In Europe

soup for us, and potatoes, vegetables, meat. Eurostar, the train catering department, every day: all sorts of snacks and nice things. The Atomium organises a children's party: 200 sandwiches with luncheon meat. The patisseries: leftover pastries in abundance, enough dessert for 200 people each day. All of it left over, not needed, all for us!’
    When the rain stops, I climb Galgenheuvel, the old gallows hill. There,for more than a hundred years, the Palace of Justice has been sitting astride the working-class neighbourhood of the Marollenbuurt. The building is a single solid chunk of congealed power: enormous courtrooms, offices and archives, a dome the size of St Peter's, and out on the pavement a Christmas tree in memory of the five murdered children for whose lives no justice has yet been handed down. As soon as I enter the great hall I become an ant, a little ant-person in the face of the giant ambition of the young Belgian nation and of the architect, who slowly went mad during the building's construction.
    Brussels is not, like other cities, a place that devours its citizens. Brussels, above all, devours itself. In every city you can take a walking tour with old photographs in hand, in every city you can shout ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, but Brussels is a law unto itself. Only in heavily bombed towns does one encounter metamorphoses on such a scale. Take South Station, for example, in its decline from the exuberant neoclassical temple of 1861, via a modern Dudok-like structure in the 1930s, to the rampant complex of offices it is today. The city's main artery, Boulevard Anspach, once Vienna and Paris rolled into one, is now a bare conduit, stripped of all monumentality. Brussels has always also been adept at sophisticated self-mutilation: courtyards have been replaced by car parks, the once elegant Finistèrestraat by a concrete trough.
    No one loves this city, no one cares for her, no one takes her under his wing. The way a traumatised child continually seeks the repetition of the suffering it has undergone, so this city is always busy violating itself and giving itself away. Every attempt to put an end to the disorder results only in greater chaos. The construction of the
Jonction
, a sort of tunnel between North and South stations, lasted from 1911–52, continuously delayed by wars, administrative conflicts and hundreds of other adversities. For forty long years, a deep trench through the centre of town blocked all traffic between the better neighbourhoods and the commerce of the inner city.
    An entire working-class neighbourhood, Putterijwijk, was razed to build the Central Station. A huge site was excavated, then the work lay dormant for years. A highway was simply slapped down on top of the tunnel, in turn giving rise to a proliferation of office towers. The well-to-do citizenry, for whom all those boulevards were built, had long sincefled to suburbia. Then NATO and the EU tore Brussels even further apart, totally uninterested in the nature or appearance of their capital, demanding only more and more office space and altitude.
    In the course of my walk I end up on Luxemburgplein, the square where the city once presented itself to travellers from Etterbeek, Charleroi and points further afield. For decades it was dominated by Leopoldswijk Station, a friendly, white, nineteenth-century building, flanked left and right by rows of cafés and little hotels with a Southern European air. But walking into the square today one sees, glistening in the afternoon sun, a vast wall of glass rising up behind the station. A few scaffolds are still standing, here and there a final cement mixer churns, but the metal detectors and security cameras are already hard at work, and suddenly one sees how dismal and small the station is in contrast to this enormity of steel and glass.
    This is Europe's brand new house of parliament. I go looking for an entrance amid the chaos. Again I am overwhelmed by the sense of my ant-ness. At the door I stop and turn around, and then I know it for sure: the forecourt of this building is clearly designed to roll on to Luxemburgplein and on into the city. And roll on it will, there can be no doubt about that. In half a year, or in five years, the little station – like cheese made from unpasteurised milk, like French bread kneaded at home, like real chocolate, untagged cows’ ears and the thousands of other things an ant-person values – will have been erased by Europe. The dark brown