Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  Watching the film with my children, who know the places too – they shout them out like bingo-callers, but don’t have the fractured internal recognitions I used to have: they are better adjusted, the places of their lives and the lives of their places are in better balance – the film still disturbs me, but not because of itself, or even the flashes of recognition I get as this or that building or street corner or windowsill, lintel, kerb or stretch of knotted water comes into view, but because it pulls me back to that day in school when the real place with its smells and tastes and sights became a celluloid ghost of itself. The next time I phoned Lucie I was told Eugène had died, and that my parents were on their way to Bouillon for the funeral. I was sitting at the payphone wearing brown flared cords I’d found in Johnny’s room and wore at weekends, running my finger along the ridges as she talked and as other boys impatiently jangled their change to hurry me up. My eyes were quite full, and I remember the corduroy lines getting larger as she spoke, magnified by tears that refused to fall. Against the Wind comes to stand for all films, but only because it is a film of Bouillon; a liquid plaque that stops time only by being made of the same stuff as time, like a statue made of flesh, that preserves things forever at the cost of reminding you that they’re gone.

  CHASING YOUR TAIL WITH NIETZSCHE

  ‘THAT WHICH DOESN’T kill us makes us stronger, said Nietzsche’, someone told me after my mother died. Typical that Nietzsche doesn’t entertain the third option, of being neither strong nor dead, but numb. But perhaps he means that being numb comes under the rubric of being strong. But then he’d have to admit it also came under the rubric of being dead. In which case he was right: that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. No third option.

  STOLEN SAINT

  THIS RECESS OR alcove (I know the word in patois: ‘potelle’) used to contain a small painted statuette of Saint Nicolas, the patron saint of miquelets. It had been there through the twentieth century and some of the nineteenth. The house into which the space is carved, 37, Rue du Brutz, belonged to an old friend, now dead, of my grandmother, and has been derelict for about ten years. It is being ‘done up’ as a holiday home in a piecemeal and erratic way by someone from Namur who is either too lazy or too irregularly solvent to do more than half-paint a room, half-install some double glazing or half-re-tile the kitchen before disappearing for another six months. ‘DIY Wallonia-style’, quips the Flemish artist in Guy’s ‘Les Miquelets’ gîte, who thinks of himself as one of life’s quippers. Like many such houses in Bouillon, it is a ruin in progress, but progress in which direction?

  One day I returned for a holiday to Bouillon and found the saint had gone, leaving only this small, sacred vacancy that no one – not the church, not the council, not even the ruling Catholic party and its perpetually-in-power bourgmestre – has had the idea of filling. It is coming into its fifth year of emptiness, and sometimes I wonder if I’m the only person who has noticed this.

  MINI-EUROPE

  WHEN I WAS thirteen I was taken to a place called Mini-Europe, on the outskirts of Brussels. Mini-Europe is pretty much what it says it is, an outdoor theme park in its strictest sense: a park with one theme. It is full of small and intricately detailed scale models of European landmarks, each of which comes with copious statistics about its country’s population, GDP, industrial output, linguistic, ethnic and religious balance (where there is one) and (again: where it exists or can be explained) electoral system, all presented on laminated roadsign-sized notice boards. Mini-Europe is at the foot of the Atomium, the vast model of an atom which was to be to Brussels what the Eiffel tower is to Paris, but isn’t. Both the Atomium and Mini-Europe have educational missions, which is why they’re so boring, but together they constitute an interesting pairing, each in its different way symbolising how not to explain things to anyone, let alone children: Mini-Europe makes Europe small, the Atomium makes the atom vast. It’s as if in order to understand things all you needed to do was shrink them or enlarge them. Going to the two ‘attractions’ together makes you feel like Gulliver: first you are a giant scanning a portable continent; next you are a nano-midget in an elevator between the spheres of an atom that has been magnified 165 billion times. In the end both things expose you to the fallacies of inner and outer, that tag-team of fake opposites.

