Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  TELEPHONE

  LUCIE’S HOUSE WAS the first on the street to have a phone, and between the early fifties and the mid-seventies it was the only one. Many people on Rue du Brutz didn’t have a phone of their own, so used Lucie’s to make or receive their calls.

  It’s a heavy wall-mounted black Bakelite affair in the dark end of the L-shaped corridor, next to where Lucie worked. Before it was disconnected by Belgacom it would make a strange high-pitched gulping sound when you lifted the receiver, which sat on its switchhook like a dumbbell on a squat rack. The phone was inconveniently positioned – you couldn’t sit as the lead was too short, so you had to stand throughout. It was mounted with a piece of wood on which there was a hook, so that you could answer the phone, establish who was being called, hang the receiver on the hook and then walk around the house shouting for them to come down and take the call. Wall-mounting was deliberate on Lucie’s part, to stop people from lingering in her hallway, and to give that transitory public-phonebox feeling to anyone who might be tempted to settle in. It had a sluggishness and dormancy about it, and everyone I’ve known who has used it has always spoken a little more loudly and little more slowly than normal.

  It stayed connected – same line, same phone – until 2005, and with that disconnection ended all its boxed-up stories. That’s what it is: a strongbox for stories. What conversations must have passed through it. Osian and Mari unhook it, and I see their hands sag a little at the surprise of its weight. ‘Plastic?’ they ask. Sort of, I reply: Bakelite, Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, the first plastic to hold its shape after being heated, which is just as well, given some of the things I’ve heard being said into that receiver. Bakelite was invented by a Flemish scientist, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, in New York. Baekeland, the son of a housemaid and cobbler, also invented Velox photographic paper. He sold Velox to Kodak for three quarters of a million dollars, and then made many millions selling his Bakelite company to Union Carbide. He became remote and eccentric and paranoid, ate out of tins and never left his mansion, then died a recluse in 1944. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in New York. This phone never received calls from New York, or indeed anywhere in the United States, one of the few places my parents were never sent, but it received them from the Congo (Belgian, as was), Tunisia, Venezuela, Iran, Romania, Turkey, Algeria, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and of course Britain. It is the best-travelled phone in Bouillon, possibly in the province, and you’d have to go to the Belgian Foreign Ministry in Brussels to find a receiver that has had the static from more countries flowing through it than this one.

  This is the phone I called several times from my house in Oxford, where I then lived, as Lucie lay upstairs dead in the bathroom doorway. I had been calling her all the previous day, but there was no answer. She always answered. Her conversation was a catechism of small complaints and expansive endearments, but she always answered. There wasn’t much to them, but these conversations are never to do with their propositional content. They’re all in the talking, the exchange of voice, the there-ness and the way the there-ness gets channelled down the line and through the narrow aperture of time we have to speak together. There-ness works with silence too.

  Why was she not answering? There was only one place she generally was: in the living-room at the back of the house. I called Guy, who said that, yes, she had been down there but had now gone upstairs for a sleep, as she wasn’t feeling well. Everything was OK. I was reassured. That evening and all the next morning I called, again and again, many times, and there was no answer. I knew that Johnny and Marie-Paule would be coming to take her on a tour of the ‘Home’, and thought perhaps she was making herself scarce or pretending not to be in. But no: she was dead. Guy found her. He hadn’t seen her making her morning trempinette in the kitchen, so he let himself in and went to look. There she was, lying where she fell. She hadn’t made it to bed the day before, and still had her clothes on.

