#143: The Prelude
Brussels Commune Advent Calendar Day 18: Schaerbeek
I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
This is part 18 of a series of short sketches from of every one of Brussels’ 19 communes, and today we’re going over old ground.
The 61 one bus dropped me off at the top of Rue Thomas Vinçotte, where it joins the Leuvensesteenweg. I almost missed my stop and had to jump out of my seat to catch the door before it closed, because the bus wasn’t supposed to drop me off there. Or maybe it was, and I hadn’t been informed that its route had been altered in the 14 years since I’d moved out of this corner of Schaarbeek.
When we lived at number six, Rue Vinçotte, I would take the 61 from Rogier all the way up and over the narrow back streets of St Josse and alight at the other end of the road, where it terminates at a junction with Rue Gustave Fuss and a couple of metres from the blue front door to our our garret studio apartment. Walking down from the bus stop, the street is much the same as it was. The same night shop where I used to run for emergency bags of chips, the same old folks home, and on the corner at the end of the street the “Club Santé & Sport Body-building” where it always was, over the road from the gloomy, apparently empty neo-renaissance villa.
The plasticky blue door of our building is still there, though its finish has started to fade and peel like days-old sunburn. I cross the road to get a better look, leaning against the building opposite that was owned when we lived here by a tempestuous couple who regularly hosted late night pitched battles where one of them would be on the footpath shouting up and the other hanging out an upstairs window shouting down. Next to them was a restaurant called “La Vieille Bosnie/Chez Boris”, only now when I look I see the name above the door has changed. Now it’s called Le Château de Dracula, there’s a Romanian-language menu stuck on a window, and a lifesize wooden bust of the titular Count impaled on the restaurant’s front door, florid moustache and all.
I retrace the route I would have taken to work most mornings, from the apartment up to Place Dailly, across the Leuvensesteenweg and along the Rue de Noyer until I cross over the communal boundary into Brussels and the European Quarter. The old folks home may still be there, but by the look of its shuttered windows and overgrown gardens, it was abandoned some time ago. There are several more long tail bikes trussed up outside the maisons de maître than in our time. The petrol station at the top of the street is gone too, but the Don Luis café - where I had my first drink as an official Brussels resident, is still on the same corner it was. The old KBC bank where I opened my first Belgian account is not, but the Carrefour, the opticians and the old paint shop are all still where I left them in 2011. From Place Dailly I can still make out the cross on top of the golden dome of the otherwise inconspicuous Syrian Orthodox church on Rue de Noyer, but later when I walk down the street I’ll notice that the Portuguese supermarket where I first bought a tin of smoked paprika has been supplanted by a pizzeria.
Place Dailly, on the other hand, looks unchanged, its dreary hostility eternal. The square is neither fish nor fowl; not really a square at all so much as the vacuum formed by the coming together of five different streets in a tangle of zebra crossings, bus shelters and traffic lights. When we moved away from the neighbourhood in 2011 they were only just finished converting the dour neo-gothic barracks that dominates one side of the square into luxury apartments, and the square was reputed to be the home base of “gangs” of local young people. On the other side of the square are the same darkly-lit billiards bars with their neon-bright gambling machines as back then, the same shabby opticians and estate agents’ office, the same dreary Ladbrokes outlet, the same parking spots with moss growing up between the paving stones, and the same mess of traffic lights and zebra crossings. There’s a new protein shop on the square’s edge though, and across the road from it the bright green cross hanging above the pharmacy looks new.
I sit down on one of the square’s few benches and try to think of the last time I might have done that. I can’t think of a single instance; Place Dailly is made for transiting through rather than lingering on. I try to conjure up other memories of these streets and I come short. I have few. I remember shopping at the Carrefour, walking past the church, and I remember nighttime raids on the night shop, but not much else. I don’t know these streets, really. I realise later while walking back from Schuman to Place Dailly that I do not even know where Schaarbeek starts and Brussels (and St-Josse) begins, that streets I thought were in the former were actually always in the latter, and having to navigate myself by way of which commune’s name is written on the little blue street signs on every street corner.
Partly that must be down to the passage of time; it has been 14 years since I lived here, and it’s not a corner of Brussels you’d come to unless you had business there. Partly too it’s down to the fact that when we did live here, our social and cultural antennae were pointed elsewhere - to Schuman and Monday nights at The Old Oak’s table quiz, or to the centre for shopping and the cinema. I did not drink at the bars on Place Dailly, and we didn’t eat at Chez Boris or any of the other restaurants in the area because we were broke unemployed college graduates. But there is something else too that clouds my memories of my earliest Brussels years: grief.
We moved into our apartment on Rue Vinçotte in July 2009, less than a year after my mother’s death. In that interim year I had insulated myself from dealing with her death by focusing on completing my studies in Maastricht, enveloped in an academic bubble. That distraction fell away when we moved to Schaarbeek, and I think it says something that among the most vivid memories I have of that time is one where I’m sitting on our bed in our little mezzanine in a protracted (but amicable) email conversation with the executor of her will trying to negotiate a stipend from the trust fund established in her will. I wanted so quickly to move on from what had happened that I simply lived those years on fast-forward, only loosely aware of my immediate surroundings.
In fact, all of the most vivid memories of our time in Schaarbeek take place not in the streets outside but in that little studio, whether it was the time we tried and failed to roast a duck for our first Christmas in Brussels, or the Halloween parties we threw, or even just settling into our bargain IKEA couch to watch Crime Night on our little cathode ray tube television. I still have a cut on the tip of my left ring finger where I sliced it open with a broken plate in our narrow galley kitchen, and I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding no matter how much toilet paper I wrapped it in.
We didn’t stay long on the Rue Vinçotte, and by the time we’d moved out in the Spring of 2011 I’d never really gotten a feel for the place. If I look back at those two years at all, I look on them as a sort of a prelude to the proper Brussels adventure that began when we decamped to the more exciting surrounds of the Vossenplein, a prologue or necessary transition period between not living in Brussels and living in Brussels.
Back on the bench on Place Dailly I realise I am the only one sitting on the square. On the bench next to me is an old mattress and duvet cover but I do not see the owner anywhere around me. I see the number 61 barrelling down the Leuvensesteenweg from Place Meiser, and by the time it pulls up under the glowing green cross of the pharmacy I am waiting to board and have it take me back to Brussels.
Touching piece. Thanks Eoghan.
Thanks for sharing the emotional relationship you had to your mother's death. Many of us can, or will, relate.