Philippe Albert now works near Bertrix, where he runs a small fruit and vegetable business. He makes his own deliveries early in the morning, and by midday his work is done. He does a spot of commentating, works hard and spends his time with his family and friends in the place where he grew up. Asked why, given the money he must have put aside, he has chosen to drive fruit and veg around Wallonia every morning, he replies that a man who retires at thirty-three needs a bit of routine and that getting up early is one way of staying focused on what’s important in life. Sometimes, the secret to a good life is that there is no secret.
EMPTY COURTYARD
SPEAKING FRENCH TO my children I think of it now as my mother’s
tongue if not, any more, my mother-tongue. It’s freighted
with a kind of loss; hers, mine, and what she lost as she passed
it on to me, continents away from where she started:
shot through with gaps, mothballed and moth-
eaten at once, the smell of preservation neck and neck
with the smell of death.
Lying for years in the cellar,
it fattened up, grew milky, slow, echoed in my mouth
as in a wind-tunnel of its own disuse. Then, like drinking
from the source, came our annual summers in Bouillon,
where our Belgitude rose up in us like the damp
behind the wallpaper in the house that stayed unused
nine months out of twelve: its empty rooms,
lost cupboards, the stored-up junk piled up so long
that each forgotten item now dovetailed into the next,
a perfect carpentry of abandonment; the tongue
and groove of unused words, life in suspension, ready
to rise again like dust in the backdraught from a closing door.
There’s something in it when I use it here brings back
those moments when, mid-play, I’d nip indoors for a piss
or for a sandwich and when I came back out the other
children were all gone, the courtyard empty, the toys
back in their boxes and the sky already crossed with evening;
brings back the knowledge, always wrong but always knowledge,
that there would never be another time than this,
this ending-tainted perpetuity.
Now my children taste it,
the empty-courtyard French I used to speak;
they push their tongues along the language
and as I hear their words snag I hear my own again,
and wake from that recurrent dream in which I’m always
waking up, and break off that aborted first line
of my story, that I’m much younger and still Belgian.
MY MOTHER
HOW I THINK about her now is how
a thought is said to cross the mind:
like a bird’s shadow as it flies,
dragging its span in darkness along the ground.
THE BOUILLON HISTORY CIRCLE
THE TITLE’S WELL-CHOSEN, because that’s how the place comes back at us:
in circles, the same tides breaking on the same shores, with,
at best, some different waves. It’s the places first: boxed up
in photographs, your finger tracks them through the decades,
stitches in a tapestry: the football club in 1946,
the primary school in 1917, the Saint Nicolas parade of 1892 . . .
Here’s the horse-drawn carriage for Brussels via Namur
standing in the square – 1908, just as the new station opens
fifty yards away to a crescendo of brass and bunting.
One world segues into the next: it’s gone in next year’s photograph,
as have the mounds of horseshit, which means the allotments
by the river (1915)
look underfertilized, the trenches straddled by thin sprouts,
old postbags where the endives sweat, drinking moonlight
through the canvas.
As for the people, their nicknames chose them
years ago, are more theirs than their own DNA:
Le Dènn, La Bédji, Les Pistache en famille, Zizi (le, la, les
depending on sex or generation), Maccabi, Le Cassoulet
and his womenfolk Les Cassoulettes. Then a drum roll
of surnames from before the Franco-Prussian war:
Polydanias, Molitor, Sainthuile (always Arsène), Lagalice,
and always (1899, 1920, 1942) a visual sepiatone
refrain, the Pator-Bodard children bent like saplings
under their almost palindromic name.
The patois still runs through the Brussels-filtered, Anglo-studded
Euro-French: la mwéjon, le tchinisse, vouille and yauk:
it’s the line of dirt that outlasts the soap, the grit
that variegates the marble. Turn the pages and their voices rise
from the stapled gulf of photocopied paper: their breath
so close now it’s like they’re there in front of you,
the smell of beeswax, lathe-oil, overheated radiators,
pot-au-feux and table beer. That’s The Bouillon History Circle,
the quarterly publication of – who else? – the Bouillon History Circle.
THE OLD STATION
NO TRAIN HAS stopped here since the fifties, but it remains
in all the ways that count my stop. It still says Gare
above the arch, the guichet’s glass has stayed unbroken,
the tracks are gone but there’s a kind of stitching
in the ground, parallel scars where grass shrinks
back from growing. Then, kerbside vertigo:
that two-foot drop from platform-edge into
the next arrival, its endlessly suspended service,
and a few (never so aptly named as here, now, though not in French)
railway sleepers, hold all I’ve ever known, in miniature,
of the world’s speed and its solidity, a delirium of lost
footing followed by the knowledge there was nowhere
further I could fall. This is still the quartier de la gare,
where the rain comes down like credits on an old film,
a roll-call of lost professions: slate-cutter, gamekeeper,
sommelier, market-gardener, butcher’s boy, seamstress,
blacksmith, breeder of rabbits and dole-queue flâneur . . .
the last being my grandfather, tempering each day to a fine point
on the soft anvil of his idleness. Artisan du temps libre
he called himself, artisan of the empty hours:
filling his days of worklessness in the Café de la Gare,
then hollowing out his nights in the Hôtel de la Gare;
he never made his mark on anything
and yet I see him everywhere.
