Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  My children are playing along that corridor now. I can hear them from the room I’m writing in. Sometimes Mari tries on some oddities she’s found and parades along the tiled floor with Eugène’s walking stick and Lucie’s spectacles, and it overlays the memory of the different clientes the way luggage labels overlay each other on steamer trunks: all there, all gone.

  UNDERSTAIRS CUPBOARD

  WALKING STICKS: 2.

  Spectacles: 6 pairs.

  Clogs: 5; 2 pairs, one odd.

  Velvet bag containing funeral urn containing ashes (Kevin McGuinness): 1

  Christmas decorations: many, in a box marked Noël, lying on a sharp sand of broken baubles.

  Nativity Scene with missing pieces; all animals, no people: 1.

  Carved elephant tusk depicting the corkscrewing hierarchy of a Congolese village, starting with assembled warriors and finishing with the chief: 1.

  Ivory figurines, mounted on ebony bases: 3.

  Various tins with old coins, thimbles, bobbins of thread.

  Playmobil, in a box marked ‘Klickys’ (they are named onomatopeically here).

  Cast-iron waffle-maker (gaufrier).

  Lead soldiers with chipped paint and plaster cowboys and Indians.

  Vintage diabetes kit, missing finger pricker.

  School reports for Patrick and Sarah McGuinness from the early 1980s. In one of these, Patrick’s physics teacher, Mr Pellereau, writes: ‘he is such a nice boy that it is sometimes difficult to get angry with him’. ‘Not a difficulty I’ve encountered much,’ said my father when he read it. To have his ashes share a cupboard with those school reports he spent so long analysing is like burying a king with his favourite possessions.

  RIMBAUD AND VERLAINE

  Verlaine on Bouillon:

  ‘The Semois, lying dark on its bed of chattering stones, its trout (really I’d call them supernatural, and only my piety stops me calling them Divine), its castle, well . . . its burg, hewn out of granite among the endless woods . . . And did I mention the trout?’

  Croquis de Belgique, 1895

  Two famous Ardennais, Rimbaud and Verlaine, ripped their soles in Bouillon and its environs, and would have been knocking around town when my great-grandmother Julia was a child. In fact, Julia and her mother worked as chambermaids in the Hôtel des Ardennes, one of the places where Rimbaud and Verlaine lodged when they visited town, and I can be reasonably sure that my great-great-grandmother changed their sheets.

  Rimbaud and Verlaine’s story is a picaresque tale, not just of drink, poetry, bohemianism and sexual dissidence, but of a strange, elastic, attachment to place: a picaresque of eternal return. We think of Rimbaud as the archetypal goer-away. But he always came back – ‘on ne part pas,’ he said: we never leave. So I imagine Julia with her parents, Lucie’s grandparents, the Bourlands and the Nicolas, catching sight of them: Verlaine with his Mongol dome (‘we instantly remark the great asymmetry of the head, which Lombroso has pointed out among degenerates, and the Mongolian physiognomy indicated by the projecting cheek-bones, obliquely placed eyes, and thin beard . . .’ – Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1891, pp. 119–20), and beside him a slut-faced adolescent boy he sometimes called his wife, walking without lifting his feet off the ground. They’d have smoked Semois tobacco in clay pipes, sampled the rain, inhaled the smell of still-to-stagnant water on a shallow bank, the heatwave bouquet of slowly poaching algae. Or, in the winter, the Semois lacquering the air, polishing it to a brassy, ringing cold.

  Rimbaud was from Charleville, about thirty km over the border: ‘Charlestown’, he called it. Verlaine’s father was from Paliseul, eight km from Bouillon, and his sister, Verlaine’s aunt, helped bring up the boy. It was to her that he and Rimbaud often came to escape the police, or their creditors, or Verlaine’s other wife, or just to hole up. Verlaine’s aunt’s house is still there, and a plaque marks it with touchingly feeble wording: ‘Ici joua Paul Verlaine’. There’s another important plaque, in Brussels, commemorating the occasion on which Verlaine shot Rimbaud in a hotel just off the Grand-Place on 10 July 1873. It is headed ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’, a quotation from Rimbaud’s ‘Une Saison en Enfer’, and an ironic choice since the hotel ‘A la Ville de Courtrai’ where the shooting took place

  fn1 was knocked down in the 1960s to make room for this characterless modern block on which the poor plaque hangs. Unwittingly, it thus commemorates the destruction of places of memory, of lieux de mémoire in order for them to become, by dint of the plaque itself, places of places of memory, lieux de lieux de mémoire.

  This is as it should be, because the best plaques are in any case the most tenuous. They assert the slimness of our hold on things, the delicacy of the relationship between the event, the time and place it happened, those it happened to, and those who remember it. Finally, they show us the gap between the event and itself. And what, anyway, is an event? Do they have plaques which say ‘Here, between 19XX and 20XX, something slowly unfolded whose nature has not yet been established, which began long before then and somewhere else entirely, and will doubtless end that way too’? That’s a plaque I would like to see. There’s a trend in France these days for the humorous plaque: ‘Ici, le 12 mai 1891, il ne s’est rien passé’, which, beneath the joke, seems to me to answer to our deep and haunting need for some things, just a few times and places, to be free of meaning, unfreighted by any sort of significance.

  ‘Ici joua Paul Verlaine’. ‘Ici’ . . . that’s how the plaques begin: ‘Here’. But after that they fall away into the amnesia and deliquescence they’re designed to guard against. They are always made of something hard and durable too: iron, stone, slate. But it’s the words on them, etched or in relief, chiselled or enamelled, that lets them down. They look solid, but really they’re melting as you read.

  Belgium is a country of plaques. Everyone passed through, not many stayed. It’s even truer here in Wallonia, the Belgium of Belgiums. So many plaques attest to a passing through, a temporary stay: ‘Here’ the metal intones boldly, assertively, ‘Ici . . .’. Then the verbs come along and attenuate it, wear it away: so-and-so ‘stayed’, ‘lodged’, ‘stopped’ ‘passed through’ . . . so many verbs for transition momentarily stalled, Time’s small speedbumps on the road out of town. In the Hôtel de la Poste in Bouillon (where my great-uncle Paul worked after the war – my grandmother’s family were in what is now called the hospitality sector), a plaque reads that Napoleon III ‘passa la nuit’ there on the way to sign the Treaty of Sedan: a stopover between defeat and humiliation.

  I remember in Sarajevo, InterRailing, finding the concrete cast of the feet of Gavrilo Princip in the pavement of the street where he shot Franz Ferdinand; there was of course a plaque too, but I remember thinking how unusual it was to see those feet: an actual imprint of people upon place, people upon time. As if everywhere we walked the ground was soft and yielding, every trace captured in the living clay, like the key in the putty. Princip’s feet have been removed from the street they trod and put into a museum. They’ve also taken down the monument to him. Sarajevo was a town I already knew before I went, because it was caught for me in the line by Lawrence Durrell: a city ‘composed around the echo of a pistol shot’. Why did I like that line so much? Because it primed me to experience Sarajevo as a kind of hologram: composed not around the bullet or the shot but around their echo, their resonating gone-ness. Their imprint, but their imprint on what? Composed around echoes: it’s true not just about Sarajevo, but about everywhere I’ve been and ever returned to. The trace, the event long-spent, the words written in rain.

  Verlaine was a connoisseur of rain, so many of his poems cocktail cabinets of different kinds of rainfall. Even his drink, absinthe, was the drink that needed water to flower into itself, ghost-grey. Verlaine and Rimbaud are still here: there is the Café Rimbaud on the riverside with its all-you-can-eat buffets, and, because what goes in must come out, there is D. Verlaine the plumber.

  * * *

  fn1 Just look at that:
Take place. ‘Take’ place . . . It says it all, but only because place can’t be taken. I cross-check it in French: ‘avoir lieu’, they say, as if a place could be had or held or owned. Even worse is the reflexive verb ‘se passer’: as if the passing was internal, as if time was inside the event rather than the event inside Time. That line from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël that struck me when I first read it as chillingly beautiful: ‘passant, tu es passé’. No wonder we invented something safe and abstract like ‘to happen’, which helps us avoid the time/place rub.

