‘Maar wat zitten we toch te klagen. Het is verdomme een heerlijke tijd om in te leven!’
‘That’s not right. We’re not rich.’
‘What do you mean, we’re not rich?’
‘We’re not even upper-middleclass. But we all have interesting jobs. Boris, and you also Cynthia, have sufficient money to live in a comfortable apartment. We all can buy pretty much whatever we want, within reason.’
‘We’re in good health.’
‘That’s right, and you Belgians have health insurance for when you’re not in good health. Cynthia has got an university graduate degree. Justus mind is alert. Cynthia, again, has got writing talent, which gives her a certain satisfaction. So please, baby, forget this artbook nonsense and become a writer. You have a great talent with words.’
‘Yes, like I also tell you so many times.’
‘Ah stop it, both of you.’
Boris, Justus, Mark en ik zaten op café. Hier zagen we elkaar vaak als Mark in de stad was. Het was een mix tussen een Parijs grand café en een Amsterdamse bruine kroeg. In het midden stond een prachtige Erard-vleugel, waar af en toe iemand op speelde. Je had er zowel lallende toogplakkers als keurige vijftigers en studenten uit de naburige scholen.
‘We are respected by family and friends and love each other. At home, the most of us, have a well-stocked personal library of books. There are many CDs, LPs, and tapes of all kinds of music. We can buy as much food as we want. Justus and Boris, both of you have a car. ‘An old car,’ zei Justus.
‘Whatever,’ repliceerde Mark. ‘An old but - a good car, that takes you wherever you need to go. Paris, Istanbul, even Asia, if you wanted to.
‘Our lives, to a large degree, are of modest but comfortable privilege.’
‘And we live in this beautiful city, except for Mark, sorry man.’ ‘Brussels is indeed a beautiful city. Not immediately, but you have to give her some time.’
‘Which reminds me of Warsaw.
‘But Justus, what Warsaw doesn’t have is the richness of all the different nationalities that you can find here. Brussels is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. It boasts an astonishing variety of cultures and styles.
‘That is true, Warsaw isn’t the headquarters of the European commission or the European parliament.’
‘Nevertheless, it remains intimate enough to allow its inhabitants to enjoy all the advantages of a vibrant city. They enlighten it by their energy, their odour, their sounds, their stories. Us Polish, you Cynthia as a Belgian, Mark as an Englishman.’
‘I’m Scottish.’
‘Right, well, we, the Congolese people, the Moroccan and the Portuguese. They all have their own stories. Because we do not arrive each day empty-handed. We come carrying our past, as if it were an orphan we found homeless on our doorstep and adopted as our own. Each day, we feed and clothe that orphan, but each day the child grows more foreign, more distant, more eager to return to a world of strangers and rumours that neither recognise nor define us. It is a paradox. We nourish our past for the sake of identity and continuity. But we abandon that past when we discover it belongs to someone else.’
‘True. Our parents came from Eastern Europe. But that doesn't mean I feel like a 'typical Eastern European man', or a typical anything. Not feeling typical is one of my basic traits. I always feel myself to be a little outside the range of what other people call 'normal', or what my friends and relatives expect from life or from themselves. I always feel a little 'foreign'. And I enjoy that feeling. Our mothers family is German. The family of our father is from the province Posen - WestpreuBen, which once belonged to Germany but is now Polish. It's because of WWII that Justus and I, live in Belgium. Our grandfather was an immigrant. Our father was born in Belgium but married a German girl. They had me, and later on, Justus. We carry a funny name. "What, Brewinski? Brewinsky, Rewinski, Mewinski? Can you spell it please, thank you." As a child, I never liked the name but with the years I naturally accepted the idea that my identity's most compelling roots reach more deeply into European soil than only into the flat and sandy landscape of Belgium. The chemistry that formed my perspectives on life and my attitudes about myself was established almost six years ago, when I came to Brussels. It was back then that I first sensed, with the perplexing certainty of instinct and the unfocused passion of impulse, that my heart and my mind were connected more intimately to Europe than to Belgium.’
‘And now, never in European history are so many people, about 450 million, I think, living under conditions of peace, democracy and the rule of law on the basis of the shared sovereignty of the EU. Did you know that the famed Brussels bureaucracy actually has fewer staff than the BBC?’
‘No, has it?’
‘Yes, and the cost of running Europe is less than a quarter of the Pentagon budget, and 85 per cent of it is returned to national governments. For this modest outlay and the commitment to share sovereignty enshrined in EU constitutional treaties, we have had more years of peace and prosperity than at any time in history. ‘Wauw, Cynthia, that brain of yours. But let me finish with a quote of Carl Sagan, before I’ll fix us some more drinks. Here it goes: the world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.’
En Justus haalde diep adem, stond op en liep naar de toog.