that a well-brought-up young lady from Waasland should start travelling the world though she did not even want to become a missionary nun, but simply went on a course, to give it all the Finishing Touch at that, far across the Channel.
That could rightly be called curious, however bright the girl herself might be, however articulate, in three languages no less. But even the matter of those three languages? She had wanted that from an early age and had pleaded her case with everyone who needed to give their permission and with lots of others who had absolutely no say in the matter. As long as she could plead her case. ‘Most of all,’ she would say emphatically all her life, usually from behind her butcher’s counter, and always with a tinge of regret, ‘most of all I would like to have been a lawyer and gone to the Bar. But I wanted children. That came first. A person has to learn to make choices in their life.’
Well, who knows? Perhaps one day she had also chosen of her own free will to become attractive and elegant? And it subsequently happened?
It wouldn’t have surprised many people. ‘When our Josée gets an idea in her head?’ You could hear her eleven brothers and sisters bring it up on more than one occasion, frequently with a sigh, at New Year’s parties and wedding receptions, just before or long after the eruption of yet another family quarrel that could drag on for years. Though it should be said that the Verbekes never showed themselves to be petty or small-minded at such striking family moments. They never failed to come back on parade, reluctantly or, on the contrary, in newly restored harmony, despite everything: here they sat again, reunited cheek by jowl, in their usual cacophony of harsh architects’ voices, grating builders’ jokes and foul-mouthed card-players’ jargon. As the hours went by, singing actually rang out (‘On the banks of the Scheldt now / Well hidden in the reeds … ’), interspersed with the loudly proclaimed opinions of the bourgeois who knows he has been a success in life.
And that’s what they were. Successful and forthright. Yes, just look around, from one to the other: here they sit, the assembled Verbekes, glued to a festive table like bees to a honeycomb. Most are accompanied by their offspring. In their hands they hold a cigar or a glass of Elixir d’Anvers, one is sucking a Leonidas chocolate and the other is nibbling an almond biscuit from Jules Destrooper. But they all have faces that speak volumes, as only the faces of older relations can speak volumes the moment the conversation turns to one of the youngest and most turbulent fledglings of the collective nest.
‘If our Josée gets something into her head?
Best keep out of the way.’
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BUT DON’T BE fooled. I’m now talking again, jumping from one thing to another, sorry, about that photo on the front cover. It’s not because that hat suits my mother—[she] ‘All my life it’s been like that, give me a hat and I look good in it, whether it’s a flower pot or a flying saucer’—that in daily life she was often discovered wearing headgear. Certainly not such a striking specimen.
She preferred a simple hairband when she was sweaty and, well into old age, was unashamedly at work in a swimming costume in the vegetable garden of her allotment. Our summer house, which we had built ourselves, called ‘the bungalow’, or else ‘our bungalow’, was located a stone’s throw from the centre of her and my birthplace, which was once promoted from an insignificant commune to a proper town by none other than Napoleon. He was already emperor at the time.
Since then Sint-Niklaas has acquired the greatest number of secondary schools in the whole area, the highest suicide rate in the country, and the largest market square—if you like, the largest empty space—in the whole of Europe.
In order to make up for everything, the emptiness as well as the suicidal thoughts, there rises once a year on that huge, empty market square, in commemoration of the Liberation—a term that awakens in the inhabitants increasingly new meanings and desires—a squadron of gaudy balloons, filled with helium or freshly baked hot air.
The latter, the modern hot-air balloons, are first rolled out on the ground by three or four balloonists at a time. An unrecognizable jumble that looks like a granny knot tied by giants is expertly disentangled and unfolded into a plastic puddle, capricious and crinkled, in which nevertheless the contours are discernible of the weird balloon shape that is about to astonish us. Or will it be another of those humdrum ones? One of those pears hanging upside down, as multicoloured as a beach ball with delusions of grandeur?
With lots of hissing and roaring a jet of flame shoots out of a burner which, together with a large fan, is incorporated in a frame that in turn is mounted on top of the balloon basket. For now that basket is lying pathetically on its side. The fan, sideways and rather lazily, directs the jet plus a first stream of hot air into the opening of the balloon. It has to be held open by the balloonist and his helpers. They stand on tiptoe, arms high above their heads, grabbing hold of the slippery edge of the opening with both hands and making sure that that they themselves don’t get caught in the stream of hot air, on pain of having at least their eyelashes and eyebrows singed off, and usually also every hair on their head. One has to make sacrifices for one’s hobby.
Behind their backs a colossus gradually takes shape, then stands up jerkily, as if after a barbaric open-air childbirth. It raises first its head, then its back, then its upper body. Slowly and majestically it seems to sprout from the ground itself, yes, it springs from our market square in slow motion, surrounded solely by brothers, as if it were one of the countless earth-born warriors which rose from the field that Jason had sown with dragon’s teeth and which he would have to defeat in order to capture the Golden Fleece. In exactly the same way, overpowering and threatening, the modern supermen swell into view, ever fuller, ever higher, until they have clambered completely upright, pulling the basket straight beneath them, their first triumph. Their jets of flame sing louder and more love-struck the more powerful and mightier they become, and look, there they stand finally fully grown, waving the plumes of their helmets, in a neat row: our gentle mastodons, swaying in our inevitable autumn breeze, trembling with expectation as is appropriate after a birth, for the time being still restrained by cables like Gulliver by the Lilliputians, but ready to make an irresistible leap up to the heavens. A contemporary army consisting mainly of figs hanging upside down—they don’t always have to be pears—in all the gaudiest colours of the rainbow. There are also some in the shape of a gingerbread house or a Smurf. There is even a crate of beer of a well-known brand which is also the sponsor of the feather-light monster, since someone has to pay the bills, even those for hot air.
A little later they climb into the sky magnificently and to loud applause. The scarce helium balloons, caught in fishnets with too large a mesh, just as a female buttock can be squeezed into a saucy stocking, quickly jettison some ballast—bags of river sand, bags of loam. That is: the contents of the bags are scattered to the four winds with exaggerated gestures, in a ritual reminiscent of the ancient sower who still adorns the cover of our school exercise books, although paradoxically no grain is sown, just sand. Sand on stone, sand on emptiness, sand on people, sand on sand.
It dissipates immediately, to the relief of the upward-looking spectators, since in extreme emergencies, for example to avoid a pylon, it is permitted to offload the sand with bag and all, at the risk of hitting a back-up car or an unsuspecting bovine or occasionally an unfortunate walker, and one disastrous year even, in order to avoid the sharp rake of a television aerial, a pram, thank God empty—the little passenger had just been taken out to peer, holding Daddy’s hand, at the Smurf floating above them, and the next instant, right next to them: splat! A sandbag, slap in the middle of the pram, whose wheels flew off at the impact.
The hot-air balloons on the other hand, fizzing angrily, suck in an extra long burner flame through their clearly visible arseholes. A reverse fart that, even more in reverse, gives them an upward jerk, toward the wide firmament. In this way our helium globes and our hot-air giants rise in brotherly fashion above our two central church towers, one of
