‘While we were walking along the Antwerp quay walls, some very remarkable ships passed by. Huge ocean giants maneuvered slowly and carefully through the shallow water. Next to me walked my friend, whom I had met only a few weeks ago in a dark bar somewhere in the student district of Antwerp. She was young and beautiful and didn’t really suit my somewhat haggard and weathered appearance. She walked quietly and somewhat bewildered next to me. I realized that I actually had a little bit of a crush on her. Her eyes smiled at me, her mouth invited me to kiss her. The wind played with the straws that were sparsely scattered on the shore in the tide line. We walked from North to South because I lived in the North. The sky was clear blue and there were quite a few people walking on and around the quay. I had little or no eye for them. It was a pleasant setting, as a background, a little misty, as if it was music playing softly, the hum of all those voices. As we rounded a muddy bend, a gigantic green helicopter pad passed by.
‘Hey Tina, that’s the new helicopter platform of the Belgian army… that was in the news yesterday!’
I said it as if I couldn’t believe it myself. It looked like a big insect. It had three large platforms, one in the center and two on the sides. They looked like the stubby wings of a budding butterfly larva. The conning tower was at the front as if it were a head. It sailed slowly down the Scheldt and turned a little further out of the bend and disappeared from sight again. She looked at me with some pity, as if she hadn’t really heard what I said. She nodded briefly. We slowly walked further south, enjoying the sun and the pleasant hustle and bustle. She was wearing tight jeans. Her breasts were beautifully displayed in her trendy T-shirt. I had often secretly recorded her and I had come to the conclusion that there was neither too much nor too little of her. She walked beautifully and elegantly, did not speak too loudly, was always cheerful and cheerful, her eyes were blue and she had beautiful full sensual lips. Her light brown hair hung somewhat disheveled over her eyes and face. The sun and the wind passed through it… affectionately…
As we walked slowly we passed the place where the Steen had once stood. It had now become a basketball court. Some youngsters threw their ball at a rusting oil barrel instead of the basketball nets. They hardly paid attention to the many Chinese and Japanese who were queuing at the Flandria quay to take the Sampans Nello and Patrache boat tour. They stood in thick rows, talking loudly, excitedly, pointing and taking pictures, while their slit eyes sparkled with wild desire. They were going to sail to Hoboken to enter the woods where Nello and Patrache so often wandered, at least according to the book! Afterwards they had Chinese food on the grounds of the dilapidated Cockerill Yards shipyard, where a clever entrepreneur had built a pagoda. He had the building shipped over from Myanmar and then completely reassembled it in Hoboken.
Of course there had been quite a bit of protest from China and to a lesser extent from the World Heritage Foundation, but the argument that this was an extremely important intercultural exchange had finally convinced the Chinese. Of course there was also the money! Of course, you get what you give! The building now stood somewhat abandoned among the remains of the shipyard. On the first floor there was a restaurant. The second was a massage parlor and the third was a brothel with Japanese courtesans. The brothel was only accessible after 10 pm. Basically it had nothing to do with the tourist cruises, but that’s besides the point. The remaining floors were empty. There had been thoughts of building a casino on the top floor, but permits for this were flatly refused by the city council. It would have been a bull’s eye, yes, unfortunately.
The left-wing rats were still sleeping off their hangover. A high that had lasted for 35 years by now, but no one had complained about it yet. It had been a long night.
Nights full of boiling fun and quackery. The anti-being and kicking at everything that stood in your way. Nothing and no one would not suffer the consequences. They read and wrote thick books and drank large cups full of impurity. The mornings were long and painful, but the demolition work progressed steadily. The void grew bigger and bigger and nothing took its place. The people of Mechelen were still vomiting their livers and kept themselves shy and fearful on the plain. In the cosmos there was still the fine dust of all the brainchildren from the sixties and seventies. It was the dust of pulverized ethics of centuries. Brain cells that had been vaporized by the incessant palaver and intransigence of the few perverse intellectuals who had set themselves the goal of luring as many virgins as possible into their fold by abusing their intelligence and undermining the entire moral and etheric establishment that had been functioning since time immemorial. As if our morality had always been that of a flat chest when in fact she was as round as Pamela Anderson’s fake breasts And why not? Breasts are round! But our ancestors already knew that, but apparently everyone missed it. And what is better? The crooked, somewhat sagging breasts of a suffragette who did not want to wear bras, or the Mount Everest that was manufactured in the obscure clinics of a doctor Hoeyberghs. It was a heart-rending choice for the left-wing intellectual and you could see that they were quietly adjusting their views. Was the earth flat or was it round? She was round! That was certain and we descended from apes, and to apes we would return. It was a long and painful process and the fog had not yet lifted, even though the tendrils were getting longer and thinner and the air was slowly clearing again. They called it CO₂ but it was actually hashish smoke. They were figments of their imagination to mask the hangover that clouded their minds. And did they succeed!? Certainly! Everyone still wondered why perverted, meaningless wenches on TV wanted to be called to vent their sexual fantasies through a telephone, for a fee of course! It was also the time of the weak establishment.
For woe betide those who could know no longer know. Then a rat with brains could all too easily take control of the highway of fast entertainment.
Now the universe was quietly clearing The mist was getting thinner and thinner and the time was ripe to declare a new era: The era of the digital pig! Why was I so afraid of the unknown, I wondered? It was hard to explain. It was a fear I couldn’t explain. A fear that made me miss out on the best opportunities I had ever been given in my young life. Fear of the unknown. Fear of walking untrodden paths. It played tricks on me! It drove me to despair! The not done feeling was very much alive in me! And what was not done and what was done? It could be anything, and it still wouldn’t even be remarkable!
It might not even reach beyond the navel of a young virgin… and then, and then! What should take precedence? Good or evil and what is evil? The standard was sometimes so vague that it seemed invisible! The earth was round, and what is round always comes back, and you can’t stop it! What stops a person then? Death and destruction, consciousness? I would have liked to live like a raging fire, a fire that could no longer be extinguished! However, the fire turned out to be just a smoldering fire. Because what I didn’t know was that the fire was being kept under control, as it should have been. Walk neatly in line, not too much and not too little. There you sat, and there was nothing you could do. You waited until the fire was out and then you moved on. But then came the morning and with it the reality and the realization and the impotence and the powerlessness! The woman and the child! The household effects, blackened by the morning sun and still a little wet, were thrown into a pile in the garden! And you looked at it and you rubbed your thick wet fingers over your unshaven chin, and you could still smell the greasy smell of shameless shame, hard and cold and black. It still smiled at you from the swampy earth, a smile that made your lips tingle. But your eyes abhorred the act and you knew the clock was ticking relentlessly and that it was against you! For the door was closed, and the seals were strong and unbreakable!
The sampans came and went and I stood there with my girl on the quay in the sun. We looked at it and wondered what we knew! The sun was shining and my skin picked up the code. The code of a perverse love that could not be understood and it blossomed open and it lit up my eyes. My eyes blinking at the shamelessness of what they wanted to say. She stood there and she looked at me. I love you! She turned once on her axis and laughed and rubbed her breast against my arm. The hairs on my arm stood up where she had hit them. No one saw it, and neither did she. A blush rose deep inside me
