The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

WHAT WAS NOT SAID IN BRUSSELS

“Brussels,” murmured John…

…and something in him whispered: “Funny place to meet up.” They were irritating, these set phrases that surged on the current of his thoughts. In this case, he knew where the expression came from. A film, of course. A French film, with Deneuve and Depardieu. But more often than not he didn’t know where these stray fragments came from, but they were there, suddenly, clearly stated, floating in the intimate monologue that accompanied John from morning till night, a wave of words he could only escape by closing his eyes and listening to a sonata (“Again with your Bach!” sighed Annie…). An article caught his attention in the Volkskrant he had just bought in the Amsterdam train station and was now reading while waiting on the platform for the Thalys departing for Brussels. Scientists had made “a giant step” in mindreading. More irritation. Why were they talking about progress (a step is progress, isn’t it?) when science made an advance — hmm, “an advance…”—when science made an incursion (an intrusion) in people’s heads? John tried to inculcate a sense of perspective in his students at the University of Amsterdam: yes, science is still the most precious thing man has (“And art, m’sieur?”—he had chosen to ignore, for once, Guusje and her little face riddled with freckles, eternally questioning everything…), yes, science, it’s what separates us from barbarism, but (he had raised an imperious finger) limits must be established!

He finished the Volkskrant article and the Thalys still hadn’t arrived. He consulted his watch then began an imaginary course for the ectoplasms: “What does that mean, ‘to read the thoughts of Mr. Tartempion’? All I had to do was think of Brussels and the phrase ‘funny place to meet up’ formed mechanically in my head. Where does this idiocy come from? We don’t know! From physicochemical connections in the spongy mass we call the brain, from an electric shock…It all happened automatically, as if I had inadvertently pushed a button programmed, unbeknownst to me, to open a hidden door. (A sweeping glance around the lecture hall to check that his students had understood the image.) To what extent am I, me, responsible for that chain of events?”

The Thalys pulled in noiselessly along the platform. John steered himself toward car 11, in front of which stood an affable employee who took a glance at his ticket.

“Seat 74, on your right,” said the employee in Dutch and then French.

John contented himself with nodding his head and giving a faint smile. He had stopped making remarks along the lines of “Yes, I know, I take this train two times a month” a long time ago, for they accomplished nothing, except, perhaps, an irate reaction from the employee (“Excuse me for trying to be of service…”). He had decided, once and for all, to consider each civil functionary as a machine with which it was necessary to maintain relations that our descendants will maintain with their South Korean robots: informative, brief, concrete — never any affect or emotion. (“But, m’sieur, you’re dehumanizing the world.” “That happened long before I came along, mademoiselle Guusje.”) Placing his suitcase above seat 74, John resumed his course: “Even if we get to that point one day, by implanting the most advanced electrodes in Mr. Tartempion’s brain, to ‘read’ his thoughts, how would we separate those that belong to him of his own right, those that engage him and genuinely express his ‘ego,’ from those that appear all of a sudden, that do nothing, so to speak, but pass through?”

He plopped onto his seat, adjusted it to the reclined position, closed his eyes and continued. Addressing Stephan, one of his favorite students, he said: “Suppose I watch our Great Leader on the television — assuming we are in a totalitarian country — and this incongruous phrase forms in my head: ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ because at school, that’s what we shouted at one of our classmates who was a little chubby and the Great Leader had put on some weight in the past few months…So, Stephan, you are a functionary of the Ministry of Control of the People’s Thoughts and the electrodes are informing on me. The brain of citizen John Van Duursen, at 8:56pm, was crossed by the words ‘Get out of here, fat-ass!’ at the moment when our glorious Guide appeared on the little screen — so, Stephan, the question is: Am I responsible for this concatenation of words that formed without my being able to do anything about it?”

The Thalys had just set off and was now gliding out of the station, with the city on the left and the port on the right. “Il y a des marins qui naissent / dans la chaleur épaisse…”, the song popped into John’s head; he very much admired the great Jacques Brel. Look who was adding grist to his mill now (“So to speak,” thought John, vexed at not having anyone to whom he could remark that to add grist to the mill of a Batavian was certainly as pointless as supplying coal to Newcastle or sand to the Sahara).

