6. Belgium

I spent a couple of pleasantly pointless days wandering around Belgium by train. As countries go, Belgium is a curiosity. It’s not one nation at all, but two, northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern French-speaking Wallonia. The southern half possesses the most outstanding scenery, the prettiest villages, the best gastronomy and, withal, a Gallic knack for living well, while the north has the finest cities, the most outstanding museums and churches, the ports, the coastal resorts, the bulk of the population and most of the money.

The Flemings can’t stand the Walloons and the Walloons can’t stand the Flemings, but when you talk to them a little you realize that what holds them together is an even deeper disdain for the French and the Dutch. I once walked around Antwerp for a day with a Dutch-speaking local and on every corner he would indicate to me with sliding eyes some innocent-looking couple and mutter disgustedly under his breath, ‘Dutch.’ He was astonished that I couldn’t tell the difference between a Dutch person and a Fleming.

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When pressed on their objections, the Flemings become a trifle vague. The most common complaint I heard was that the Dutch drop in unannounced at mealtimes and never bring gifts. ‘Ah, like our own dear Scots,’ I would say.

I learned much of this in Antwerp, where I stopped for an afternoon to see the cathedral and stayed on into the evening wandering among the many bars, which must be about the finest and most numerous in Europe: small, smoky places, as snug as Nigel Lawson’s waistcoat, full of dark panelling and dim yellowy light and always crowded with bright, happy-looking people having a good time. It is an easy city in which to strike up conversations because the people are so open and their English is nearly always perfect. I talked for an hour to two young street sweepers who had stopped for a drink on their way home. Where else but northern Europe could an outsider talk to street sweepers in his own tongue?

It struck me again and again how much they know about us and how little we know about them. You could read the English newspapers for months, and the American newspapers for ever, and never see a single article about Belgium, and yet interesting things happen there.

Consider the Gang of Nijvel. This was a terrorist group which for a short period in the mid-1980s roamed the country (to the extent that it is possible to roam in Belgium) and from time to time would burst into supermarkets or crowded restaurants and spray the room with gunfire, killing at random – women, children, anyone who happened to be in the way. Having left bodies everywhere, the gang would take a relatively small sum of money from the tills and disappear into the night. The strange thing is this: the gang never revealed its motives, never took hostages, never stole more than a few hundred pounds. It didn’t even have a name that anyone knew. The Gang of Nijvel label was pinned on it by the press because its getaway cars were always Volkswagen GTi’s stolen from somewhere in the Brussels suburb of Nijvel. After about six months the attacks abruptly stopped and have never been resumed. The gunmen were not caught, their weapons were never found, the police haven’t the faintest idea who they were or what they wanted. Now is that strange or what? And yet you probably never read about it in your paper. I think that’s pretty strange or what, too.

I went to Bruges for a day. It’s only thirty miles from Brussels and so beautiful, so deeply, endlessly gorgeous, that it’s hard to believe it could be in the same country. Everything about it is perfect – its cobbled streets, its placid bottle-green canals, its steep-roofed medieval houses, its market squares, its slumbering parks, everything. No city has been better favoured by decline. For 200 years Bruges – I don’t know why we persist in calling it this because to the locals it’s spelled Brugge and pronounced ‘Brooguh’ – was the most prosperous city in Europe, but the silting-up of the River Zwyn and changing political circumstances made it literally a backwater, and for 500 years, while other cities grew and were endlessly transformed, Bruges remained forgotten and untouched. When Wordsworth visited in the nineteenth century he found grass growing in the streets. Antwerp, I’ve been told, was more beautiful still, even as late as the turn of this century, but developers moved in and pulled down everything they could get their hands on, which was pretty much everything. Bruges was saved by its obscurity.

