Christ’s Entry Into Brussels Read online

  Christ’s Entry into Brussels

  (In the year 2000 and something, or thereabouts)

  DIMITRI VERHULST

  Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

  For Chris, Gerard & Lieven

  La la la lala la la la la la la

  lalala lalala la la la la la la

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  First Station

  Second Station

  Third Station

  Fourth Station

  Fifth Station

  Sixth Station

  Seventh Station

  Eighth Station

  Ninth Station

  Tenth Station

  Eleventh Station

  Twelfth Station

  Thirteenth Station

  Fourteenth Station

  About the Author

  ALSO BY DIMITRI VERHULST FROM PORTOBELLO BOOKS

  Copyright

  First Station

  People claim that starting a story with a description of the weather shows a distinct lack of craft and I see where they’re coming from. But that doesn’t mean I have a better alternative – and believe me, I’ve considered them all – than opening this account by stating that it was not raining on the morning of the day on which it was announced that Christ would soon be visiting Brussels. It was more the nondescript kind of weather Belgium excels in, the weather that helps it maintain its position as a global leader in the consumption of antidepressants. It’s a phenomenon that is more than familiar to anyone who’s ever flown to our capital: fluffy, fleecy, candy-floss clouds clumping together the moment you enter our air space and darkening as the descent commences. Thick and gloomy, they gather over the runway, and the first sight of that mass of cloud is generally enough to drain any batteries the homecoming passengers have recharged over the course of their holiday. The rattling aircraft drills a path through the thick mists, a voice pants à la française that it’s time to fasten your seatbelts, and a different voice says the same thing in no-nonsense Dutch while straining to conceal a Leuven accent. Weeks of constant rain is the only realistic expectation and it’s always surprising how low you’ve already sunk when you finally see the ground, how much detail you can make out as you study the lawns on which trampolines stand next to big, blue, unused soup bowls of swimming pools, the square middle-class villas lining the roads, the neatly trimmed hedges surrounding the houses, the neighbourhoods in which alarm systems protect children and chattels. But, no … it’s not raining. It’s neither hot nor cold, grey nor blue, and definitely not one of the two hundred annual days of precipitation that fans of averages are so fond of quoting. The wind is blowing from where it generally blows from, the southwest, nowhere near strong, but with just enough force to convince lazy cyclists to subject themselves to the misery of public transport.

  That was the kind of weather on that particular morning, and predicting it would have been a cinch. It wasn’t raining – I’m happy to repeat that – not in the slightest, not a single stray drop was falling from the sky. And because the inhabitants of this kingdom value the anonymity provided so perfectly by an umbrella, it was up to them to imagine their umbrellas: cocoons, psychological demarcations, walls separating them one from the other to make sure there was no need for contact. Fashionable tracksuits were kitted out with cowls the young were only too keen to use, drawing their whole troublesome personality back out of sight or pushing the earphones of their MP3 players deeper into their earholes to shut out the ugly sounds of the world. On all lines, above and below ground, between Gare du Nord and Foyer Schaerbeekois, between Berchem Shopping and the Porte d’Anderlecht, between the stop for Montgomery and the stop for Gare de l’Ouest, everywhere, commuters were texting chit-chat somewhere else – the form of communication they hid behind to avoid conversation. Faces were buried in newspapers, noses turned towards windows, leaving damp spots behind on the glass. If not for the bell that rang to alert passengers to approaching stops and the occasional wild cry rising from a baby’s buggy, there would have been nothing at all to distract the figures in this deaf-and-dumb tableau from their own ongoing funeral procession.

  Those who believe there’s no such thing as coincidence consider it prophetic that Pieter Bruegel the Elder, possibly the city’s best-known son, nicknamed Peer the Turd, assured himself of a place in history by painting the most famous of all biblical towers. With its frustration at being hindered in all things by its mishmash of languages, Brussels had in any case been compared many times to the ziggurat of Babel. Inside its buildings, the inhabitants prayed, dreamt, threw plates and made love in every possible dialect from every corner of the globe. But on trams, trains and buses, they were all just languages to shut up in. And what few dared to admit was that most people were delighted to live in a place where humanity was present in all its diversity. It gave everyone with inborn antisocial tendencies a cheap excuse for hiding behind the façade of their mother tongue.

