Christ’s Entry Into Brussels

by Dimitri Verhulst

  Foreign Affairs had selected Ohanna to accompany Christ during His earthly sojourn. Officially because, considering her origins and innate linguistic sensitivity, there was a high probability of her grammar closely approaching the original Aramaic. Her being chosen ahead of, amongst others, the eager Jewish applicants for the honour may have been closely related to her age. Still a child in all things.

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.’ It was a sentence that more than one ministry staffer remembered as having been spoken by the Lord, or rather, thought they could remember, because attempts to find that particular quote in the Bible were thwarted by the arrival of the coffee break. But choosing a child was usually a safe bet, just ask the ad men. Kids could be an enormous pain in the neck, but once you put that detail out of your mind, it was easy to accept a child as a symbol of absolute innocence. What’s more, Ohanna had a cute little face that could have been plucked straight from a UNICEF calendar – the month of May, for instance. There was no better way of showing Christ the concern people in Belgium felt for the powerless and the outsiders, knowing that as a child He too had been a powerless outsider, so much so that His Mother had been forced to secretly drop Him in a stable, out of sight and smelling range, as if He were a piece of shit she couldn’t keep in a moment longer.

  Her selection gave Ohanna and her parents a future – that was a miracle in itself and something they’d no longer dared hope for – but the great responsibility that had been thrust upon her weighed heavily on her delicate shoulders. She had to do the job with verve, otherwise she and the rest of her family would be flown straight back to misery. No wonder the task preyed on her mind day and night: she thought about it when she got up in the morning and in the evening when she went to bed, and even when she was asleep her dreams brought it back. Her parents were counting on her. The country was counting on her, the European Union, the Vatican perhaps. What choice did she have? She had to do her work perfectly, and that meant showing the Son of God Brussels as it really was, the city she knew all too well, a place where a quarter of the population didn’t have a pot to piss in, where a third of the children, that’s right, a third, grew up in families without an income acquired by work. Where one in four sick people postponed medical treatment because dying was more affordable than a cure. She had to show Him the city on a morning when its desperate young were out looking for work, with way too many of them thronging together at the windows of the employment agencies, battling for the same dirty jobs in the full knowledge that thirty per cent of them would never see a payslip. Ever. She had to show Him the schools the young had left prematurely and without a diploma, as sceptical as they were about the value of one of those signed scraps of paper, if only because their fathers – despite banging on constantly about how important they were – had never got anywhere with their own.

  *

  Ohanna was in luck: in her dream she was standing on a grey platform at North Station, in the middle of a neighbourhood she knew well. Jesus stepped out of a graffiti-covered carriage, second class, as could be expected, and into the fried-onion smell of a nearby black pudding stall. She spotted Him at once and said: ‘Welcome, Jesus Christ, Messiah and only-begotten Son of God, to Brussels, the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, the capital of the Flemish and French-speaking communities, the administrative centre of the European Union and home to NATO. We are most honoured by Y our coming.’ Exactly as she had been taught. Then she took Him by the hand, with His permission, and together they took the escalator down to the train station’s depressing central concourse with the refreshment bar where surreptitious drunks stopped in the morning to drown their craving for alcohol by slobbering down a few hasty cans of beer before disappearing in front of computers all day, after which they repeated the ritual in the evening until they had poured themselves enough courage to start a stupefying train journey home to prolong their somnambulant marriages. A little further along, numbers and letters rattled into position on the sign that indicated destinations and departure times. No, it’s not true, that numerical dance stopped rattling when they started using LED letters to list the latest delays. But in the heads of impatient travellers, the boards still rattle and clack like they did in the days the first locomotive blew out its first furious head of steam. It was lunchtime: at the food stalls, plastic bottles ejaculated threads of mayonnaise into bread rolls filled with ham and cheese for the restless souls who ate their meals on the hoof. Their diaries barked out orders – forward march, left, right, left, right, left, right, left – so loudly, they didn’t notice Christ getting in the way.

