Europe @ 2.4 km/h (19 page)

547-557 km

Antwerpen in Vlaams, Anvers in French. Must I say everything twice? Must I say everything twice?

Belgium is overcast. But only when it’s not raining. Which makes the grander clocks and mirrors in the gilded Royal Cafe at Antwerp’s Centraal Station all the more dazzling. Even under reconstruction as it is now, the terminus’s flying buttresses put one in mind of a magnificent church and it comes as no surprise to learn that its nickname is the Railway Cathedral.

And so to the sights. Buffeted by powerful gusts of wind, I ascend the broad ramp to Zuiderterras, overlooking the River Scheldt, just in time to see a mean weather front closing in. A cosy restaurant will be extremely welcome. Just as well the Belgian Government of 1962, when it drew a line across the national map giving preference to Flemish north of the ‘linguistic divide’ and French south of it, didn’t impose culinary no-go zones at the same time. At Façade — which offers French-Belgian cuisine right in the Vlaams ‘capital’ — I enjoy the crispest, most magnificent example of that famous Parisian dish, spaghetti — washed down with Australian red wine poured by the sommelier, Igor. Flemish art may not be what it was, but great value is still placed on artworks, even of the commercial variety. On the wall in front of me hangs an elegant framed coffee poster from the 1950s. ‘For better coffee, de Boekelaar’ … I think that’s what it says, I’m a little drunk on the wine by now … ‘with chicory’. Igor tells me it’s worth a cool €4000 (nearly A$7000).

560 km

If you liken Centraal Station to a cathedral, then the standard you have in mind must be the city’s landmark, Onze Lieve Vrouwkathedraal (the Cathedral of Our Lady). I have seen what I thought were great churches — in Uppsala and Haarlem — but this is the first encounter with ones that are (the word is carefully chosen) glorious. Externally, its sheer scale inspires awe. Sit beneath the ornately chiselled portal and gaze at the steeples rising 123 metres above you — two-thirds the height of Rotterdam’s Euromast, one of the ‘great towers’ of the world — and, moreover, call to mind that this monument took 170 years to build (1350-1520) long before the advent of modern technology, and your sense of wonder must be dead if it isn’t stirred by these reflections.

Inside, what leave a lasting impression are the magnificent Flemish artworks, principally by Rubens, Antwerp’s most famous son. The most stunning are
The Raising of the Cross
(1609-1610) and
The Descent from the Cross
(1611-1612), from two triptychs commissioned for the cathedral by the Arquebusiers’ Guild. Yes, the makers of deadly weapons. Did the Church feel a pang of conscience at accepting money from the arms industry to revere the Prince of Peace? Evidently not. In those days the Church militant wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

In a darkened corner of the church is a memorial to several Flemish priests massacred in November 1964 during the first Congolese civil war. My thoughts fly back to the visit I made in 1988 to Zaire — which Congo had been renamed — and Kindu seminary where I stayed a few days. Kindu is the capital of Kivu province, where those murders had taken place. I expect the Belgian priests at that dining table would have known the victims, despite the difference in their years.

567 km

This evening, outside Cartoons cinema, the projectionist and I sit discussing many things over coffee. At one point Hannah waxes lyrical about Antwerp, saying, ‘I love my beautiful city by the river’. Then she chides me for giving it only two days of my time, protesting, ‘But there is so much to see. And, you know, we are the centre of fashion’. (Dare I breathe the words ‘Paris’ or ‘Milan’ in her presence?)

But Antwerpeners (pardon my Flemish) do not take themselves too seriously. Hannah relates the risible history of the city’s new Palace of Justice — a building she says I should see. Its construction was a succession of scandals. The cost overrun was vast, the design wholly inappropriate. Its entrance gates are narrower than the police department’s vehicles, so detainees — violent criminals among them — cannot be transported to the cells built at great expense to hold them.

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I find the Flemish brand of humour appeals nearly as much as their world-class beers. Soon after the train pulled out of the station-cathedral I was reminded of this — as well as of the helpfulness of Belgian railways staff by stark contrast with certain of their Dutch counterparts.