  There was no point angling for a smile or a hello in the city centre, unless of course you were dealing with shop assistants who were willing to demean themselves with a touch of friendliness in an attempt to offload some summer stock that had already gone out of fashion. Haste and speed – whether more or less of either – were a barrier to any kind of politeness: the word ‘please’ was a waste of valuable time. People hoping to return home with their faces unscathed were better off assuming that nobody would be holding any doors open for them.

  Back in front of their own flickering fireplace, these individuals slithered over to their computers, where they used pseudonyms to spew poison on all kinds of blogs. They spat in the face of entire communities, juggled obscenities and accompanied their foul-mouthed diatribes with threats aimed at those whose opinions were a consequence of actual thought. But in physically tangible reality, they were heads without speech bubbles, outstanding performers in their roles as silent extras in the metropolitan mass spectacle.

  It wasn’t raining, unless you went by people’s faces. Drained and rained on, soaked and oafish every day.

  The news of Christ’s coming – and I, despite being averse to all persuasions, can only call it happy – reached most of us Belgians, bravest of all the Gauls, in the glass cathedrals of the central business district after we got bored with the umpteenth game of patience and surfed to a news site, frowning deeply and chewing the ends of our pencils in a pretence of concentration designed to mislead our heads of department. There it was, tucked away between an item about an attempt on the world hotdog-eating record and one listing the latest antics of a female pop singer. Christ was coming to Brussels on the twenty-first of July. Although anonymous, the sources were highly reliable and His coming was a definite fact. Further information would follow.

  The serenity with which this item was both presented and read was as miraculous as its contents. True, society had secularised to its heart’s content, but most people still had more faith in God than in journalism. The hacks had fewer and fewer scruples when it came to filling pages, columns were farmed out to celebrities with more fame than brain and, judging by the number of words, a TV quiz was considered more important than the suffering in places like Sudan. Journalists flaunted the term ‘sexy’, applying it to both politicians and shares. Editors did their moral duty by placing an article about ecological degradation in the news section, then filled the weekend supplement with praise for shamelessly fashionable trips to distant kerosene-guzzling paradises. If the newspaper grew tired of the real world, it commissioned a pollster to produce a statistic that conned the readers into believing that French-speaking Belgians spent more time in their kitchens than Dutch-speaking Belgians, vaguely insinuati
ng that these were two completely different species with distinct DNA sequences and thought pat terns. And even more pernicious for the reputations of the paper whistle-blowers was the indiscriminate way they swallowed and propagated so much guff. A young film-maker who was hungry for the attention of the public only needed to dispatch a press release that his latest cinematic effort had won the Golden Applause Meter at the renowned Sarajevo Film Festival and the next day the article would be picked up by fourteen independent and ostensibly critical papers. Clearly, we had no reason to get excited about the news of Christ’s coming.

  *

  I can’t remember anyone jumping up out of their office chair that afternoon. Nobody burst out laughing at reading something that could easily have been taken as an inspired joke; no religious souls crossed themselves; no cries of joy interrupted the harping song of the printers and photocopiers. And even the smokers – brought together by the Ministry of Health as the common enemy and forced to spend their breaks outside on public display as weak-willed objects of ridicule – kept this quite extraordinary fact out of their conversations. Of course, we had to leave the head of department under the illusion that we had busied ourselves exclusively with the details of invoices; we didn’t want our salaries called into question. And it was also possible that we simply didn’t believe our own eyes. Afraid of it being an unnoticed typo, we waited for someone more courageous to finally expose themselves to ridicule by saying, ‘Hey, did you see that article, Jesus Christ …’

  We all read the news alone and kept it to ourselves.

