 asanova Restaurant Book: Gaston's Story
Chapter 2
Our parent's main competitors were across the square. Old Mr. and Mrs. Hocke had run a grocery store in Malmedy for decades, until the bombs hit. After the war, they built a small temporary wooden structure on the same spot and reopened their business. It was in a prime location, with lots of walk-by traffic.
My mother learned that the Hockes planned to move the temporary structure and build a four-storied building on the property. They wanted to sell the new building to provide income for their retirement. This was just the opportunity my mother was looking for. Not only would we have a building all our own in a great location, but we would also eliminate our primary competition. In his usual way, my father was resistant to the change, but my mother insisted that this opportunity was too good to pass up.
She worked out a deal with the Hockes that was typical in Belgium. First, they negotiated until they agreed on a fair price for the new building. My parents made a small down payment, and the Hockes financed the remainder, which would be amortized over the number of years that the Hockes were expected to live. My parents would make these monthly payments until both of the Hockes died. This provided steady income for as long as the Hockes lived, but it was a bit of a gamble for our parents. If the Hockes both died sooner than expected, the actual cost of the building would be low. But if even one of the Hockes lived to a ripe old age, then the building would be expensive. My mother was confident that it was worth the gamble. We watched the building go up quickly over the coming months. Like most of the buildings constructed after the war, it had no particular architectural style. Because demand for workers was high and building materials scarce, construction quality was often low. There were no building codes, except that buildings around our square could not be more than four-stories high.
Our new grocery store, with its bright yellow and chrome decor, was on the ground floor. At the rear of the store, there was a small toilet and a staircase that led to the living quarters above. There was also an entrance to the cellar where there was a huge coal furnace, with a mountain of coal that was replenished twice a year.
Our home was the upper floors. Walter and I had a room at the very top. The view from our dormer windows was incredible. When we climbed on a chair and leaned way over, we could see rooftops and balconies all round the square and, to the left, the towers of the grand cathedral.
Beyond the chimney tops was a wooded hillside called "Le Calvaire," named for its mile-long trail dotted with the Stations of the Cross, twelve alters symbolizing the events leading up to Jesus' crucifixion. A large wooden cross marked Le Calvaire's peak.
It seemed that everyone in Malmedy was Catholic, so the trail was quite crowded with adults during Easter week, but at other times of the year, we had the hill mostly to ourselves. My friends and I collected beetles in these woods and paint their hard wings like fighter planes - some were Nazi, some British, others American. The American ones were the most difficult; it's not easy to paint stars on a squirming beetle. ***
My parents were very successful in their new location due, in part, to a chance encounter my mother had with a man from her German hometown. She learned that he conducted weekly bus tours, pilgrimages from German border towns to the tiny Belgian village of Banneux, where the Virgin Mary appeared eight times to a poor 12-year-old girl in 1933. He had built up a steady business as the religious fervor of German housewives grew, fueled by the fact that the day-long excursion provided one of the few legal ways that Germans could cross the border into Belgium where they could buy fine coffees and chocolates at a fraction of the German black-market cost.
My mother knew that each German was allowed to bring one pound each of coffee and chocolate back across the border. It didn't take her sharp mind long to calculate the potential profits from a weekly busload of fifty pilgrims. She worked out a deal with the bus driver. Since Malmedy was along the route, the driver agreed to stop the bus at her store each week. In exchange, he would eat a hot meal in our kitchen while the women shopped, plus he would get a percentage of the sales.
The arrangement was even more profitable than my mother imagined. On the first day the bus was to arrive, our mother and Gilbert spent the entire morning weighing out one-pound bags of whole bean coffee. There must have been 200 bags, more than we would normally sell in two weeks. She stacked them up near the store entrance beside a similar display of chocolate bars. The smell of fresh roasted beans filled the air.
When the bus arrived in the mid-afternoon, women flooded the shop. Amazingly, before they left, the entire stack of coffee had disappeared. After the bus had driven off, headed for the German border, my mother was ready to take a break after spending a solid hour ringing up sales. She asked me to straighten up the bathroom at the back of the store. This was a job I really hated, but I knew better than complain. When I opened the restroom door, I found the trashcan overflowing with empty coffee bags.
