Brussels Noir Read online

  “I’ll discover these images only later. For the moment, I remain standing there, without even glancing at him, for fear of confirming his suspicion: namely, that a camera is filming these men without their knowledge. K. remains silent, alerts no one. He too has a hidden agenda, and is setting the stage. I take the plunge and ask: ‘How much to join the pool? I wanted a sheep but they’re too expensive and not big enough.’ The steadiness in my voice surprises me; it does not tremble with excitement at this chance to take my film in a direction I could not have hoped for. ‘I have a hundred twenty euros on me.’ ‘We put in two hundred each.’ ‘Two hundred fifty,’ the vendor says. The discussion drags on, the vendor is getting annoyed. ‘I can lend you eighty euros, if that’s all you need.’ K.’s intrusion into the affair unsettles me. His deep, velvety voice has an entrancing quality, but one senses it could become threatening if not taken seriously. I don’t yet realize that by offering to help me, he’s advancing a pawn. ‘If . . . it’s not too much trouble,’ I say. ‘No, not in the least. God wants us to be generous to our brothers, after all.’ A murmur of approval greets this platitude. I accept K.’s offer.

  “The group of men finally follows the vendor, who leads us toward the area of the market reserved for butchers, far from the produce stalls, the kebab carts, and coffee stands. I expect them to search me, to confiscate my film; I prepare to make off with my camera between my legs. But such chaos reigns in these hours before the festival. Everyone’s shouting and bargaining, tying up animals and dragging them from their pens, and rarely do they give in without a struggle. Sometimes the fight becomes a spectacle, with all eyes on an animal determined to go out in glory. Several men might be needed to restrain it, but not as a father holds his child back during a tantrum, summoning all his patience to console the kid. No, this is a fight to the death, never mind that the animal is acting out of fear. Everyone knows that its resistance is in vain. With each moan, it is saying farewell to this life, to these men who surround it, and among whom, it hopes, there might be one who objects to what they’re about to do to it. After all, has it not been loyal and obedient, has it not used all its strength to serve man, to spare him from ruining his health with hard labor? The animal asks not for pity, but for recognition. Barely two years old, our steer weighs 714 kilos; raised in the open air, in one of the country’s most pristine regions, it comes from a stock known for the tenderness of its meat. While my companions calmly fulfill their duties as good patriarchs, eager to observe the edicts of their faith, I stay in the background for two reasons: to keep my camera at the best angle for viewing them, and to not come too close to the animal. I do not fear it will attack me; I’m afraid of looking into its eyes.

  “But the animal does better: rolling its immense head on its muscled neck, it looks away. I feel as though I am standing at the entrance again, watching one of the bronze bulls above the gates come suddenly to life. Its mouth is dribbling saliva, its nostrils flare, exhaling plumes of vapor in a sigh whose meaning escapes me: Is it one of resignation? Or of a warrior who knows he must return to battle? I hear one of the men say that this animal, chosen to satisfy God, is blessed. We say the same thing about suicide bombers. The vendor is joined by two men in bloodied aprons. One sharpens his machete on the rim of a toothed wheel. Several knives of various shapes are laid out on the block beside him. His gestures are precise and mechanical; he works quickly so that we won’t have to wait long. The other approaches the steer. No sooner do I realize he’s holding a syringe the size of my forearm than the needle is sinking into the animal’s neck; the plunger, pushed all the way down, injects the sedative. Then the butcher starts to lay into the animal. One-two, left-right, a boxer warming up on the bag, softening its leather. By instinct, the steer follows the butcher’s movements with its eyes. Its own innocence does it in; it grows tired within seconds. Then the butcher pushes forcefully against the animal’s flank, as if he were trying to flip a car over onto its roof. The steer resists with all its strength, but its knees finally give in. It emits moans at random, a foghorn launching its last distress signals before a shipwreck; engulfed in a sea of darkness, the steer is sinking, its enormous body collapses. This time, there’s no doubt; it is a sigh of resignation. What awaits it is beyond its comprehension; killed twice over, its corpse desecrated, hacked into six parts to be carried off in six different directions, in the hands of six predators who will never see each other again. I can no longer bear it; I close my eyes. (But the camera films everything.) I hear the clatter of horns on concrete, the sound of the blade against the sharpening device, the prayer that precedes its assault on flesh and bone; I hear these men murmuring, ‘Allahu akbar,’ and I wonder if this is really what God wants. Then someone flicks a lighter—a cigarette? They’re ready to smoke, to enjoy the show. I hear a braying, more human than animal, and the butcher’s voice asking his partner to help him ‘hold up the head.’ Behind my eyelids, I see one of my cousins lying on the floor of our living room, shaking with convulsions. My father holds his head to keep him from choking on his own vomit. He’d swallowed pills. To die. His wife, too beautiful for him; her red mouth, her black curls, her eyebrows like arrows, and the looks men gave her. My father had arranged their marriage so that this nephew would be able to regularize his situation in Belgium. The violence between this man and this woman: Did it come from love? From hate? For each other, for themselves? It was unspeakable. And their death, three days later: two strangers broke into their apartment, stole nothing, and killed them in their sleep, two bullets each, in the chest and the forehead. We will never know just what they were mixed up in, only that their executioners came from Antwerp.