  It was raining when we clocked off that evening. Quite heavily, in fact. But you wouldn’t have known it from the way people were acting. Umbrellas remained unopened. Even adults were skipping from puddle to puddle. Drivers realised that they’d forgotten to beep their horns like idiots and had still managed to make it from one end of the Rue de la Loi to the other without picking up any fresh dents. On the tram a woman suddenly said, ‘Nous sommes des passeurs, nous avons besoin de mots des autres,’ because she had just read it in her newspaper and found it so beautiful that she felt a need to say the whole sentence out loud. A very small part of her wanted, out of habit, to apologise for this impulsive act, but it was too late: she had broken through the commuters’ lethargy with her words and she had enjoyed it.

  For myself, I did something I hadn’t done for ages and stopped in Les Jardins du Luxembourg to buy flowers for my wife, white ones. A whim that showed me, more than anyone else, that I was apparently still willing to work on stopping that sleepy marriage of ours from dozing off permanently.

  Second Station

  Belgium is one of the Holy Family’s favourite travel destinations, always has been. Anyone who has combed through the archives of the Roman Curia can attest to that. Most notable was the dark year of 1933, when the Virgin Mary appeared on Belgian soil so often it must have been quiet up in Heaven. Just over forty days before the start of the calendar year, on the nineteenth of November 1932, She started Her run on top of the railway viaduct of Beauraing, beaming as if She’d knocked back a glass too many of Elixir d’Anvers, and aiming that somewhat sinister smile at five children of humble origins. Up to and including the third of January 1933, She would appear to these children no less than thirty times, standing beneath the branches of a hawthorn hedge. ‘I am the Queen of Heaven,’ the body in the radiant glow declaimed, ‘Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God. Pray to Me! Pray always!’ The news spread like syphilis and soon coaches headed for the mystical site were leaving Brussels, Charleroi, Givet, Dinant, Namur and St. Hubert. From all over the magnificent Gothic-novelist-favouring Ardennes, extra trains to Beauraing were scheduled so that all and sundry could witness the miracle. The children to whom the Mother of God had revealed Herself were observed by a range of psychiatrists, all of whom reached the independent conclusion that not one of the five had a screw loose. Completely normal children, touched by ecstasy. The people – having arrived en masse from all regions of the country with picnic baskets and rosary beads and warming themselves in their misery on this revival of religious mania – sang to the Madonna, ‘… extend Your blessed hand out over Belgium.’

  Twelve days later and 85 kilometres down the road, in Banneux, a village whose only claim to fame prior to that day had been its colossal pies, the Blessed Virgin appeared again to another child, a girl called Mariette Beco, a semi-namesake, and led her to a trickling spring with the cryptic words, ‘This spring is reserved for all nations – to relieve the sick.’

  And Mary did extend Her blessed hand out over Belgium: in that same year the most famous of all mothers popped up in Herzele, Onkerzele, Etikhove, Olsene, Tubize, Wielsbeke, Wilrijk, Verviers, Berchem and Foy-Notre-Dame, unhindered by language boundaries and to the great merriment of building contractors, as every apparition was honoured by the immediate construction of a chapel. Many saw it all as proof of Mary’s disinterest in geopolitics, because if there was anywhere She could have assisted mankind with Her apparitions in 1933, it was Germany, where a new Messiah had just arisen, one with less beard than his predecessor but a more neatly trimmed moustache.

  The Blessed Virgin Mary: She’d been here so often, She probably knew Belgium better than She knew the Holy Land itself. Hail Queen of Heaven, the ocean’s tar … thrown on life’s urge, we claim thy car.