  That was the phone we used, my mother and sister and I, when we left Iran during the revolution and my father had stayed on, like many staff, an extra few weeks until things became too dangerous. I was in school, watching the Iranian revolution on the news by teachers’ special dispensation: the only boy in school who had to watch the nine o’clock news to find out how his parents were. Eventually my mother and sister were evacuated, and I was brought back to join them in Bouillon, where we would all watch the news on RTBF and see the revolution unfold on our screen. Lucie would be at work on a dress, clientes would walk up and down the corridor, Eugène would peel his canados in the kitchen or pop out to The Arse, Johnny would be listening to the Beatles (‘Les Béâtles’, Lucie called them) in his room, and Claude and Collette would drift in and out of the house asking for news. Sometimes the phone would ring and it was my father, faintly calling from Tehran, saying things were all right, which was his way of saying they weren’t, with us standing in a line in the darkness of the corridor, holding the phone, tangled in its lead, passing it from hand to hand. That phone seemed miraculous then, and it still does, which is why I’ve left it up on the wall, and despite the fact that I have the latest iPhone and can not only request real-time Twitter updates on any number of revolutions currently unfolding, but I can probably call both the regimes and the regime-changers and ask them how they’re doing.

  Marie Chenot was an old lady who lived three doors away, up the ruelle du passage that began at the back of our house. When we were small, my cousin Patrick and I used to bring her items of shopping and she would give us ‘Petit Beurre’ biscuits that were always slightly soft, impregnated with the cellarish dampness of her house. Her house was tiny: one up one down, as many of the workers’ houses are, with an understairs toilet and a cellar for mazout, the heating oil many houses converted to after the war. When she became too old and ill, she had the bed brought down to the kitchen, and her life was a tightening circumference of bed, toilet, oven, TV. And then simply bed and TV. I know the people who live there now: they’ve spruced it up and turned it into a modern gîte, but in Marie Chenot’s time it was thick with darkness, and she would sit in her armchair and watch television eating cakes and biscuits and trempinette.

  This was her sorrow: Marie had a child out of wedlock, and her life as a single mother was difficult until she found a man who, as they say, ‘took her and the boy on’. He was a brute who drank, beat her, gave her three other sons, and victimised the boy she had had before she met him. He would chase the child around the street with a knife, threatening to cut off his cock and balls, beat the boy and humiliate him sexually – always sexually – until one day, at the age of eleven, the boy pulled the knife out of his hand and stabbed him in the guts with it. The stepfather survived, but with much-reduced mobility and capacity for evil. The boy was sent to the equivalent of a borstal near Saint-Hubert. His only contact with his mother was through Lucie’s phone, because every Sunday for the next seven years, without telling her husband, Marie Chenot came to Lucie’s house and phoned him.

  PICTURE AND FRAME

  THIS STORY PROBABLY means nothing, but it has the outward neatness of a parable along with the inner messiness that made parables necessary in the first place:

  In the early 1990s, I arrived in Brussels with a bag full of Christmas presents. I had forgotten to buy anything for Lucie, so I stopped in an arcade and bought a picture frame. She liked photographs, and the house is full of them, going back more than a hundred years. The earliest frame in the house contains a smudgy photograph of a Bourland in military uniform (he must have moved his head slightly as the shutter came down as one side of his face melts, Francis Bacon-like, into a smear) heading off to the Franco-Prussian war. It is carved with a small huntsman’s knife out of dark oak unevenly gouged, though not so unevenly that you can’t see a pattern to it. The newest is a shiny red plastic frame with a picture of a recent child.

  The frame I gave Lucie was walnut, and had that marbled, rippling wash effect you see on fresh conkers. Inside it, thoug
h I didn’t notice it then, was a picture of two people, wholesome and bland and with the kind of consensual good looks that seem to have been designed by a focus group. This is how shops sell you frames: there’s a standard-issue picture inside – usually sunsets, couples or cats – to show you that the frame works, and also because it would be spooky and unsettling to have a blank space inside it. So here we had a couple, smartly dressed, generically in love and all in all a good advert for people, monogamy and frames. I gave this to Lucie and she admired it and thanked me and said she would keep it in her bedroom.

  I never asked what she put into it, and I never set foot inside her bedroom, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t assume that it would be a picture of me or my sister, or the two of us together. When Lucie died and I went into her room to clear it, I saw that the frame was there, splendid and polished, but also the picture inside it, which she had never taken out. For the remaining seven or eight years of her life, she had slept with a mass-produced picture of two strangers beside her bed.

  I had given her a frame, but she had received a picture.

  EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

  WHERE TO BEGIN and where to finish? And then, if you’ve answered that question, you then ask yourself: whether to begin, whether to finish. The writer who wants to write about nothing (Flaubert’s dream of the ‘livre sur rien’ . . .) and the writer who wants to write about everything are equally doomed, but at least the one who wants to write about everything can make a start.

  WATCHED BY ANIMALS

  THE ARDENNAIS, AND the Walloons generally, are fond of animal parts, not just for eating but for home decoration. A great deal of my childhood was spent beneath the quizzical, slightly ironic expressions of wild boar, owls, deer and foxes, whose heads were mounted on the walls of pretty much every house we visited. Of all of these it is the stuffed owl in Mme J—’s house that still haunts me, and is still there, though she died nearly twenty years ago. The owl is in mid-swoop, joining wall to ceiling as it flies out at us from a wallpaper of fat green leaves and flowers. Which of us is more surprised, you or me? it seems to ask.

  Animals would be stuffed and put on dining tables or dressers or above televisions, and their skins could be ordered from the butchers’ along with the flesh and bones they had once wrapped. Before the abattoir was converted into a sports centre, you could get the skins and heads, hooves, antlers, horns, tusks, legs and tails and have them made into everything from rugs and lampstands to key-rings and bottle openers by a local shop which specialised in hunting and fishing equipment and cheap taxidermy. The animals were there not as hunting trophies – there is nothing boastful or exultant about the way people hunt here – but as guests, albeit dead ones. Their presence, especially against those dense wallpapers with their foliage and tendrils and organic patterns, was like a homage to the forest, an overlap between the woods and the home. In one house I recall there was half a deer that seemed to spring through the wall, its head, antlers, and a good part of its torso mounted on wood and with its legs in mid-leap. Many of the poses, like this deer and like the owl in Mme J—’s, were thrillingly dynamic, so you got the sense of movement suddenly stilled, and ready to resume, as if the animal was waiting for you to leave the room to complete its action. It was a static safari. Other animals were more dormant. One boar’s head just lolled sideways out of the wall, as if the animal had pushed through, taken a look around, and then fallen asleep or died of apathy between worlds. For the hunters, these animals meant something precise: they were, however still and dead, always explosive with the moment of their killing, and therefore with life.

  One morning in the woods when I was about eight, I saw some antlers poking through the mist and then disappearing. There was no body, just these ethereal pale branches of bone moving slowly against the mist-muted greens and browns of the forest. The next time I saw a pair of wall-mounted antlers I thought I knew what it was that humans were trying to replicate: that feeling of being watched in return, tracked down in our own habitat, our walls no longer solid but porous and cracked and splitting at every join and angle to let the outside in.

  THE GOLDEN BOOT

  THERE IS VERY little to link my father’s family and home, the McGuinnesses of Wallsend on Tyne, to Bouillon, and I often wonder what my father made of the place when he arrived, engaged to my mother, and what my mother made of Wallsend when she visited, engaged to my father. My grandfather on my father’s side worked in the shipyards. Like Eugène, he died young, but really very young: soon after my father started at university. My father’s mother, Edith, worked in a large department store in Newcastle, and she died when I was about eight. My father was an only child, and it was clear he loved his father and was at best ambivalent about his mother. My mother was not ambivalent about his mother: she disliked her for being a snob (my mother despised the under-resourced snobbery of the self-hating working class), and for thinking that no one, least of all a Belgian, was good enough for her Kevin.

  When she died, Edith left me – just me, not my sister – her two-up two-down terrace house in Wallsend. Soon afterwards it was compulsorily purchased and demolished, and my parents spent the money on a small plot of land in ‘La Ramonette’, the part of Bouillon where the poet Charles Van Lerberghe lived for a few summers writing his long Symbolist poem ‘La Chanson d’Ève’. It was the plot next door to my great uncle Paul’s house, and it lay vacant until my parents sold it, unchanged but overgrown, twenty-five years later. The only sight I got of my grandmother Edith’s house was on some sort of planning document my parents received where the whole street was ringed for bulldozing. I remember being fascinated by the odd way in which houses were represented on architects’ drawing or on title deeds: their rooms tightly angled, the diagrams of stairs and roofs, the walls appearing as lines between houses and between house and garden, house and street. It was the way the mess was contained by lines, the way the endless overlappingness of things translated into these fictions of mathematical angularity and unbreachable borders that I liked. But I only liked it because it wasn’t true. The different colours too: yellows and blues and pinks, dotted lines like sutures and thick lines like furrows. The houses looked like square amoebas with their see-through membranes.