It is a rare place. I walked for a day with my mouth open. I looked in at the Groeninge Museum and visited the beguinage, its courtyard lawns swimming in daffodils, but mostly I just walked the streets, agog at such a concentration of perfection. Even the size of the place was perfect – big enough to be a city, to have bookstores and interesting restaurants, but compact enough to feel contained and friendly. You could walk every street within its encircling canal in a day or so. I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn’t want to live on, a pub I wouldn’t like to get to know, a view I wouldn’t wish to call my own. It was hard to accept that it was real – that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops and walked their dogs on these streets and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world. They must go into a deep reverberating shock when they first see Brussels.

An insurance claims adjuster I got talking to in a bar on St Jacobstraat told me sadly that Bruges had become insufferable for eight months of the year because of the tourists, and related to me what he clearly thought were disturbing anecdotes about visitors peeking through his letterbox and crushing his geraniums in the pursuit of snapshots. But I didn’t listen to him, partly because he was the most boring fart in the bar – possibly in Flanders – and partly because I just didn’t care to hear it. I wanted my illusions intact.

For that reason I left early in the morning, before any tour buses could arrive. I went to Dinant, a riverside town on the banks of the stately Meuse, crouched on this day beneath a steady rain. It was an attractive place and I would doubtless have been highly pleased with it if I hadn’t just come from Bruges and if the weather hadn’t been so dreadful. I stood on the bridge across the river and watched raindrops the size of bullets beat circles in the water. My intention had been to hike through the southern Ardennes for a couple of days to see if I could recognize any of the little villages and roads I had walked around on my first trip, but I hadn’t packed for this kind of weather – I was already soaked through and shivering as if I had forgotten to take my malaria tablets – and instead, after only an hour in Dinant, I walked back to the station, caught the first train to Namur and travelled on to Spa. One of the virtues of Belgium is that its tininess allows you to be anywhere else within an hour or two. It takes a while to get used to the idea that the whole country is effectively a suburb of Brussels.

I had no particular reason to go to Spa, except that it always sounded to me like a nice place, and indeed it proved to be, set in a bowl of green hills, with a wooded park, the Parc de Sept Heures, a grand casino out of all proportion to the modest town and a pair of big white hotels standing around a little island of green called the Place Verte. I liked it immediately. The rain had stopped and left the town with a clean, fresh feel, vaguely reminiscent of sheets lifted warm from a tumble dryer, and it had an eerily timeless air of convalescence about it. I half expected to see limbless soldiers in brown uniforms being pushed through the park in wheelchairs.

Spa is the original spa town, the one from which all the others take their name, and for 200 years it was the haunt of Europe’s royalty. Even up to the First World War it catered to aristocrats and grandees. It was from Spa that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, a milestone that marked its decline as much as his own. Today it didn’t seem to cater to anyone much, at least not at this time of year. I went to the tourist information centre in the park and, after browsing politely at the displays, asked the man behind the counter where all the kings and queens were.

‘Ah, they do not come any more,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘Not so much since Peter the Great.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Fashions change. Now they want the sunshine, the sea. We still get the odd baron, but mostly it is wealthy Germans. There are many treatments available if you are interested.’ He waved a hand over a selection of brochures and went off to help a new caller.

The brochures were all for places with no-nonsense names like The Professor Henrijean Hydrology Institute and The Spa Therm Institution’s Department of Radiology and Gastro-Enterology. Between them they offered an array of treatments that ran from immersion in ‘natural carbogazeous baths’ and slathering in hot and gooey mudpacks, to being connected to a freestanding electrical sub-station and briskly electrocuted, or so it looked from the photograph. These treatments were guaranteed to do a number of things I didn’t realize it was desirable to do – ‘dilate the dermal vessels’, ‘further the repose of the thermoregulatory centres’ and ‘ease periarticular contractures’, to name but three.

