Geraardsbergen

Geraardsbergen is a picturesque small town in East Flanders in what are called the Flemish Ardennes of my country of birth, Belgium. It was almost eery looking up pictures of the town on Google, the place looks beautiful. To me, however, the memory of Geraardsbergen evokes an unsettling emotional response. I was there only once, when I was 20, the summer before I started college at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. My mother had a friend of her mother who lived in Geraardsbergen, a woman named Laura, for whom my mother got her middle name. By the time my father and mother and my siblings and I visited Laura's large brownstone on a shaded broad lane on the outskirts of town, she was already in her seventies. Laura and her husband Leon were financially very comfortable and had no children. Their house was very quiet, the kind of house where it feels no one ever comes over anymore. The only excitement for us was their barky Pekingese dog that never seemed to leave Laura's side. They had a large pool that at the time of our visit was still empty, but in the process of slowly being filled up, as Leon was an avid swimmer. Their yard also had a large walnut tree, and I remember my brother, sisters and I passing the boringly long visit by checking out the dusty shed by the tree and eating walnuts that had fallen to the ground. At the time, I was puzzled as to the reason for our visit. It was quite a drive from our house in Roeselare, to Geraardsbergen, just for a cup of tea and some cookies. But as I found out a couple of months later, apparently Laura and her husband were willing to help pay my expensive tuition for my college in Texas. There certainly was no lack of anxiety around the visit and the weeks after it. Apparently Laura's frugal husband had decided the whole idea was bogus and I never knew how things turned out, but I apparently almost missed my start at TCU that fall. It has remained a bizarre episode in my destiny, one of which I will never know but bits and pieces. The oppressive visit left an imprint on my memory and mind, a sort of ill defined nausea, at realizing how flimsy my future had been at that time. In the years following my family's implosion between 2000 and 2008, I have had ample taste of solitude and at times oppressive isolation. It seems odd, but it is certainly accurate, that the feeling of unsettling discomfort and disconnection on that hot afternoon of the visit to Geraardsbergen, is identical to the at times screaming silence I have had to battle and overcome trying to put the pieces of my heart and soul back together after the trauma of all my family tragedy and drama. It seems the sense of nausea that at times still overwhelms me is very much the sense of disquiet I experienced at Laura and Leon's ample villa all those years ago. A sense of foreboding mixed in with anxiety and excitement, being in that stiflingly quiet house and hearing conversations between my parents and their slightly uncomfortable hosts, that seemed artificially congenial and relaxed. What is really strange to me 38 years later, is that the experience of driving to Geraardsbergen and the formal, mysterious visit has stayed with me like the memory of an unsettling dream. Today the weather here is very much the way it was that afternoon, humid, warm, cloudy. And I am right back there, in the cool, high ceilinged nicely furnished house, with the large living room and its large bay window, overlooking a wide lane lined with oak trees. I am right there again in a place that seemed frozen in time, and that made an afternoon feel like an eternity to my 20 year old mind. My parents never clarified how things were evidently resolved, and the incident was never mentioned again. The experience is stored in the box with vague and ill defined memories, and will always continue to feel like looking intently at a painting that time has forever faded to familiar yet unsettling shadows.