  Thinking about Bouillon and my life there, I realise that Mini-Europe does have its explanatory uses after all: my early childhood there gave me exact and detailed small-scale replicas – technically they were proto-replicas, since the replica tends to come after the original and not, as in this case, before – of every major feeling and emotion I’d ever have. With Mini-Europe, you stood outside and looked in at, or over and across, buildings that, when you saw them or felt them in real life, engulfed you and couldn’t be taken in whole; buildings that offered you no place or perspective from which to see them clearly. So it was, dramatically, with feelings: feelings and emotions that swallowed me up when I was older and have yet to spit me out, I knew in a kind of emotional pocket-size when I was a child. So that when the real things happened, the deaths and illnesses and losses, the bereavements, divorces and disappearances – in other words when the Atomium paradigm of being crushingly outscaled took over – I was able to recognise feelings that might otherwise have been too big to withstand.

  STATIONS

  I HAVE WRITTEN a lot about stations, and about trains, and spent a lot of time in and around them. They are where I do some of my best mourning, and rail travel generally is conducive to all varieties of introspection, from the kind where you feel you’re descending a mineshaft to the kind where you feel you’re being scattered thinly and lightly, like the ash you will become, over the world around you.

  I like station buffets and I like station hotels and cafés, places which seem to have absorbed something of the essence of departure and arrival but not to have caved in to them: the sticky, reluctant going, the fresh confusions of arrival, the empowerments of disorientation, and all that lies between them. The solidity of these places in the face of all that going and coming seems a comfort. There’s a muted romance to it all that you don’t get in garages or airports or bus depots, but also an ordinariness too, as if all our departures and arrivals were part of a single movement, and we simply have our own piece, hewn off, to work on like a sculptor with a slab of marble.

  I like those station cafés that stay open all night, playing to those goods and post trains that go on through, dragging the curves of their sirens across the night, long after the country’s passengers have gone to bed. In my mind I transfer those haunted diner scenes from Edward Hopper onto the dark interiors of Walloon cafés. They are reminders that there’s no such thing as complete silence, complete stillness, complete emptiness, but it’s precisely because they aren’t silence, stillness, or emptiness, that they help us to evoke those absolutes. Less is not always more; sometimes it’s everything.

  These cafés and hotels are also places of intersection: day shift meets night shift; commercial traveller, timetable-squeezed and destination-harried, meets backpacker with no sense yet of where he wants to go. Last night’s drinkers overlap with this morning’s espresso-randy executives; it’s someone’s thousandth visit to the town and someone else’s first and only one. These cafés and hotels wear neon advertisements for old drinks long since abandoned by the market or still occasionally ordered by grandparents when they remember to. They have their seasonal specialities, limited but usually decent food such as all-night spaghetti or a ham hanging in a backroom that smells of dog food and the damp cardboard of cash-and-carry boxes. In the Arlon area they serve their own Maitrank, the Luxemburgish Mosel wine that has been macerated with asperule flowers, sweet woodruff, which according to the Maitrank website, ‘broadcasts its aroma in early May’ – hence the name: May Drink. These places keep watch over the stations and are so still you’d think them closed, though they’re always open. My favourite old station, aside from Bouillon, was Quartier Léopold in Brussels, whi
ch was clean and colonial on the outside, but derelict on the inside; where the trains didn’t stop but slowed down glutinously, long enough for you to feel you were inside a dead tooth: a pristine white shell mushy with caries. It is now an information centre for the European Parliament, and the old Quartier Léopold has been mostly knocked down to make room for the glass and steel buildings of Euroland. There are no Bruxellois left in the area, and when I was last there I felt like the only Belgian, perhaps even the last Belgian. Being only half-Belgian does not disqualify me from that slightly adrift sense of belonging that constitutes Belgitude, because all Belgians are only half-Belgian.