  It was winter in Ohanna’s dream; that helped, because she was able to show Him how the station filled with beggars, sluggish from the cold and the diet they scraped together from rubbish-bin specials. Roma Gypsies, wrapped in tattered blankets and misled by their enthusiasm for a destination that had been sold to them as a decent place to live. Vagrants, stubborn drunks, ghosts really, because administratively they were long dead and rotten, stinking from all their encrustations. She introduced Him to Mariëtte, the station’s toilet attendant, who was kind enough to allow the homeless free use of her two profitable toilets. And He promptly decorated Mariëtte with His blessing.

  Ohanna gripped Jesus’s hand even tighter and led Him through the thoughts of the many passers-by – it was a dream, anything was possible, she had to seize the opportunity! And there they saw the conviction that none of these scabby derelicts actually needed alms. How could they? This was a country with all essential social services, there was help for anyone who wanted it; these losers slept on the streets of their own free will. It was true that the babies in the arms of the wretched-looking mothers were real babies that evoked the pity of women who had to dump their own offspring in a crèche during office hours, but they had been rented by the hour from a criminal agency that had discovered how much more appealingly a beggar’s cup rattled in a mother’s hand. They strolled past the belief that these tramps were dropped off at their begging pitches in the morning by a taxi, a black Mercedes, and that the same vehicle picked them up again in the evening. They were part of well-organised and extremely lucrative companies, purveyors of squalor, and any taxpayer who was prepared to shed one more drop of sweat for an employer needed their head read when you realised the kind of fortunes people accumulated just sitting on their bum on the floor of a train station.

  Then, leaving these reflections behind, they stepped out into the city under its blanket of smog. An accordionist warmed his fingers on a first tune, harvesting mocking glances from creatures who had been born into more sanitary conditions but wouldn’t recognise a high C if it slapped them in the face. That’s if they accorded the accordionist the humanity of a glance. Mostly they just ignored him, the good-for-nothing loafer, leaving his hat empty. But this was a dream and people looked his way.

  After that, things started to speed up in Ohanna’s sleep, growing more exciting, and she climbed onto a bus that was waiting for her in the Rue du Peuple: a bright red city bus, designed for tourists in a hurry. The keys were in the ignition. Jesus went up onto the top floor and Ohanna did the driving; she was as surprised as anyone that she could, swerving between the other vehicles on the permanently clogged inner ring as the drivers beeped and waved their fists and gave her the finger. And just as the sea had once parted for the Lord, all the traffic lights now turned green.

  In the Rue Van Gaver she grabbed her microphone and said, ‘On Your left, Lord, you see deceived girls, lured to the West by the promise of human rights and now stranded, washed up on this shore like so much driftwood, wreckage from a ship that was given up as lost long ago. To survive they have to take it in every orifice. On Your right, exactly the same thing.’

  She drove Him to the Rue Bodeghem so he could feel the Salvation Army’s coarse but welcome blankets. She showed him the slums of Marollen, houses where mushrooms do better than people, and the car park on the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique so He could see how the homeless get
their beauty sleep by sliding in under a freshly parked car to enjoy the warmth of its engine. Then she led the Good Shepherd along the gloomy canal, whose bed has been fertilised with the body of many a despairing suicide and beside which the city’s famous gueuze is brewed, to the Boulevard du Neuvième de ligne, home to an asylum seekers’ centre and possibly, by consequence, Brussels’ most famous avenue, globally speaking.

  This was where the dream changed into a nightmare. Jesus tore off his mask, revealing himself as a local government inspector. He roared, ‘Ha, where’d you get the gall to give Christ such a distorted picture of Brussels? You haven’t said a word about the magnificence of the Chinese Pavilion, not a letter about the great Maison Delune, Horta’s buildings, the grandeur of the Parc du Cinquantenaire, the riches we amassed on the backs of all the people we slaughtered in our colonies, our chocolatiers, our chips, the fashionable boutiques on the Place du Grand Sablon …’ The longer Ohanna stared at the unmasked face, the more con vinced she became that it belonged to no-one less than the Devil himself, a role some people believe comes naturally to government inspectors.

