s daughter would be housed in a place a bit more luxurious.”
This time she doesn’t look up. “My mother owns the house and rents the other apartments. I wanted to live here.”
“Between the riffraff.”
Smiling. “Yes, between the riffraff.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Attributes.” What a strange word for that kind of girl.
In the farthest corner, there is a small bookcase.
Metamorphoses Book 2.
“You read that?”
“Hmm?”
“You read Ovid?”
“Why not? My father loved him.”
Jesus, the pitiless Eliath Meijers was fond of Ovid. So it’s true: mankind is inscrutability incarnated.
She reappears in the living room with an old-fashioned snuffbox. “It’s about changes.”
“So I gathered.”
“I would like to change.”
“Change isn’t like putting on another dress.”
She opens the box and lays out two generous lines on the coffee table. “You believe in life after death?” she asks, seemingly nonchalant.
I must cut this shit off, snort my free line, and get the hell out of here.
“You believe in life before death?”
That look again, as if frightened by something. She doesn’t answer, bows her head to the first line. Her mascara is a bit smeared, as if she was crying in the kitchen. I follow her example, our heads nearly touching above the small table.
“Oh, wow . . . Gitte, I’m on fire. I see your father burn in hell. I stand next to Eliath and, man, he’s burning real good.”
She offers me a smile that should be knowing and conquest-minded, but fails miserably.
* * *
I’ve heard my own voice telling her everything about Serge and my suspicion that her father killed the raving Tutsi. Gitte rolls her eyes. Red-cheeked and huge pupils—this baby chick is getting off on her father’s sins, if you ask me. Her head pulsates. Oh wow, am I really that high? Like a Boeing 727?
“Interesting.” She yawns. “But I liked your capitano story better.”
“Oh?”
“Querida! Querida!” she crows.
I get the message.
“Where are your paintings?”
“In my mother’s house.”
“She still lives in that mansion in Drogenbos?”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
“So, let’s go.”
“Now? It’s half past one.”
“Art knows no time.”
“Maman will be asleep.”
I get up. I want to know if the daughter of Eliath Meijers has it in her. “No problem. She’ll be glad to see me.”
“Did you date her after my father died?”
“Of course I did. And we called it fucking. Come on, let’s go.”
She rises slowly. Suddenly, I pity her and that makes me even more vicious.
“Hurry up, your friends’ panties will get wet when you tell them what fun you had with the notorious Drees de Grijse.”
She shakes her head, a bit compassionately, it seems. “They only get wet for pop stars.”
* * *
We’re at the door when she says: “Just a minute.” Leaving me standing by the front door, disappearing into the kitchen again. Coming out with another snuffbox, this time a blazing red one with a bright yellow star on it. “Before we go, a special treat. It isn’t every day that a humble young woman like me receives a visit from the great Drees de Grijse.”
Is that irony? Derision, even? Payback for my remark about her mother?
Her eyes are bright and shiny. “A special blend, concocted by my friend. Real designer stuff.” She beckons me over to the coffee table.
A minute later I’m snorting like a delighted horse.
When we descend the stairs, it dawns on me that she hasn’t tried the designer stuff herself.
* * *
It’s warm in the MG’s cabin. Outside, a capricious wind blows.
She drives fast and recklessly.
“I haven’t painted in over a year now,” I say.
She doesn’t react.
“I’ve filled 168 canvasses. I’m fifty. Why should I go on?”
“Because you can’t do anything else.”
She hunts the night with her red car and I ponder what she said. It can’t be that simple, can it?
At our right skulks the Anderlecht Canal. She takes the rue de Biestebroeck, speeds toward the Quai de Biestebroeck.
Maybe she has a mind as deep as the canal, maybe she’s . . . What’s this? I have the sudden feeling—the certitude—that Serge is coming for me with a vengeance.
I start to sweat. Is my head lolling on my neck? Am I losing control over my muscles?
Do I hear her laugh softly?
What has she given me?
I see it. The Land Rover. At the opposite side of the quai. No lights on. A dark vehicle of doom. It’s charging toward us. The flaming ghost of Serge Butoyara at the wheel, and I know he can’t drive.
Look at Serge laughing; this ghost of flames and fury is having wicked fun.
I grab the MG’s steering wheel and turn it sharply to the right. The lightweight sports car veers off the road, crashes against one of the iron poles lining the quai of Biestebroeck, and screeches when it starts spinning like a carnival ride.
Then there is the feeling of zero gravit
y.
A deafening splash.
A spine-jolting shock.
* * *
Double vision.
It’s worse.
Double me.
I’m floating above the canal; I see white moonlight bobbing on the water.