  “I hear the butcher order us to step back, and a few seconds later, the sound of a jet of blood spurting from the steer’s veins like water from a ruptured hose. I hear crackling noises I can’t identify. Perhaps they’re lighting a fire to smoke the head, as my father used to do during festivals when he would force me to participate in the sacrifice; to tie the animal’s hooves together, to hold it back as it struggled against the slashes of the knife. The crackling of that fire has found me here. I feel a moist heat exhaling from the area that surrounds the steer, as if I were standing on the threshold of a hammam. I know it is coming from the animal’s opened body. When I dare to look, I see the steer’s head lifted at an unnatural angle and its neck exposed: a gash beneath the chin reveals the quivering muscles of the throat. The butcher is straddling the animal, one arm held tightly around its neck, the other pressing the knife handle over the veins spurting blood. I throw a glance at the inner courtyard, spattered with rain and hail. I walk toward the exit. Outside, men and sheep are lurching like cats in the downpour, and into the open gutters of the Anderlecht abattoir flows the blood of beasts and of men I’ve seen killed by bullets, fire, and drowning, the blood of those who kill themselves—last month in Schaerbeek, where most of the Turks in Brussels live, three young people, whose parents are from the same village as mine, found asphyxiated in their car in a locked garage—they’d let the motor run. No letter, nothing. Just death, at barely twenty years old. And every forty seconds, someone on this earth puts an end to his life. The abattoir did not invent suffering, death, or sacrifice; man, already disposed to dance with death, comes here to kill freely.

  “‘Would you like to film something interesting?’ The voice is not yet familiar to me, but it’s no longer unfamiliar. It shouts against the drumbeat of the rain. K. stands right beside me. With raised arms, he shields himself from the thousands of arrows that fly at us from above, sent by an army in position behind the clouds; the rain forms a thick screen of mist in front of his face. There is something unreal about K. ‘I . . . I don’t have your eighty euros anymore.’ He smiles amusedly at me, then turns and begins fighting his way through the crowd.”

  We hear the filmmaker running and the image turns shaky; K. is jostled from head to toe. The setting becomes a flurry of disjointed signs. Near the gates, the camera stops to film the bronze
bulls standing guard. The rain slides over their chiseled muscles, their slanted brows and grimacing mouths. In the street, chaos ensues; people dash across the pavement, cars zigzag in and out of lanes.

