Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
back up there with no buses or cabs to call on.
Eventually, I hauled myself upright, using the barn as support, and hobbled erratically to a caf￩, where I
fell into a chair near the door and ordered a Coca-Cola. I took off my boot and sock and examined my
ankle, expecting - and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping - to find some
splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But it was just
faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely
achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a
fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms. I sat glumly sipping my Coke for half an hour
and discovered upon rising that the worst of the pain had subsided and I was able to walk after a fashion.
So I had a limping look round Durbuy. It was exceptionally pretty, with narrow back streets and houses
built of stone beneath slate roofs. At one end stood a chateau lifted wholesale from a fairy tale and beneath
it was a shallow, racing river, the Ourthe. All around were the strangely overbearing green hills that had for
centuries kept the outside world out. I gathered from the size of the car parks that this was a popular spot
with trippers, but there was hardly anyone about now and most of the shops were shut. I spent a couple of
hours in the town, mostly sitting on a bench by the river, absorbed by scenery and birdsong. It was
impossible to imagine in any sensible way that this perpetually tranquil place had, almost within my lifetime,
been the epicentre, more or less, of the Battle of the Bulge. I lugged out Gilbert's magisterial history of the
Second World War and skimmed through the index. Durbuy and Barvaux didn't get a mention, but many of
the other neighbouring towns and villages did - Malm￩dy, where seventy-two captured American soldiers
were taken into a field by an SS unit and machine-gunned rather than be kept as prisoners; Stavelot, where
two days later the ever-busy sub-humans of the SS killed 130 Belgian civilians, including twenty-three
children; Bastogne, where American forces were besieged for a month and hundreds lost their lives; and
many others. I simply couldn't take it in - that these terrible, savage things had happened here, in these hills
and woods, to people as close to me in time as my father. And yet now it was as if it had never happened.
Germans who had once slaughtered women and children in these villages could now return as tourists, with
cameras around their necks and wives on their arms, as if it had all just been a Hollywood movie. I have
been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans
after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had
helped to ruin.
* * *
At about three o'clock it occurred to me that I had better head back to Barvaux. It took me until just after
six to reach the station because of the pained slowness of my walking and the frequent rests I took along the
way. The station was dark and untended when I arrived. No other passengers were about and the walls
were without timetables. I sat on the platform on the opposite side from which I had arrived, not knowing
when the next train might come along, not knowing indeed if there might be a next train. It was as lonely a
station as you could imagine in such a small and crowded country as Belgium. The tracks stretched in a
straight line for two or three miles in either direction. I was cold and tired and my ankle throbbed. Even more
than this, I was hungry. I hadn't eaten all day.
In my lonely, enfeebled state I began to think longingly about my old home-town diner. It was called the Y
Not Grill, which everyone assumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning. It was a strange
place. I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's
adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time. The food was terrible, the waitresses notoriously
testy and stupid, and the cooks were always escaped convicts of doubtful hygiene. They always had one of
those permanent, snuffly colds that mark a dissolute lifestyle, and there was invariably a droplet of moisture
suspended from the tip of their nose. You always knew, with a sense of stoic doom, that when the chef
turned around and put your food before you, the drip would be gone from his nose and glistening on the top
of your hamburger bun, like a bead of morning dew.
The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met.
Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to
Tijuana for a filthy weekend.
'You want
what
?' she would say.
