Open City (13 page)

I tell you, that was two months of hell for the family. And Duchâteau, the kidnapper, had written somewhere: These are tiny little slips of paper, but they mean everything, money brings liberty. If you see Jean now, there’s a little knob where that finger used to be. But the worst, if you ask him, was not that amputation, it was the cold. I think he was terribly cold for the two months; they made him sleep in a tent in an unheated room. And light deprivation, so he wouldn’t recognize his captors. Cold and dark. For these tiny little slips of paper, right?

It was morning. We were flying with a bank of clouds above us and a bank of clouds below, and Europe was close. I asked Dr. Maillotte to tell me more about her children. They are all doctors, she said, all three of them, like my husband and me. I think it’s what they wanted, but who knows? My eldest, well, he was thirty-six last year when he died. He had just finished his residency in radiology. Cancer of the liver, and a quick decline. It’s an impossible thing to go through, watching a son die. He was married, and had a three-year-old daughter. It was impossible; it still is. The other two: one is in California, one is in New York. They are the younger ones. And my husband is with me in Philadelphia, well, we’re just outside Philadelphia, and he’s a cardiologist, and he just retired, too.

A silence fell on us. And you, she said, tell me, why Brussels? It’s a strange place for a vacation in winter! I smiled. Cozumel was the other possibility, I said, but I don’t know how to dive. Well, she said, here’s the number at Grégoire’s. Friendly people, you know, they don’t put on airs. I’ll be there for six, maybe eight, weeks. You should come around and have dinner with us. I thanked her for the invitation and told her I would consider it. And, as I looked at the number she had written down for me, I thought about the Paris Métro, that expression of optimism and progress, and about the ancient city
in Egypt that had also been known as Heliopolis, before Baron Empain built his version, and of underground travel, we millions moving around underneath cities, inhabitants of an age in which, for the first time, traveling great distances beneath the earth had become normal for humans. I thought, too, about the numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs. The pilot announced the final approach for landing, in English, French, and Flemish, and as we broke through the lower bank of clouds, I saw the city spread across the low landscape.

M
ayken, the woman who owned the Brussels apartment, had offered to pick me up from the airport for an additional fee of fifteen euros. The other options, she had told me on the phone, were to take a taxi for thirty-five euros, or to take public transportation and risk being robbed. And so, when I arrived on the overnight flight, she was waiting in the arrivals lounge with a sign that had my name on it. Her bleached hair sat on her head like yellow cotton candy, and looked likely to lift and sail away if caught in the wind. I bid goodbye to Dr. Maillotte, and walked over, waving until Mayken spotted me. She was in her fifties, friendly, but with a sharp business manner that, as we later went over the short-term lease papers—pages and pages of picayune legal detail—became, with her bouffant hair, the only visible part of her personality.

The original idea of Brussels, she said, as we drove out of the airport, was that it should be equally Flemish and Walloon. Of course, it’s not that way anymore, she went on, now it is ninety-five percent
Walloon and other French speakers, one percent Flemish, and four percent Arab and African. She laughed, but quickly added: These are real numbers. And the French are lazy, she said, they hate working and are envious of the Flemish. I’ll tell you this in case you don’t hear it from anyone else.

I looked outside the window, and in my mind’s eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders’ retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.

Mayken’s English was slightly inflected with wavering Dutch vowels. I looked out on both sides of the speeding car, and the Brussels of my experience came back to me. It was my third visit to the city, but the previous ones had been brief, the first having been more than twenty years before, during a two-day layover on the way to the United States from Nigeria when I was seven. At the time, my mother had said nothing about her mother, though my oma had moved there by then. The details of that journey were buried in my memory until I saw the Novotel Hotel near the airport, where the airline had put us up. How ideal it had all seemed back then: the black Mercedes-Benzes that were used as taxicabs at the airport, the strange food at the hotel buffet. It was a glimpse of impressive sophistication
and wealth, that first experience of Europe. Outside the hotel, I had noticed the order and grayness, the modesty and regularity of the houses, and the cool formality of the people, against which American life, my first real contact with which came a few weeks later, had seemed lurid.

It is easy to have the wrong idea about Brussels. One thinks of it as a technocrats’ city, and because it was so central to the formation of the European Union, the assumption is that it is a new city, built, or at least expanded, expressly for that purpose. Brussels is old—a peculiar European oldness, which is manifested in stone—and that antiquity is present in most of its streets and neighborhoods. The houses, bridges, and cathedrals of Brussels had been spared the horrors visited on the low farmland and forests of Belgium, which had borne the brunt of the countless wars fought on the territory. Slaughter and destruction, ferocious to a degree rarely experienced in history, had taken place on the Somme, in Ypres, and before that, out at Waterloo.

Those were the theaters, so conveniently set at the intersection of Holland, Germany, England, and France, in which Europe’s fatal tussles had played out. But there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting, or one under glass, with somber trams and buses. There were many people, many more than I had seen in other European cities, who gave the impression of having just arrived from a sun-suffused
elsewhere. I saw old women with dotted black patterns around their eyes, their heads swaddled in black cloth, and young women, too, likewise veiled. Islam, in its conservative form, was on constant view, though it was not clear to me why this should be so: Belgium had not had a strong colonial relationship with any country in North Africa. But this was the European reality now, in which borders were flexible. There was a palpable psychological pressure in the city.

