We'll Always Have Paris (25 page)

Of course Brussels French is rarely the French of native speakers: most of us are just getting by as best we can in a language that isn’t our own and some are barely making an effort at
all. I feel much less self-conscious speaking French here than I ever did in France, because most of the people I speak to aren’t any better at it than I am. It’s very freeing, in a
way: I can say anything to anyone, because I’ll probably make as decent a job of it as most other people. But without the permanent fear of disapproval, I feel as if my French is getting
worse.

In the office, we mainly speak English, but it’s a peculiar kind of English. With a mix of Swedish, Dutch, French, Australians and Germans and Brits, there is no one prevailing cultural
influence so we operate in a functional, but unlovely, multicultural administrative Esperanto. People ‘assist to’ meetings and we have ‘
stagiaires
’ or
‘
referendaires
’ instead of interns. My boss is fairly typical: he’s Dutch-speaking Belgian, but his French is perfect and his English is exuberantly colloquial, peppered
with swearing and oddities. Evening receptions involve a puzzling thing called a ‘walking dinner’ and the office canteen offers such delights as ‘birds without heads’
(it’s a sort of rissole) and ‘
cannibale
’ sandwiches (I never find out what these are as I am too frightened to try). There is a puzzling series of festivities to grapple
with: ‘Secretaries Day’, Assumption, ‘Schuman Day’, even a Breughel-themed night in the office bar.

I find it hard to work out where I fit in. The young lawyers of all nationalities, here for a year or two at most, live within three or four streets of each other and go out to the same bars
when they get an evening off. The partners live out in the sticks, in huge villas with gardens and wives and children and dogs, driving into the office in huge German cars. The secretaries are
mostly my kind of age with children, but they stick together and live in other towns, dashing to catch their trains in the afternoon. I am not part of any group, at once too old and too young to
fit in. My work, too, is self-contained, verging on dull on occasion, and I never get the usual bonding experiences: impossible deadlines, travel, absurdly demanding clients. I don’t take
proper lunch breaks so I can leave earlier and pick the boys up (I rush off at 5:30 to get my tram every day) and though our weekly office ‘teatime’ should be a good opportunity to
socialize, most of the lawyers are too busy to attend, so it’s usually me, the office handyman, a handful of secretaries and whichever partner has to host that week, making small talk over
tiny plastic cups of tepid Lipton Yellow tea and frangipane tarts (I miss Colin the Caterpillar). Everyone is nice, lovely even, but it’s hard to make proper friends.

My feeling of dislocation intensifies with the arrival of Saint Nicolas, the confusing
Mitteleuropa
proto-Christmas. Few Belgian events have the power to bewilder the migrant like Saint
Nicolas. The festival has its origins in a grisly little legend in which three children are captured by an unscrupulous butcher, who chops them up and salts them in a barrel, intending to sell them
as ham. The children are miraculously resurrected by Saint Nicolas, who just happens to be passing. It is a very big deal indeed in Belgium and the Netherlands, with Saint Nicolas’s arrival
each year by speedboat from Spain (where, according to legend, he spends the remainder of the year) televised to great national excitement.

The office pushes the boat out for Saint Nicolas, with a party for employees’ children: obviously, we bring the boys. The lobby is filled with balloons, and baskets of speculoos biscuits
replace the branded mints at reception, while in the library the dusty volumes of the Belgian civil code are moved aside and replaced with a lavish buffet of cream horns, frangipane cakes,
M&Ms, pastel marshmallow effigies of the Virgin Mary and waffles in their many splendours.

Outside in the atrium, rows of children watch a shadow puppeteer conjure up a series of shapes in front of a rudimentary screen – the entertainment must be wordless, due to the lack of a
common language among the office offspring. There’s an owl, a galloping horse, then what appears to be a series of Can Can dancers. The audience, aged 2–12, is a tough crowd, restive
and easily distracted by the incredible snacking opportunities mere yards away. Theo more or less refuses to watch the puppeteer when there are M&Ms to lick and discard and Louis prefers
removing back issues of the
Common Market Law Review
from the library shelves, but everyone, including my children, snaps to attention when a white-gloved hand appears, tantalizingly
draped over the first-floor balcony railing.

‘He’s here!’ the whisper goes round, in many languages simultaneously.

