I am sitting on the roof of a terraced house in the Rue Fontaine d’Amour. It is seven o’clock. Brussels lies smouldering on the hills. In a minute the city will roll over on its side. Like an old lady with bedsores, she shakes the inhabitants off her back. Look with me over the edge of the roof. Do you see that man in his fifties on the front path, with his hat and an oversized bag? That’s Professor Dr. my father. Back straight as an arrow, flabby buttocks pressed tightly together – as it should be for an expert on classical ballet. He licks his lips, looks for the beginning of what’s to become of the day. He stops at the late night shop on the corner. I see the Pakistani waving from behind the glass.
My name is Lize. I’m fifteen years old. When my father gets up in the morning his breath smells of anxiety. I know that’s because of me. He’s afraid I can see into his head.
Father wrote a dissertation on the star Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to thank for his title. He calls himself a specialist in the notation of human movement – as if his children could care less. It’s fifteen years now that he’s been running the Carlotta Grisi Institute, school of romantic-classical ballet in Brussels. We are precisely the same age, my father’s work and I.
Since the separation father has been intolerable. In the first weeks he was cheerful, dusted the furniture every day, ate asparagus for breakfast which mother always loathed. Then his inner mollusc gained the upper hand. He hung around on the sofa for days at a time, drooled all over the cushions, drank beer until he forgot where it was kept. The jellyfish gradually got legs again. He cautiously tripped over to the window, stared at the city, looking for landmarks of his new life. After a while it dawned on him: everything was different. He didn’t necessarily have to go out the door in an ironed shirt. The washing up could hang around for days. And there was no longer anybody who hissed in his ear that he had still not changed the light bulb in the toilet.
And thus, we try to live here together. He and I. In this much too large house on the Rue Fontaine d’Amour, with the smoking city in the distance and the park to the right. Even though I often smoke there just as much. ‘Babap ickle Weed.’
Down below in the Rue Fontaine d’Amour, two rats scuttle around a plastic chip container, a mayonnaise city is being built on the pavement. A doorway with four girls’ legs. On the balcony a tarted up woman talks on the phone while she paints her nails. Three Congolese men sit on the ground in front of the gate of a garage which as far as I know is never opened. They throw twigs on the ground in front of them, continually shaking their heads as they talk.
In the yellow stucco house just ahead and to the left a lady with no hair lives on the second floor. Françoise, she calls herself; even though the whole block knows she’s actually called Cindy. From eight to twelve, when she dozes wearily in her rocking chair, she combs her head. The plastic teeth leave red trails on her skin.
I would have liked to have a conversation with the person who made this street. I would ask him why the Rue Fontaine d’Amour is such a loveless place. Why the houses have doors when the inhabitants are closed up like snails in their shells. Why the pavements are so grey and the drainage so bad. Somebody must have had the idea for this street. And somewhere in that idea there must have been a shadow of the future.
Such as: a slightly better neighbourhood near the valley of Schaarbeek, Josaphat Park nearby for the kiddies. As well as beautiful avenues, a tram stop and a good connection with the ring road. Once all the streetlights must have worked and all the windows must have been intact. The idea that somebody would have created a dead street from the outset is one I find unbearable.
Lena saw it in a better light. She has just turned eighteen. She made a break for it. My sister was born clever but became stupid. Three months ago she broke out of this house and walked into the Rue Fontaine d’Amour.
I was sitting here on the roof, just like today. Suddenly her red scarf was there in the street. It wasn’t just hanging there as usual but followed on, flapping wildly in her trail. Even though there was nobody who could go after her, she ran as fast as she could away from our house. I was sitting on the roof; what could I do? From the roof ridge to the attic, from the attic to the stairway, sixty steps, the front door.
I would have liked to shout: “Stay, Lena, come on.”
Or better yet: “I’m coming with you. Wait, I’ll pack my sports bag.”
But I can’t do that. I am fifteen and therefore nothing. Even a child gets further with her father than a daughter my age.
Of course I was angry. She hadn’t said a word to me. At least not where I thought: that’s unusual. Our last conversation before she left wasn’t even a conversation. A few mumbles in the bathroom and then: “There’s a spot on your top.” Finished.
She had had a new job for a few weeks, that much I knew. L’Avion Rose, a bar at the other end of the city. A bit nightclub, a bit disco. Make conversation with the customers, be friendly, give compliments, receive compliments. A dance now and then underneath the disco ball, a hand here, a hand there. A decoy bird with suspenders. It didn’t pay badly and she could sleep in every day.
Father was furious about it. The morning she left I heard them having a shouting match that lasted for ages.
Now she lives in a secret place. I see her once a week. Then I put my hands on her cheeks and say it’s better this way.
It is better this way.
Look over there, where the Rue Fontaine d’Amour turns into the park: the red of the copper beech trees, a dog pisses on a yew tree, kids beat up an old lady on the way to school. Lovers sit on a bench amongst the rhododendrons. The man with a tie and a briefcase next to him on the ground. The woman with a suit, glasses pushed up on her hair. A little longer and the working day will begin. They are no married couple. The place is too exciting for that, the touches too passionate, the lips too greedy to explore the other. It is a goodbye. However brief, I recognize it immediately. It is hidden in the reserved gestures. A head briefly laid against the neck of the other. Two fingers that brush loose hair behind an ear. The one lover smoothes the clothes of the other, stands up and disappears without looking behind the bushes.
There’s a hole in the city. I can see it from the roof in the Rue Fontaine d’Amour. In the branches of the copper beeches where the shadows of the rhododendrons and the fig trees mingle. Amongst the leaves there is a hole. Now and then I see people hoist themselves up along the branches. Creep in there and you’re gone forever.
Sometimes I imagine how one morning all the streets of Brussels could fold up and with an enormous clap of thunder disappear in that hole. They drag the houses along in their wake, the blocks of flats, offices and theatres. Only the Rue Fontaine d’Amour remains. All around is nothing. I could climb off the roof and go into that nothing.
Yesterday I saw a cat, emaciated, a dismal cry for food. It must have known. It sauntered around in the bushes for several minutes, sniffed at the footsteps that end amongst the beech trees. It buried excrement among the fallen figs, quickly rolled itself into a little ball and shot up into the tree. It had disappeared from the city in a flash. I spent a while looking for a tunnel above the tops of the beeches. Or an air bridge to the clouds. It would be really reassuring to know what was on the other side of that hole.
I almost told Lena about it. Each week we saw each other at the foot of the copper beech. Then we sit between the wide roots and say nothing. How often it was on my lips: if we climb the branches, everything will be over. I didn’t dare say it. I’m afraid I’ll get up one morning to find that the city has not disappeared into that hole, but just Lena.
---
Lately, father often looks worried. Every day we have visitors in the Rue Fontaine d’Amour. At the oddest times he walks down the stairs and lets in the two Albanians. Besnik and Ismail they are called. They’re in their mid twenties, I guess, rough, but not completely ugly. Besnik has three piercing in his ear. His face is covered with small scars, as if hot cooking oil was splattered into it. Ismail is more stocky, with pale curls down to his shoulders. They are not fat and not thin. Besnik is almost tall and Ismail is almost short. The city is choking with young men like these. Seedy, often on the run. If you ask what brings them here, they dump their whole life in your face.
Lena calls them illegals but father says they’re angels. He sees that in their clear eyes, a certain sorrow in their faces. From a distance they’re a bit dingy, like the majority of our neighbours. Not fit and lively like you might think from their age, but with a stiffness in their walk. Coffee stained teeth. Extra wide shoulder blades.
I can’t see the wings. A bald spot in their stubbly beards. Yesterday the taller one spit a green wad on the ground, just in front of father’s feet. For him it was a blob of divine providence, dropped onto the floor.
They’re probably conmen. Maybe they’re not even real Albanians. Lena says there’s a test for angels: lock the Albanians up in the kitchen, turn on the gas cooker and throw in a match. If you smell singed feathers and they’re suddenly right behind you undamaged, then you know who you’re dealing with. If they’re blown to smithereens then at least you have smoothed the path to heaven.
Besnik and Ismail lie around all evening stretched out on the sofa, beers in hand. If I ever go to Albania, the first thing I’ll do is open a bar. Those men can really drink! Father sits there on a chair and listens to their stories, drivelling. They talk about the ruin of Brussels, about God and freedom. The whole city is going to pot and the invaders are come to save father. In exchange for a free meal and a lot of alcohol, of course. Name me an illegal who has ever thought up a better scheme.
I hang suspended in a great air bubble, float back and forth between the kitchen and my bedroom. I can hear them through the kitchen doorway. Not that I want to listen to their conversations but I can’t completely ignore them. Somehow I want to know, understand why father allowed this to continue. Why he wanders through the house at night and lets himself be taken advantage of by illegals. It is not through charity, that’s for sure. He has never been able to imagine what’s going on inside other people. The separation fell on him like a bomb out of thin air, while mother had been at the end of her tether for years. And then all that business with Lena.
Maybe he sees it as a duty: giving the hungry to eat. Or maybe he doesn’t dare refuse anything to this rabble. But why does he have such a stupid smile on his face?
“Have you been living here a long time?” I hear Besnik ask.
“How long is long?” father says.
“Such a big house just for you et votre fille.”
“It does have its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“The view.”
“What’s so great about that?” Ismail asks.
“The air,” father says.
“It’s slowly turning red,” Ismail says. “Vous l’avez vu?”
“Sand from the Kalahari Desert,” father says. “Carried over Brussels by the wind. There was a documentary about it.”
“Nonsense,” Ismail says.
“That red,” Besnik says solemnly. “C’est l’Amour de Dieu. Will you accept that from us?”
Involuntarily, I turn my head to the kitchen window. A freight lorry thunders past. A few seagulls fly up and disappear behind the roofs. Their excrement remains like red flecks on the zinc ridge of the roof. I see what father means. As if someone dripped a few drops of red ink into the atmosphere that were more and more diluted. But it could just as well be the fumes from all those kebab shops.
Father coughs. I hear him scrape back his chair and walk to the bookshelf. As so often he pulls out a yellowed copy of Nijinsky’s diary. Without opening it he begins to quote out loud: “I will be a fish and not a man if men will not help me. I understand that the earth is being extinguished. I know that the earth was a sun. I know what a sun is. The sun is fire. People think that life is dependent on the sun. I know that life is dependent on people.”
A fish, I think. Just the thing for him.
“I once wrote a doctorate on Nijinsky but I couldn’t understand it. I thought he was crazy.”
“You said he was, didn’t you?” Besnik says.
“Since your arrival I’ve begun to doubt that.... Listen: ‘I feel much and therefore I live. In me the fire does not die. I live with God. People do not understand me. I came here to help. I want paradise on earth’.”
“Bien dit,” mumbles Ismail.
“Precisely what we want,” Besnik says: “Paradise on earth.”
“And especially for you, monsieur le professeur.”
Suddenly father walks into the kitchen. When he sees me, he gets a terrible idea: he wants me to sit by his drunken visitors on the sofa. He sounds half drunk himself. There’s no question of this: playing the sweet laughing little daughter.
“It is an opportunity to practise your French,” he says.
“I have to study,” I tell him. “Physics tomorrow!”
When he keeps on about how important it is for me to speak French, I stick my fingers in my ears. As soon as I see him shuffle off back to the living room, I go to my room. I crawl through the window and climb back onto the roof.
A man on crutches has difficulty with the incline of the street. A stray dog barks behind him. A greying Arab stacks up floor tiles in the boot of his car. A child plays with an empty cigarette packet. Delivery vans load and unload furniture.
I pick at some moss under the roof tiles. I spit over the edge and watch the saliva go down. I count the seconds between its launch and the splat on the porch tiles below.
They say that shitty fathers act from a lack of power. That they don’t know how to give direction to their fatherly love and therefore screw up their kids’ lives. I don’t know about his love but he can screw up with the best of them. One day he’ll find me here; that much I’ve promised myself. On the ridge of the roof. He’ll get the fright of his life. And I’ll show him: a dead normal street with dead normal people, a park to the right and the Pakistani to the left, rubbish everywhere; grass sprouting in the guttering.
He won’t understand me and I won’t mind. I have promised myself that too.
This is what he knows: I wear clothes he doesn’t like. I have my own room. I am enrolled in year ten of a secondary school. I blush easily. I used to have a hamster. As a baby I fell off the changing table. Mother turns me against him. My “a”s are ugly when I speak. As a child I had head lice every year.
This is what he doesn’t know (for starters): I have a piercing in my belly button. I like stubbly beards, bare upper arms and boys’ eyes that light up with a sparkle. I collect unfinished poems. I use almond and honey body milk every day. I cried myself sick as a baby because he couldn’t express himself. One day I’m going to buy a motorbike. Every so often I French-kiss Lena. I’ve saved up for a one-way train ticket to Barcelona.
---
Lena says that only a full life is a true life. That someone who doesn’t fully enter into it hasn’t actually lived, even at the point of death. That he could just as well lie down immediately after birth. But what is that, a full life? Running away from home, is that it? Flirting with strange men, drinking with your arse in the air?
Lena hasn’t really run away. She has moved from one side of Brussels to the other. She’s trying to forget, not to live. And there’s a difference.
Still, I would like to be able to do that: put on my jacket, shove some books and clothes into a bag and run. Further and further. Along the avenues and boulevards out of the city. Goodbye bulging rubbish bins, degenerate bus passengers, children lighting a fire on the pavement. Away from all the walls that collapse inward, and the doors with locks that grind and crack. Freed from soap dishes and curtains, mouldy bread and dirty underpants. Delivered from this place that clings to your feet and sucks at you if your steps are too big.
I would be able to stand by the side of the road and stick my thumb in the air. One second with your thumb in the air can make all the difference.
A car would stop.
Someone would lower their window. Look at me. Ask a question.
“Hello.”
“Where are you going?”
The smell of coins, a stubbed out cigarette.
“Somewhere there’s a friendly village waiting for me.”
A pause. Perhaps a smile.
“Would you like to take me there?”
And then just driving. Ever onwards. What’s the use of a reverse gear if you really want to live? That’s what I’ll ask the driver and we’ll laugh about it. There, lurching through the meadows, lost, criss cross through the country.
Translation: Katheryn Ronnau-Bradbeer
