Christ’s Entry Into Brussels

by Dimitri Verhulst

  One discussion point could in any case be laid to rest quickly: anyone who had the ambition of chaperoning Our Saviour during His stay in the city would need to speak His language!

  There were still some people who listed a proficiency in Latin on their curriculum vitae. It wasn’t a language you could buy a loaf of bread in any more, and even the best-educated girls had long accepted the attentions of boys who kept their ablatives under wraps. But there were a few who had kept their mental muscles limber by studying it during their grammar school years, a cerebral workout that others got by reaching for a chessboard. A more vulgar motive for choosing the subject was to acquire the status that a knowledge of the pluperfect had long provided in the shadow of the steeple. But this – alas, alack – was only Latin, the language botanists use in private to discuss their dried autumn leaves.

  But Christ had multiplied His loaves in Aramaic! Ha! He had abused the merchants and moneychangers something rotten in Aramaic. That was the language in which he gave Caiaphas short shrift; in which He helped Lazarus over his paralysis; the language in which, on the Mount of Olives, he prayed his most wrenching prayers; the language in which He, some people dared to suggest, dreamt of the lover He never had.

  The members of the committee were just tucking into the mousse au chocolat (Was that a subtle hint of cognac?) and looked at each other. Aramaic? Anyone? That would have been nothing short of astonishing. Apart from a few crusty biblical scrolls, Aramaic had been virtually wiped off the face of the planet. Neo-Aramaic, or a comical dialect derived from it, was still spoken by a few people here and there. Assyrian Christians in Iran and Iraq, for instance – there were a few thousand of them left, they’d have to maybe be capable of interpreting a conversation with The Prophet. But going to look for them didn’t even bear thinking about, with the poor bastards hiding in the mountains in fear of their lives, the umpteenth diaspora trekking over the globe.

  And so it came to pass that the nation’s hope and eyes turned to Transit Centre 127. There, in the transit zone of the national airport, behind barbed wire, were those who had exhausted all legal avenues, the undocumented, those who had sought understanding and asylum in vain, waiting for a plane to repatriate them to the one place where they were even less welcome. Given that it hadn’t fallen into their laps, it was up to them to pursue happiness across many national borders … It was too bad we didn’t have any coalmines left, otherwise we could have shoved them in there. Then we would have got some profit out of the happiness they found. Our country was full, crammed full … with Ikea, Tonton Tapis and Lederland retail chains. So tell us: where were we supposed to accommodate the poor devils? In the display rooms of all those chains, perhaps? Seeing as all their appeals for refugee status had been denied, these people were illegal. As if they were the personification of a bag of cocaine or a box of explosives. Illegal: imagine hearing it about yourself! That your existence is unauthorised! That your birth was non-statutory! That you weren’t actually allowed to exist! They didn’t dare to ask more of life than standing underpaid and without a word of thanks at the sink of some restaurant somewhere. They were willing to live in rooms where the mould was so thick on the walls that even the most noxious of gas heaters couldn’t make a dent in it. But even that comfort was denied them. They had to go. Back to where their mothers had dropped them. It was the most narrow-minded idea the modern age had brought forth: that the information in your passport defined you!

  Mankind had ringed the birds and branded the cows. The last thing it had to squeeze into a catalogue was itself. The species’ faith in its own ability to think and act was clearly so lamentably weak that the idea of someone transcending their native soil was considered an impossibility.

  There, where the bars crossed out the view, in that heavyhearted Transit Centre 127, there had to be someone perhaps, among the spurned, whose mother tongue allowed them to make head or tail of old Aramaic. If that could only be true, we’d have an interpreter for Our Lord and that man or woman would immediately receive a definitive resident’s permit. Foreign Affairs were already on their way with the stamps.