An eerie procession descends to the main atrium, to the accompaniment of a choir of children singing the sickly ‘Sinterklaas Kapoentje’: dearest Santa. The saint is first. He is not
fat and jolly like our Santa, but tall and imposing, with a crook, mitre, white priestly vestments topped by a red cloak and most of his face obscured by a long beard. He is accompanied by four
‘Zwarte Piets’ – Black Petes or ‘Pères Fouettards’ (whipping fathers, unnervingly) in French – his sidekicks or enforcers. The Pères Fouettards are
dressed in fifteenth-century-style black and red page outfits with huge lacy collars and white gloves; most unnerving of all, they are blacked up. Some defenders of the tradition insist that Zwarte
Piet is not racist: he is simply ‘dirty’ from the soot in the chimney and it is a ‘lovely tradition’, but the traditional curly black wig and earring that finish the outfit
off make this interpretation difficult to sustain.

The Pères Fouettards wave and throw chocolate coins into the audience. One of them is carrying a large book: Saint Nicolas’s register of the nice and the naughty. As Saint Nicolas
approaches the crêpe-paper-covered dais and settles on his throne, a convulsion of excitement and something darker grips the assembled children.

‘Noooo,’ weeps a girl of about six in her best velvet party frock, patent-shod heels dragging on the herringbone parquet as one of the Piets beckons to her, the whites of his eyes
gleaming against a full face of black make-up, one gloved hand proffering a basket full of candy. ‘I don’t want to go in his sack!’ Traditionally, the Pères Fouettards are
responsible for beating naughty children with a birch twig, before placing them in a sack or wicker basket and kicking them back to Spain. With this in mind, the atmosphere in the room is not one
of joyful anticipation.

One after another, the children are summoned up onto the stage to be quizzed by Saint Nicolas, while the Fathers Whip consult their Big Book of Children. Some smaller children are encouraged to
give up their dummies, which the Fathers Whip place in a giant Nutella pot, in exchange for a gift. My sons watch, wide-eyed. They have been prepared by weeks of colouring and songs at school, but
Saint Nicolas in the flesh is a whole other proposition. Finally, buoyed by chocolate and lured by the large presents the children who submit to Saint Nicolas’s examination leave holding,
Theo is persuaded onto the stage, where he sits for a photo, unsmiling, on the episcopal knee. Louis follows, of course: he will never allow himself to be bested by his brother and we leave
clutching lavish gifts. On the way back to the car, still a little unnerved, Theo pulls at my sleeve.

‘Do those men
have
to come to our house?’

There is a lot of this kind of thing in Brussels; the city is in thrall to its own folklore. In July, hundreds of people (and horses, and large papier-mâché figurines) process
around the city centre in sixteenth-century costume to commemorate Charles V’s ceremonial arrival in Brussels in 1549. In August a group of men called, improbably,
buumdroegers
(‘tree carriers’) cut down a tree – the
meyboom
– in the Forêt de Soignes and parade it through the streets of the city in traditional costume, accompanied by
a selection of papier-mâché giants (the men who carry these are the
poepedroegers
, which is just as bad). In November students parade through the city in lab coats with beer
tankards round their necks to celebrate St Verhaegen and in March a charitable fraternity of blacked-up men in top hats and knee breeches parade around the Grand-Place collecting money. The
Manneken Pis has an association of friends and defenders and a wardrobe of some 800 traditional and not so traditional costumes from around the world in which he is dressed ceremonially (a
committee decides on the introduction of new outfits, periodically, and on the rota of which ones he should wear when). On certain days, the water he pees is replaced with beer (you can check which
days on the Manneken’s website). In the boys’ schoolyard, the children wear fancy dress as the headmaster puts a flaming torch to
bonhomme hiver
, a human effigy of winter, on a
windy February day, flames licking the base of the climbing frame in an affront to received notions of health and safety.

