I first met the Magpie on a bleakly cold Autumn night in early November. It was in Zilverhof. I had come to talk house-business with Syrus, but when I arrived at eight or nine in the evening, Syrus wasn’t there. Instead I found the Magpie, perched upon a small green stool in the kitchen.
Like his namesake, the Magpie likes to talk a lot. His twitters and chitters come out in song-like trills from his lips. Like his namesake, the Magpie’s eyes sparkle and glint – but not like the bird’s deep mahogany or oak brown, but with the fierce blue of the sky. The Magpie does not have black hair, but a tangled knot of bright gold tresses bunched up at the nape of his neck. Like the Magpie he is a little wild and a little lonely. Like the Magpie he is excellent at finding things – finding treasures – and he can be impossible to track down.
So the first night that I met the Magpie we talked about the Revolution – the next day we went to it.
But let me begin with the tale of the preceding night. I had come for Syrus, but Syrus wasn’t there. Instead I found Jo – the Magpie – sitting upon a stool with his guitar and Virgil, a talkative drunk, well-known in Ghent. Before too long the unlocked door once more swung open and admitted another frosty pair of night-walkers: Michael and Rolls. A profusion of French and curse words: rich and profane. After warm greetings and hugs, Michael and Rolls sat down on the mélange of odd chairs that had collected in the kitchen. There was nothing in the house to eat or drink – not even coffee – but Jo generously offered us all to partake of his bottle of whisky – that he was drinking for medicinal purposes, naturally – which we then sipped in small tumblers, shot-glasses and wine glasses. We settled down together and spoke an admixture of French, Flemish and English.
Rolls was a fiery young man who affected a Jamaican accent in English; Michael, a portly, rubicund man of middle age with full cheeks and a bristly white beard. Michael had the kind of appearance that would not look one bit out of place in the Firth of Forth, so it did not surprise me when he came out with a brawny Northern English dialect and explained that his second wife, now dead, had been a Liverpudlian and that his daughter grew up there. As thimblefuls of whisky passed around the group – to some more than to others– we spoke of the demise of the fishing industry in Britain, as well as what Thatcher’s legacy to Britain had been since the eighties. The remainder of the group got involved and the discussion became inevitably political.
“Thatcher, the bitch,” asseverated Rolls angrily. “That’s what Bart De Wever wants to do here.”
“It is the same with the ring-wing across the world,” mused Michael dolefully, “tax the poor harder and give tax-breaks to the rich.”
Virgil grunted.
The hot topic of the evening, was of course, Belgium’s newly elected governing party – the right-wing New Flemish Alliance – who were wreaking havoc with Belgium’s well-established, frankly wonderful, welfare system.
“Cuts to all sectors, but especially to the arts,” said Jo. “That’s who will suffer the most from this: the artists, the students and the sick and weakest of society.”
I told them that the same pattern had emerged in the UK two years ago. “Austerity measures” and cuts, student protests, the closure of university departments, the diminishment of the arts. There was some resistance, but not enough.
“And it will happen here also,” said Michael blackly.
“The only way to prevent it is to fight,” proclaimed Rolls, roused once more. “Sometimes words are not enough.”
By this time he had produced a platter of sandwiches and canopés left over from a banking soiree, where he had been working as a caterer.
“I talked to the kitchen staff, who were about to throw it all away.”
I cast my eyes over the heap of smoked salmon and cucumber, parmaham and mozzarella and blue cheese sandwiches.
“The rich bastards didn’t eat a thing.”
From time to time, punctuating these expostulations, Jo would play a strain of painfully beautiful and melancholy music from his guitar. It sounded like music from the South of France, from the Romanies. He turned the collar up on his jacket. Even with the whisky the kitchen of number 10 Zilverhof was freezing.
I glanced over the assembled company – the ring of men gathered together in a circle, deep in earnest conversation, rubbing their hands together against the cold. Here we were: liberals, anarchists, workers, artists, foreigners railing against the status quo and cursing the rich. There was a timeless, almost archetypal quality to the words that were spoken. We could have been the bums from Cannery Row squatting in an abandoned house on the edge of town or the idealistic students that Flaubert parodies in Sentimental Education. Here we were: proud of our poverty, merry with liquor, comrades in arms. It felt that, with their warm words and hearts, they were defending a dream that had faded from the UK a long time ago: a liberal political system under threat and Belgium’s strong and proud socialist history.
“That is why we all have to march tomorrow,” said Michael finally.
“March?”
“Yes, haven’t you heard about it? There is going to be a great manifestation tomorrow, in Brussels. They say that a hundred thousand are expected to march, from all over Belgium.”
That’s the first time I heard the delicious misnomer, manifestation, so much more mystical and appropriate than protest.
“Yes, I want to go,” said Jo suddenly.
“You should,” replied Michael.
“Yes, we all should,” said Rolls beadily. “I would if I could, but I’m working. That’s how the system gets you. Work so you can’t march.” He laughed bitterly.
“All the syndicates from Ghent are meeting at St Pieters at nine tomorrow morning,” said Michael, “I am going with them.” Michael was talking about the Belgian trade unions – he now worked in a factory.
“If you come with us, there is a reduced train fare subsidized by the unions.”
“Alright, I’ll come,” said Jo suddenly, “but I don’t want to go alone.”
“I’ll come too,” I suddenly piped up. Enough words. “I have a day off tomorrow.”
“Me too,” said Jo and winked at me. As a street performer he has no fixed schedule. My heart pulsed with excitement, at last I had found someone as free as me; someone I could on adventures with at the drop of a hat.
“Alright, Zilverhof at 8.30 in the morning?” I said, full of revolutionary optimism. I was already near midnight.
And that was how our first rendez-vous was fixed.
833 words a day 