“Looks like I got a little derailed there,” he said — and he heard the phrase: “You mean, a little detailed?” Ha, ha. Here we have the clear proof of his theory: our thoughts don’t belong to us, for the most part. They fall under the jurisdiction of…what’s the phrase? Ah yes: spontaneous generation. They are little electric currents that…Anyway. He dove back into his magazine. The phrase “funny place to meet up” was all the more incongruous because he knew perfectly well why he was going to Brussels: to put an end to his relationship. Funny place to break up.

Annie hasn’t smoked for a long time. She renounced her vice for John, her Hollandais (“No, Annie, Holland is only a province of the Netherlands. I am né-er-lan-dais.”)…her capricious Néerlandais, a bit stubborn, terribly intelligent. She doesn’t smoke anything and so much the better, for there is no longer anywhere to “light up”—she learned that expression from John — in the Gare du Nord, where she is waiting for the Thalys that will take her to Brussels. For the first time in months, her fingers are itching for it, she bites her lips, this would be the moment to exhale her anxiety in the cigarette’s smoke. She raises her eyes toward the board that she’s consulted a thousand times since the start, two years ago, of her long-distance relationship with the great Batavian she is about to meet in the land of Tintin.

The train leaves in fifteen minutes. I have time to go buy a newspaper. A bit more than an hour and I’ll be in Brussels. It’s curious, he didn’t seem surprised when I proposed we spend the weekend there, instead of meeting up, per usual, in Paris or Amsterdam. He didn’t ask any questions…What would I have replied? We began this adventure in Brussels, it’s logical (she hesitates, perhaps that’s not the appropriate word), it’s right (suitable? appropriate?) that we separate there, like a loop closing itself, at once finished and infinite. How will John react to the decision she had made? To break up.

Car 17. After leaving her suitcase at the entrance, Annie goes to sit in the seat indicated on her ticket, discreetly stuffs Quies earplugs in her ears — no interest in hearing the multilingual jabbering of her neighbors — and takes out her newspaper. “The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair” continues. It’s a godsend for the press, whose sales are exploding. Everyone has an opinion on the topic. As it happens, it was the cause of her latest fight with John. Fight? Let’s say snag, a cultural misunderstanding… “This type of scandal wouldn’t happen in my country,” John had decreed with that little air of moral superiority that frustrated Annie so much.

“That’s right, treat us like degenerates while you’re at it.”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate. You know I adore France. But come on, you let everything slide with your male politicians.”

“Yours don’t interest anybody, that’s why we don’t go digging through their private lives. Who ever heard talk of Balkenende or Rutte?”

It wasn’t the first time they had quarreled, but that time had left a sour taste in her mouth. Was it possible to spend one’s life with someone who always assumed the role of moral authority? A man she believed she loved but who irritated her with his obsessive reduction of everything to the following certitude: he knew what was right and she had no choice but to come around to his opinion. The Thalys was trundling now through the Parisian suburbs before reaching its tremendous speed in the plains of the north. “It’s hard enough with each of us living in our own country, to always have these three hours of train between us,” she thought. “If on top of that I have to live in a sort of permanent guilt because I don’t have the Calvinist principles of Monsieur…” She remembered that John Calvin was French but didn’t know how to turn the phrase to her advantage. Oh, whatever…Her eyes lingered again on the headline of her daily. Look at that, Johnny Hallyday is playing the actor, on the stage. In a play by Tennessee Williams, no less. She dreamed for an instant about going to see it with John but collided with another one of his principles: a play is done in the language in which it was written. Easy to say, when you’re a polyglot like him. I’m a professor of history, not letters. I prattle through a bit of English. Thankfully he speaks my language. Ah, another theme of our squabbles. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would partake in long conversations in Dutch, in Amsterdam, in a café or at the home of friends, unconcerned that she didn’t understand a word.

“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…

Their steps had carried them toward the museum of the Cinquantenaire. They stopped a moment to look at the great building, somber and solemn. They found themselves climbing up the majestic steps quite naturally. John mumbled something, she nodded yes and he went to buy two tickets. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself.