  DEGRELLE

  ‘I AM LÉON Degrelle and I was the Leader of Belgian Rexism before the Second World War. During the War I was the Commander of the Belgian Volunteers on the Eastern Front, and fought in the 28th Walloon Division of the Waffen SS. This will certainly not be regarded as a recommendation by everyone.’

  This swaggering piece of understatement comes at the start of a letter written by Bouillon’s most famous son (unless you count Godefroid the crusader, who probably never came here) to Pope John Paul II in 1979. It’s the preamble to one of the most tasteless, glib and maliciously casual pieces of holocaust denial in the history of the genre, and was prompted by news of the Pope’s imminent visit to Auschwitz in June that year. Degrelle is worried that the Pope’s presence will legitimise what he calls the ‘Hollywoodesque myth’ of the Holocaust, and he even hazards a little joke about the Pope’s own wartime incarceration: ‘Some say you were yourself at Auschwitz; well then, you must have got out, since you are now Pope, and a Pope who, it seems, does not smell too much of Zyklon B!’

  Degrelle was the Belgian Nazi leader, founder of the Rexist movement (a reactionary and militant Catholic group: ‘Christus Rex’) and leader of a collaborationist battalion, the Légion Wallonie, in which he served, first as a private and eventually as General, with such outstanding bravery that he became the German army’s most decorated foreign soldier. The Légion Wallonie was incorporated into the Waffen SS after its heroic defence of the German army’s retreat from Russia. ‘If I had a son’, he claimed Hitler told him, ‘I would want him to be like you’. Degrelle lived until 1994, safe in exile in Spain, and to the end of his life he claimed that meeting Hitler was his proudest moment. ‘Je suis plus Hitlérien que jamais,’ he boasted in the 1980s: ‘I’m more of a Hitlerite than ever.’ Unlike many French and Belgian collaborators, who went along with the Germans out of pragmatism, weakness or fatalism, or saw collaboration as an acceptable price to pay for the establishment of an authoritarian, Catholic and monarchist national order, Degrelle was a thoroughgoing and extravagantly committed Nazi who never expressed the slightest regret for his actions nor sought to invoke any kind of exculpatory contexts for them. He welcomed the Nazis as soon as they invaded, and was finishing his articles with ‘Heil Hitler’ within days of the German occupation. Even in December 1944, during the Ardennes offensive, as the Allies advanced and the game was up, he fought the liberation of Belgium and killed his own countrymen with an exultant devotion to Hitler and Nazism.

  Degrelle claimed that the Walloons were a lost Germanic tribe that was destined to rejoin the greater Reich. The idea of the Walloons, with their instinctive aversion to anything that smacks too much of work, as being related to the Germans, would have baffled anyone it didn’t amuse. Try telling that to Paprika, Bouillon’s laziest man, who held a party to celebrate sixty years on the dole, and managed to get the council to fund it as a piece of ‘folkloric’ spectacle (I’m not sure this is true – it may be a legend created to convey a reality by inventing it). I once ran the lost Teutonic tribe theory past my grandmother, who for a moment forgot herself and told me ‘Tê ch’teu’ (‘Tais-toi’) – this was before I knew that she and Eugène had the house expropriated by the Germans and were sent to pull up vegetables in Vichy France for most of the war. I still have a German helmet which I found in the cellar when I was clearing it out. So whenever I imagine the house as ours, I have to, as the phrase goes, ‘factor in’ its occupation by German officers. But I can’t sense it the way I can sense the other things that happened here – there are no traces, and I can’t even introduce them into my fictional memories of the house, into my idea of what the house remembers about itself. Maybe a plaque would do it.

  Degrelle escaped capture, was sentenced to death in absentia, lived out the next sixty years in Malaga, enjoyed nearly six decades of insolently good health, and made no attempt to hide or go underground. He worked as an occasional consultant for General Franco’s security services, and his company was involved in the building of US military bases in Spain. There was something of the pantomime Nazi about Degrelle, who never missed a chance to pose in his SS uniform or wear his Iron Cross and his Order of the Oak Leaf, and he was often photographed in front of Nazi flags and other paraphernalia. He remained to the end a vocal neo-Nazi, anti-Semite and dubious friend to the stars. There’s a comical photograph of him, ‘avec son ami Alain Delon’, during the filming of Zorro in Spain in 1974. This was the same film of Zorro I watched with my great-grandmother, who had known Degrelle, in her room when I was a child. Delon is in his Zorro uniform, and Degrelle is in a crisp cream suit. He married off his daughters in full SS regalia and stooping under the weight of his Nazi decorations. He once sent some of his cartoons to Hergé, and later claimed to have been the inspiration for Tintin. Is it true? We do know that in the 1930s Degrelle was in the US working as a correspondent for Le Soir when Hergé was a reporter at its Brussels office; we know that they knew each other, and we know that Degrelle sent Hergé some American comics, which according to Degrelle, set Hergé off. What is for sure is that Degrelle has a small place in the grey area that is Hergé’s own relationship with the German occupiers.