  But 1933 wasn’t the only year to feature disproportionately in God’s mum’s travel diary. In 1415 the devout peasants of Scherpenheuvel placed a statue of the Virgin Mary in a hollow oak. In the absence of reliable doctors, and still awaiting the invention of antibiotics, the local ague sufferers went there to pray, apparently with success. When a shepherd tried to steal the statue, he was immediately struck with paralysis and unable to move from the spot, as if frozen in place. It was only after the holy statue had been returned to the hollow that he could be liberated from his comic predicament. Later, in 1603, drops of blood rolled down over the lips of that same statue, a gruesome fact that was passed down to us by no less than three eye witnesses. Someone who wouldn’t question a single comma in this story is Maria Linden, yet another namesake. In September 1982, this resident of the municipality of Maasmechelen noticed the plaster statues of Mary on her mantelpiece weeping tears of blood. The news crew from the national broadcaster arrived just a little too late to capture what would have been an international first.

  But never before in our national history had we known the Mother of God to intervene as resolutely as She did in 1919 in Malmedy, where a man had forced his way into a lady’s home with, as could be deduced from his already unbuttoned trousers, dishonourable intentions. The lady threatened to call upon the aid of the Holy Virgin if the undesired intruder did not cover up his privates and leave the house double-quick. And there can be no doubt that the rapist would have been tickled pink to hear his defenceless victim threatening him with a – ha-ha – virgin. Until the Alma Redemptoris Mater suddenly really was there, right next to the bed, completely fearless and lighting up the whole room so brightly with the glow of Her aureole that the poor sinner had no choice but to flee out into the night. According to some accounts he was afflicted with erectile dysfunction ever after. Hardly surprising.

  *

  But all these folkloric occasions involved visitations of Mary. Now we’d been promised the arrival of Jesus Christ himself, in person!!! And not just rocking up out of nowhere in some rural hole, no. Preannounced! And going straight to the capital! Which happened to also be the capital of Europe!

  As relaxed and murmuring as the news – you could call it the Glad Tidings – had been that afternoon when it caught our attention, by evening it was raucous, a hubbub through every conversation. The TV networks, of course, weren’t interested in anything else. On all kinds of talk shows – which had to stay cheerful no matter what, current affairs being public amusement – leading figures of various stripes sat cosily next to each other on sofas to chat about the possible meanings of Christ’s travel plans. Rabbis and prominent atheists, a
gnostics, henotheists, eternal doubters, the chair of the Muslim Executive (who consistently referred to it as the coming of Isa), Anglicans, representatives of religious women’s councils … yes, they’d even found a Bridgettine nun willing to leave her enclosure and enter the pernicious world so she could shout her joy in a voice that had withered from long years of cloistered life, gesticulating with fingers that had grown crooked from all that lace-making. Their discussions alternated with jazzed-up versions of hymns. ‘Oh sacred head, now wounded’, but pushed through the grinder of a beat machine. And after that, live, the libertine girls of the pop group Brigitte panting out a song from their debut album, Jesus Sex Symbol. In their underwear – black. Two commercial breaks later and the studio guests were already talking about Christ as if He was an old friend, the kid from next door who’d made it as a rock star. And the host’s eyes were already gleaming at the thought that he might soon have the Lamb of God Himself on his talk show. The ratings would go through the roof!

  ‘So, Jesus … It’s all right if I just call you Jesus, isn’t it? Yeah? Thanks … Could you finally let the cat out of the bag, because this is a question that we, of course, have been dying to ask for a good twenty centuries now … Those apostles of yours, they can’t have all been straight, surely?’

  These shows were so relaxed and light-hearted, entertaining above all, that we almost forgot to notice that no-one, neither the nihilist nor the Antichrist, questioned the veracity of the newspaper reports. The free-thinkers expressed their enthusiasm, in anticipation of the philosophical riches that an encounter with such a shining light would be sure to generate. The Marxists – who traditionally depicted the Nazarene as a big morphine pump designed to keep the masses in ignorance – praised the anarchistic characteristics of a man who, like Che Guevara, preferred to die for His ideals rather than live a lie, and hoped to soon greet Him as the forefather of leftist philosophy.