  Sixth Station

  I think I had always found Brussels at its most beautiful in the second week of July, when the high ozone concentrations obliged chemists to stock up on asthma inhalers and discount-obsessed women had saddled up for the start of the bargain-hunting season in the Rue Neuve. When the summer holiday casuals were realising that operating a checkout wasn’t quite as easy as it had always looked, the civil servants’ compasses were turned to the lazy south and for once the city had briefly shrugged off its frantic tides of traffic. A morning in the inhabited world couldn’t dawn more beautifully than the one on which the first side-show operators drove their heavily laden trucks through the centre of town. It was time for the summer fair. No sooner had the first lantern been screwed into its fitting than I could already smell the donuts, the waffles, the fritters. And as if it was being poured out over us from the skies, I always heard the stirring voice of Jacques Brel to accompany it, singing: J’aime la foire où pour trois sous l’on peut se faire tourner la tête. I can’t deny it, summer after summer I was thrilled to watch the hustle and bustle as they filled the entire kilometre between the Porte de Hal and the Porte d’Anderlecht with ice palaces and carousels. Bizarre really, because I wasn’t one for crowds. Never had been. But a fair, hothouse for misanthropy that it is, yes … There I found the courage to let my mistrust of the mob slide. It wasn’t something I could explain either.

  It’s been a long time since three sous was enough to get yourself swung upside down through the domain of the birds. Far from it: most fairground rides now offer the ultimate entertainment of a near-death experience at a price that puts a serious dent in the average family budget. But the dodgems had fortunately survived many a fashion and still provided youths with an ideal and affordable backdrop for puffing up their chests, throwing their shoulders back, coolly smoking cigarettes and ogling the opposite sex, the last-mentioned with undoubtedly more courage and self-confidence than I had at their age. It was one of the few things I treated myself to every fair: the dodgems, three or four rides. Of course, I wasn’t a threat to any of the youthful machos and nobody got any fun out of ramming me in the side. They tolerated me in their territory as an aged and increasingly pathetic relic, freewheeling through his frayed and threadbare nostalgia. The only contemporaries I encountered under the neon lights were men who had splashed down into fatherhood fairly late in life and were giving their son, or occasionally their daughter, a playful initiation into the art of driving. Having already had some dealings with osteopaths, they knew what whiplash was and took the name dodgem literally, no longer seeing the cars as vehicles for ramming each other, but regarding them purely as didactic devices for teaching their progeny the rules of the road. So yes, I couldn’t really argue with the youths who saw me as a lost and pitiable melancholic when I steered my car over the battleground, their battleground. All the same, I couldn’t break the habit of always climbing back into a dodgem. Now too, as the steel skeletons of all kinds of gigantic whirling machines were being screwed together, I realised that I would grip the steering wheel again this year, and felt a remnant of the old excitement that had thrown my nervous system into an uproar so many years ago, women ago, sorrows ago, when the arrival of the fair rang like a promise.

  This neighbourhood could do with a little enchantment, and that’s another reason I had always looked forward to the arrival of the showmen. These stubborn romantics liberated us from ugliness, and as liberators they deserved to be greeted like the chain-smoking Canadians on the Avenue de Tervueren on the third of September, 1944. If this required our girls to accept the responsibility that came with their charms, so be it: Deus vult!

  I am exaggerating … slightly. But there’s no denying that the Boulevard Poincaré had been growing greyer for years. Of all the things we have had to accept in this neighbourhood, few went down as easily as the deceits of a Ferris wheel b
y night, a mechanical supernova lifting us up above our daily shades of grey. During these luminous weeks, faces were glued to the windows of the international trains pulling out of South Station, and their fixed expressions betrayed their regret that an ultra-fast railway line had been drilled through the bed of the Channel. They would have rather stayed a little longer, now that the temperatures made it even more enjoyable to knock back a cold gueuze and the time had come for Belgians to exhaust themselves discussing the merits of the new season’s mussels. But the demands our era placed on train traffic were unrelenting, only two croissants separated the Grand Place from Piccadilly Circus. And as time and money are two maggots that feed on the same corpse, there were share hunters who were convinced that the travelling time between Brussels and London could and should be reduced to just one croissant. By the time Jacques Brel launched into the next verse, the commuters of commerce were already deeper than the cod

  Et nous donnant un peu de rêve pour que les hommes soient contents.

