If it’s Monday, It Must Be Brussels
Melita
14 June 2007, 18:15Of course, it’s not Monday, but Thursday. And while I’m certainly in Brussels, I’m posting on the Epic India site. It all fits together nicely in a way that doesn’t fit at all, which fits in, because every passing day here shows me just how surreal a place it is.
I’ll give an example from my walk home from work last Monday, in the interests of making a little sense.
A quarter of the way there, next to the home hardware shop, a front door suddenly opens to the view of a lovely naked man picking up his copy of the local free press (best resource here for apartment seekers; check it out at www.vlan.be).
Perfectly timed to the degree that I wondered if I was being flashed, but then his attitude was one of a man who had opened the door to get a magazine caught in its hinge without considering the consequences of doing so naked on a busy street; he performed a panicked little dance to try to shield his bits.
All of this happened in the span of two seconds and I kept walking without turning my head or doing anything extraordinary with my eyes as though I’d noticed nothing. Nevertheless, I was in a really good mood after that.
Four fifths of the way to my flat, a 10-ish boy was keeping pace with me while walking his bicycle on the pavement. My heart was going out to him because he kept crashing the pedals into his calves. He looked slightly perturbed, and kept looking at me, finally approaching me in his formal kiddie French.
‘Excuse me, madame, may I ask you a question?’
‘Good sure that yes.’
‘Is it normal to have a red mark on my arm like this after walking my bike while holding it by the handlebars like so?’ And he indicated a very faint reddening on his forearm.
‘No, not for truly. A little bit of ache, could be, but not a mark red. It must be something of other.’
I’m not fully confident in my French so the conversation ended there. I should have reassured him it was nothing, of course, instead of leaving him hanging, wondering if the ‘something of else’ was leprosy or the bubonic plague, but that didn’t even occur to me until five minutes later.
I must shed my discomfort with this language. After all, I’m fully capable of expressing ‘I am certain that it not is the plague bubonic, but you could consider of to put on it some cream anti-bacterial’ and there is no need for me to go around scaring cute little Brussels kids.
But then in this city I feel like one surreal element among millions, so maybe it’s best that I keep not making sense. We’ll see.