  “K. leads me down rue Ropsy Chaudron. We’re not far from rue Liverpool and the neighborhood where I grew up. There was Francis the barber, who’d been racist at first, then a little less so. Jeff and his dog Faruk. Nathalie, the princess of my childhood, whom I saw again one day on the 63 bus, and who’d gained so much weight that she now took up a row of her own. Giovanni—Belgian mother, absent Sicilian father—who still sucked his thumb at twelve. Who knows where they’ve all gone, the playgrounds replaced by dealerships exporting cars to the Balkans. K. stops beside a Ford Transit. He opens the passenger-side door and turns toward me. He senses that I’m nervous, hesitant. ‘What did you come here for? To film a different world, right? Well, do what you set out to do!’ He gets in on the driver’s side and looks hard at me. I climb in. It’s an almost unconscious decision, and an irrepressible one. Through the rain-lashed windows, the world is a smeared painting. As K. starts the car, I hear the sound of stamping hooves; behind me, the floor is carpeted with newspaper, straw, and minced herbs; at the back of the van, a plump young sheep trembles and defecates black pellets. Fear.”

  Then cut to black. An ellipsis of time and space that complicates the work of the investigators, who continue to study the images for clues to where they might have been shot. Any typical elements of setting—streets, businesses—could help them to trace his route and identify the zone of residence of K.’s family. Difficult to imagine that such footage would not exist; the only explanation is that the filmmaker edited it out. When he gets into the car with K., he has no idea what awaits him. But he knows that by cutting to black, he’s letting the rain wash his own tracks away.

  4.

  In a world forsaken by the gods, the camera films a man with a thick mustache. K.’s father is dark-skinned, with hazelnut eyes and thick, lustrous eyebrows, of the type that one grooms with a small comb. He drinks tea. Clasped between his thumb and forefinger, a rosary. There are two kinds: the long string of beads, ninety-nine in number, is meant for prayer, while the shorter string of “worry beads” is used by men to calm their nerves. They finger the amber beads and, once at the end of the string, twirl them around like pistoleros. Other men talk and drink tea in the father’s company. The doorbell rings, the guests continue to rush in. K.’s father is the eldest, and families always gather at the home of the eldest. This reunion is being held here for other reasons too—reasons linked to the festival, certainly, but to a unique conception of it.

  “We are nearly thirty, most of us of an age to be parents. Yet I am struck by the absence of children. By ‘film something interesting,’ was K. suggesting this family’s tribute to the blessedness of carnal pleasure? And do they expect me to immortalize their shindig with a home movie? For the moment, they allow me to walk around, filming. Everyone has been informed of my presence, of my camera—they all seem to know more about it than I do. They force themselves to act naturally as I weave through the vast living room. I approach the large picture window to film the garden and the tableau it offers: K.’s mother, a basin balanced on her hip, stands in the company of seven living sheep. After having seen hundreds of them at the market, it’s the whiteness of their wool that’s striking. Without touching it, one knows how soft it must be. But what are seven perfectly healthy sheep doing here? Like brothers around a campfire, they huddle near the basin. The camera zooms in and films its contents: a mixed salad of zucchini cubes, celery sticks, lettuce, tomato quarters, and shaved carrots. ‘Today marks the seventh year that my family has bought a sheep on the day of the festival . . . and sacrificed none,’ says K., who appears with two steaming cups of tea. ‘Why buy them, then? To do as everyone else does?’ ‘It’s more complicated than that. But I will try to explain it to you. It’s time.’”

  In a long, unsteady shot, the camera scans the spines of several books, classics of various literatures: Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Edward Bunker’s Beast trilogy, essays on ethnology and the social sciences, including René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. (The presence of this last work gives pause, considering that Girard took mainly Judeo-Christian texts as the basis for his study.) This succession of images—the antique and modern volumes, and the classical music added to the montage—bring to mind a scene from Seven: on the eve of his retirement, Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) locks himself in the library and gives us a glimpse into his research methods. He peruses works that might shed light on the motives of the killer who plagues the city, staging elaborate murders based on the seven deadly sins. A conscious reference on the part of the filmmaker? Indeed, for he goes on to say:

  “Seven. One of the great modern tales of the darkness of our souls. This investigation of the violence that engulfs us all, following on the trail of a harrowingly lucid serial killer, remains unforgettable even after several viewings. K. and I had spoken of it. Hard not to take Brad Pitt for a moron in the role of Detective Mills. But why blame him? He who doesn’t know doesn’t know, and he who knows can no longer pretend not to. The veteran detective played by Morgan Freeman knows. And it keeps him up at night. It’s so humid in this city swarming with mortal demons that he sleeps with his window wide open, and wakes in the night to hear God murdered in a blind alley. A wave of darkness is spreading over the world. He doesn’t know whether he should speak of it, or how. He doesn’t know if anything can be done to reverse it. His doubt is so great, in fact, that in the end, when the killer insists that he and Somerset are more alike than different, the detective finds it hard not to agree with him. And when the moment came, I too would find it hard not to agree with K.”

  K. speaks with a fervor that transfixes the camera: “I studied all the texts, questioned every resource. Every night, I dreamed of death. Always, it was barbaric. I sank into a depression. My family wanted to call an exorcist. I told them it would solve nothing—I was tormented not by jinns, but by man. Man who had committed the irreparable and condemned us to perish, not in some unfathomable afterlife, but here, on Earth, where we would soon unleash a living hell.”

  In this room that serves as a library, a row of framed portraits in black and white, of young men between the ages of twenty and thirty, decorates a wall. There are seven of them, youths whose expressions are kind but distraught, as if they knew things one shouldn’t know so early in life. The black and white lends an old-fashioned air to these faces, a timelessness, a charming patina. Seven portraits in a row on this memorial wall. Here, the only dissolve in the film occurs. A dissolve is a progression of frames from the end of one shot to the beginning of the next. A dissolve can be rapid. It can also be drawn out, so that the viewer has the brief impression of looking at a single, larger image. This effect usually seeks to provoke an emotion, to establish a link between two things, drawing attention to their similarities or contrasts. Here, the image of the seven portraits dissolves into that of a sheep. Then the camera zooms out and gradually incorporates the six other sheep into the frame. We are at the back of the garden. The father, crouching, digs a hole in the ground with a stainless-steel bowl. The sunset reflects an indigo light on the clouds behind him. Breathing heavily, the father scrapes and throws the dirt, digs, scrapes, and throws. With the flat of his hand, he smooths over the walls of the hole: the gesture is so careful, you would think he was consoling the earth. On a napkin, he has laid out two clean knives and a sharpening stone. Difficult not to think of the butcher’s instruments on display at the abattoir. Except that there is only love in the father’s eyes.

  “It is into this hole that the blood will flow, once I’ve severed the vein. The blood must return to the earth. That is one reason I never arrange for sacrifice at the abattoir. There, the blood is drained away in onyx gutters. Stripped of its poetry. The earth must absorb the blood, commemorating the lives that it sust
ained.” He takes hold of the larger knife. “Son, there is nothing more important, at the moment of sacrifice, than the condition of your tools. The knife must be perfectly clean and sharpened. Otherwise the blade will tear at the flesh. And the victim will suffer longer than necessary.” “The sacrifice is an ordeal, then?” The father addresses the camera with a playful look. “Death is never a bed of roses. Even if it is desired. Even if it is justified . . .” “You seem to be acting against your will.” The father mops his forehead with the back of his arm. “You don’t know yet what I’m going to do.” He points to the hole. “But what must be done, must be done. From now on, each of us must bear his responsibility.”

  5.

  “If God sent the ram to Abraham, then we wouldn’t have to sacrifice our sons . . .” “What do you mean, if God sent the ram?” K. walks toward the picture window. In the garden, his father rises to his feet. Father and son exchange a look. “There are seven sheep outside,” he murmurs. “And seven portraits in the room next door. One of them is my brother. My best friend, until the day he left us . . . We have always known how to mourn those we’ve lost. What these portraits have in common is that they live in our hearts, and, by substitution, in our garden. Each day, we care for our sheep as though they were our children.” “You . . . what are you saying?”