Where, I wondered, could those women have hidden all the extra coffee they had bought? ***
One day my mother announced that Rita would be taking Walter and me on a vacation to De Panne, a Belgian beach town on the North Sea.
Vacations were almost unheard of in our family. The closest thing to a vacation that I had experienced before was trip to the coast with my parents, Walter and our cousin Robert soon after we moved to Malmedy. My father drove his new camel-colored GMC panel truck that only had a drivers' seat. He chose this model because trucks with two or more seats were charged a higher tax rate. That posed no problem for our father. He simply took the upholstered armchair from our living room and sat it beside his seat so our mother could ride in comfort, even if she did slide around a bit on the curves.
Walter, Robert and I sat in the back on the floor. There were a few bottles of wine among the groceries that our parents had packed. While our parents were busy driving and talking, Walter took a sip of wine from one of the bottles. Wine was reserved for adults; children drank low-alcohol table beer, so this was Walter's first wine - and he liked it. Before we knew it, Walter was quite tipsy, and while he was clowning around, he tossed Robert's beret out the window. Through his rear view mirror, Dad saw the beret fly out and hit a passing truck. We just kept going.
We arrived at the beach late in the afternoon. I figured I'd be able to look across the North Sea and see England over on the other side, just like the school maps. But all I could see was water. I had never imagined that the ocean would be so huge.
Just as strange was the sight of my father removing his shoes, rolling up his pant legs and wading in the surf. I had never seen my father barefoot before, and his legs were white as chalk. I'm not sure, but this was probably the first time he and my mother had seen the ocean too. Walter and I stripped down to our underwear and played in the cold shallow water until the sun went down.
That night, we camped on the beach, and our mother warmed soup on a butane camp stove. It exploded, and her hair and clothes caught fire. My father ran to the truck, grabbed a blanket and threw it around her, putting out the flames. Fortunately, her burns were minor. We drove home the next day, my mother drooped in her armchair, with singed hair and eyebrows.
But this trip would be a real vacation. For two whole weeks, Rita, Walter and I would be staying in a one-room apartment over a gift shop only a few blocks from the beach. This was a big deal. My mother bought swimsuits and tennis shoes for Walter and me, and hired a seamstress make matching shirts for us. My god, how we hated those shirts. They were made of stiff green-and-white checkered fabric with big collars. Worst of all, instead of having buttons, cotton cords were used to lace the front closed. But my mother thought these shirts were exactly what well-dressed boys should be wearing on holiday. She even took our picture in our new outfits before we left.
Pol drove the three of us to the coast, leaving our parents behind for a few days of peace and quiet. As soon as we passed the Malmedy town limit, Walter and I dug our old shirts out of our suitcase and changed.
Just after noon, we stopped at a small bistro. Pol ordered oeuf Russe, or Russian eggs, for all of us. This was a simple dish - hard boiled eggs covered with a tomato sauce and served with a green salad - that should be faster than the prix-fixed menu listed on the chalkboard. Then we waited. And waited. All around, customers arriving after us were enjoying roast chicken and potatoes followed by custard for dessert. Pol called the waiter over and asked him to check on our order. The waiter assured Pol that it would be out soon, and we continued to wait. Finally, we were the last customers remaining.
Then we saw a sweaty man wearing an apron run from the kitchen, through the dining room, and out the front door. In three minutes, he hurried back to the kitchen, carrying a paper bag. Pol shook his head and said to Rita, "I bet he went to buy the eggs."
We were finally served our meal and were soon back on the road. Pol dropped us off at our beach apartment, and headed back for Malmedy. Our two weeks flew by. Most afternoons, Rita would take us to the board walk and buy us thick Belgian waffles with fruit and whipped cream - so different from the thin waffles our mother made - and left us to watch Laurel and Hardy movies while she went to dance hall a few doors down. We spent our mornings wading in the shallow water, since we didn't know how to swim, and renting pedal cars that we rode up and down the ocean-front dikes. Rita even bought us new blue and red beach shirts to replace the ones we hated. It was a grand vacation.
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