Low Country … Brussels

Yesterday we went out to Tervuren. In the park the heat was scorching and fish were jumping in dirty green ponds linked like a canal. Under the trees was cool but the Africa Museum in the old palace was distinguished by the combination of hot weather and myriad stuffed animals. It smelled rather like a crusty old cowshed, with a soupçon of the wild smell of fear and danger. The dubious merits of such a memorial to Belgium’s colonial past have to be balanced against the fact that they clearly had an awful lot of stuff and needed somewhere to put it.

6 July 2006

In the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels the two paintings I like the most are of contrasting seasons. One is a sunny, flax-harvesting scene by Emile Claus and the other a depiction of skaters on a frozen river, with a bird trap on the bank, by the elder Brueghel.

Ten years before the hot afternoon in Tervuren, a first visit to Brussels had involved a different woman and a somewhat frostier atmosphere. TV shots of European Union landmarks had given no true advance impression of the Belgian capital. It was more like Auden’s poem, Brussels in Winter. Wandering through cold streets, I knew the formula had escaped me alright.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, in well-seasoned exasperation.
“I’m freezing.”
“Well, you should be wearing layers. That’s how to dress, over here, in winter. Don’t you know that?”

In the church of Saint Nicolas, near the Grand’ Place, I lit a candle as an offering to Job. She saw what I was doing and for a moment her old warmth and amusement seemed to return. Back in her place in the gentrifying eastern Schaerbeek, I fell asleep in my overcoat on her couch as she sat at a computer across the room. It was a strange kind of sickness, like a flu which never took hold but enveloped the gloom and left me in a daze. When I awoke, she was smiling.

“What’s so funny?”
“You’re such a waster,” she kindly explained.

Brussels has a split personality, the French light and the Flemish shadow. By that I chiefly mean the cold reaction of the Flemish minority in the city if addressed in French. Then there are the many thousands of Eurocrats. An ambassador (2006) confided to me that, out of their ranks, having to ship people home after psychotic episodes was by no means uncommon.

In 1996, Brussels was a city whose ghostly, darkened, Gallic facades on our walk home the night before, when not a harsh word was spoken, had made me wish to return on stronger ground sometime. In 2006, I found Booze ’n’ Blues, near the Bourse. It was my kind of bar, narrow with high stools and old sounds that filled the silences of the other female companion, hopelessly marooned in her own thoughts.

There was a black and white photo behind the counter of Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré and Georges Brassens, all at a table covered in ashtrays, bottles, glasses and mikes. Apart from them I focused on the lethal, narrow, spiral staircase to the basement.

The next day, the launderette was another quietly shared activity. I carried the black sack along Rue Dupont. “Welcome to Turkey town,” the sack’s owner said of western Schaerbeek. “And hookers,” I added, because she’d already shown me the contents of some of the nearby windows.

P.S. … Auden (1938)

Journey to the End of the Bed

London, July 1989

The phone rang and it was Kim. He agreed to go and see her. He simply couldn’t refuse that beloved voice at the other end of the line. He hadn’t heard from her in a while but when he got there, her boyfriend was away. They had a good time in the pub on the corner that same evening before returning to the laboratory conditions of the flat, to flashbacks of the agony in the box garden.

The heavily scented bathroom had a noisy ventilator. Windowless, the enclosed space intensified the claustrophobia. There had been candles for the sacred rites after someone dried his hair too vigorously with a towel and smashed the light fitting in the ceiling. While the sturdy ventilator was booming, no one inside could hear a thing from the rest of the flat, no matter what was being said about him or her.

There was even less illumination after someone stayed in the bath so long that the hot candle wax that filled a glass ashtray on the upper of two glass shelves by the wall inside the bath caused a cracking, crashing, flaming cascade into the water and that other someone screamed through her Psycho moment.

Two of Kim’s man’s brothers were now crashing there, in the main man’s absence, so she brought him into her room to continue the chat. She sat up on the bed, leaning on the pillows. She was in one of those moods again. He took the other end but her boyfriend was in real trouble.

“Right now I feel like crawling over there and nibbling your ear,” she offered.

It was a journey to the end of the bed. Was there something the world knew that he did not? At his age, twenty-five, he wondered sometimes about that.

“But you can’t, you know that.”

He felt a little unwell but he had to tell her now.

“Have you any idea at all how much I wanted you, from the beginning?”

In the beginning, when it had been just about the two of them, there might have been a double date with Adam and Eve.

“But darling, you never gave the slightest sign of that.”

“I thought you were… you know… you hadn’t.”

“I had.”

To him she’d seemed a childlike angel with a body to confuse all the tadpoles down below, with all the false alarms, but it hadn’t been as it seemed. It never was. There had been a blessed spell in the petting zoo that lasted a month, before travels on her part intervened for the first time.

When she came back the first time, she soon said the thrill was gone. She told him he was up in the air, like a man tied to balloons in an art shop print, on one of those Dublin afternoons where there was always a bus or a train to get, but he didn’t understand what she meant.

Now, in the room, she was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke up again. Though she would end up comfortable with one of her own kind, it seemed he wasn’t quite that much of a dreamer after all.

