Compared with this scholastic finesse of needle and thread, the sewing work of my mother and her friends represented little more than clumsy popular devotion, but more especially it seemed to me only logical that Belgium was not a country of embroidery or knitwear, but of lace. In a place where the art of lacking was practised so exuberantly and ubiquitously, something like Belgium was bound to be born sooner or later: a nation that was constantly playing on the fringes of its own emptiness, just as all of us, driven by our soul, our most intimate vacuum, have continually to knit ourselves together.
That was more or less the conclusion of our historians. They filled bulky volumes with explanations for the creation of our fatherland, wedged between north and south, east and west: a region whose specific feature was mainly the absence of specific features, where different spheres of influence operated as capriciously as the high- and low-pressure areas in their hopeless struggle in the sky above our heads. Those learned gentlemen usually came to the conclusion that if Belgium had not been invented, someone would have had to discover it.
*
“Helena, child, my little gazelle,” laughed my brother after a while. “Your mental gymnastics always make me thirsty. Shall we have a drink somewhere?”
We usually went to the cafés around one of the stations, never to the establishments which of course he only frequented when the night gave the streets a salutary anonymity. It did us good to feel our tiredness, the pain in our legs from the long walk, and we sank contentedly onto one of the terraces to be able to sit and absorb the life around the station square.
We liked the fragmentary nature of our home town, because we wanted to be fragmentary ourselves, free of the corsets into which the older generation wanted to force us, and I wonder why I should glue the pieces together here. In the museums, where Edgard and I sometimes sheltered from an unexpected cloudburst, the mouth or wing of a seraph on a shard of a stained-glass window from the Middle Ages evoked its figure more tangibly than if the angel had arisen full-length in front of us, high in the transept of the cathedral, where a stone or cannon shot had shattered it.
Why should it be different with people, or with the words that I see clinging together here with some disgust? It is as if I have never been able to shake off my mother’s admonition that I was hopeless at needlework. A firm tissue laces itself as if automatically to the pincushion of this page. I see my thoughts take the form of sentence constructions that accommodate an enervating abundance of furniture, curtaining and supporting cushions like the stuffed interiors in which I grew up. Even the voices of my father, my mother, my brother and myself start speaking again as we thought we should speak to each other: with an eloquence that betrayed how closely we listened to ourselves.
Maintenir was the key concept of our class. We didn’t have conversations in those days, cultured people maintained them. We didn’t give dinner parties, we maintained a table. We did not enjoy reading, we maintained our knowledge of literature. We didn’t have friendships, but formed affectionate attachments, maintained the best relations, strengthened connections; we maintained, we maintained and we told ourselves that this was in no way a duty, or a mission, or even a choice. It was quite simply a fact that with the deaf and dumb inexorability of gravity worked equally on all things at once.
And from all that maintenir the whole edifice of civilization rose up almost as a matter of course, as natural and unconsidered as the wax that honey bees secrete, and of which their honeycombs are made. Although without the diligence of our own class, we thought, this fine-meshed labyrinth of wrought iron and plate glass, all that architectural know-how, would naturally never have got off the ground. We regarded ourselves without any hesitation as the salutary middle way. Without us the world could only go under in the anarchistic tumult of the mass below us, or evaporate in the drawl of nobility and old money in the stratosphere above — we kept things in balance.
“So God, if I’ve got it straight,” laughed my brother, when I talked to him about my personal theodicy over a glass of mint water, “has actually created the ideal thermostat in the bourgeois.”
I laughed heartily with him.
*
However butterfly-light and refined that vanished world considered itself, it had a weight. It weighed on me and on everyone. Everywhere, whether we want to or not, we always carry a whole globe on our shoulders. And, just as in my childhood I regularly visited our basement kitchen to find a less artificial dimension of life in Emilie, our maid, not least in her rough dialect, which, I felt, sounded “more real” than our language, so almost everyone longed, secretly or not, for a form of release from the sophisticated lacework that we at the same time “maintained”.
There was a hidden thirst for some form or other of ritual laxative: a collective cleansing that would greatly benefit the metabolism of our civilization. We obviously had to remind ourselves at regular intervals that, all things considered, we remained apes with clothes on, who in a circus of our own making jumped through hoops and threatened to forget that we were basically swinging on creepers and eating bananas. That would greatly improve our health, though admittedly we lost sight of the fact that a person, besides being too sick, can sometimes turn out healthier than is good for him.
Be that as it may, I liked the evening hours, especially in early summer, when the blue turning to purple moved in from east to west behind the increasingly elongated sunset, and in the cafés and restaurants around the station the lights were turned on, while it was not yet completely dark outside — the moment when the pigeons go to sleep and the bats wake up. The city became an area of transition, a twilight zone on the unstable boundary between day and night. The bow was a little less taut, the yoke lifted from the shoulders.
*
“And soon the minister will put his nightcap on,” I said to my brother as we both sipped our supposedly well-earned refreshment. “And the market-stall lady, and the bishop and the greengrocer. And then the curtain will fall, and the rest is silence.”
My brother was silent, but under his nose his milky moustache went to and fro in a lively way on his top lip, an expression of my father’s which he must have noticed and which he may have been deliberately imitating. He liked to make an impression of worldly wisdom on me. When I said something, I saw him thinking and running through a large number of possible answers in his head — for or against, usually against.
He brought his glass to his lips, drank a mouthful and looked out over the square in front of the station, where the last street trader was loading his wares onto a handcart, and sniggered without looking at me. “Dear girl, dear girl,” he chortled. “Either your eyes are full of shit, or you don’t get out enough. When it gets dark is when the show starts.”
He knew more parts of town, more layers and hemispheres than I and perhaps my mother. He was probably less familiar with the establishments that seldom advertised themselves as such on the outside, but behind their closed fronts hid a world of abundant plush, subdued red lighting, intimate boudoirs and painted girls, than with the meat market, which at once more and less visibly took place around the kiosk in the town park, in the vicinity of certain urinals or in certain cafés where an unwritten code of behaviour, facial expressions and phrases gave a double meaning to everything said or not said.
Later, after the war, he would point it out to me as we walked arm in arm through the park. What to look out for. What the signals were. Ways of hanging about. All too furtive glances. Where you sat down, on what bench and how.
I don’t know if he told me everything. Perhaps he sometimes pulled my leg, so that in almost every gesture, every detail of clothing I suspected a fascinating iconography of male lust.