  All of my father’s world is lost. He was not especially attached to it, that’s for sure, but also it simply couldn’t compete with Bouillon; he accepted that and fell in with it. There was an aunt Gladys of his in Cullercoats, someone called Norman in Whitley Bay, an elderly couple called Brenda and Reg who lived in Stafford and then Doncaster, but nothing and no one to draw us back to his world. There was also a family we visited a few times, cousins again, who lived in a large caravan and moved around the north of England. We visited them near a motorway in Bradford, and then again, much later, around Nottingham, before losing touch. They were, I realise now, what are called ‘travellers’: my sister admired their caravan and I admired their daughter, Peggy or perhaps Pegeen, who was a little older than me and beautiful. My father inherited his mother’s snobbery and her clinically nasty tongue, which meant that he despised his own family in ways that corroded him more than he knew. Bouillon was spared that, because, despite the opportunities for snobbery it offered, it always offset them with its eccentricity and exoticism.

  So it is always with a sense of a rich but sudden connection, an overlapping, that I see the plaque on the wall on Les Ramparts, the street in Bouillon with all the restaurants and take-aways. It’s a plaque with a shiny golden boot, in honour of Philippe Albert (1967–), the great Belgian international footballer and legendary Newcastle defender (1994–99). His face is also carved into the slate and he wears, as he did at the peak of his game, a mullet and a moustache that must have been modelled on the Dalton Brothers in Lucky Luke. Though we knew each other a little as children, I’ve met Philippe Albert twice as an adult: once in a café in Bouillon, and once in the urinals of the New Inn nightclub in Bertrix, the Manchester of the Ardennes, as no one calls it. We were introduc
ed by my cousin Patrick, who knows everyone, and Philippe bought me a beer. He had just started playing for Anderlecht and I had just started a Master’s degree on Ezra Pound and French Symbolist poetry. That was not the only difference between us.

  At Newcastle, under Kevin Keegan, he became a cult hero, and Newcastle fans sang a song about him set to the tune of Rupert the Bear: ‘Philippe, Philippe Albert, everyone knows his name’. Keegan was himself a cult hero in Bouillon in the seventies and eighties: Kevin Qui Gagne as we thought he was called. In fact we thought ‘Qui gagne’ was another of those Bouillon nicknames. This cult is linked to a spate of Kevin baby names in the area and, for all I know, across half of Europe. Suddenly there were Kevins everywhere: ‘le petit Kevin’ you would hear as people stopped their prams and showed off their newborns to their fellow-Bouillonnais. Men with names like Alphonse, Marcel, Léon and Polydore, and women with names like Albertine, Micheline, Germaine and Josette suddenly found themselves with grandchildren called Kevin.

  Philippe Albert lived the dream. He signed for Newcastle while Kevin Qui Gagne was manager, which he still remembers as his happiest time, where he played with drive and tenacity, and where, despite being a defender, he was often to be found in the opposing team’s penalty area. His goal for Belgium in the 1994 World Cup against the Netherlands triggered street celebrations in Bouillon where his parents were lifted onto people’s shoulders and carried around the roundabout on Place Saint-Arnould, where traffic police in white gloves and fluorescent batons serenely misdirect the cars when the crowds descend upon the town. I know Philippe’s brothers better, who work in the local supermarket, and I still see his parents in Frank Istace’s La Grignotte chip shop (there’s a plaque there too: Frank is a member of the guild of artisan-chipmakers). Though there is no plaque to this, Philippe Albert thus represents the link between my father’s and my mother’s people and places, a small hinge between two panels that meet only in the hinging.