I decided without hesitation that my thermoregulatory centres were reposed enough, if not actually deceased, and although I do have the occasional periarticular contracture and pitch forward into my spaghetti, I decided I could live with this after seeing what the muscular, white-coated ladies of the Spa institutes do to you if they detect so much as a twinge in your periarticulars or suspect any backsliding among the dermals. The photographs showed a frankly worried-looking female patient being variously covered in tar, blown around a shower stall with a high-pressure hose, forced to recline in bubbling copper vats and otherwise subjected to a regimen that in other circumstances would bring ineluctably to mind the expression ‘war crimes’. I looked at the list of the town’s approved doctors to see if Josef Mengele appeared anywhere, but the only memorable name was a Dr Pitz. Resisting the impulse to ring him up and say, ‘Well, are you?’, I went instead to a small hotel recommended to me by the man in the tourist office.

I showered, dined, had a diverting stroll through the town and repaired to a convivial little bar on the Rue Royale for an evening with Martin Gilbert’s grave and monumental Second World War. It is not a pub book, I can tell you now. You read a bit and before long you find yourself staring vacantly around you and longing for a conversation.

But hardly anyone in Wallonia speaks English. I began to regret that I didn’t understand French well enough to eavesdrop. I took three years of French in school, but learned next to nothing. The trouble was that the textbooks were so amazingly useless. They were always written by somebody clearly out of touch with the Francophile world – Prof. Marvis Frisbee of the Highway 68 State Teachers College at Windsock, North Dakota, or something – and at no point did they intersect with the real world. They never told you any of the things you would need to know in France – how to engage with a bidet, deal with a toilet matron or kneecap a queue jumper. They were always tediously preoccupied with classroom activities: hanging up coats in the cloakroom, cleaning the blackboard for the teacher, opening the window, shutting the window, setting out the day’s lessons. Even in the seventh grade I could see that this sort of thing would be of limited utility in the years ahead. How often on a visit to France do you need to tell someone you want to clean a blackboard? How frequently do you wish to say, ‘It is winter. Soon it will be spring’? In my experience, people know this already.

I could never understand why they couldn’t make the textbooks more relevant to the adolescent mind and give us chapters with topics like ‘Gerard et Isabelle Engage dans some Heavy Petting’ or ‘Claude a son Premier Wet Dream. C’est Magnifique!’ At the very least they could have used comic books.

I woke to find rain streaming down the windows. The streets were half flooded and the cars below whooshed as they passed. I went out to cash a traveller’s cheque and window shopped along the Place Verte, sheltering beneath awnings on which the rain drummed steadily and rather soothingly. Every shop was filled with the most tempting foodstuffs – La Raclette Fromagerie, with cheeses the size of automobile tyres; the Boucherie Wagener, where strings of sausages hung in the window and slices of smoked Ardennes ham lay stacked in pink piles; La Gâterie, where the window was a delirium of marzipan fruits, hyperventilating cream cakes and other frothy delights. How clever these continentals are with their shop windows. Even the windows of chemists are so tidy and clean and scrupulously arranged that you find yourself gazing longingly at corn plasters and incontinence pads.

When I reached the last shop, I stared emptily at the Place Verte, not certain what to do with myself, and decided impulsively to push on to Durbuy in the hope that the weather would be better there. This was unlikely, considering that Durbuy was only fifteen miles away. None the less, thanks to the bewildering peculiarities of the Belgian railway system, to get to Durbuy took most of the morning and required three separate (albeit short) journeys and even then I couldn’t quite get there, as Durbuy has no station. The closest I could get was Barvaux, which on the map is about half a millimetre to the left of Durbuy, but which in reality is four kilometres away, with a monumentally steep hill in between. Even from the station I could hear trucks straining to climb it. But at least the rain had stopped.

I thought I’d take a cab, but there were none at the station, so I walked into the town – a large village really – looking for a bus stop or a cab office, and went into a hotel on the main street and discovered from the dour patroness that Barvaux had neither cabs nor buses. In my best schoolboy French I asked how one then gets to Barvaux when one is sans l’auto. I braced for the lady to put a dead beaver on the counter, but instead she just said, ‘À pied, monsieur,’ and gave me one of those impassive Gallic shrugs – the one where they drop their chin to belt level and try to push their ears to the top of their head with their shoulders. You have to be Gallic to do it. It translates roughly as ‘Life is a bucket of shit, monsieur, I quite agree, and while I am prepared to acknowledge this fact, I shall offer you no sympathy because, monsieur, this is your bucket of shit.’