I’m sure Mayken’s “four percent Arab and African” was intended to be snide, but from what I saw, it might have been a modest estimate. Even in the city center, or especially there, large numbers of people seemed to be from some part of Africa, either from the Congo or from the Maghreb. On some trams, as I was to quickly discover, whites were a tiny minority. But that was not the case with the morose crowd I met on the metro some days after my arrival. They had been to a rally at the Atomium to protest racism and violence in general, but in particular a murder that had happened much earlier, in April of that year. A seventeen-year-old, after refusing to give up his mp3 player, had been stabbed by two other youths at the Gare Centrale; this had happened on a crowded platform, during rush hour, with dozens of people around; the fact that no one had done anything to help the boy had become a point of discussion in the days following the murder. The murdered boy was Flemish; the murderers, reports said, were Arab. Fearful of racial backlash, the prime minister had appealed for calm, and in his homily that Sunday, the bishop of the city had bemoaned a society so indifferent that everyone around had refused to help a dying boy. Where were you at 4:30
P.M
. that day? he had said to the crowded congregation at the Cathédrale des Saints Michel et Gudule.

The bishop’s hand-wringing had gotten a swift and impassioned response from the Vlaams Belang (the Flemish right-wing party) and its sympathizers. Well-known columnists took a wounded tone and complained of reverse racism. The victims were being blamed,
they said; the problem was not with uncaring passersby but with the foreigners who committed crimes. It was easier to get flagged for violating biking rules than for actually stealing a bike, because the police were afraid of being seen as racist. One journalist wrote on his blog that Belgian society was fed up with “murdering, thieving, raping Vikings from North Africa.” This was quoted approvingly in certain mainstream sources. Efforts by the Muslim community in Brussels to heal the wound, such as their distribution of home-baked bread at the public memorial service for the murdered boy, drew a furious response from right-wingers. Later, during the elections, the politicians of the Vlaams Belang recorded gains once again, consolidating their position as possibly the biggest party in the country. Only the coalitions of the other groups kept them out of power. But the murderers in the Gare Centrale case, it turned out, weren’t Arab or African at all: they were Polish citizens. There was some debate about whether they were Roma, gypsies. One of them, a sixteen-year-old, was arrested in Poland; his seventeen-year-old partner was arrested in Belgium and extradited to Poland, and with his departure, some of the tensions around the case dissipated.

But there were other ugly incidents. I was there at the very end of 2006, a year in which several hate crimes had ratcheted up the tension experienced by nonwhites living in the country. In Bruges, five skinheads put a black Frenchman into a coma. In Antwerp, in May, an eighteen-year-old shaved his head and, after fulminating about
makakken
, headed for the city center with a Winchester rifle, and started shooting. He seriously injured a Turkish girl and killed a nanny from Mali, as well as the Flemish infant in her care. Later on, he expressed a specific regret: for having accidentally shot the white child. In Brussels, a black man was left paralyzed and blind after an attack at a petrol station. The paradoxical result of these crimes was that even politically centrist parties like the Christian Democrats began to lean rightward, adopting the language of the Vlaams Belang
in order to cater to voter discontent about immigration. The country was in the grip of uncertainties—the sense of anomie was apparent even to a visitor.

I went to the Parc du Cinquantenaire. It was covered in fog, but this made the scale of the monuments seem even bigger. The already gigantic arcades shot up vertiginously and lost their heads in faint white veils, and the rows of trees before and beyond them, rigid as sentries, stretched into eternity. The park, built by a heartless king, was also of inhuman scale. A handful of tourists, so dwarfed by the monuments that, from a distance, they looked like toys, roamed around silently, taking photographs. When they came closer, I heard them speaking Chinese.

It was half past four, night fast falling, and the air was misty and cold; the area just southeast of the park looked out into Etterbeek and the Mérode metro station, a complex assortment of roads, tram tracks, and signs, but few people were about on Christmas Eve. In the park, right in front of the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, which I had intitially taken for the better known Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, a broad-headed horse stood by a carriage marked
POLITIE
, but there were no police officers in sight, and the museum was closed. Under the arcade was a bronze plaque displaying in relief the portraits of the first five Belgian kings: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, and Baudouin, and beneath it an inscription that read:
HOMMAGE A LA DYNASTIE LA BELGIQUE ET LE CONGO, RECONNAISSANTS, MDCCCXXXI
. Not triumph, then, but gratitude; or gratitude for triumphs achieved. I stood under the arcade and watched the Chinese family enter their car. They drove away, leaving just me and the patient horse. We were the two living animals in that place, and with every breath cold fog entered our lungs. I was there, it seemed to me, to no purpose, unless being together in the same country, as I and my oma now were (if, that is, she were still alive), was, by itself, a comfort.