“But wouldn’t it be a mistake for us to make love now?”

He thought of three things at that instant: the knot of bitterness and the pair of righteous brothers outside the door. The bitterness could have been overcome but, like Wilhelm Reich, he at least understood the crippling effect of a lack of privacy on human relationships. He muttered an answer instead of breaking something. He mumbled that it would.

One of the righteous brothers even entered the bedroom to give her a quick little lecture while he was in the bathroom, having flashbacks. Thereafter their conversation died away, drained unnaturally after that talking cure. He left the room for good soon after she said she was tired. He retired once more to the living room.

In the course of falling asleep again on the extendable chair, it seemed to him the emotional coast might be clear. No noise came from the flat upstairs. Presumably they still blared Doris Day, occasionally. Our lips shouldn’t touch, I like it too much. He thought again of a night in February.

As he’d reclined in his sleeping bag on the dental chair, the only light came from a far streetlight through the window. All it really needed was the faint sound of jazz but beside him Donegal Dec was lying on the floor, reciting one of his poems. He was proud of the line “Vivaldi plays on hired contraption” and why not.

The room was hot because the tenants were in the habit of leaving the radiators on all night. This only added to the claustrophobia. The window was open almost a foot. Instead of Vivaldi, the music they had to listen to consisted of Doris Day records. They were having a party upstairs and shouting voices could be heard erupting intermittently, over Doris. If it meant he really had to listen, then he waited for Move Over Darling.

Waking up in July was like the relief after an operation. Then the patient leaves the hospital, thinks he’s healed, but the scars are tender for a long time and finally leave their mark. A girl friend of hers called to the flat and the three of them went down to the park, Wormwood Scrubs. The way Kim was dressed, in light pink shorts and matching tight top, with sandals with heels, helped explain the looks she got from the chaps sitting drinking outside the couple of bars on the road. Jaws were dropping away from the pints, at the tables, across the lively traffic. He saw them. He understood them. As for the feeling in the park, he felt like tearing up tufts of burnt grass instead of contributing to the conversation. By then the summer felt like a Mediterranean climate. Another feeling was one of wondering if the emotional coast really was clear. The prison stood in the distance. What prisoner, had he known, would have swapped places with him at that moment? The common or garden psycho would have had no problem with that.

High Country … Amsterdam

January 1996

The Fall is the most famous book set in Amsterdam, “a capital of waters and fogs, girdled by canals, particularly crowded, and visited by men from all corners of the earth”. Albert Camus also wrote of it “asleep in the white night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges” and when we landed, there were snow flurries rippling across the runways at Schipol.

Viewed from the tram on the way from the station to the hotel, the snow on the dark brown stone was like a Black Forest gâteau. The cold that white night reached down as far as sixteen below. I saw the red digits and the minus on the wall of the hotel room when I woke to see a window wide open. One of my two companions had ten-thumbed the window latch.

What really made the Saturday night there, nonetheless, in the Grasshopper hash bar on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, was the episode with the guy who came up the stone steps inside the front door and then collapsed across the table beside us, smashing cups and saucers before hitting the floor like a dead man. At least, I thought he might be dead. The most famous song about Amsterdam is also in French and Jacques Brel had put it well. Tout à coup l’accordéon expire.

The bunch of teenage American girls at the table of smashed crockery went, “Omigaad, is he OK?” “I hope so,” replied the cute little Dutch one who reluctantly came out from behind the counter. Sitting nearest the body, I helped her pick him up, as a teen asked one of my companions a question.

“Is your friend a doctor?”
“No. But it’s OK, he’s got a Master’s in Sociology.”

The guy we hauled up and plonked on a seat rested for a minute or two before making his way unaided to the toilet. Later that same night, the Bamboo bar was where we met another young American, a chancer who came in with a Dutch mother and daughter. This chap discreetly explained the presence of his two companions.

“I picked up these two babes in a McDonalds.”

The daughter was in her early forties, a good-looking Germanic blonde, among many, among the menacing trams and bicycles. Her mother was maybe seventy. She looked like a grandmother. The American had gone up to them in the burger debris and given them a little-boy-lost story. The charm worked and later he bought them a drink or two before they all arrived at the Bamboo and squeezed in around the big, round table.

At this stage the daughter was clearly on a high, which was only added to by the fact of getting into the bar, away from the cold and the snow and the slush and the frozen canals. She was waving money and insisting on getting the drinks and laughing and seemingly telling her mother that she didn’t have to stay if she was fed up.

I didn’t think the mother looked too bothered, actually, with the lights reflecting on her round glasses. There was a crowd and a blues band down the back. The daughter just seemed thrilled to be having a bit of fun. I imagined a suburban home and a divorce. The young American looked to be on a definite promise that night.

P.S.

In 1997, a BBC documentary on Camus ended with the camera on the warm, sunlit trees along the empty French road where he died in January 1960. His last four love letters, read in a solemn voice-over by the actor Brian Cox, were unintentionally funny. None winged its way to Francine, the wife he so ill-used. Each time, the only changes to the artist’s passion were the woman’s name and the day or time they were to meet, after he got back to Paris. How did he get time to write a line?