  Fabulist, liar, vainglorious fantasist, fascist dandy, what strikes us the most about Degrelle in the recordings we have of him is his complete undefeatedness. On recordings you can find on YouTube, he rails in a thick Bouillonnais accent (sixty years since he visited the place but it’s as if the accent has been kept in brine, perfectly preserved) about world Jewry, Bolshevism, Islam, and talks about his friends Jean-Marie Le Pen, Franco, Salazar, et al. Another of his visitors was the French actress Arletty who was herself arrested after the war for her relationship with a German officer. Her reply – ‘Mon coeur est français mais mon cul est international,’ ‘My heart is French but my arse is international’ – shows that a certain panache is always useful, even at times of vigorous national retribution. Degrelle’s family paid the price: his brother, a local pharmacist, was assassinated by the Belgian resistance (see below, ‘Edouard Degrelle and Henri Charles’), and his mother died in prison after the war.

  Degrelle himself died a defiant, happy, tanned, unapologetic Nazi, and asked to have his ashes scattered over the ‘Tombeau du Géant’, a beautiful hill beside Bouillon covered in pines and encircled by a bracelet of water that doesn’t just run over the stones but flexes like clear muscle over its riverbed. It’s a Wagnerian location, a giant’s tomb in the Ardennes, and it says something about the way Degrelle saw himself: consumed in a Walloon Götterdämmerung. In the end a group of neo-Nazis accompanied one of Degrelle’s comrades-in-arms to Germany, where they clandestinely scattered his ashes on the site of Berchtesgaden. A final, filial, homage to the Führer, these Bouillonnais ashes invested in German soil.

  There is no plaque or monument to Degrelle, but he is the cause of plaques and monuments to others. To this day, the grave of Degrelle’s youngest brother, who died at the age of two, is still tended and flowered, by persons unknown, in the infant’s section of Bouillon cemetery.

  WALLOON PARTY SONGS

  WALLOON IS A variety of French dialect, and was until recently one of the few minority languages still spoken in the cities and industrial heartlands. This can be inferred by the preponderance of aprons and overalls on the record sleeve of this old family favourite. Walloon is concentrated around the big cities of Liège, or Lîdje, and Charleroi, or Tchârlerwé, where the legendary Bob Deschamps
came from. Although Walloon has declined as a community language, its riches still seep into Belgian French and, notably, into the various patois of towns like Bouillon. In fact, Bouillon patois sounds so much like Walloon that you have to know Walloon in order to know that it isn’t. The only other country where Walloon was spoken in any concentration for the duration of more than one immigrant generation is Wisconsin, where thousands of Walloon industrial workers went to live in the mid-1800s. Recordings from the Wisconsin Oral History Network show that a surprising number of people still spoke Walloon into the 1980s. The number is surprising not because it is large, but because it is any sort of number at all.

  EDOUARD DEGRELLE AND HENRI CHARLES

  DEGRELLE’S STORY IS intertwined with Bouillon’s and thus, in a small way, with my family’s.

  Degrelle had a brother, Edouard, who ran a pharmacy on Boulevard Heynen. When I was growing up the building was a Tiercé, the local betting shop, and was flanked by a friture and a grocer’s, and sat among a few chokingly drab clothes shops. There’s now an artisan-glacier and a chocolate shop, and several of the old shops have become private homes. They’ve kept their huge windows but these are blocked off with thick lace curtains, through which you can still make out the blue of TV screens and old people moving with the slowness of fish in an aquarium. Across the river you can see the pedalo-hire kiosk and the Café Rimbaud.