Six months in Belgium

Notes from a curious country

‘Petite Place de la Gare’ by Paul Delvaux, 1963

It’s always difficult to write a love letter to Belgium, as first of all the question arises as to whether it should be written in French or Dutch. Things normally don't get any further than that. Putting forward German as a compromise (the mother tongue of circa 30,000 Belgians in Eupen, Wallonia) seems more of a pub quiz answer than a solution. I did consider, when I received my Belgium work visa, asking for it in German in order to create some poor unemployed translator some work.

Belgium has been home to many of my people. These people are generally Jews who are either artistic or minor criminals. My Grandfather, who I shockingly recently learnt was actually Dutch, returned to Belgium and Antwerp after the war to marry his childhood sweetheart; he’d left her behind on the eve of the war. I have such strong memories of his heavy, high-ceilinged house in the Flemish capital, his office a tumult of papers and books. After he died, he left behind an exhaustive collection of ‘Playboy’ magazine; before he died, he expressed the wish that my brother marry my cousin.

Sometimes as a kid my Grandad took me round Antwerp. I remember him taking me for a pancake once, you could get a good pancake in those days, those days being the late 1980s in Belgium. I have a very clear memory of standing in the bathroom of a fancy restaurant with him, and him paying for me for the toilet, him laying down a round shiny Belgian franc on the tray and saying something to the attendant, probably ‘For the small gentleman’ or the like. It was the first time I’d been introduced to the concept of paying for the toilet. I didn’t have any ideas then, just experiences.

I kept coming back in my youth too. I’d sometimes take the bus over from Berlin, a good long journey that, easy ten hours or more. North European flatness the whole way. Always worth it tho, to become briefly involved with my cousins’ lives and their partners and their children. Like cameoing in a long-running sitcom.

I began to pick up some Dutch then, which my early-20s acquisition of German obviously helped. I started to know Antwerp well. And in my 30s, too, in my days on the war tourism circuit, I was never happier than when on an early morning we got on the bus in Paris and drove to Belgium, marking the ceremonial entry by taking a happy photo by Woinic the giant steel boar, a statue meant to symbolize the porcine spirit of the Ardennes, situated to be clear on the French side.

I live here now, in the strange little country where I have always wanted to live. I wonder if, on some level, Belgium isn’t the natural end destination of an absurdist comedian, certainly one of my stripe; it’s always been a sort of punchline place, the threat of ‘You'll have to move to Belgium!’ with Belgium a metonym for ‘obscure country where nothing happens’. The joke is certainly to an extent on the Brits, as Belgian public services, amenities and transport appear remarkably high (though the UK remains unsurpassed on parks). At a recent half-marathon I ran, there was a special train service dedicated to getting all the runner to the start line; I have no doubt that in modern England that would have been at best a shuttle bus and more likely nothing.

That’s not to say that Belgium is without drawbacks. Its most salient political feature, the long-running dispute between the Walloons and Flemish, focused above all about the matter of language, is deeply tedious to an outsider from a country of even modest size. Have you ever considered... speaking two languages? Of course, it too has an economic component, with the Flemish viewing the Walloons as an economic drag on their region, with Flanders providing 58% of Belgian GDP.

Within such a tiny country, the communities are astonishingly divided, with calls to split the country; even in a country of just 11.7 million, to give example, there are two separate versions of the reality series The Traitors, in French and Dutch. Worse, the two peoples barely seem to fuck each other. To an outsider, an overarching political divide like this feels parish pump and small time, a waste of energies and wealth which really could be put to better use elsewhere. Incredibly, some people even put the Belgium federal model forward as a solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict; it is certainly novel to present bureaucratic paralysis so bad that it saw the country enjoy the longest post-election period without forming a government in peacetime (541 days) as a model for others to follow. The Hamas-Likud negotiations will be a cinch in comparison.

In such a context the subversive moves seems to try and speak all the languages; I know German already and am confident in French, so am adding Dutch. Then I can be a true Belgian – or am a Belgian deviant for precisely this pluralism? Mind you you could make the argument that Belgium, a country of exceptional liminality, is the natural home of the perv. Certainly by all accounts the sexual scenes here in Brussels are exceptionally debauched. I was told at a party recently of a woman who remarked ‘If you’re a single woman in your mid-40s in Brussels and you want to get laid, you’ll probably have to do a gang-bang.’

As for geographical exploration, my weekends have been spent discovering a series of Belgium small towns, from Erps-Kwerps to Weerde, and running across the flatlands in snow, sleet and intervals of sunshine almost more disconcerting.

In the meantime I need to find myself a Belgian football team. Of the Brussels teams, Union SG seems too perfectly hipster; Anderlecht too squarely the glory of yesteryear. A friend suggests RWD Molenbeek, whatever that is. There’s a hyperlocalism to the football here as to all other things; lifestyle magazines rate not just the best chip stand but the best chip sauce. Or the worst; this is after all a nation which painstakingly chronicles its own ugliest houses. It’s probably a cultural law: In a country with a lack of space, things will be endlessly subdivided.

Belgian culture does stretch beyond potatoes, not that the potatoes aren’t good, and I’m surprised at my new home’s artistic pedigree. Agnes, Chantal, René – all great artists who were rooted here in Brussels. Chantal Akerman compared Brussels to the Prague of Kafka, namely a good place to work precisely because the weight of culture was not so heavy as elsewhere. Everywhere in Belgium there are weird little pockets of genius. Another childhood memory of my grandfather is him bringing me to the Paul Delvaux museum, understanding nothing, but knowing the paintings spoke of important things. My uncle explained that the small anxious man in some of the paintings was Delvaux himself.

There’s something about the flatness of Belgium, its nondescription, that stimulates a certain kind of artistic sensibility. Perhaps anybody who works as an artist in Belgium becomes a poet of boredom, otherwise known as a comedian. I don’t think anyone would claim Brussels is the centre of the universe but in its very not being, in its obscurity, there is something stimulating. It reminds me of the great opening stage direction of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, which says ‘the action which is about to begin takes place in Poland – that is to say, nowhere.’

So I find myself washed up in the land of beer and chips, and I can’t say I’m too unhappy about it. I enjoy my job here; London, while close, seems a long way away now. Tho it will of course always be home; I will always understand it better than anywhere else. Yet for now I’m in Belgium, for exactly six months now, and have done one year in my job. I have family close; I’ve made a handful of new friends. I can get to Luxembourg in a day, which confirms me in my other theory that all writers eventually end up living their own novels (see here). I can’t say I’ve exactly fulfilled the prophecy of my earlier Tweet – Brussels is for all its sins more than a small town – but I’ve certainly never been closer. After all the humiliations and frustrations of London, I’m more than due a break. I think I’ll stay.