Fouad Laroui - The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

“You just have to learn Dutch.”

“When, where, how? And why? All Dutch people speak English. And all I can make out is the ghrs and the khs in that variety of sub-German.”

In that instance, he was the one who got angry. First of all, Dutch was its own language, not a dialect. And it was the richest language in the world. Yes, madam! He had insisted on showing her, shaking with anger, the twenty or twenty-two volumes of the great dictionary of the Dutch language, “with more entries than the Oxford English Dictionary or the Grand Larousse.” The quarrel lasted hours.

She tells herself she’ll go light a votive candle at the church of Sainte-Catherine, in that pretty neighborhood in the center of Brussels, once she’s no longer with John. She’s not at all religious, but that would be a way to close the chapter. When the votive candle has been burned through, the relationship will have been utterly burnt out. Or else the reverse?

They had agreed to meet on the Place Jourdan, in a big hotel recommended by a diplomat friend. When Annie entered, she saw John sitting on a vast patio decorated with works of art and lit up by a skylight. She was impressed with the place. John had already checked in and was holding the room key in his hand. They kissed on the cheek like strangers. In any case, John didn’t like public displays of affection. He brought her to the seventh floor (“seventh heaven, it’s over,” she thought with a pang of emotion…) and showed her with slightly melancholic pride the modern and comfortable suite with a beautiful view of Brussels. They struggled to recognize a few monuments in the distance. She was afraid he would want to take her in his arms, but he contented himself with waiting for her in the little living room, sitting on the sofa while she dropped off her things in the bedroom. She made a quick tour of the bathroom (everything was perfect) and then returned to the living room. In a cheerful tone she asked:

“So, what should we do now?”

The same thought crossed their minds: “Now’s not the time.”

“Have you eaten lunch?” (She nods, she had a sandwich on the train.) “Alright, let’s take a walk, it’s not even two o’clock yet, we’ll decide about dinner later.”

“Where should we go?”

“While I was waiting I took a look in the guide. There’s a big park close by. We’ll go take a walk through there?”

( Fine, as usual, he’s the one who decides, but it’s the last time .) They left the hotel, turned left and started down rue Froissart, then down rue Belliard. It was splendid out. That time, neither of them commented on the façades and their typically bruxellois alignment combining styles and epochs “with no regard for harmony,” he normally said, “but which in any case has a certain something,” she would then reply, “a je-ne-sais-quoi…”

“Ah yes, the je-ne-sais-quoi , the very practical French invention for when one runs out of arguments,” he had said one day, snickering.

“Not at all, it’s the expression of a subtle sentiment, almost… ineffable,” she had replied. “Your mind is too practical to feel it.”

He didn’t like when she teased him.

“That’s it, I’m just too…how do you say it, fruste? Frustre?”

“Frustre doesn’t exist, it’s a barbarism. The correct word is fruste.”

“You think I’m unsophisticated? Because I don’t know what the I-don’t-know-what is?”

He had laughed, rather satisfied with his play on words. She had replied, smiling, but with a dash of irritation:

“You are the most intelligent and most cultivated man I know. But come on, it’s true that there’s something quite Dutch about you. You yourself taught me the expression ‘merchant and pastor.’”

“Yes, koopman en dominee. We still have a bit of that in our mentality. So?”

“So, neither the merchant nor the pastor is reputed for his sense of nuance, of ambiguity, of the in-between…”

That day he had laughed and left it at that. Today, Annie gazed with a bit of sadness at the façades of the buildings on the rue Belliard. It was the last time she would see them in John’s company. Would she see them again one day? Would she have a reason to come back to Brussels and to this business district where tourists never venture? Everything around her seemed to be saying goodbye.

Five minutes later, they entered the Parc du Cinquentenaire. Contrary to their normal habit, they didn’t hold hands and even avoided touching. “How will I tell him? What explanation will I give?” This silence that simultaneously separated and united them began to weigh on Annie. She pointed out a tree in the distance:

“Did you see that magnificent maple?”

John turned in the direction Annie was indicating, her hand extended toward a corner of the park, and hesitated an instant. Then he nodded his head without saying anything and plunged back into his thoughts. Trees…At the beginning it had been a delight to discover their names in the two languages, to touch a chestnut tree and exclaim at the same time, laughing: “ Marronnier !” “ Kastanjeboom !” or “ Chêne !” “Eik!” “Eik???” She had laughed herself to tears. What a funny name…“ Hêtre! ” “ Beuk !” “Beuk??” “Come on, are you naming your trees or insulting them?” He had forced a laugh. And then, little by little, over the course of their walks, another feeling had surfaced. Sometimes he thought nostalgically of his previous relationships, with Petra or Mieneke, when it sufficed to name a tree, a flower, a fruit, without having to translate, so that right away, for both of them, a taste, a color, a childhood memory came to mind — and often the memory was the same, or nearly, the first orange tasted at Christmas, the striking appearance during a bike ride of an oak tree with its branches full of snow in the unreal silence of a winter morning, frozen and luminous, the first flowers to bloom in the garden of the family house, which bore a striking resemblance to the house that Petra or Mieneke had grown up in…With Annie, things were different: trees formed a sort of wall between them, the flowers spoke another language, fruit had the taste of another childhood, of another life. And all of that was lost… Lost in translation: It was the perfect phrase. It was a foregone conclusion: he had just seen the film…

Over the course of their walk, several such phrases formed in his head. “What am I doing here?” She was an old acquaintance, to whom he no longer even paid attention. The anxieties of adolescence…Yes, granted, no one knows why they are thrown into this (“cruel,” of course) world, we can lie to ourselves, believe in endless rubbish, imagine ourselves chosen, invent gods and great designs, but at the root of it all, we don’t know anything. So what? What does it matter if life does or doesn’t have meaning, as long as it has flavor? Another inscription surged from who knows where: “Who is this woman next to me?” Oh, he could have filled out a police report, he knew her name, her birthday, certain details that might be of interest for an anthropomorphic survey — and after? Would he have exhausted her? “It’s been a while since you wore her out.” Who said that? What boor? In the curve of a path, he had seen these words: “One must know how to end a strike.” Curiously, the phrase was written in French; it took him a few moments to recognize it. Yes, it was the phrase that Annie had taught him, one of those quotations she had forced him to repeat, the good history professor, “because France is that, too, not just monuments and nice little meals, but also proclamations, slogans engraved into the French imagination and which now form a part of our soul, our collective unconscious — to understand us, you must learn them by heart…”—but where did that declaration come from? Ah yes, that former communist leader — John furrowed his brow — who? Yes, Maurice Thorez: “One must know how to end a strike.” But why did he think of that? What was the connection? The words started to dance, then to glimmer and he saw that now they were saying something else: “One must know how to end a relationship.” Who is speaking? Are they giving me an order? A piece of advice? Is it me talking to myself? In a language other than my own? Bizarre…