‘LA V’LÀ, TA PIÈCE’
THE FIRST TIME I heard – and then listened, really listened to – a conversation that was going nowhere and had no intention of ever going anywhere, was when L’Oncle Paul and his wife Marie came for lunch, as they did most Sundays. Paul was Lucie’s brother, and a few years older than her. There were three brothers: Albert, or ‘Le Pichalit’, who now lived in Gaume and was rarely seen in Bouillon; Emile, who died in the Allied bombing of 1940; and Paul. Paul was a wheeler-dealer. He was lucky enough to have been caught early in the war, and spent nearly five years alive in Stalag XIII rather than dead, or worse than dead, in battle. That was where he learned many of the skills that stood him in good stead later, when he became, by Nicolas-Bourland standards, well-off. This isn’t saying very much, but by the time he died he owned two houses and a holiday chalet he let to Flemish tourists who went everywhere dressed only in pants,
fn1 a small pine wood for Christmas trees, and hundreds of rabbits which he sold, along with his vegetables, at markets in Belgium and France. It was at Stalag XIII that he learned gardening, animal-keeping, and black-ma
rketeering, and when he returned to Bouillon in late 1945 he took a job at the Hôtel de la Poste as an errand-boy cum waiter. Stalag XIII was made famous by the film Hogan’s Heroes, and though the little checking I’ve done suggests that there was no resemblance between the real one and the fictitious one, Paul would not have been out of place there. Paul made money during rationing with small-time contraband, and saved up to buy a house in La Ramonette, where he and Marie lived, childless, until his death in 1990. Paul looked like a Walloon Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco, with a nose that resembled a gnarled potato and eyes that squinted humorously at some far-off comedy – perhaps the role he might have had in Hogan’s Heroes.
Paul talked a lot, Eugène said very little, and Marie and Lucie had nothing in common because they were such similar people. Watching them talk was like watching two chess players who have arrived at the board with the same game plan. Paul would launch himself into market-gardening and rabbit talk, smoking thick wet roll-ups and drinking white port or whisky. Eugène would talk about football, displaying a knowledge of English league football which my parents’ friends found impressive when they visited.
fn2 Paul wore either clogs or old boots you now only see on actors playing Vladimir or Estragon: spattered, creased, their tongues lolling and their eyes half-laced. His suit consisted of unmatching jacket and trousers, tied together with a red patent-leather belt which he’d bought at some sale from a counter doing clothes for large women. Or borrowed from Marie, who was a large woman, with a wide face and vast thick spectacles that were even wider and belonged more on children’s TV than on the bridge of a weathered Walloon nose. Lucie was thin and nervy, and Marie, despite her beaming fleshiness, was canny and sharp. Both women were more literate and more numerate than their husbands, and both understood money and how it worked, though each did something different with that understanding. Lucie was generous with it, Marie was tight as Molière’s L’Avare, though she was also joyful and good-humoured. It was only money she was tight with: with food and drink, the tarts she baked, the drinks she served, the jams she made, and with her time, she was generous and free. Marie was in charge of Paul’s money, and we discovered after he died that she had been siphoning most of it off to her nephew, Thierry, in order – perfectly legally – to dodge the Belgian inheritance laws which mean that a childless person’s estate is shared between his wife and his own family. This legal circumvention of the law seems to me to be the very essence of the law. By the time Paul died, there was hardly any money, the pine wood, holiday home and the house in Botassart had been made over to Thierry, and there was only La Ramonette house left, where Marie lived until she went to a ‘Home’. Marie was alert and jolly until she suddenly wasn’t: dementia didn’t set in, or any of those gradualist verbs we use to describe incrementalism or encroachment; it Blitzkrieged its way through like the Germans in 1939. Now Thierry lives in La Ramonette with his family, lets out the holiday cottage to the children and grandchildren of the people Paul let it to, and manages the pines and the house in Botassart, near the ‘Tombeau du Géant’, where Degrelle wanted his ashes scattered.
For me, the climax of these Sunday afternoons would come when Paul winked at me, cleared his throat, and got up stiffly and with fart-stifling care. That was my signal. This may have been the climax for Paul too, because throughout the afternoon he had been winking and gurning at me whenever he caught my eye, pointing at the ceiling, his agitation increasing until he could contain it no more. I would leave the room first and wait for Paul outside the bathroom on the first floor. It was not a pleasant place to meet, though it had the liminality appropriate to conspiratorial encounters: a dark corridor flanked by open doors that opened into rooms even darker, one of which framed a toilet in perpetual flush, and which, by five o’clock on a Sunday, had hosted half a dozen pungent and sulphurous deposits and was still hoarding their aromas.