‘Are you comfortable?’ the conductor asked me, a question unheard-of in Amsterdam or Rotterdam. ‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Good. We throw you out in Brugge.’

Bruges is what the French and the English — and, by extension, we Australians — call it; Brugge is what the people who live here call it. But then what would they know? This city is one of the most touristed in Europe, so I am prepared to be repelled. But Brugge’s charm captivates
despite
the crowds. Probably the most impressive city hall I’ve ever seen, and certainly Belgium’s oldest, occupies one whole side of Markt, the central square.

571 km

I’ve hit upon a great lurk. Although I carry a laptop with me, it’s often more convenient to check emails at the local library. So in several countries now I have got into the habit of introducing myself at libraries as an Australian travelling through Europe (no word of a lie there) and asking if I could access the Internet for an hour or two. Nowhere had this request failed — until today at Brugge’s public library. The librarian wasn’t hostile to the idea, it’s just that Internet access there is governed by library card recognition. My feet being useless, I was forced to think on my caster wheels. ‘How much does it cost to join the library?’ I said. ‘Five euro,’ she replied. ‘But that will be far too much for you.’ I slapped the required amount down on her desk, countering, ‘Not at all’. Within a minute I was a proud member of the Brugge public library. Come to that, I still am. Haven’t borrowed any books but six hours at the library’s terminals over two days cost me considerably less than an Internet café would have charged.

Tonight completes 100 days of travel. According to my trusty speedometer I have pushed 575.3 km, or five-and-three-quarter kilometres a day. The distance covered by pushing and taking public transport combined comes to 12,392 km, or almost 124 km per day. My daily budget for the 100 days was €62.40; actual spending has been €64.34 — or almost €2 (A$3.33) a day over budget.
Not bad
, I tell myself,
but must do better
. Still, like St Augustine putting off chastity to another day, I decide to reward my near success at fiscal self-control by splashing out.

575 km

So I’m at Lokkedize restaurant enjoying a succulent steak and
frites
— the Belgians claim to have invented chips, and I’m not arguing, just wolfing them down — when the owner discovers I’m Australian. ‘Did you know we have an Australian living in this street?’ he says. I cringe, not having come all this way to meet compatriots. But when, apparently sensing my lack of enthusiasm, he adds, ‘He’s a painter’, my reluctance melts away. An Australian artist living in Brugge: now that must be an adventurous soul. I don’t know the half of it …

Later in the evening the artist, Svein Koningen, drops in and we enjoy a couple of beers. He drives me back to my hostel in the relentless rain, and agrees to pick me up this morning at eleven to visit his house, meet his wife and — not least important — see his art.

Belgium is the perfect domicile for Svein, in whom North meets South. Of Norwegian descent, he happily dubs himself ‘the Australian Viking’. The man-of-action tag is no pose. In his time he has stalked Black Panther saboteurs in the Caribbean with firearms. Since 2005 Svein has lived on one of the only Brugge streets not paved with cobblestones, in a two-storey terrace with his studio at the back of a small garden. At 61 he is as fit as a Mallee bull in a non-drought year. Born in Trondheim, Svein was raised by paternal grandparents in Amsterdam. Taught to draw at a young age, he annoyed his primary-school teachers by drawing all over his exercise books.

A high-school dropout, his early jobs embraced light engineering, the aluminium industry and graphic design. Melbourne trams and buses displayed ads he had created. But the Viking in him was never far below the surface. ‘After a year in Melbourne I was a young man with a temper’ is all he will say about that. His father found a business opportunity on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, about as far from Australia as you can get without leaving the planet. The business supplied insulation for vessels in ports and oil refineries. Svein built it up until 200 laggers were working for him in ‘Puerto Rico, Aruba, Curaçao, all over the shop’ (it warms the heart to hear that Australian turn of phrase so far from home). But the Black Panthers had just moved in.

‘I remember trying to buy a gun and I couldn’t; I did get an air rifle, though. People were climbing up on roofs and lighting fires, all sorts of bullshit. One time there was a sound on the roof. I went out expecting to be jumped on — and it was a lizard or something.’