  I spent a lot of time in the part of Bouillon called the quartier de la gare, where the old station created around it a small eco-system of shops and cafés and hotels. They’ve long since closed and some are now being demolished. The station was part of the Paliseul-Bouillon vicinal, and as it came into town it gave you spectacular views of Bouillon, ridging the hill so you saw the castle, the Ducal palace, the Ramparts and the river. It then wound downhill and across the Pont de France and headed out to the villages and eventually across the border to Sedan. There is still a pair of parallel scars where the old track used to be, and if you compare today with old postcards and photographs of the vicinal at its height, you see that the old track and the new lines of blank, grout-coloured gravel correspond exactly. Rail-shaped barren lines are etched into the grass, and the ghost of the old track is still there, faithfully following it, rail-shaped aftermaths of rails in the fat undergrowth.

  The vicinal shut to passenger traffic in 1957, and then in 1960 to freight trains. When I knew the station it was the bus depot, where the yellow local buses to Libramont and Paliseul grazed on a concrete forecourt. It had lost most if not of all of its stationhood by then, ‘essence of station’ you could call it, and the businesses that had grown up around it were gone or going in a last-gasping, lingering way. In the peak years of the quartier as a place of bustle there were a couple of hotels and a few good cafés, a bookshop, two newsagents and a record and musical instrument shop. The Post Office was also placed there, and today is the only one of those businesses to survive. The station hotel is in the process of being demolished, but it used to be swanky and expensive, the first hotel in Bouillon to have a sauna. The station is owned by the council, and they keep it spruced up in cream paint, though the old bell is still there and looks splendid robed in rust and ready to ring, if there was anything to ring for. From the dark, syrupy carillon of the church announcing a juicy Walloon funeral to the hollow, mothballed jingle of bare coathangers in an empty wardrobe, Bouillon was a town of bells. These days it’s mostly the tourist train that you’ll hear.

  You can go up the steps through the arch where the platforms used to be and instead of steaming trains and travellers and cases there’s a flat empty wasteland with waist-high weeds. Nearby, the only café that still works is Le Vauban, run by Willy the landlord who was a mercenary in the Congo, who made good money doing bad things, and is now a slow, shaky drunk who runs a tobacconist’s from inside his café and cooks meals for his customers on a camping stove on the bar.

  Trains tell you about time, though what they say is never conclusive. At least Belgian timetables do what they say they do: they tabulate time. Here in Britain you get given the destinations alphabetically arranged, and then the time of departure and arrival. Belgian ones give you the time, hour by hour, minute by minute, so you look at the departure time first, and then follow the stops until you find yours. If it isn’t there, you look to the next departure. You look through each departure time until you find your stop, and doing so you see all the stops you won’t stop at, and many you won’t even pass through. Belgian stations are full of people running their fingers along the timetables, often with their lips moving as they speak out the station names, like worshippers at a prayer wall. The train connections are called ‘Correspondances’, and you see the words emblazoned across the timetables and departure boards.

  ANGELRY

  I’VE BEEN ATTRACTED to the poetry of train travel, and I enjoy the species of sub-attentive attentiveness it brings out. European train poems are usually about speed and movement, about transport in the sense of ‘transport of the soul’ or ‘transport of the senses’. Even the lulls are enriching, allowing you to look and see and drink in the stops. British train poems are about stalling, or breaking down (Donald Davie’s ‘In the Stopping Train’ is perhaps the greatest analogy between a broken self and broken rail network: ‘Time and again, oh time and/that stopping train!/ Who knows when it comes to a stand,/and will not start again?’).