On some level, the city still believes it is a place of guilds and merchants and princes, a prosperous city-state defined by its glorious history. (‘A ghost town,’ spat Baudelaire,
‘a mummy of a town, it smells of death, the Middle Ages and tombs.’ For Marlow in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
it’s a ‘whited sepulchre’.) In fact
it’s kept afloat by thousands of lanyarded back room politicians and lobbyists and their expense accounts in antiseptic, anonymous office blocks. I can understand, though, how that cosy sense
of tradition endures, because Brussels feels nothing like a modern capital city. It reminds me most of Rouen: a prosperous provincial town. Everyone seems to go to the same places at the same times
and wherever we go (the market, the cinema, the playground), we see faces we recognize. Half the street comments on the audacity of our colour choice when we paint our door cornflower blue, and
when Olivier goes to the local barber, he comes back with a wealth of anecdotes on our Texan–Parisian predecessors and conjecture on the state of their marriage. Our neighbourhood is a hotbed
of PG-rated small town gossip, propagated by the barber, the shopkeeper’s son and the groups of mothers who sit in the playground. Within weeks, I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of various
divorces, poor school attendance records and run-ins over parking spaces.

But it’s odd, too. One evening a taxi driver shows me his portfolio of miniature liturgically-themed art, which he keeps in the glove compartment of his car. Another time a fellow
passenger on the 92 tram decides to engage me in conversation about whether it would be possible to milk rabbits. There’s a pensioner called ‘Mr Penguin’ who walks the streets of
Brussels dressed as, and quacking like, a penguin. One weekend we go to a gallery and a group of Icelandic performance artists, one of whom is wearing a string of sausages round his neck and
another carrying a large glass pot of yoghurt, steal my handbag. A giant blue brain sculpture appears in the sky on the roof of a museum and disappears a few months later without apparent
explanation, like something from a Tim Burton film or a Magritte. The city’s most famous graffiti artist, Bonom, covers vast office blocks with beautiful, weird natural motifs: dinosaurs,
spiders, a giant falling fox and, more controversially, a copy of Courbet’s distinctly not safe for work nude
L’Origine du Monde
. At the summer Zinneke parade – a
contemporary invention, intended to celebrate the city’s diversity – I watch a woman on a bicycle-drawn float serve papier-mâché ice cream cones filled with paper herrings
to an enthusiastic crowd. Nearer home, the man who lives next door to the corner shop sits on the street on sunny days on a bench of his own creation, which is kitted out with a rear-view mirror, a
CD player on which he plays Bach fugues, a fencing foil, a sandpaper scratching post, a variety of circuit boards, magazines and pencils. Where are we? What
is
this place? Some days it
seems as if everyone in the city is insane; that surreality is hard-wired in the Belgian DNA and Sebald’s hunchbacks and lunatics are everywhere.

For me the lunatics, the penguins, the papier-mâché herring-filled ice cream cones, are my favourite part of Brussels: they cut through the cosily self-satisfied Mercedes-driving,
tweed-wearing parts. There’s a subversive heart to the city and in a place that refuses so categorically to take itself seriously how could you not be happy?

When I am not at work – and I am at work far less in my new job, that was the point of it – I look after the children. We go from park to museum to musty suburban
soft play area (beer is available in all these places, interestingly) and often end up in
Quick
, the optimistically named Belgian fast food chain where no one is in a hurry to do anything.
More often than not, though, we stay at home, relishing the luxury of space: a garden in which to poke things with sticks, stairs to run a Slinky down and enough room to leave your crayons and Lego
scattered across the floor. It is a very different existence out here in what I must accept are the suburbs; life is slowed down and stretched out to toddler pace. If the boys want to spend fifteen
minutes examining a dead wasp, that is perfectly fine since we have nowhere we have to be and no one is behind us tutting. A slow meander to the corner of the street for an ice cream and back is
enough to occupy most of an afternoon. I don’t know how I feel about this, but the boys seem to have eased into it effortlessly. Their hierarchy of needs – juice, sandpit, digger
trucks, cartoons – is met and if Theo occasionally talks wistfully of his best friend Julius back in London, they have expressed little angst at the upheaval.

I suppose these lazy, quiet afternoons are a good thing, because in the most basic way, everything has changed for both of them: they have started school now, that proper Belgian primary school
down the road. Louis is only two and half, hardly more than a baby, but even he is old enough for the reception class (the
classe d’acceuil
), so every morning we trot off, the boys
with their heavy school bags on their backs, to the door of the
maternelle
section, where I kiss them goodbye under the basilisk glare of the classroom assistants.