‘Dianne’ — who has been standing at the kitchen counter making tea and smiling with amusement at the tale of her Viking James Bond — ‘is my third wife,’ Svein says before going on to tell of how, now back in Australia, he became a stockbroker and financial planner.

His art education began in the mid-Sixties ‘when abstract was the mainstream art’. But Svein didn’t become a full-time painter until he was 49, ‘a pretty late age to take up a profession from which you can’t be sure you’ll make any money’. His first show, in Brisbane in 1996, flopped. ‘You couldn’t sell abstract art then.’

For an Aussie male — and a Viking, to boot — Stein appears remarkably in touch with his feelings. Once he attended a spirituality course in Gippsland — ‘eight of us lying on the floor, and the lead facilitator says, “Imagine you leave your body and you go on a train and you see eyes. Whose eyes do you see?” And I said, “I see my father’s eyes.”’

The third time he did that exercise he saw female eyes — Dianne’s. ‘Six months later I said to her, ‘Do you mind if I become an artist?’ She must have given the right answer because here they are in Brugge today, with the struggling-artist phase at last behind them. On 11 November Stein is looking forward to exhibiting 40 works in the town of Kapelle op den Bos (Chapel in the Bush) outside Brussels.

Before leaving, I photograph one of his larger canvases,
Gorges
de Verdun
, a favourite of Dianne’s. She ticks him off, not altogether in jest, for having left it out in the rain. Perhaps, I suggest, it was a deliberate technique, to make the colours run? Svein clearly makes a mental note to use that for his excuse next time.

579 km

For a different artistic inspiration, I visit the Groeningemuseum. Just now it has a temporary exhibition called ‘Exotic Primitives’, focusing on the way they became the first European artists to incorporate non-Europeans into their artistic visions.

In the 21st century it is more than a bit Eurocentric to see a phrase such as ‘the known world’ used to explain how much of the world was known — to Europeans — in the 15th century. Australia, after all, was known to the Aboriginal nations, most of South and North America to Amerindians, and Aotearoa to the Maori.

In
Rest During the Flight to Egypt
(1575-1600), Johannes Sadeler ventures into pictorial theology by drawing European churches, gables and a windmill in his backdrop. There are not many of those in the Sinai even today. But, even as Europeans were setting out to conquer what was to them the New World, the odd artist broke the mould.
The Adoration of the Magi
(anonymous master, 1510) depicts one of the Three Wise Men as black. Exotic animals and slaves would soon be counted among the curiosities at the courts of European kings, reminding us that from the vantage point of European supremacists the rest of the world was theirs for the taking.

On 12 April 1994 the Belgian Government, moved by public outrage over the deaths of ten Belgian peacekeepers, withdrew Belgium from Unamir, the United Nations Mission in Rwanda. Unamir’s commander, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, would later write of how he despised the Belgians for this, noting that exactly 50 years earlier his father and father-in-law had been fighting in Belgium to free the country from Fascism.
¹⁵

Let us get this in proportion. Nearly a million ‘Rwandan lives’ were extinguished in 90 horrifying days, three months of mass slaughter in which there was a death toll the equivalent of a 9/11 every single day. But what is a ‘Rwandan life’ worth? Like the Rwandan currency, it is very cheap, taking many thousands to equal one US unit — and there are even more to the euro. In case you were wondering, I put the quotation marks around ‘Rwandan lives’ because I recognise there is no such thing. Nor are there ‘American lives’, a term that sometimes appears in media reports as if we ought to care more, or take notice. If we don’t hear about ‘European lives’, it is probably because the sense of a ‘common European home’ (Gorbachev’s phrase) rather than an assemblage of nations is not well developed, even now.

Lives don’t have nationalities; people live and die. That they are Americans, Iraqis, or Rwandans, presidents or villagers, businesspeople or paupers, should be of secondary importance — in the eyes of God or from a humanist perspective. We should need no reminding, but heritage runs deep. From the 16th to the 20th centuries, Europeans fanned out across the world, exploiting non-Europeans with little or no compunction, slaughtering many thousands in the Americas and Africa in the name of their so-called higher civilisation, doing things unto others they would never have had done unto them.