#91: Pacified City
The arrival of Ramadan tends to have the effect of both heightening and subduing Brussels' chaotic tendencies
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This week’s newsletter is about changing rhythms, Other Brussels, and vicarious feasting.
It was only when we stumbled on the three men squatting over a throwaway barbecue on a street corner off the Gentseteenweg that we figured out why the streets were otherwise so quiet on Sunday night. We were on our way to Vorst to watch Union St-Gilloise, and they looked as if they were just getting into breaking their fast for the day.
They were the first people we - me in the saddle and the two children in the cabin of the cargo bike - had seen on the street during our bike ride through Koekelberg and Molenbeek, down the Gentseteenweg and out over the canal towards Vorst for the match. This neighbourhood is rarely peaceful, usually alive with slow-moving, anxious traffic, barber shops and clothes shops and supermarkets open late even on a Sunday, people spilling out over the lip of the footpath and into the road, swerving bike lanes and illegally-parked SUVs. But this Sunday night the street was dead. Not just dead but empty, devoid of life, abandoned.
The men who usually sit around the entrance of the bars and fast food shops that punctuate this otherwise commercial strip were gone, the chairs stacked and the tables folded away tidily by the café doors. The sea blue metal shutters of the Tangermarkt supermarket were pulled down over the shop’s wide entrance, and every other shop appeared to have followed suit.
Where the shops had no shutters and where curtains had been drawn instead, there were thin outlines of light along the edge of the windows suggesting that life hadn’t quite abandoned the street, it had just escaped indoors for the evening. At the barbers at the corner of the Jetselaan and Rue Sergijsels the blinds hadn’t quite been closed all the way, and rolling past I saw a man sitting at a wooden crate turned on its side pushing the sharp end of an overstuffed baguette into his mouth.
Two streets over and the Turkish bar with the bleached picture of Mount Ararat stuck to the façade hadn’t bothered with any camouflage, their wide open door revealing three men hunched over a plastic table watching football projected on the café’s back wall. A little further along and the terrace at the Le Fairplay Molenbeekoise was abandoned too, the men who usually occupied the prime seats on the little terrace in front of the café’s entrance had retreated indoors, visible through a crack in the door sheltering under bright lights and empty Coke bottles on the sticky plastic table in front of them.
The Gentsesteenweg wasn’t its usual self, and it didn’t smell like its usual self either - petrol, car exhaust and chip fat. In fact, it didn’t really smell of anything, which was disconcerting, and passing the sole fast food place that hadn’t closed - the restaurants glaring fluorescent lighting exaggerating the deep red pleather of its empty banquettes - it was, I said to the children, like cycling through town on Christmas morning.
I don’t know why it took me as long as it did to work out where everyone was. We’d left the house at 18.30, four minutes after the sun had officially set, four minutes after the neighbourhood could break the fast it had been observing since the early morning. Brussels, or at least our corner of the city, always takes on a different rhythm during Ramadan; the streets are quieter and the shops a little emptier during the day, though this altered cadence is more pronounced when the holy month falls in the summer.
But even in the early Spring Molenbeek and Anderlecht and Koekelberg are a little more peaceful from sun-up until the early evening, when a frenzy erupts outside the bakeries and patisseries as people rush to stock up for that evening’s Iftar, and the roads are overwhelmed by the revving of engines and the beeping of horns of drivers stuck in traffic all trying to get home before sun-down. At which point the streets empty out and everyone withdraws indoors to eat.
It is particularly around this time of year when I’m reminded there’s another Brussels that exists parallel to my own, one I know little about for all that I’ve lived in or alongside it for almost a decade. Growing up in suburban Ireland in the 1990s, Ramadan, Iftars, Eid - words that if I was familiar with at all were at best abstractions. Brussels’ north African influence is just another aspect of the city’s incorporation - in the absence of a durable local identity - of the cultures of the people that have come to live here. Some of these have made more of an impact on the city’s fabric than others, but live here long enough and most of the time it's like a kind of urban wallpaper unremarkable or unnoticed in the background.
Except around Ramadan, when it becomes more visible and I’m reminded that, for all that I am a minority living in their majority and despite 16 years living in Brussels and 10 in Koekelberg, I do not know many (any) Muslims, practising or otherwise. Those that I do are largely a function of the children or family relationships. If I was being harsh on myself I would put this down to incuriosity. But I don’t think that’s true; I’m intensely curious about the whole thing, despite my areligiously and precisely because it is so unfamiliar. If I was cutting myself some slack I would say it was because of my congenital timidity, the language barrier, and being socially maladroit. I do not like sticking my nose when I don't believe it belongs, however hospitable the community may be. I am unlikely at present to invite myself to someone’s Iftar.
Which is why I suppose I was drawn to those three men crouched in a in a bricked-up doorway over a disposable barbeque, each of them cantilevering something in their hands out over the hot coals, while a fourth stood up and arched his back and stretched his arms up over his head. We had smelled them before we even saw them, a great big whack of charcoal smoke and sizzling animal fat hitting me in the face when we turned off the Gentsesteenweg into the Rue Ransfort. At first I thought it was coming from a Moroccan restaurant that had installed their own, more professional, grill on the footpath and was serving waiting diners hidden from view under a big blue gazebo. But the smell wasn’t coming from there, and though we couldn’t see what the men were cooking in their makeshift kitchen, they looked happy, relieved.
We didn’t see anyone else all the way down Boulevard Poincaré, the hardly lit bars empty, the fruit and vegetable stands stowed away indoors behind closed shutters, and the garages of the transport companies abandoned by the men usually sat outside on grubby plastic chairs having a smoke and a cup of tea. The extractor fans of the steak restaurant on the corner of Boulevard Jamar were humming though, pumping out sweaty beef grease into the evening air and suggesting the presence of customers inside, and the railway underpass at the station smelled ever so faintly of fish from the Sunday market that had packed up and gone home at lunchtime.
By the time of our return journey, the city looked and sounded as if it was returning to its usual cacophonous self. A mosque on Avenue Fonsny was disgorging its congregation of men in loose tunics and robes onto the footpath. Further along past the station on Boulevard Abattoir the cafés that had been empty several hours earlier had sprung back to life. The terraces were back out, and their male occupants too. Several of the bars had set up makeshift food stall at their entrances, and we cycled past tightly packed stacks of boxes of dates, muddy potatoes piled up in green crates, tables piled up with generous chunks of clingfilmed watermelon and half litre plastic bottles of (I want to say) yoghurt. There were baskets of oranges next to industrial squeezing machines with their wires trailing behind them back into the café next to charcoal pits warming up with skewers of meat waiting to be grilled.
Back on the Gentsetweenweg, as we chugged up the hill away from the canal, the air was thick again with petrol fumes and rubber tyre residue. The street corners were full again, and the men were back out on their chairs, in their cars, on their street corners, and riding their e-scooters. Young men in low-slung hatchbacks braaaaped their exhaust mufflers as they stopped and started through traffic that was slowly building itself back up to the street’s regular rhythm.