Thanking her for playing such a small and passing role in my life, I walked to the edge of town and was confronted by a feature of landscape that was more wall than hill. The road was lined by the sort of unappealing houses that get built along any busy road and always look as if they are being slowly shaken to pieces by heavy lorries. Each yard was enclosed with a chain-link fence, behind each of which dozed a dog named Spike, who would leap to life and come flying down the front path as I approached and fling himself repeatedly at the gate, barking and baring his teeth and wanting to strip the flesh from my flanks in the worst way.

I don’t know why it is but something about me incites dogs to a frenzy. I would be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time a dog tried to get at the marrow in my ankle bone while the owner just stood there and said, ‘Well, I don’t understand it, he’s never done anything like this before. You must have said something to him.’ That always knocks me out. What would I say to the dog? ‘Hello, boy, like to open a vein in my leg?’

The only time a dog will not attack me with a view to putting me in a wheelchair is when I’m a guest at someone’s house sitting on a deep sofa with a glass filled to the brim. In this case the dog – it’s always a large dog with a saliva problem – will decide he doesn’t want to kill me but to have sex with me. ‘Come on, Bill, get your pants off. I’m hot,’ he seems to be saying. The owner always says, ‘Is he bothering you?’ I love that, too. ‘No, Jim, I adore it when a dog gets his teeth around my balls and frantically rubs the side of my head with his rear leg.’

‘I can put him out if he’s bothering you,’ the owner always adds. ‘Hey,’ I want to reply, ‘don’t put him out, put him down.’

It wouldn’t bother me in the least (and I realize I am sounding dangerously like Bernard Levin here, which God forbid) if all the dogs in the world were placed in a sack and taken to some distant island – Greenland springs attractively to mind – where they could romp around and sniff each other’s anuses to their hearts’ content and never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this round-up is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.

I don’t like most animals, to tell you the truth. Even goldfish daunt me. Their whole existence seems a kind of reproach. ‘What’s it all about?’ they seem to be saying. ‘I swim here, I swim there. What for?’ I can’t look at a goldfish for more than ten seconds without feeling like killing myself, or at least reading a French novel.

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don’t need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down and they are so trusting and stupid that you cannot help but lose your heart to them. Where I live there’s a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends for ever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.

Durbuy lay, at the foot of a startlingly steep road, on the other side of the hill. It looked to be about a half a mile below me. It was the kind of hill that, once you started down it, you couldn’t guarantee to stop. I walked with an increasing loss of control, my legs moving beneath me as if on stilts. By the last bend I was really just a passenger on a pair of alien stumps which were frantically scissoring me towards a stone barn at the foot of the road. I could see myself going through it like a character in a cartoon, leaving a body-shaped hole, but instead I did a more interesting thing. I stepped heavily into a wobbly drain, spectacularly spraining my ankle – I’m sure I heard a crack as of splintering wood – did a series of graceless pirouettes which even as they were occurring put me in mind of the Frankenstein monster on roller skates, spun across the road, smacked face-first into the barn wall and, after teetering theatrically for a moment, fell backwards.

I lay still in the tall grass, taking a minute to accommodate the idea that down at the bottom of my right leg there was an unusual measure of agony going on. At intervals I raised my chin to my chest and gazed down the length of my body to see if my right foot was facing backwards or otherwise composed in a way that would account for the vividness of the pain, but it looked normal enough. From where I lay I could also see back up the hill and I spent some time wondering, in a curiously abstract way, how I was going to get back up there with no buses or cabs to call on.

Eventually, I hauled myself upright, using the barn as support, and hobbled erratically to a café, where I fell into a chair near the door and ordered a Coca-Cola. I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting – and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping – to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But it was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms. I sat glumly sipping my Coke for half an hour and discovered upon rising that the worst of the pain had subsided and I was able to walk after a fashion.