  Each time the neighbourhood took on the promising aroma of horse shit, deposited from the well-styled rear ends of jaded fairground ponies, I readied myself for a walk past the attractions – a walk which took me, at the same time, past the past itself. I found the sentimentality cloying, but what could I do? Each visit to the fair was a visit to the fairgrounds of yesteryear. I immersed myself in the calls of ticket-selling stallholders and searched for the spider lady, the travelling cabinet of Siamese twins, the caterpillar. Languidly, I wandered through memories of the brasserie Caulier-Express Midi – where I once drank my first beer and pretended to like the taste – of boxers and wrestlers, of teenage infatuations that blossomed and shrivelled during one and the same summer.

  But still something seemed different this time. Something essential. Of course, various machines catapulted the avidly screeching girls up into thin air higher and faster than they had the year before, and a ride on the carousel was a lot dearer than it had been 360 days earlier. But that wasn’t essential. What I’m trying to say is that this fair suddenly had more to do with the future than with the past. This time the fair deserved its place; it was justified now, simply because there was something to celebrate.

  Were my eyes deceiving me, or were the immigrant families loading up their vans with reluctance, preparing for a reunion with their more and more estranged kin in Morocco, a left-behind grandmother whose peace of mind required them to keep quiet about how difficult it was to survive in Europe? And was I seeing things, or were there residents who had suddenly put out window boxes here and there? Residents who had dared to put out window boxes? Because you can be sure that anyone who had ever taken the trouble of adding a little colour and life to decorate the façade of their home and, with it, the neighbourhood had quickly relented. A significant number of the city’s many unemployed youths were convinced that, along with the window boxes and bus stops, they were demolishing their own boredom. A few brave souls persisted in their civic contribution to beautification by arming themselves with a brush and pan and immediately replacing the window box, but I’ve never had the privilege of meeting someone with enough determination or naivety to put out a third. As a consequence, we should be grateful for the existence of satellite dishes, otherwise many of our façades would look even more cheerless. But now one window box after another was appearing in the streetscape; you couldn’t believe your eyes.

  Beleaguered travel agencies came up with more and more aggressive advertising, splashing out with discounts, free this and even freer that, in an attempt to jumpstart the hitherto disappointing bookings for July, which was, after all, the make-or-break month for their annual turnover. (‘Jumpstart’: a buzzword used by sad cases who drag themselves from one conference to the next.) Inversely, the price of a Brussels hotel room, with or without stars, shot up to dizzying heights. The celery in the allotments near Laerbeek Wood had to make way for an improvised campground, and anyone who was short on conscience and hoped to turn a profit from the special situation rented out their utility room as a bed and breakfast for the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims.

  And it was true really. If our city was, briefly, the navel of the world, why should we spend our holidays elsewhere?

  By chance, and unusually for us, Veronique and I hadn’t yet planned a trip for that summer. Perhaps we’d been afraid, each of us separately, that we wouldn’t survive a holiday as a couple – that was how deep a rut our relationship had been in for the last year. We were tired of each other. I had started to calculate how much of myself I had given up to be absorbed in this unity of two. It would be too coarse to claim that it was only convenience that was keeping us together, but an undeniable curiosity about other ways of life had crept into my thoughts, an interest in the greener grass on the other side of the fence. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to know that the chance of falling ecstatically in love with the first stranger to come along was greater than ever. That applied to her, it applied to me.

  Was that what I wanted?

  Sometimes! But, and this was important too, not always!

  ‘You’re too private, but it’s not your fault,’ she had once said, and she wasn’t the first of my partners to raise this theory. ‘You never had a father. You were always alone with your mother … There was no-one to teach you how to live together.’