They walked through the rooms exchanging a few formulaic phrases. (“It’s incredible how rich this museum is! — Yes…Why isn’t it better known? You never hear anyone talk about it. Did you see those marble statues? — Fabulous!”) Little by little, the phrases became less conventional, or else they took on a new meaning, as the museum closed in on them and its richness took on an extraordinary effect. The Mosaïque de la Chasse from Apamée in Syria, which the guide specified “came from the palace of the governor of Syria Secunda, a Roman province,” left them speechless. Annie summed it up in one of her reflections that she sometimes made aloud and regretted just as soon, qualifying them herself as “Poujadist.”

“I say, well, the governor of Syria Secunda did all right for himself!”

She had had to explain the word poujadiste to John a few months earlier…

The bronzes of Lorestan gave John an opportunity to speak of his time backpacking through Iran during his studies. “It was before the ayatollahs…” Annie remembered she had admired the beautiful samples at the Cernuschi museum in Paris.

“Samples of the ayatollah?”

“No, nitwit, of the bronzes!”

They burst out laughing, nervously, then became serious again, he a bit melancholic, she on the verge of tears. To get a hold of herself, she started reading aloud entire phrases from the guide. Since they were alone in the museum, she felt like she was strolling through an immense palace, as if it were their home. Her home. “The Egyptian collection contains more than eleven thousand pieces,” she read. She showed him the “Dame de Bruxelles,” then the relief of Queen Tiyi. He nodded his head without teasing her about her very recent knowledge. “The Roman collections are structured around a few important oeuvres: remarkable Etruscan mirrors, marble busts of the imperial epoch…” Leaning over the immense model of Rome, they showed each other, with their fingers, the monuments they recognized.

“That will be our next trip!” exclaimed Annie rashly — then she bit her lip.

In another room, they saw icons, silks, Coptic textiles, and Byzantine ceramics.

“Mais c’est Byzance…” Annie murmured mechanically.

John approached her.

“What did you say?”

Annie hesitated a bit then turned toward him and taught him the expression she had heard so often in her childhood. Her grandfather, in Toulouse, would come close to the table during parties, a big smile lighting up his emaciated face that had known so many hardships and he would exclaim, full of sun and kindness: “Mais c’est Byzance!”

“How would you say that in Dutch?”

He started to think.

“Het is de hoorn des overvloeds, maybe. But there’s probably a better translation. I’ll think about it…”

The Vietnamese ceramics, the Khmer sculptures, the drums from Laos plunged John into his childhood haunted by echoes of the war in Indochina on the radio…An imposing sculpture, brought from Easter Island, lured them toward a somber corner of the museum. Speechless, they lingered for several minutes before the menacing colossus without realizing they had drawn nearer to each other and were almost touching. The neighboring rooms presented the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations. Annie leaned in and read the texts diligently. John preferred to look first at the objects at length, then throw a rapid glance at the little cards glued to the displays. Annie murmured:

“…the feather-working art of the Indians of the great Amazon forests…”

She burst out laughing. John started to smile and looked at her, intrigued.

“No, it’s nothing, it’s a word that made me laugh: plumassier. I don’t know it. It made me think of plumard. L’art du plumard…Bed art…It’s funny.”

John didn’t laugh. “Vind je dit grappig?” He saw the words float before his eyes with the French translation: “Et vous trouvez ça drôle?” which he knew because one day Annie had made him listen to a sketch by Coluche which had ended in those words. Again another thing that didn’t work: she never laughed at his witticisms. By the time he explained them, dissected them, they had obviously lost all their appeal. “You’re terribly serious, you don’t have a sense of humor…” Petra and Mieneke, on the other hand, had appreciated his deadpan humor, the little absurdities he delivered with a very serious air. Again, it was necessary first to understand them…

