Luminița Does the Work

This is a story about what happens when you try to deny a part of yourself.

It's also about a man with enough love and presence to be a grounding force in his woman's storm; one that leans in to listen, not away.

It's dedicated to Dave, and to An.

I live in Zandvliet, a small town in the Flemish part of Belgium.

Zandvliet lies, or rather sprawls, to the north of the thriving city of Antwerp, and stays a respectful walking distance away from the Dutch border. The first houses line the A12 motorway, which, if you drive south, will take you in minutes to the outskirts of Antwerp, and in an hour to Brussels; drive north, and it will take you to the first cities of Holland: Breda, then Dordrecht and Rotterdam. The hum of the motorway can be heard throughout our town, and, in the forest which surrounds it, the hum pervades the space between the trees. The inhabitants like to spend an hour or so in the forest, mostly at the weekend, riding their bikes or their horses, or walking their dogs. After their weekly dip into nature they return home and reflect on the delightfulness of living in a rural area.

Most of the streets of our town align in a quadrilateral pattern, enclosing regular blocks of houses and gardens. But within this geometrical layout, each house is different, built one by one to individual plans. They do have some things in common: they are each modestly but comfortably sized, with a reasonable plot of lawn, sometimes natural, sometimes astroturf. They are each completed by at least one relatively expensive car. But the thing which really unites them is the prevailing tendency to choose functionality over charm, comfort over beauty. In neighbouring countries like France, when new houses are built, they attempt, albeit sometimes half-heartedly, to maintain traditional regional aesthetics, with finishing touches like terracotta tiles and painted wooden shutters; here, individual home-owners-come-building-project-managers do not concern themselves with these constraints in form that could compromise functionality. The result is a mismatch of houses displaying varying degrees of emancipation from tradition: some try to keep it homely, and with smooth new bricks build oversized cottages, with arched windows, stone lions or dogs flanking the front door, and gnomes in the garden. Others do away completely with old fashioned concepts like sloping roofs and build themselves a practical box.

Somewhere in one of the rectangular plots, between the box houses and the grand cottages, nests a small weathered chapel. It has its own grounds, in which stand stone saints in semi-circular formation, shaded by ancient trees. Daffodils grow at their feet in spring, and mushrooms in the autumn. The chapel, no bigger than a one-car garage, closes the semi-circle. Most people living here are unaware of its existence, but a small group of old women - an endangered species - keep the rows of candles burning, the ornaments and altar dusted, and the dead leaves swept from the floor.

Also dotted amongst the box houses of our town are some older dwellings, small red-brick cottages with windows only on the ground floor, the upstairs just a dusty space under the eaves. Above each ground floor window and above each front door, is a row of coloured tiles. Each row aligns with the width of the window or the door, so that if there are two windows and one door, which is usually the case, there will be three single rows of tiles above them in the brickwork. The tiles are usually brightly coloured and intricately patterned, and serve no purpose other than to make the humble abode a little prettier. These meek cottages stand with dignity in the shadows of their oversized descendants and their distant cousins, the box houses.

The polystyrene pandemic claimed its first victims among these relics from another age.

I call it a pandemic, because although I will only recount events from one small Belgian town, I am aware that it’s hit hard internationally too. Also, pandemic is a suitably dramatic word, and God knows, folks here need to grasp the drama.

I did not personally witness everything I will impart. This story is reconstructed from the confidences of my dear friend and neighbour Stefaan, who is married to the beautiful Luminița, pronounced Luminitsa, Lulu to her friends. I also exchanged a few words with their fourteen-year-old son, Bram, which is a privilege, as he doesn't say very much nowadays. And I have filled in some blanks, as writers do.

Lulu was the first to sense the danger when the virus began to spread. She was sitting in the passenger seat of their car as Stefaan drove home. They were in Zandvliet, nearing the end of a long journey. Bram was on the back seat, looking at his phone.

‘Did anyone else see that?’ Lulu said.

She leant forward in her seat and turned to look at the house they had just passed.

‘What?’ answered Stefaan, a little absently.

She stared forward now, looking in panic at the road ahead, but seemingly seeing something else.

‘They can’t do that. It’s one of those old ones, you know with the pretty tiles. That one had dark green tiles, with white flowers. Oh no, no. They can’t do that.’

She was talking very fast.

Stefaan turned to look at her slowly, frowning. The long day of driving dulled his mind.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That little house. They’re wrapping it in polystyrene. The tiles are covered already.’

Stefaan turned back to the road.

‘They’ll never be seen again,’ she added, quietly now.

‘Sweetheart, it’s just insulation,’ Stefaan answered. ‘People gotta insulate, you know; their house is worth more like that.’

‘Yeah Mum,’ came the teenage voice from behind. ‘Don’t be such a drama queen.’

Lulu slumped into her seat, silenced. She was still silent as she stood sipping tea in their living room, looking across the road at the little cottage with its three rows of pink and yellow tiles. Her husband came to stand beside her.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come eat something. Dinner’s ready. Tomato soup.’

And she sat down obediently at the table.

You may be thinking that Luminița is not a very Flemish sounding name. And you’d be right. Lulu comes from Romania, but she doesn’t talk about her past very much.

‘Stef rescued me,’ is all she’ll say about the moment they met.

Stef will tell you about a beautiful young woman in dirty clothes, with deep brown eyes, a mane of black curls and a quiet grace. He first met her when he handed her a bowl of soup at the shelter for homeless people in Brussels, where he was a volunteer. At least he told me that, I think he has another story for the rest of the world. He also told me about the time when the shelter was full, and they turned Lulu away, and he ran after her into the street, begging her to come home with him, not caring if he broke the rules.

‘I won’t take advantage of you, I promise. I will just give you a warm place to sleep. You’ll be safe with me.’

She stared back at him in silence, then turned and walked into the November night, her breath suspended in the light of the street lamp. The next day, she allowed him to buy her coffee, and they talked for two hours, added sandwiches and cake and tea to the order, but she disclosed nothing deeply personal.

The only trace of her past sits now on their mantelpiece: a black and white photo in a frame. It shows an old woman standing in front of a large house, with a scarf in her hair, and strong arms folded across her chest. Her pleated face doesn’t smile. Mountains loom behind the house.

‘That’s my grandmother,’ she once told me. ‘She was the richest woman in our village.’

Her shoulders seemed to straighten as she said this.

‘The roof is actually red,’ she added. ‘Like all the roofs in the village. And the walls are lighter, and not so grey. There are goats in the gardens and bears in the forest. You can hear wolves howl from your bed.’

‘Don’t you ever want to go back there?’ I asked.

‘No. I have no-one to see there now, anyway.’

I’m sure her shoulders drooped again then.

I probed Stefaan when I caught him alone. If it wasn’t poverty, I wanted to know what had chased her from her mountains, how she had ended up taking soup in charity from her Belgian prince Charming.

‘She doesn’t like to talk about it, and I don’t force her,’ was his only answer.

Every time Stefaan buys her flowers, she dries one, usually a rose, and lays it next to the photo. The frame sits in a mound of dull yellow and dark barely red papery flowers, like a shrine to something unspoken, dry petals overflowing to the ground.

Her miniature grandmother watched now from the mantelpiece as she ate the soup Stefaan had cooked. It was tastier than the one at the shelter. Like in most Flemish soups, meatballs bobbed at the surface, and fresh, generously buttered, fluffy bread rolls waited next to it. She looked at her husband in quiet appreciation.

‘Put your phone down and eat up,’ she said to Bram, breaking the silence.

‘Don’t be too upset about that house, sweetheart,’ said Stefaan. ‘I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other coloured tiles left alone.’

But he was wrong.

The next day Lulu came back from walking their dog in the forest.

‘They’ve taken two more. Covered the bricks. And the Van Hooydoncks have piles of polystyrene blocks on their driveway.’

Stefaan made her tea, and sat down to listen to her talk about the tiles: how old they were, how sweet it was that people thought - all those years ago and with such humble means - of decorating their tiny houses that way, how sad it was that the tiles were disappearing forever.

‘Don’t you see it, my love? Don’t you see how sad it is?’ she looked at him and he felt he could melt into her eyes and be absorbed forever.

But he tugged on his greying beard.

I asked him later why he didn’t just say yes - yes, he felt it too, yes, he mourned the tiles with her. He could have told a white lie, but Stefaan is an honest man, and a practical one too. He pondered what he would do if he owned a pretty tiled cottage. Their own house is modern. He bought it before he knew her; it was the investment of a successful single man. They had planned to move into something more remote, with a bigger garden. They’d have donkeys, they said. They’d planned it years ago as they walked past a big old house in the forest, young lovers hand in hand, and paused to talk to the donkeys that loped through the garden to meet them. But the time has never been right to move, and now Bram's roots are furrowing deeper into Zandvliet soil, and spreading into Antwerp, the city he calls home, where he can do all the things that teenagers like to do.

So from his modern house, Stefaan imagined himself the owner of a sweet old cottage, and he had to admit to himself that he might choose the increase in value of several thousands of euros that insulation would bring, over the preservation of a few old tiles.

He hadn’t spoken but Lulu looked away; his answer was clear. No, he didn’t feel it. He didn’t mourn the tiles with her.

She stopped talking about it then. As the months went by, the number of houses wrapped in polystyrene steadily increased. Sometimes it was the old cottages, sometimes more recent houses, built just before insulation became part of the process. Their red bricks were replaced with straight, even surfaces of beige, white or pale grey. House by house, the face of the town changed.

Lulu didn’t talk about it, but she became increasingly scathing of Flemish people in general. She laughed when her neighbours bought new cars, or put up balloons in the street for their wedding anniversaries. ‘What do they have to celebrate?’ her hardened gaze seemed to say.

Then one day, it happened. It was Friday afternoon. A lorry deposited stacks of polystyrene blocks next to the little cottage across the road. Scaffolding gripped its walls. Mr Van Eycke, the owner, was away for the weekend. Work would start on Monday.

Lulu said nothing then.

But that night in bed she said a strange thing.

‘Did you hear that, Stef?’

‘What?’ came his sleepy reply.

‘Wolves. Maybe they’re in the forest.’

‘There are no wolves here. Don’t worry.’

And he lay a heavy arm around her waist.

Around two A.M., Stefaan woke to Lulu moving next to him in the bed. He switched the lamp on. She was sitting up, brushing her arms with her hands as if something was stuck to them.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Polystyrene everywhere,’ she said. 'Everywhere. They covered the house and the roof and the grass and built towers around the trees and then a small aeroplane swooped down and dropped a bomb and all the polystyrene exploded and the air was full of little balls and they got in my nostrils and stuck to my hair and my skin and blocked out the light...’

‘Hey, breathe, it's just a dream.’

He rubbed her back. She looked at him.

‘We have to do something,’ she said.

She ran down the stairs, her nightdress billowing in the wind she created. Stefaan followed. Without the adrenaline that flowed in her veins, he was slower, and he squinted in the light as she hit the switches she flew past. He followed her out the backdoor and into the garage. The crisp night air made her nipples stand hard under the single layer of thin cotton, but she didn’t appear to notice the cold. Her deep brown eyes were like fast swirling pools, and Stefaan felt the current trying to pull him under. He stood helpless as she grabbed a crowbar. His armed wife ran barefoot down the driveway and across the street. He followed slowly, shivering in his pyjamas.

The crowbar sank its point into the smooth surface of the first block, and a fine spray of little balls erupted, covering her hair like snow. She drew back her weapon and struck again, and again. With strong, rhythmic strokes, like a peasant woman with a scythe, she crushed every block. Stefaan stood watching, waiting; it wasn’t safe to approach the swinging bar. She seemed unaware of his presence; there was a momentum in her movement that would not have stalled. When every block was crushed, and little balls lay clinging to the grass, to the brick walls behind her, to her nightdress and to her skin, she stopped and her body hung limp, leaning on the bar as if all the hay were made. It fleetingly occurred to him that she would soon have to attend to the goats, but then the crowbar ceased to be a scythe, and his wife ceased to be a peasant. He approached her rounded shoulders. Her hair hid her face. As he wrapped his arms around her and let the little balls stick to the flannel of his pyjamas, a sob shook her body.

The street was still, the houses around them looked down through dark windows. Not a soul had stirred.

‘Ssssshhhhhh,’ he said, and rocked her gently, prying the crowbar from her hand. ‘Let’s go home.’

She shivered on the sofa as the kettle boiled. He wrapped a blanket around her.

‘So are you going to unrescue me now?’ she asked.

‘Why would I do that, Luminița?’ softly, reverently he pronounced her full name, then melted into her chocolate eyes.

They sat in silence for a while, sipping hot tea. He held his steaming cup with one hand, the other wrapped firmly around her shoulders.

‘I see it now,’ he said after a while. ‘I saw the tiles in the light of the street lamp, whilst you worked. I’d never really noticed how pretty they were before.’

They sipped in silence again then for a minute.

‘Stef,’ she said, putting down her mug. ‘Let's go on holiday. I’m ready to show you my village.’

He squeezed her shoulder tighter, and kissed her hair, getting polystyrene on his lips.

‘Okay,’ he whispered, and brushed the little balls away.

***

The next morning, Stefaan and Lulu sat eating warm croissants and studying a roadmap on the coffee table. Bram came downstairs.

He looked out the window.

‘What the - ?’

‘Watch your language, Bram,’ said his mother.

‘What happened to Van Eycke’s polystyrene?’ he reformulated.

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged his father. ‘Vandals, probably. Never mind. He’ll have insurance.’

I was standing, at that moment, in the group of puzzled neighbours forming around the obliterated blocks. I didn't know then that I would be the only neighbour to learn the truth. And I could not, by the wildest stretch of my imagination, have guessed what it was.

‘Bram,’ said Stefaan. ‘We’re going on a road trip.’

‘Cool,’ said the teenager, not awake enough yet to ask where.

He sauntered into the kitchen and took a carton of milk from the worktop. Finding it empty, he threw it in the bin. As the lid closed on the rubbish inside, some small white specks caught his attention on the floor, in the corner behind the bin. He crouched to touch them, and they stuck to his finger.

He turned narrowed eyes on his parents.

Poring over the map, oblivious of the scrutiny, they continued to chat and eat and sip coffee.

He hadn’t seen them look so happy in a very long time.