  Veronique’s holidays had started too now. Three weeks without deadlines, crammed inboxes or ringing telephones. By the time she’d more or less relaxed into a life away from the grind, it would be time for her to creep back in between her office partitions.

  To celebrate the start of our holiday, we slid our legs in under a table at Le Tournant, ordered Italian bubbly and pretended to study the menu, already knowing far in advance that we would both take the sweetbread. With almond flakes – you could do worse. Our lack of a travel destination would come up and I was on edge about that. I knew how much she suffered from the realisation that a human life was not long enough to have admired all of the earth’s crust, or even a quarter of it. She was convinced there were deserts out there just waiting for her. There were mountain passes she needed to walk through, forests to smell, squirrel monkeys longing to be patted. For myself, I’d already made up my mind: I wanted to stay in Brussels this summer, now that the city had rediscovered its faith in itself and was undergoing a completely unexpected renaissance, with metro tunnels that, at first sniff, smelt a fraction less like piss and were being livened up by local oom-pa-pa music by Grand Jojo, Coco Van Babbelgem and other half-forgotten folk bards. But I wasn’t anticipating a round of applause after announcing my personal holiday plans. Inasmuch as I’d lost my calling as a fortune teller, I expected Veronique to respond by going travelling without me. Broad-minded couples wouldn’t make a problem of something like that, marriage is not a prison; after all, you mustn’t restrict each other’s individual freedom. But I was level-headed enough to know what that freedom came down to in the end.

  ‘We still haven’t booked anything for the summer …’

  She hadn’t sounded indignant or disillusioned. She had just presented it as a matter-of-fact observation. We hadn’t booked anything yet, full stop.

  ‘No, that’s right. Did you have a destination in mind, maybe?’

  ‘Well, there’s still plenty of places to see of course. We’ll never tick them all off.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe …’

  ‘… that you’d like to stay home one year for a change?’

  ‘Well … You know … I still need to clear out my mother’s apartment. Until it’s completely empty, I have to keep paying the rent. That’s one thing. And second, right now Brussels feels so, I don’t know, enjoyable. It seems a shame to swap it for a beach or whatever. How can I put it … the fair … this whole Jesus business …’

  And her expression seemed to lighten. She’d been thinking exactly the same thing, but hadn’t dared say so.

  S
ometimes predictability has its enjoyable side too: once again the sweetbread was succulent.

  On our way home at least forty people spontaneously wished us a pleasant evening.

  Seventh Station

  She usually dreamt her dreams on worse mattresses. That was when she was lucky enough to have a mattress at all. Newspapers spread out on the floor, park benches, flattened cardboard boxes in deserted shopping arcades – they were the surfaces on which she generally fell asleep. Compared to that, the beds in the Transit Centre had been pure luxury. But now, on one of those mild July nights, eleven-year-old Ohanna and her parents were suddenly sleeping in the Boulevard Adolphe Max – the street where wankers young and old try to wear themselves out in sex-shop peep booths – in the most expensive beds this city has to offer. The presidential suite of a hotel. 7,800 euros a night or, according to the statistics of the moment, five times the average monthly wage. Magnates, ministers and oil sheiks had slept between these very same sheets.

  The suite measured three hundred and forty square metres and the hotel’s interior decorators had reduced the awkward, empty feeling by decking it out with disproportionately enormous TV screens and, almost inevitably, a Jacuzzi. If guests found its ugliness too much to bear, they could camouflage most of it reasonably well with the lighting – computer controlled, of course. Standing discreetly in the background was a butler with a postgraduate degree in the silent removal of champagne corks and an exceptionally well-feathered nest, thanks to the tips slipped him by numerous lonely women. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar was available for guests who wished to venture out into the world they could see though the triple-glazed windows and – because you can work up a sweat living even the cushiest of lives – there was a multi-jet shower for them to wash themselves in.