I’m also in the sinking car. Getting very dark in here. What a breathtaking sight, this fluid darkness. The girl beside me screaming, her head bloody against the steering wheel. Water gushes through the leather canopy of the convertible. My other me, floating like an angel above the water, signals that I must turn down the window. I obey. The canal water stinks. The door opens. Where is Gitte? Too dark to see.
I feel a jolt like an electric current when I’m reunited as one.
I’m a strong man, a good swimmer. My head surfaces—and who is fluttering above? Goddamn Serge. His smile is as cold as the whole fucking North Pole and South Pole combined. I cough. The high cranes at the other side of the canal resemble the martians in that black-and-white movie of the H.G. Wells story. Cold, it’s so cold in the water. I swim toward the gently sloping shore where the concrete quay ends. Ever so slow. But fucking Serge is screaming that I will live, that I have to suffer some more before I perish. That godforsaken black ghost hits the nail on the head. Where’s the fucker now? Vanished already, like always when the going gets tough.
Feeling mud under my feet. Stagger up the slope. Wind tugging at my wet clothes.
Turning around. Facing the dark water, the martians, the pale concrete quay.
“Gitte!”
No Gitte rising out of the waves. No floating head that I can rescue and kiss passionately.
Only wind and waves.
And my brains bursting apart, suffering the power of one hell of a designer drug.
* * *
I’m in survival mode.
Yeah.
I’m only body.
The body thinks: Dry clothes, warmth, house, shelter.
The body thinks: Nobody will know that Gitte Meijers had a passenger. The water will have cleaned my presence from the car.
The body has instinct.
The body feels wallet in leather jacket.
It’s grosso modo twenty minutes walking to the rue Pierre Marchant and then through the deserted streets of Anderlecht to the boulevard Sylvain Dupuis. This quest will harden the body, while the brisk breeze stiffens the clothes.
On the boulevard, hail one of these Taxis Bleus. Get your story ready: Man, what a party! Jumped rat-assed drunk with all my clothes on into the swimming pool. Freezing, man, I tell you, my balls almost fell off, but I was the star of the evening. So sorry for the smell—the pool hadn’t been cleaned for two months.
The body dreams of the warm softness of a soapy bath.
The body thinks: Birgit will cry a river when she hears about her daughter.
Tja.
The body thinks: Why am I so fucking alone?
* * *
You dream of me while I’m crouching on your dick, Drees.
You gasp, but you don’t feel a thing.
Shed my leading role in your nightmare. Wake up and move that old man’s body.
Don’t lie there snoring in your bed with your mouth wide open.
Your closed eyes don’t fool me.
You’re awake and you can still feel my presence, can’t you?
You have killed me to take revenge on my father.
Get up.
Do your thing.
Grab the phone.
Dial the number.
When a woman picks up, start breathing through your nose.
The woman, a grieving mother, shouts at you, wants to know who you are.
You want to tell her what you did.
You can’t.
You breathe.
She slams down the phone.
Your finger creeps toward the redial button . . .
There . . . there you go, Drees . . .
Only the sound of breathing and the thumping of your heart . . .
The Beekeeper
BY JEAN-LUC CORNETTE
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert
After three days of constant rain, the Semois finally returned to its banks. The flood hadn’t spared the campsite. Dank puddles spread across the paths and underneath the trailers. The smell of frost and wet grass hung in the air. The guy sat, as he did on the same day every month, in the small living room area of Melchior’s mobile home. His presence didn’t bother the cats napping on the edges of the furniture. In summer the guy liked to wear Hawaiian shirts. “Nice shirt,” said Melchior, just to make small talk. The guy refused a Nescafé. Melchior made himself one and wondered if the guy might be afraid of leaving remnants of his DNA. After asking the few customary questions, the guy left an envelope on the plywood table and slipped away. His car tires squealed on the humid gravel of the visitor parking lot.
It would soon be two years since Melchior had moved into the Saint-Roch campsite in Florenville. Before that, he’d lived in Brussels. A gardener at the Château de Laeken—the prince’s gardener.
Melchior thought back over the past six decades, to the days when his name had been Joseph. He recalled his most cherished moments, watching Visa pour le monde on TV with his dad. It was a game show in which the contestants competed to win a trip around the world. Every Sunday, the host, Georges Désir, asked complicated questions pertaining to a specific country. Radio Télévision Belge had designed a set resembling the interior of a Boeing 747. Joseph and Léon, his dad, shared a passion for faraway countries, exotic landscapes, and primitive regions. Mexico fascinated Joseph. In front of the TV set, he transformed into a young Zorro riding across the scorching desert on the back of his loyal Tornado. Later, when his hormones kicked in, he pictured himself with a Robin Hood mustache. His dad was passionate about Asia: rice planters in tunics and pointed hats in the highlands of Vietnam, white-faced Japanese geishas in silk kimonos, and Indian dancers in gold-threaded saris—these were the visions reflected in his glasses. It was thrilling to observe those flashes of joy in his otherwise aloof functionary’s gaze. But Léon had never seen the splendors of the world. He’d never even left Brussels. Not once had he brought his family to the coast or to the Ardennes. He was born in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, had gone to school in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, had married the amiable Maryvonne Van Goidsenhoven of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, and everything was pointing to the fact that he would croak from a heart attack on a sidewalk in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert.
Maryvonne, a seamstress, worked in her living room, tailoring the dresses that chic ladies bought at the department store l’Innovation, on rue Neuve. Léon Brotchi issued passports at the city hall. The families that stood in line at his counter never failed to divulge, with a blissfulness approaching arrogance, which paradise on the other side of the world they were headed to for vacation. And then the day came when Visa pour le monde aired an episode on China. The Mosuo tribe, indigenous to the Yunnan Province, was only briefly mentioned. But from that moment on, Léon was forever changed. The light in his eyes would never again go out. His brows stiffened into disconcerting horizontal lines as his thoughts guided him, little by little, toward an irrevocable decision. He submitted a request for a passport. A good employee, honest and respectful of his fellow citizens, he did not move his application to the front of the queue. He waited. And the whole time, he said nothing to anyone.
Three weeks later, on May 22, 1967, the same day that l’Innovation went up in flames and nearly four hundred people died, Léon left for a region where men have no responsibilities. In Moso society, women are dominant; they pass their surnames on to their children. Men are lovers, progenitors, or uncles—never fathers.
Joseph stopped watching Visa pour le monde and began to grow cacti on his windowsill. It took a year for the young man to understand that his father had chosen to be reborn in the form of a benevolent penis offered to all those who wished to receive its blessing. He’d converted himself into a sexual object unburdened by the demands of family life
; he’d permanently freed himself of the bonds of paternity.
To assuage his grief, Joseph began growing cannabis between his cacti. The first little seed he planted marked the beginning of the forty-five-year countdown, joint by joint, to his flight from reality. His exile to a mobile home on a bank of the Semois was already quietly preparing itself.
Maryvonne compensated for the loss of her husband’s love with a disproportionate affection for feral cats. Several old ladies fed strays on the outskirts of the old Etterbeek cemetery, near their apartment on avenue Edouard Speeckaert. Abandoned the year before in favor of a new, modern cemetery in Wezembeek-Oppem, its grounds were rapidly transforming into a jungle and a shelter for these vagabond felines. Maryvonne kidnapped one, a Siamese, and had it neutered. A growing need for tenderness pushed her to continue these abductions. She finally stopped once she had seventeen at the house. “One for each year spent with the other Chinese,” she joked.
* * *
A decade of buying kitty litter and Whiskas flew by. Joseph had dropped out of university, worked in a few bistros, and continued to cultivate his balcony garden. His fine mustache and long hair gave the young man something of the air of a bourgeois bohemian. Maryvonne lost more and more of her clients. A new dressmaker opened up shop in the Tomberg district, between the city hall and the old cemetery. Sainte-Rose, the seamstress, was a tall, proud Martiniquaise with luxuriant black hair that fell down to her hips. Her long, curved eyelashes quivered in the breeze like the feathers of a crow, and her dark eyes betrayed no emotion. In this bourgeois neighborhood, her bronze skin intrigued men and fascinated women. The ordinary racism trolling the avenues of the capital muttered a thousand insults behind her back. Fearing that this siren of the islands would turn their husbands’ heads, the neighborhood vipers hissed all the more fiercely.
A single woman with a three-year-old girl aroused all kinds of suspicions. People spoke of voodoo, of dolls stabbed with sewing pins, of decapitated chickens, and all manner of black magic. Those were the days when Moroccans had not yet dared to leave the most working-class neighborhoods of Brussels. Apart from Sainte-Rose and Moana, her little girl, foreigners in Woluwe always remained foreigners. If you were born in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, you lived there and you died there, before you were taken to be buried in Wezembeek-Oppem. A similar practice was expected on the part of immigrants: let them live and die in their own neighborhoods! But the weeks went by and turned to months, and no one ever saw Sainte-Rose with a man. From sunrise to sunset, she dedicated herself solely to her work and to her daughter’s education. The rumors slowly died out and, repelled by the lingering odor of cat urine that seeped into the fibers of their skirts, the ladies of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert started going to the new boutique in Tomberg to have them tailored by a Creole princess.
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