So I had a limping look round Durbuy. It was exceptionally pretty, with narrow back streets and houses built of stone beneath slate roofs. At one end stood a chateau lifted wholesale from a fairy tale and beneath it was a shallow, racing river, the Ourthe. All around were the strangely overbearing green hills that had for centuries kept the outside world out. I gathered from the size of the car parks that this was a popular spot with trippers, but there was hardly anyone about now and most of the shops were shut. I spent a couple of hours in the town, mostly sitting on a bench by the river, absorbed by scenery and birdsong. It was impossible to imagine in any sensible way that this perpetually tranquil place had, almost within my lifetime, been the epicentre, more or less, of the Battle of the Bulge. I lugged out Gilbert’s magisterial history of the Second World War and skimmed through the index. Durbuy and Barvaux didn’t get a mention, but many of the other neighbouring towns and villages did – Malmédy, where seventy-two captured American soldiers were taken into a field by an SS unit and machine-gunned rather than be kept as prisoners; Stavelot, where two days later the ever-busy sub-humans of the SS killed 130 Belgian civilians, including twenty-three children; Bastogne, where American forces were besieged for a month and hundreds lost their lives; and many others. I simply couldn’t take it in – that these terrible, savage things had happened here, in these hills and woods, to people as close to me in time as my father. And yet now it was as if it had never happened. Germans who had once slaughtered women and children in these villages could now return as tourists, with cameras around their necks and wives on their arms, as if it had all just been a Hollywood movie. I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.

* * *

At about three o’clock it occurred to me that I had better head back to Barvaux. It took me until just after six to reach the station because of the pained slowness of my walking and the frequent rests I took along the way. The station was dark and untended when I arrived. No other passengers were about and the walls were without timetables. I sat on the platform on the opposite side from which I had arrived, not knowing when the next train might come along, not knowing indeed if there might be a next train. It was as lonely a station as you could imagine in such a small and crowded country as Belgium. The tracks stretched in a straight line for two or three miles in either direction. I was cold and tired and my ankle throbbed. Even more than this, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten all day.

In my lonely, enfeebled state I began to think longingly about my old home-town diner. It was called the Y Not Grill, which everyone assumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning. It was a strange place. I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one’s adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time. The food was terrible, the waitresses notoriously testy and stupid, and the cooks were always escaped convicts of doubtful hygiene. They always had one of those permanent, snuffly colds that mark a dissolute lifestyle, and there was invariably a droplet of moisture suspended from the tip of their nose. You always knew, with a sense of stoic doom, that when the chef turned around and put your food before you, the drip would be gone from his nose and glistening on the top of your hamburger bun, like a bead of morning dew.

The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend.

‘You want what?’ she would say.

‘A pork tenderloin and onion rings,’ you would repeat apologetically. ‘Please, Shirley. If it’s not too much trouble. When you get a minute.’

Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in diners, ‘Two loose stools and a dead dog’s schlong,’ or whatever.

In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, ‘Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it, ya big palooka.’ If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Shirley, alas, didn’t have a heart of gold. I don’t think she had a heart at all, or indeed any redeeming features. She couldn’t even put her lipstick on straight.

Yet the Y Not had its virtues. For one thing, it was open all night, which meant that it was always there if you found yourself having a grease crisis or just wanted to be among other people in the small hours. It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper’s painting ‘The Nighthawks’.

The Y Not is long gone, alas. The owner, it was said, ate some of his own food and died. But even now I can see it: the steam on the windows, the huddled clusters of night workers, Shirley lifting a passed-out customer’s head up by his hair to give the counter a wipe with a damp cloth, a lone man in a cowboy hat lost in daydreams with a cup of coffee and an untipped Camel. And I still think of it from time to time, especially in places like southern Belgium, when it’s dark and chilly and an empty railway line stretches out to the horizon in two directions.