With great ceremony, and putting his finger to his mouth to conjoin me in secrecy, Paul would delve into his pocket with arthritic hands that looked like flesh-coloured gloves that had been filled with differently sized stones. Slowly, he would pull out a sum of money, so small, so exiguously tiny, that the whole transaction’s point seemed not to give me anything as such, but to set me marvelling at the disproportion between the gift and the ceremony of the giving. Now that I am older and have my own money, I realise that gap was a beautiful chasm. Back then I tended to focus, if I’m honest, on the wrong end of the process: the twenty-franc note (that too was disproportionate, but on a national-exchequer scale: why have a note for so little money?). Now I realise that I should have enjoyed the ratcheted expectation, the suspense of Paul’s drama, and lived inside them more, let them work on me for their own sakes, and not just sat about, as I did, wondering whether I could even be bothered to wait for twenty francs clammily offered in a fug of clashing shit-smells, given that I could be playing outside, or smoking one of the many cigarettes that lay about, or eating sweets, or buying Luxemburgish eau de vie from the Epécé like my friends Luc, Dominique and Alain, and that ravenous-looking girl from the butcher’s, Murielle.
‘La v’la ta pièce – téch-te et dis rîn à la Marie’, Paul would say as he handed over the cash, or rather this minimalist symbol of cash, patted my head and headed into the toilet himself to park his lunch. ‘Keep it quiet and don’t say a word to Marie.’
By the late afternoon, no one would be saying anything. They’d talked and drunk, filled their stomachs and emptied their bowels, and now they sat and listened to the clock. I thought of the pendulum of the wall-mounted wooden clock as a slicer – it reminded me of the meat-slicers in the butchers’ shops – and at the start of the day, as people milled and chatted and made food, it seemed to go fast, slicing time salami-thin, tight little rondelles of the minutes. After about four o’clock, the same pendulum would be cutting fat fillets of time, while the Bouillonnais refuelled on silence, listened to each other breathing, dozing. A conversation might start but then fade away, the talk became punctuated with phrases like ‘Eh oui . . .’ and ‘Quant on d’vînt vî . . .’ (roughly: ‘That’s old age for you’) and ‘Pâç què . . .’, the kinds of things you say while exhaling ponderously but without much interest in what either you or the others are saying. They would talk about big things – death, illness, decrepitude – but with such casual fatalism that those big heavy words – mort, decès, enterrement, maladie – were like balloons being lightly buffeted from one speaker to another, completely devoid of their darkness and weight.
* * *
fn1 I can’t remember which of the old Bouillonnais it was – Zizi? Mataba? Paprika? – who once defined the Flemish as ‘des allemands en slip’, Germans in pants, but I still think of it as I see the tourists descend on Bouillon at weekends in their camper vans and mobile homes, or with their holiday-home DIY stacked in trailers. The invasion jokes have always been there, and Eugène once told some German tourists who stopped him on the Pont de Liège and asked him which way the castle was: ‘même qu’en ’39’, he replied, same as in 1939. I call it an invasion joke, but Eugène wasn’t joking.
fn2 Eugène was the last man in the family to be able to talk knowledgeably about sport. Two generations later, his Welsh great-grandson Osian, Osian Lejeune-Prys-McGuinness, has taken up the mantle.
MAYBE EVEN PARIS . . .
OCCASIONALLY, SOMEONE OR something would add a further stop on our branch-line network of provincial achievement, opening our horizons beyond Arlon, Namur and ‘maybe Brussels’. For Lucie, the epitome of ‘peut-être même Paris’, and I suspect the one for whom the term was coined, was Madeleine Ozeray, who was born in Bouillon in 1908 and became one of the great actresses in French theatre and cinema. She played Helen in Louis Jouvet’s production of Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place in 1935 where Jouvet himself, who became her lover, played Hector. Maurice Pirotte, the hundred-year-old poet of the Semois, remembers the couple coming to Bouillon. They flaunted themselves like Mazarin, h
e says, lording it over the locals with their Parisian ways. Jouvet’s fabled wit cut little ice with Pirotte, and Pirotte claims to have outsmarted him on more than one occasion. It is true that Pirotte was always a sharp and funny man, and as Bouillon humour is the humour of debunking, it is quite possible that he bested Jouvet. In any case, Pirotte says that the real star who graced Bouillon wasn’t Madeleine Ozeray but Simone Signoret, who lived here during the shooting of Against the Wind, a film in which she plays a ‘plucky’ Belgian resistance fighter (see ‘Against the Wind’).
Sometime in the seventies, Ozeray bought the house next door to my uncle Claude and my aunt Collette, 13 Rue du Brutz, and right opposite Lucie’s house and Guy’s next door. It was a modest house but with marvellous views overlooking the forest and river. When Ozeray died in 1989, Claude bought it from her estate and intended to knock through and incorporate it into his own house. Knocking through was always a concept I liked, the idea of breaking down partitions, of extending and pushing on, adding room to room, the pleasure of seeing the new space – another room, perhaps just sky or street, outdoors or another indoors – emerging square by square in a smoke of dusty plaster and falling brickwork. But they never knocked through in the end; Claude just used it to store his wine, put in a new freezer, keep his lawnmower, and set up a small studio where, after retiring from the French air force, he learned to paint watercolours.
Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory Page 9