Inside the museum, he discovered a Gothic cloister. They sat for a moment on the cold stone. They had promised, one day, at the beginning of their adventure, to visit all the cloisters in all the abbeys of Europe… “A vast undertaking.” “Yes, I know, I was waiting for that,” thought John, hearing the voice of de Gaulle whispering his words to him. “I’ll go alone to the cloisters,” Annie said to herself, “maybe I’ll put on a little black veil, they’ll think I’m a penitent…” She pulled herself together. “What do I have to atone for? This is nuts! There’s a part of me that feels guilty…” They left the cloister, took a wrong turn and found themselves in an immense room of pre-Columbian art. They were standing looking at a sort of miniature totem pole when John suddenly felt himself assailed by a tide of colors and sounds. Words formed in his head, it was as if he were a spectator looking on as it happened, and he distinctly heard his voice pronounce this phrase, in French:

“Annie, I’m sorry but it’s over between us.”

Immediately he felt a chasm open beneath his feet. No! He wanted to take back his words but it was impossible. The words were no longer there, there were only garish images, colors, echoes that bored into his skull. Terrified, he turned toward Annie but she was no longer at his side. Feverishly, he looked around the big room then saw her in the distance, her back to him. She was on the other side of the room, frozen before a display. He approached her, wondering how she had managed to walk away without him hearing. He touched her shoulder, she gave a start and turned around, shaken, shocked, looking haggard. But it was impossible, she couldn’t have heard him. Why this fright, then? He noticed a sort of gray mummy in the display. It was a terrifying skeleton, an adolescent embalmed in a strange position, as if crouching. His bones were distinctly visible, one could make out the pieces of skin now turned to leather, one could surmise his gaze in his sunken eye sockets. Annie nestled herself in John’s arms and started to cry.

Now they were too tired to go admire the glassware, the stained glass windows, the tinware, and the ceramics the guide promised in the chapel. The lacework, the textiles, the clothing…

“Another time,” she said.

“Yeah,” he responded. “I shall return.”

“Why are you speaking in English?”

“It’s actually a famous saying. It’s what General MacArthur said while leaving the Philippines under the threat of the Japanese, during the war.”

“Do you know how to talk other than in quotations? Do you know that you’re extremely tiring? And for starters, it’s not I shall return but We shall return.”

She had said all that with a lot of tenderness. They returned to the hotel, making a detour to pass under the archway of the Cinquentenaire. This time, in the park, their hands searched for each other, found each other. Back at the hotel, they went to have a drink at the restaurant bar. They decided together to stay there for dinner instead of going to the Grand Place, as John had planned. The waitress was Italian, friendly, and discreet. Annie took a sip of wine and remarked:

“You’re certainly quiet, for once!”

He smiled, took her hands and looked her in the eyes. He said nothing, but the words jostled around in his head.

“Today, I almost lost you…But I realized that all the phrases that brought me toward our separation…toward what I thought was my decision to separate, were not from me…In a certain way, I heard voices. Quotations. Words, collars of sounds that came from I don’t know where. When you were getting on my nerves, I saw phrases appear. ‘What an idiot!’ ‘What am I doing with this woman?’ ‘This relationship isn’t going anywhere.’ ‘Let’s finish it!’ Words…But the important thing is that atrocious feeling of solitude that gripped me in a second when I thought it was over. That was concrete. That was me. My body, my soul, call it what you will…It’s then that I understood, at that precise moment. (By what miracle did you walk away from me when I thought you were by my side?)”

She looked at him with a sardonic air, thinking: “You’ll never know it, but I came to Brussels to break up with you. It’s too complicated, this long-distance relationship. And your hollandais character…sorry, néerlandais. And then, it’s stupid but…It was while looking at that mummy that I said to myself: he is alive. You, I mean…He’s full of faults, obsessions, he gets on my last nerve sometimes, but it’s precisely that which makes him alive. It’s that spark of life, even if it expresses itself through a bad temper, that I’m in love with. I know that now. We will visit all the cloisters of all the abbeys in the world.”

The delicious dishes that came one after another unknotted their tongues. It was almost midnight when they got back to the seventh floor. He stepped aside to let her enter the suite then entered in his turn. He closed the door, softly, almost tenderly, aware that he was entirely inside of this act. And in all those that were to come.