He plopped onto his seat, adjusted it to the reclined position, closed his eyes and continued. Addressing Stephan, one of his favorite students, he said: “Suppose I watch our Great Leader on the television — assuming we are in a totalitarian country — and this incongruous phrase forms in my head: ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ because at school, that’s what we shouted at one of our classmates who was a little chubby and the Great Leader had put on some weight in the past few months…So, Stephan, you are a functionary of the Ministry of Control of the People’s Thoughts and the electrodes are informing on me. The brain of citizen John Van Duursen, at 8:56pm, was crossed by the words ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ at the moment when our glorious Guide appeared on the little screen — so, Stephan, the question is: Am I responsible for this concatenation of words that formed without my being able to do anything about it?”
The Thalys had just set off and was now gliding out of the station, with the city on the left and the port on the right. “Il y a des marins qui naissent / dans la chaleur épaisse…”, the song popped into John’s head; he very much admired the great Jacques Brel. Look who was adding grist to his mill now (“So to speak,” thought John, vexed at not having anyone to whom he could remark that to add grist to the mill of a Batavian was certainly as pointless as supplying coal to Newcastle or sand to the Sahara).
“Looks like I got a little derailed there,” he said — and he heard the phrase: “You mean, a little detailed?” Ha, ha. Here we have the clear proof of his theory: our thoughts don’t belong to us, for the most part. They fall under the jurisdiction of…what’s the phrase? Ah yes: spontaneous generation. They are little electric currents that…Anyway. He dove back into his magazine. The phrase “funny place to meet up” was all the more incongruous because he knew perfectly well why he was going to Brussels: to put an end to his relationship. Funny place to break up.
Annie hasn’t smoked for a long time. She renounced her vice for John, her Hollandais (“No, Annie, Holland is only a province of the Netherlands. I am né-er-lan-dais.”)…her capricious Néerlandais, a bit stubborn, terribly intelligent. She doesn’t smoke anything and so much the better, for there is no longer anywhere to “light up”—she learned that expression from John — in the Gare du Nord, where she is waiting for the Thalys that will take her to Brussels. For the first time in months, her fingers are itching for it, she bites her lips, this would be the moment to exhale her anxiety in the cigarette’s smoke. She raises her eyes toward the board that she’s consulted a thousand times since the start, two years ago, of her long-distance relationship with the great Batavian she is about to meet in the land of Tintin.
The train leaves in fifteen minutes. I have time to go buy a newspaper. A bit more than an hour and I’ll be in Brussels. It’s curious, he didn’t seem surprised when I proposed we spend the weekend there, instead of meeting up, per usual, in Paris or Amsterdam. He didn’t ask any questions…What would I have replied? We began this adventure in Brussels, it’s logical (she hesitates, perhaps that’s not the appropriate word), it’s right (suitable? appropriate?) that we separate there, like a loop closing itself, at once finished and infinite. How will John react to the decision she had made? To break up.
Car 17. After leaving her suitcase at the entrance, Annie goes to sit in the seat indicated on her ticket, discreetly stuffs Quies earplugs in her ears — no interest in hearing the multilingual jabbering of her neighbors — and takes out her newspaper. “The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair” continues. It’s a godsend for the press, whose sales are exploding. Everyone has an opinion on the topic. As it happens, it was the cause of her latest fight with John. Fight? Let’s say snag, a cultural misunderstanding… “This type of scandal wouldn’t happen in my country,” John had decreed with that little air of moral superiority that frustrated Annie so much.
“That’s right, treat us like degenerates while you’re at it.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate. You know I adore France. But come on, you let everything slide with your male politicians.”
“Yours don’t interest anybody, that’s why we don’t go digging through their private lives. Who ever heard talk of Balkenende or Rutte?”
It wasn’t the first time they had quarreled, but that time had left a sour taste in her mouth. Was it possible to spend one’s life with someone who always assumed the role of moral authority? A man she believed she loved but who irritated her with his obsessive reduction of everything to the following certitude: he knew what was right and she had no choice but to come around to his opinion. The Thalys was trundling now through the Parisian suburbs before reaching its tremendous speed in the plains of the north. “It’s hard enough with each of us living in our own country, to always have these three hours of train between us,” she thought. “If on top of that I have to live in a sort of permanent guilt because I don’t have the Calvinist principles of Monsieur…” She remembered that John Calvin was French but didn’t know how to turn the phrase to her advantage. Oh, whatever…Her eyes lingered again on the headline of her daily. Look at that, Johnny Hallyday is playing the actor, on the stage. In a play by Tennessee Williams, no less. She dreamed for an instant about going to see it with John but collided with another one of his principles: a play is done in the language in which it was written. Easy to say, when you’re a polyglot like him. I’m a professor of history, not letters. I prattle through a bit of English. Thankfully he speaks my language. Ah, another theme of our squabbles. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would partake in long conversations in Dutch, in Amsterdam, in a café or at the home of friends, unconcerned that she didn’t understand a word.
“You just have to learn Dutch.”
“When, where, how? And why? All Dutch people speak English. And all I can make out is the ghrs and the khs in that variety of sub-German.”
In that instance, he was the one who got angry. First of all, Dutch was its own language, not a dialect. And it was the richest language in the world. Yes, madam! He had insisted on showing her, shaking with anger, the twenty or twenty-two volumes of the great dictionary of the Dutch language, “with more entries than the Oxford English Dictionary or the Grand Larousse.” The quarrel lasted hours.
She tells herself she’ll go light a votive candle at the church of Sainte-Catherine, in that pretty neighborhood in the center of Brussels, once she’s no longer with John. She’s not at all religious, but that would be a way to close the chapter. When the votive candle has been burned through, the relationship will have been utterly burnt out. Or else the reverse?
They had agreed to meet on the Place Jourdan, in a big hotel recommended by a diplomat friend. When Annie entered, she saw John sitting on a vast patio decorated with works of art and lit up by a skylight. She was impressed with the place. John had already checked in and was holding the room key in his hand. They kissed on the cheek like strangers. In any case, John didn’t like public displays of affection. He brought her to the seventh floor (“seventh heaven, it’s over,” she thought with a pang of emotion…) and showed her with slightly melancholic pride the modern and comfortable suite with a beautiful view of Brussels. They struggled to recognize a few monuments in the distance. She was afraid he would want to take her in his arms, but he contented himself with waiting for her in the little living room, sitting on the sofa while she dropped off her things in the bedroom. She made a quick tour of the bathroom (everything was perfect) and then returned to the living room. In a cheerful tone she asked: