Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick McGuinness

  Map of Bouillon

  Dramatis Personae

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Doors and Windows of Wallonia

  Marie Bodard’s Sweetshop

  Les Vieux Bouillonnais

  Keys

  Collette

  My Suits

  Lining

  Cardinal Mazarin

  Trappist Beer

  The Arse

  Corbion

  Robert Hainaux

  Aesthetics

  ‘Faire le tour de Bouillon’

  Triage

  Pissing in Your Chips

  Boxes

  Corridor, 8 Rue du Brutz

  Corridor, 8 Rue du Brutz, II: The Catwalk

  Understairs Cupboard

  Rimbaud and Verlaine

  Degrelle

  Walloon Party Songs

  Edouard Degrelle and Henri Charles

  Crime Wave

  Newshound

  All Photography is Trick Photography

  Even Brussels . . .

  Pension Calendar

  16/20

  Le Dènn

  Centenarian

  Murder in Morocco

  ‘Au Premier’

  Recipe: Canados aux rousses

  Trempinette

  Hors sol

  Trois gants

  Demolition

  Sobriquets

  Telephone

  Picture and Frame

  Everything and Nothing

  Watched by Animals

  The Golden Boot

  Empty Courtyard

  My Mother

  The Bouillon History Circle

  The Old Station

  ‘La v’là, ta pièce’

  Maybe Even Paris . . .

  Naturalisation

  The Factory for Sad Thoughts

  Against the Wind

  Chasing your Tail with Nietzsche

  Stolen Saint

  Mini-Europe

  Stations

  Angelry

  Tourist Train

  National Day

  The Belgiad

  Déjà-vu

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People’s Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character – full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world.

  This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child – first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully – ‘Most of my childhood,’ he says, ‘feels more real to me now than it did then’. For all its sharp specifics, though, this is a book about the common, universal concerns of childhood and the slowly developing deep sense of place that is the bedrock for our memories.

  Alert and affectionate, full of great curiosity and humour, Other People’s Countries has all the depth and complexity of its own subject – memory – and is an unfashionably distilled, resonant book: unusual and exquisite.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Tunisia in 1968, Patrick McGuinness is the author of The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award and won the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010). He is a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where he lectures in French.

  Also by Patrick McGuinness

  POETRY

  The Canals of Mars

  Jilted City

  FICTION

  The Last Hundred Days

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  (The list does not include the living)

  The Lejeunes, the Nicolas, the Bourlands and the McGuinnesses

  Lucie Lejeune, née Nicolas, dressmaker, couturière, grandmother (1920–99)

  Eugène Lejeune, ‘Le Dènn’, ferronnier, metalworker, grandfather (1914–83)

  Monique Lejeune, mother (1942–2002)

  Kevin McGuinness, father (1938–2004),

  Collette Lejeune, aunt, teacher in the école communale (1944–87)

  Paul Nicolas, great-uncle (1916–82)

  Marie Nicolas, née Pierson (1918–2001)

  Albert Nicolas, great-uncle (1912–96)

  Emile Nicolas, great-uncle died in the fire of Bouillon (1911–44)

  Julia Bourland, née Nicolas, great-grandmother, hotel chambermaid (1890–1975)

  Elie Nicolas, great-grandfather, forest warden, husband of Julia Bourland, father of Lucie Lejeune (1890–1958)

  Eugénie Bourland, great-great-aunt, sister of Julia, mother of Victor Adam (1885–1971)

  Lucie Bourland, great-great-aunt, seamstress (1889–1951)

  Victor Adam (‘Pistache’), father of Guy and brother of Nanette, executed by the Gestapo (1913–44)

  Emile Lejeune (‘Emile Picard’, ‘Emile la petite’), carter, great-grandfather, murdered in ‘Le Maroc’ (1882–1924)

  Olga Lejeune, great aunt (1918–2000)

  The Bouillonnais

  Léon Degrelle, Belgian fascist leader (1906–94)

  Edouard Degrelle, brother of Léon Degrelle, died aged twenty months (1902–4)

  Edouard Degrelle, pharmacist and Léon Degrelle’s brother, assassinated by unknown resistance members (1904–44)

  Robert Hainaux, garagiste, bon-viveur and Fiat car salesman (1935–2007)

  Marcel Hanus, ‘Le Cul’, ‘L’Queu’ (‘The Arse’), café owner (1924–83)

  ‘Mataba’, Gaston Maziers, café owner (1906–84)

  Maurice Pirotte, Bouillonnais poet and centenarian (1913–2013)

  Madelaine Ozeray, actor (1908–89)

  Godefroid de Bouillon, Crusader, King of Jerusalem (c.1060–1100)

  ‘Trois gants’, ubiquitous but ineffectual gendarme, real name Jules Antoine (1918–2003)

  Marie Bodard, sweetshop owner (1903–89)

  ‘Zizi’, or ‘Zizi Pan-Pan la Galette’ (Louis Albert), Bouillon’s most libidinous man and a Bourland on his mother’s side (1934–2011)

  Visitors, Tourists and Passers-through

  Rimbaud, French poet and Ardennais (1854–91)

  Verlaine, French poet and Ardennais (1844–96)

  Baudelaire, French poet and reluctant traveller through Belgium (1821–67)

  Simone Signoret, actor (1921–85)

  Gordon Jackson, actor (1923–90)

  James Robertson Justice, actor (1905–70)

  Jack Warner, actor (1895–1989)

  Louis Jouvet, director (1887–1951)

  Cardinal Mazarin (Giulio Mazzarino), Italian cardinal and French statesman (1602–61)

  For Osian and Mari, so they know where they come from

  Other People’s Countries

  A Journey into Memory

  Patrick McGuinness

  Allez, tais-toi, dit le paysage.

  Come on, shut up, says the landscape.

  PAUL DE ROUX

  First there is memory, its sleights of mind;

  then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed.
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br />   DOORS AND WINDOWS OF WALLONIA

  BEFORE TELEVISION BACKLIT them with its haunted blues,

  its gauze of voice over voice, dubbings of Dynasty and Dallas,

  there were firesides filtered through net curtains, shadows

  pulling free from shadows. The furniture didn’t furnish,

  it loomed; heavy as cannon, it boomed darkness.

  After closedown, after the trembling not-quite-stasis

  of the RTB testcard, the blue glow lingered,

  fizzed against mosquito nets, caught the flypaper garlands

  with their incrustation of bluebottle and mouche à merde,

  the banal shitfly with his coalface glitter.

  That was the house’s pulse, a comatose cellar-beat

  to which my grandmother, Bouillon’s only dressmaker,

  pedalled kilometres of stitching, threaded her needles

  seven to seven in daylight that took all day to die.

  Her only books were swatches; she held them up

  to the daughters and widows of Wallonia

  fresh with their ideas from Brussels, of haute couture,

  their cut-outs from Paris-Match: a small-town catwalk

  of Deneuves along a corridor of Stockman mannequins

  stuck with pins, stained with oil or grease, and for me then

  (for me still) so oddly sexual with their tapered waists,

  the perfection of their closedness. My face at the window, I’d watch

  her busy sparrow-jerks inside the darkness that fleshed her out,

  and smell the last-but-one all-day pot-au-feu that held its own

  against the clashing scents of factory-owners’ wives.

  But the body that stayed caught in the full-length looking-glass

  is mine, my drowning childhood pulling down, and these days

  nothing – least of all my whole life – flashes by. Only the empty

  mirror gives me back that time, and the lace curtains,

  more air than lace, are sieves for shadows to pass through light.

  Each time I breathe I breathe it in, that sublimate of all that’s gone.

  Essence of Indoors would be the perfume, if they made it.

  MARIE BODARD’S SWEETSHOP

  THIS SMALL DARK monochrome shop on a thin cobblestoned street with a pavement the width of a dustbin in the Belgian border town of Bouillon has become a legend in my children’s bedtime. It feels more real to them than ever it felt to me, clouded over as it is in a mist of imperfect recollection and wishful thinking. Even at the time, when I was a child visiting it every day, I felt as if I was remembering it. Or that it was someone else’s memory I was hosting, incubating it like a kind of surrogate. And as with so much of that childhood, I seem to remember not the things themselves but the memories of the things, as if the present I experienced them in was already slowing up and treacling over, fixing itself in a sepia wash. My children don’t know that feeling yet, so telling them about Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, filling it in, is like colouring in a black-and-white picture. Actually, since there were never really enough sweets to call it a sweet shop – ‘magasin d’bonbons’ described, in truth, its function rather than its essence – I find myself putting in most of the sweets too.

  Like most shops and workplaces in Bouillon, it was really just someone’s front room, where they sat, smoked and ate and watched TV, gliding around on fat felt slippers, and sold what they made or cooked, gutted, chopped or topped and tailed. The baker’s across the road had their oven in the back of the house, their shop at the front. In the evenings they’d roll their sofa and armchairs in front of the bread-oven and gather around what was left of the day’s heat. And it was a particular kind of heat you got in the baker’s in the evening: all residual, infiltrating the air rather than wrapping it in warmth, but always somehow enough.

  The cafés and cigarette- and souvenir-shops were the same: a counter or a bar with the owner or landlord sitting on the customer side smoking, eating, reading the papers, until someone came in. At this point they would stop being a person living in their house and become a tradesperson or a shopkeeper – a commerçant – but only for the duration of the transaction. Even the butchers lived at the back of the shop, their immaculate living room flanked by a fridge room and a hoseable chopping room. (I always tried to pay the exact money, so as not to receive the bloody change, usually streaked with meaty pulp.) My grandmother, Lucie, also worked in the front room, using the corridor as a catwalk for her ‘clientes’ and a large cupboard built into the wall, whose door she had replaced with a thin curtain, as her dressing room. She overworked and undercharged, cooked and kept house, did her own accounts and looked after her ailing husband, Eugène, my grandfather, damaged by a life in the factory owned by the people for whom Lucie made dresses.

  Eugène ailed. For most of my childhood that seemed to be his job, his second career: to ail emphysemically, peeling potatoes and playing cards in the kitchen on a red formica table. He had been a useful local footballer for Le Standard de Bouillon, a mean couyon-player and local pétanque champion, and in the days before the ailing began, it was my job to scour the cafés of Bouillon (about twenty for a population of two thousand) to bring him back for meals. Another habit of his, which runs in the family, was to piss outside wherever possible; indeed, to go out of his way to take a piss outdoors, even when he was comfortably settled indoors: even when watching television across the landing from the bathroom, he’d get off the sofa, go down the stairs, out into the ruelle and urinate against the outside wall. Sometimes he’d go up the small lane to the foot of the castle and piss against the rock, or down to the river, where he’d add a bladderful to the water he fished in. A piss was always a special occasion for men in the Lejeune household. Somewhere there is a photograph of three generations of Lejeunes – my uncle Jean-Pol, my son Osian and me – lined up at the water’s edge pissing into it. The blur, the haunting at our shoulders, is Eugène, joining his progeny in adding his golden arc to the moving water of Time. And we in turn are paying what Robert Frost, in his poem ‘West-Running Brook’, called ‘the tribute of the current to the source’. Eugène’s nickname was Le Dènn, a patois corruption of the Walloon Le Djenn which is itself a corruption of Le gène, which is also the French for gene, as in progeny, genetics, genes, Genesis and eugenics. Eugène may not be where it all began, but it’s his face we wear: my sister, my mother, my children and me.

  When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors. To remake that childhood (to remake myself) I’d need to build a house made of all the rooms in which the things and the nothings that went into me happened. And plenty of nothing happened too: it’s The Great Indoors for me every time. This house of mine, this house of mind, would be like a sort of Rubik’s cube, but without any single correct alignment or order: the rooms would be continuous, contiguous, they could be shuffled and moved about, so that its groundplan would be always changing. Just as they build for earthquakes or hurricanes, creating buildings that have some give in them, that can sway with the wind or sit on stilts in water and marshland, that can shake to their foundations but still absorb the movement, so the rooms in the house of a remembered childhood take on the shocks and aftershocks of adult life, those amnesiac ripples that spread their blankness along the past. Trying to remember is itself a shock, a kind of detonation in the shadows, like dropping a stone into the silt at the bottom of a pond: the water that had seemed clear is now turbid (that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word) and enswirled.

  One evening, my children asked for a picture of Marie Bodard’s, so we set about recreating it. Remembering makes things real – it’s the only guarantee that they’ve actually happened. Events owe their existence to memories more than memories owe their existence to events. Most of my childhood feels more real to me now than it did then. There’s been a filtering out of overall meaning or poin
t (half the time now I can’t remember, if I ever knew, who most of the people in my mind’s eye’s memories are – they’re like the forgotten cast of a lost film), and a heightening of detail: smell, taste, sight, touch. Textures and moods and states of mind or body (comfort, safety, warmth, or nausea, cold, sadness) push out the big things, the ‘significance’, the ‘meaning’ of the event. No, they don’t push them out; rather, they become the means by which you get access once again to the big things. Death becomes concrete once more not because this or that loved family member or friend occupies your heart any more than they once did, but because the timbre of your sorrow comes back to you through your senses, through the feeling you had then, that day, which has stood suspended, has lived in its room unchanged, long after the house itself, the house that gave it context, has crumbled or been demolished. So the house of memory becomes a house in which all the rooms that have survived demolition have been arranged. The house has been flattened but somehow the rooms are all intact. I think that’s what I mean.

  LES VIEUX BOUILLONNAIS

  MY MOTHER’S FAMILY have lived in Bouillon for generations. Until the early twentieth century, many of the men worked as miquelets, small-scale loggers, cutting down trees in the forest that surrounds the town, chopping the wood and tying it up into rafts, and then floating them into Bouillon to be dried and sold. The attics and cellars of hundreds of Bouillon houses still store the old miquelet tools, and some gîtes display them on their walls to give their visitors that ‘Ardenne profonde’ feel. Later, like my grandfather’s family, the men worked in one of the two factories, or, like my grandmother’s, as domestic servants or hotel chambermaids, waiters, handymen or kitchen staff. As with many such families joined together by marriage, they all finished up living in the same place: 8 Rue du Brutz, a three-storeyed house made up of two houses knocked through. At the back of the house you can still see the outline of the badly filled-in front door of the second house beneath the oak beam that was its lintel. The steps that led to it are long-gone. On the other side of that infilling, the cavity that was once the doorway is now a cupboard full of sheets and bedding in the first-floor bedroom. As the closest bedroom to the bathroom and stairs, it was traditionally reserved for whoever was oldest or most infirm. In my time it was my great-grandmother’s, then my grandfather’s, and finally Lucie’s, my grandmother’s. I had it for a week myself when, aged about ten, I twisted my ankle by jumping from a high wall near the castle. Lucie, a dressmaker and seamstress, had made me a Spiderman costume after I had seen the film at René Lemaire’s cinema. She must have forgotten to explain that the costume did not in itself confer the matching superpowers, because I embarked on a series of high-risk spider-stunts which finished with me being bandaged up and stuck upstairs for days, still wearing blue tights and red underpants, and watching Zorro, for which Lucie also made me a costume.