The Chessboard

1

I was expecting old age, not lockdown.

2

It sometimes happens in life that the time of the world, the time of history—the time of wars and pandemics—comes to resonate with the intimate time of our personal lives. This is what happened to me in the spring of 2020. What occurred at the time, during that first lockdown when the whole world went numb, was an unexpected collision, an unpredictable coincidence between two periods of my life that nothing could otherwise have brought together.

3

One day, during lockdown, I walked past the school on Rue Américaine that I attended as a boy. The Brussels streets were deserted, there were very few cars in the neighborhood. When I arrived in front of the red brick building of my old school, I pushed the door open and glanced into the entrance hall. I barely recognized the place, only the smell transported me fleetingly back in time while everything else remained foreign to me. Behind a series of glass doors and corridors I could just make out an undifferentiated backdrop of high windows and classrooms. A deserted playground, a covered courtyard. I did not go into the school, I stayed on the threshold. I was standing there, motionless at the entrance to that large hall with its black and white floor tiles, and what then appeared before me in the dazzling sunshine of that morning in March, in a kind of visual reverberation emerging from the depths of time, like distant shapes that appear to waver in the heat of a mirage, was the checkerboard floor of that vast entrance hall as it must have been in the middle of the 1960s, often wet from the rain, smeared with mud and the faint watery traces of footsteps and school-bags. I was looking at those old black and white tiles, now dry and dusty, on which slow-moving listless shadows were interlaced, reflected from the branches of the horse chestnut trees in the playground or maybe from farther away, from the abysses of the past, when I realized—it had never struck me before—that the floor of the entrance hall of my old school looked much like a chessboard.

4

I was standing there, motionless, in front of the chess-board of my memory—and I will stay there throughout these pages, it is the present moment of this book, its infinite present.

5

In Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec applies a principle derived from an old problem that is familiar to chess players: the polygraphy of the knight. It’s a mathematical logic problem, also called knight’s tour or knight’s algorithm, based on the knight’s move in chess, which consists of making the knight land on each of the sixty-four squares of the chessboard without stopping more than once on the same square. I am not aiming for such autobiographical exhaustivity here. No. At most I will have to content myself with idly moving my knight from square to square as my memories arise and I try to give new life to a few fleeting and affecting figures that passed through my life.

6

The symbol of my childhood neighborhood in Brussels, its lighthouse, so to speak, is the building at 2 Rue Jules Lejeune, which rises up at the corner of Place Charles Graux, and dominates Rue Washington with its height. It is built of gray stone and red bricks that are visible from a distance, and whenever I now pass through the neighborhood, I never fail to glance up at the window on the fifth floor. I look up at that window, and I sometimes feel as if I can sense the child I was, there behind the glass. Yes, I can see myself in pajamas waiting for my parents’ return when they were late coming home. My first memories of anxiety date from this period—and if the memory is so vivid, it’s probably because that was the first time, aged seven years old, that I imagined my parents’ death.

7

Rue Jules Lejeune, Rue Washington, Place Leemans, I could draw up a map of my private childhood geography, where a few places would appear like so many reassuring havens: the Renier Chalon playground, my school on Rue Américaine, the local GB supermarket that ended up changing names for commercial restructuring reasons about which I have no clue nor interest, or the little Spanish restaurant on Chaussée de Waterloo, where my parents sometimes took my sister and me for dinner. Enthroned at the heart of this stable and reassuring childhood universe was the bedroom I occupied with my sister on Rue Jules Lejeune. I remember the fictional environments that Anne-Do and I constructed there, our imaginary forts, the names we invented for ourselves to embellish our make-believe worlds. Mine was Michel, an homage to the eponymous hero from the Bibliothèque Verte series of children’s books, Michel Leads the Investigation, Michel Goes Diving, Michel Chases Shadows. Michel! Beyond the stable topography surrounding the peaceful haven of Rue Jules Lejeune, an unknown world spread out, immense and undifferentiated, where only a few tiny familiar islands emerged, Sart-Dames-Avelines, Ostend, and Le Coq, where we would spend our holidays with our grandparents, and which in our childlike perception of the world at the time, appeared to be at transatlantic distances from Brussels.