Whenever during a walk we have to pass one of those alleys because making a detour is not possible, my father invariably quickens his pace. He takes me by the hand, pulls me along and I laugh. It doesn’t occur to me that a grown man like him can know fear, the element that dominates childhood and loses both its brilliance and its darkness as one grows up — an awakening that in my eyes has always seemed more a long-drawn-out process of falling asleep.
One anaesthetizes oneself against the lucidity that brings fear with it as one grows up. The unbearable sharpness of vision that it opens in us admits of only three responses: flight into blind panic, lethargy, or confronting the situation as it is in order to act decisively.
My father is too calm by nature to panic. He is the cell wall that surrounds my mother, my brother and me in order to protect us from the dangers of the outside world.
“We’ve got to hurry a bit, my girl,” he says. “It’s not healthy for you here, with that stinking water down there.”
I try to take as big steps as he over the paving stones, but I can’t. I stroll behind him, scanning his steps with the syncopated dance of my heels and soles. Only later does it strike me how much the route of those walks meanders, how small the area of the town covered by our promenades is before they encounter unmarked limits, so that in retrospect our excursions seem to me to resemble the hopeless pacing to and fro of a predator behind bars at the zoo or the circus.
I miss the bustle of the streets in those days. The swarming of the masses, the hats, the caps, the umbrellas, the thronging about among the horse trams, the coaches, the carts. The festive chaos in the time before the car enforces its segregation between pedestrians and bicycles on the street can impose itself on me with such sharpness that I wonder: did I really see all this? Have I stored all those scenes, all those still lifes, unwittingly inside me? The delight of unleashing them is too strong for my constitution, too unadulterated.
I remember the pleasure that took hold of me during family New Year parties, because God, or Time, or whatever, was kind enough to make us a gift of a whole new year, still for a little while as pristine and quivering like the pudding on the silver salver that Emilie brought to the table for dessert.
Our days were dome-shaped, exhibition palaces in steel and glass. Beneath their translucent womb wall were the resplendent palm gardens of our lifestyle, heated with coal and gas.
“What a brilliant stroke of inspiration Belgium is!” chuckles my father during the banquet. The wine frees up the mild irony with which he is always able to disarm me.
He raises his glass. “To Belgium! Our mountains are not too high, and our rivers not too deep. Not too big, not too small. Belgium is completely accessible and navigable.”
A country like a Liège waffle, I think now. Crispy outside, but with a heart of white-hot dough. The morality of the Father, king and law forced its rigid system on the town, which divided satiety in unequal portions among the countless throng who hungered and thirsted after pleasure, and what they did not get they would sooner or later steal. That’s how it has always been, and so it shall be for all time — history is another word for hunger, and hunger does not speak but gnaws.
If I was to believe the nuns at the school where my mother sent me when I turned eleven, the Almighty Himself had created Belgium, a second Genesis in a minor key. Just to bring Belgium into being He had sent a succession of disputes and revolutions raging through the old Europe like earthquakes, and had made other countries clash until cracks appeared and somewhere a splinter shot out, which was knocked into shape until Belgium was there. Back in the days when the Romans made camp here, and long before that, when humanity was messing about with flint, He, Whose work the nuns regarded as a heavenly form of needlework, had refined the idea of “Belgium” further and further. Old atlases preserve the outlines of his first patterns. He had drawn chalk lines, stuck in pins, changed His mind and begun again, and once more and again till gradually His Very Own Nation took shape and everything was finally where it obviously had to be: between the accursed heretics in the north and the despicable revolutionaries in the south. God’s own garden, His second Eden, in which a new Adam this time had, thank God, given everything nice French names and soon filled the air with the hammering of his energy and industry. For we Belgians are hard workers, exulted the nuns and praised the Lord.
But when we went to the sea annually on the train at the end of spring, like everyone who could afford the luxury of a few days off, the country looked so small, so diminutive, that the thundering of the locomotive and the carriages seemed to continue right up to the borders, as if we were nothing more than a nation of cardboard, a painted background for a group portrait or the backdrop for an operetta.
For all the frail ladies’ toes that preciously tested the coolness of the waves from the steps of the bathing carriages in Blankenberge, De Haan or Ostend, elsewhere children’s fingers were dipping matchwood into steaming cauldrons of liquid sulphur, girls’ hands carded cotton, threaded yarn onto spools or chain cylinders, from siphon to shuttle, and twined and twisted, and beat jute and plucked felt, or sewed the gloves that my mother and I put on to stroll along the promenade. It was a world I saw only later, when my brother was instructed to take me out for a breath of air, although it was under my nose all the time, in the corners of the town that my father avoided on our walks.
If there was a pub at the bottom of the alleyways on the steep slopes by the river, which my father always walked quickly past, one of the pubs in which Emilie got up to God knows what on her days off, there was often noise from down below: laughter, screaming, violent disputes, the surf of a volcanic euphoria which could turn into its opposite at any moment. Papers, which my father hid in vain from my brother and me, reported that in those parts of town eruptions spread to adjacent properties, and perhaps without the intervention of the gendarmes would have reached our better neighbourhoods.
On one occasion I see, during the annual Whitsun fair, in the big square in front of the abbey, children not much older than me, loudly encouraged by the adults around them, throwing mud and horse manure at the front of the collegiate church where a service is going on.
My mother pulls me briskly away from the scene. She seldom has a good word to say about priests, but religious matters are among the things in life that a person, as she usually says, can better “leave well alone”.
As she pulls me after her through the crowds of visitors to the fair to the other side of the square, the roundabouts and swings suddenly seem more than ghostly machines that unleash nothing but pleasure. Their mechanisms appear, if not finely enough tuned or insufficiently calibrated, able to put natural laws out of action and release unprecedented energies. Festivals and fairs suddenly strike me as pregnant with a hidden power that provoke a disaster that my parents only ever admit into their conversation in the most covert terms.