  ‘Thanks for services rendered, but you’re no longer of any use to this country. Your room in Transit Centre 127 is ready and waiting.’

  *

  Ohanna woke with a start, dripping with sweat. The multi-jet shower came in handy.

  Eighth Station

  Belgian stamps have always excelled in two subjects: the portrait of the King and birds, preferably defenceless little winter birds that the man and woman in the street can easily identify with, which naturally does no harm at all to the sales of wooden bird feeders.

  Besides stamps, Our Majesty’s head also fills the TV screen on New Year’s Eve when he reads out his New Year’s address to his subjects. Ribbon cutting he leaves increasingly to his son, to make sure he masters the profession of head of state in a timely fashion. Kneading his cranium to the shape of the crown, moulding his backside to fit the cushions of the throne. Despite the ever-increasing numbers of prophets of doom whispering that the end of the nation is at hand and that the whole dynasty will soon be moving out of the palace and into a hovel.

  My whole life, I’ve read the slogan BELGIË BARST – daubed on our public bricks by people who feel strengthened by the persuasiveness of alliteration – but Belgium hasn’t burst apart or gone to hell, despite the dedication of all those graffiti-spraying activists. It has survived five thorough-going reforms of the state, withstood many identity crises and much introspection, floundered through two world wars and endured various separatist movements … to more or less preserve the form that was cast by Philip the Good four centuries before the kingdom’s actual foundation. Belgium is geography’s hypochondriac: the State that is convinced it won’t last much longer and consequently invests in itself with the greatest of reluctance, as a result of which, given that it does continue to exist, it perseveres as a shambling, invariably backward nation that has invested too little in itself.

  Of course Belgium will one day cease to exist and be replaced by something else that won’t last forever either. Longevity is reserved for the sponges, but they too will one day be obliterated.

  And so it was that year after year we had felt a certain hesitation when marking the celebration of our nationhood on the calendar (the twenty-first of July, that’s right, the date on which, in 1831, our first king – a German – had taken his less-than-whole-hearted oath).

  *

  Christ’s planning His coming for our national holiday bitterly offended our fatherland-haters, who saw it as misplaced meddling by an omnipotent being who had no business getting involved in earthly politics. If Homo sapiens hadn’t been Creation’s manufacturing error in the first place, the Saviour wouldn’t have been in a position to gloat over His progeny’s form of government anyway. All at once republicans revealed the depth of their biblical knowledge by grumbling that Jesus’s choice for the twenty-first of July had nothing to do with His sympathies for the Belgian royals, and everything to do with the opposite. Because just as He had once astutely pointed out to Pontius Pilate that the true King had Mary as his mild mother and grew up among the shavings of a carpenter who was not his begetter, so Christ was now descending to the open sewers of Brussels to draw the attention of the King of the Belgians, aka Grand Master of the Order of Malta, Grand Master of the Order of Leopold II and Knight of the Danish Order of the Elephant, to his complete incompetence as a monarch …

  Blah, blah.

  And once again, blah.

  But even if you had ideological objections to monarchy as a form of government, considered the notion of the sceptre passing to someone who had simply inherited it medieval, and couldn’t stomach the idea of the Crown being protected at all times – even if you were horrified by the enormous subsidies poured each year into the tomatoes in the royal greenhouses just to maintain a symbol – you still had little difficulty in admitting that the monarch was probably a great bloke. I say ‘probably’ because, of course, you didn’t know him personally. Anyone who wanted to get to know the King had to move to a flood-prone area or survive a train crash. But then, assuming your first impressions were rendered more reliable by a life richly filled with human contacts, you would be very likely to admit that our monarch was pleasant company. Speaking for myself, I would not have had any objections to dining with him. He was, if I’ve judged his character correctly, essentially a dead ordinary softy, a person like you or me who secretly reached into the frying pan at home with his dirty fingers. A cheerful sneak, skilled in the unnoticed filching of chocolates, creative when it came to unearthing occasions on which to drink an extra glass of wine. A person with bowel movements so troublesome that he often didn’t leave the toilet until the newspaper ink had penetrated his knees. Unlike the ancient skalds, our poets should present our king as a gentleman with endearing failings, a supply of slightly risqué jokes he could draw on to accompany a digestif, a hearing aid, high cholesterol. Someone who had had his indiscretions and felt remorse for the heartache it had caused his wife, the Queen, a former model who was now showing a little too much craquelure. But the King was not the kind of person who would show us up in front of Christ – the commission members in the priory of Val-Duchesse reached agreement on that too, just before the crème brùlée was served.

  You see, practical considerations alone were enough to convince everyone that it was far easier to celebrate both Christ and our worldly king at the same time. If the parades in honour of the two of them took the same route, there would be no need to close extra streets to traffic unnecessarily, and enough parking meters would be left operative and generating income. Accordingly the committee decided to locate the lion’s share of the festivities on the route the military parade traditionally followed on the twenty-first of July: the Place Poelaert, the Rue de la Régence, the Sablon, the Place Royale. Christ could, for example – this was just a first draft – be driven in a special vehicle with a bubble of bulletproof glass all the way up to the stage where the royal family was waiting for Him on the seats of honour. Although it was questionable whether a country with a national debt of 296 billion euros should invest heavily in the security of someone who was immortal. Of course not. An assassination attempt on the Messiah was the most ridiculous thing a terrorist could come up with. So, here we go, a second draft. Christ could ride in a sedan chair, the papal Sedia Gestatoria … Yes, that was more ceremonial, carried up to the King and, not forgetting, Ohanna. Or we’d let Him ride a young ass – rumour had it He was a dab hand at that. Afterwards, the two guests of honour could watch the parade of marching cannon fodder – for unity we’d die a hero’s death – followed by a procession of stilt-walkers, as if to assuage any fears that life might not be worth living if you’ve had a leg shot off. The gendarmerie brass band, founded to prove that a ticket writer can also grasp the rudiments of music, would blast a hymn through their bombardons, with the Moha majorettes in their wake. Then a squadron of F-16s would fly over the heads of
the many invitees in formation: a cross, for instance. If we could be so bold as to uphold tradition, a detachment of the local police, comprised of a Volkswagen Jetta from police district Sint-Truiden and an inconspicuous Skoda from the district La Louviére, would then proceed through the capital. Followed by a detachment of the federal police flaunting a Peugeot 807 from the Canine Support Service and an Opel Vivaro from the lab of the federal court police in Tournai. To stop the Lord from nodding off completely, there’d be some thunderous fireworks next, with loud church music evoking a theatrical scene from the Old Testament. Again, it was just a suggestion.

  It was clear, more thought was required.

  Maybe a good idea to put out some feelers with an event organiser?

  As tentative as the details of the programme were, the announcement of the route caused an unambiguous outburst of joy in Brussels Park, where masses of the Lord’s most tenacious fans had set up their tents, leaving me unsure as to whether I should compare the overpopulated space to a festival field or a refugee camp in Darfur. And to think that all this hysteria had been started by one old lady on a folding chair on the pavement. The authorities had trucked in Portaloos, but these proved unable to swallow the vast quantities quickly enough, which was unpleasant for anyone with open footwear. Depositing the final product of one’s digestive system in a bush was far preferable, even if the space given over to shrubbery in this park was nowhere near enough to provide cover for more than a week to thousands, no, tens of thousands of believers’ bowel movements. The man who had climbed up into one of the park’s many trees – soon known as Zacchaeus – was determined to hold on to his fabulous lookout post; he accepted the food and water passed up by volunteers and took the easy way out by shitting shamelessly in his pants. On the day itself the branch on which he was sitting would be the nec plus ultra of any real estate agent and would undoubtedly bring many times more than flat residents in, say, Monaco could get for renting out a square metre of balcony when the Formula One cars were tearing through their fiscal Valhalla. Fortunately the eating stalls that had sprung up everywhere – chips, escargots, hot dogs … the usual suspects – disseminated smells strong enough to take up the gauntlet and combat the reek of ammonia.