Ceci n'est pas la Belgique

Belgium: sixty kilometers of dunes where the summers were mild and the sea was gray or green, never blue (horrid Mediterranean blue, light without imagination). We didn't travel abroad yet. Only rich children did that. We were children of the north, neither poor nor rich, keen on a North Sea that was welcoming and rowdy, cold and rebellious. We loved the great movement of its tides, with its strong smell of seaweed and mussels. Protected by the breakwaters, it surrendered and recaptured right at our feet vast expanses of dreams. How do you exile yourself from a happy childhood? Yes, when vacation time arrived, Flanders, with its sixty kilometers of beaches, was sweet for the Belgian children of the interior, who, drunk on salty green horizons, came-if they were children of the bourgeoisie-to build castles doomed to magnificent collapse. My homeland: a federation of fine sand castles, Flemish and Walloon fortresses, side by side, in a make-believe nation, confronting the gray and green sea that laughed at our shouts and our varied accents, covering them with its immense murmur. This was the time when the great Belgian champions-Romain and Sylvere Maes-were on their way to winning three Tours de France. So, all the Belgian children on vacation at the North Sea became Belgians against the French. I also remember the nails that were (allegedly) thrown somewhere in France under the tires of our champions with the same agitation as I do the Nazi flag I saw hoisted over the Royal Palace of Brussels, where a few moments earlier the black, yellow, and red flag had still waved in the cruel blue sky of the spring of 1940. To cure chauvinism, that childhood disease, and avert patriotism,