  fn1 It isn’t surprising – not since Auden has a British poet really got into the spirit of train travel, and this is partly because our trains are so bad that only nostalgia can give us back the idea of freedom on the rails. Compare that with the exultant optimism of Cendrars’s Trans-Siberian Prose (Cendrars was the Kerouac of rail), his idea that you can start anywhere, finish anywhere, but that a certain directedness beyond your ken would always enfold you; or the mysterious, luminous everydayness of modern French train poets like Gilles Ortlieb. Ortlieb has written about the economically depressed French Lorraine, and his position of perpetual unmooring as a translator in the European Commission in Luxemburg gives him unique access to the dignity of this area’s desolation. He too is an hors sol. He writes about the ex-industrial towns that end in ange, that remaindered German suffix (it’s tempting to call it, loadedly, German annexe) that was the butt of so many wars and is now the butt-end of so much history. His book, Tombeau des anges, which won Luxemburg’s Prix Servais in 2012, charts his visits through towns that are in reality epitaphs of towns, town-shaped vacuums; that are to towns what a high-watermark is to water, what the scar is to the wound.

  Here in Belgium, in the Ardennes, in the Province de Luxemburg and our own Belgian Lorraine, we have our fallen angels too: Martelange (where my uncle Johnny now lives), Pussemange, Dodelange, Radelange . . . the question is how many angels you can get to dance on the head of a pun. Like Bouillon, these towns are still vibrating from the shock that made them stop. They have stopped; they aren’t going anywhere, but they vibrate in their own outlines like tuning forks. Vibrating is not quite the same as moving, and for me, these ongoing vibrations are as meaningful and mysterious and heroic as anything I’ve felt in the great ‘dead’ cities of literature: Bruges, Venice, Ravenna, Saint-Malo, all of which have spawned a breed of necro-tourism which, ironically enough, keeps them alive. Not here: these places, my places, are kept authentic by never being looked at, and even now, immersed in them, I have to keep turning away from them in order to recapture the desuetude that made me want to look at them in the first place. How can you convey the unlooked-at-ness of places and things?

  In one of his poems Cendrars puns – I am sure he does – on that word ‘Correspondance’, the idea of an integrated rail and transport system being, as in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances’, a transcendent harmony of routes, each one different from, but also somehow equivalent to, the others; it’s a great holistic dream, something symphonic, great ramifying synaesthesias of steel and glass and iron and wood. As Baudelaire wrote of his ‘correspondances’, they ‘chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens’: they sing out the transports of the soul and the senses. Baudelaire may well also have been punning on rail transport and rail timetables, since we know he was an avid train traveller, and that he used that line from Brussels to Luxemburg when he went to visit his friend Rops in Namur. We know too that after his visit he boarded the train in the wrong direction and finished up in Luxemburg.

  The point is, it doesn’t matter whether you start in Bouillon or Paris: you can be in Kiev or Moscow or London or Cardiff, and all those places are already there at the end of a rail. Stations start from somewhere so you don’t have to. Here in Wallonia the trains always work, and they’re always on time. It’s the destinations that are late.

  * * *

  fn1 I w
rote this before I discovered that Davie’s ‘In the Stopping Train’ was written about a train journey from Tours to Paris, and hence only qualifies as a ‘British’ train poem because of its author, and not its location, train or rail network. This doesn’t negate my theory about comparative rail poems, but it does undercut the breezy certainty with which I offered it up.

  TOURIST TRAIN

  NAPOLEON III, WHO stayed at the Hôtel de la Poste in Bouillon for one night, has little to recommend him, beyond provoking Hugo’s Les Châtiments and the great line from Marx, which was a refinement of Hegel, about how history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. In Bouillon this is true of the train, which now survives in the form of a clownish repetition: a tourist train that isn’t a train but a train-shaped lorry, painted garish red and black and yellow, which emits a camp high-pitched whistle as it drives along the streets and alleys where the rails once were. But the Petit Train is no new-fangled attrape-nigaud – it’s been going nearly fifty years. My uncle Johnny used to drive it when he was back from college, and I once met some motorcyclists in Wales who had visited Bouillon in the seventies and remembered a wild long-haired youth driving the Petit Train and jumping drunkenly off the bridges into the river whenever it stopped to pick up passengers. That was Jean-Pol becoming Johnny, down from university in Brussels and earning drinking and smoking money in his home town.