Open City

Julius decides to take a vacation to Brussels for three weeks over his winter break. On his plane trip, he talks with the elderly woman, named Dr. Maillotte, seated next to him. She puts down her book and tells him about her interactions with other people from Nigeria and Ghana. He asks about her life, and she tells him about becoming a gastrointestinal surgeon and growing up during World War II in Belgium.

After napping, Julius talks with Dr. Maillotte about Heliopolis in Egypt, her friendship with the aristocratic Empain family, and skiing. She describes the kidnapping of Edouard-Jean Empain in the 1970s, an event that made international news. Then, at Julius’s prompting, she talks about her children—all doctors like her and her husband. One of her children died at 36 years old from cancer. She invites Julius to visit her and Gregoire Empain in Brussels. Julius considers underground travel and underground structures that hold the dead.

Mayken, the woman who rents Julius an apartment in Brussels, meets him at the airport for an extra fee. As they complete the lease paperwork, she talks about how most of the residents are Walloon, but a small percentage are Arab and African. Julius considers the lives of Maillotte and Saito in 1944. Then, he recalls traveling to Brussels when he was seven years old, and how it affected his perception of America.

Julius details some of the history of Brussels, including how its rulers “declared it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment” (97) during WWII. He notes how there seem to be more Arabs and Africans than Mayken claimed. Shortly after Julius arrives in Brussels, there is a protest against racism exacerbated by the murder of a 17-year-old on the metro in Gare Central. He considers how the murder sparked racial tension, as many made the racist assumption that the killers were North Africans and blamed the entire North African community for the crime, though the perpetrators were later revealed to be two Polish teens of Romani descent.  

Julius considers other hate crimes in Belgium as he walks around the Parc du Cinquantenaire. As he looks at a plaque with Belgian kings on it, he considers his oma (grandmother). He has tried to look her up in a couple different Belgian phone books without success. After leaving the park, he visits an Internet and phone shop to search for her online.

At the shop, after making some phone calls about his patient V.’s medications, he strikes up a conversation with an employee named Farouq. They discuss the authors Walter Benjamin, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Mohamed Choukri. They also discuss orientalism, the value of difference, and the differing ideas of Malcolm X and MLK. Julius notices how Farouq and other dark-skinned people are treated in the city, and he starts to avoid all-white establishments. When Julius returns to the shop, he does not want to talk to Farouq again, believing that their politics are too dissimilar.

Julius feels lonely and goes to a cafe in Grand Sablon. A young waitress flirts with him, but he is not interested in her. Instead, Julius flirts with a Czech woman, whose age—he guesses—is around 50 and whose name he immediately forgets. After they share an umbrella, she invites him to her hotel room. They have sex and nap. Julius leaves a few hours later, thinking about how this is his first sexual encounter since he and Nadège broke up.

The next day, he reads, then calls Dr. Maillotte from the internet shop to make plans with her for Monday. As Julius is about to pay for his call, Farouq comes in and tells him it’s on the house. They talk about his diverse customers, and Farouq says he wants to study people with different values coexisting. He describes working as a janitor at an American school in Brussels, where the principal was rude to him because of his position. His official course of study is translation, and Julius notes how he talks to the customers in different languages. Farouq talks about Malcolm X, as well as how he is a pacifist and a “bad Muslim” (114). The men agree to meet at Casa Botelho after Farouq is done with work.

Before meeting Farouq, Julius goes on a walk past the Royal Palace and thinks about his oma. It begins to drizzle, so he goes into the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, but changes his mind and walks around until he is soaked and has to change before going to dinner. At Casa Botelho, Julius meets Farouq and his friend, Khalil. They smoke and Khalil speaks in French, which Farouq has to translate for Julius.

The men discuss leftist politics in America and the situation between Palestine and Israel. Khalil argues against American communitarianism, which Julius does not completely understand. When Khalil asks Julius about Black culture in America, Julius replies that only some Black men are part of the hip-hop culture that is on MTV. They discuss how people in power are the ones who determine how people are portrayed. Farouq and Khalil think Saddam was a minor dictator and other dictators in the Middle East are much worse. However, Saddam was the one who went against the wishes of America, so they targeted him.

They talk about al-Qaeda, and Khalil says he understands why the group attacked the twin towers, even though he thinks it was a terrible act. Julius half-heartedly argues that Khalil is an extremist and asks for Farouq’s opinion about al-Qaeda. Farouq replies with a story from King Solomon about how snakes defend themselves by killing and bees defend themselves by dying, so he does not judge nor support the actions of al-Qaeda.

Julius thinks Farouq looks like Robert De Niro. Farouq thinks America can be compared to al-Qaeda, but both Americans and Europeans have terrible opinions about Palestine. He speaks against Jewish people in a way that makes Julius uncomfortable, but Julius doesn’t confront Farouq, attributing his comments to cultural differences. Farouq suggests Julius read Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, a controversial book whose thesis is that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust has become a way to justify Israeli oppression of Palestinian people. Khalil’s phone rings, and he leaves after paying for everyone’s drinks and food.

Julius changes the subject, and Farouq answers questions about his family. He is not close with his father or eldest brother but is close with his mother. He liked reading more than attending classes. He is passionate about people seeing the diversity among Arabs. Julius suggests he visit America, but Farouq does not want to experience Islamophobia there. He notes again how he is not a devout Muslim—especially since he drinks—but that he loves the Prophet. He believes Enlightenment thinking is devoid of divinity. Farouq originally wanted to go into critical theory and become the next Edward Said—the enormously influential Palestinian American scholar and author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism—but his thesis committee met shortly after 9/11 and rejected his work. Shortly after hearing this story, Julius decides they should call it a night and head out.

Julius wakes up from a dream about running a marathon with his sister in Lagos. Since he in fact has no siblings, he is disoriented and takes a moment to remember who and where he is. The rain in Brussels reminds him of a day when he was nine. He was at home with his paternal grandmother, who would have allowed him to break his parents’ no-TV-on-school-days rule, but the power was out. He wanted a Coca-Cola, but there was also a rule against drinking those except on special occasions. In his youth, Julius dreamed of drinking Coca-Cola whenever he wanted.

He went outside and dangled his feet in the well, thinking about the spirits rumored to be below, and tossed stones in the water. Young Julius went to his bedroom, took off all his clothes, and considered masturbating. He recalled a sexy magazine image, got dressed again, and looked for the magazine. However, after an hour of searching, he didn’t find it. He drank a bottle of Coke from the fridge and replaced it with one from the storeroom.

After it began to rain again, his mother came home and Julius felt angry with her for enforcing his father’s rules. A flood followed, and in the present day Julius looks out the window at the gentle Belgian rain and compares it to the Nigerian monsoon. He regrets the falling out he had with his mother that day and notes with irony that as an adult, he dislikes Coca-Cola.

Julius arrives early for his dinner with Dr. Maillotte and goes into the church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle. Recorded organ music plays as a woman vacuums the empty church. The woman is Black, and he guesses her nationality as Congolese, since the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo was once a Belgian colony, but he recalls having recently visited a club called Le Panais where he made the same assumption about a group of African patrons who turned out to be Rwandan. Julius compares the silent woman to silent women in a Vermeer painting.

At the restaurant, Aux Quatre Vents, televisions play news about the storm. Dr. Maillotte arrives and comments on how unusual the weather is for Brussels. As they eat dinner, she talks about meeting jazz musicians like Cannonball Adderley, and how her husband prefers America to Belgium. He thinks about how his mother spoke to him in German for a while, but only admits to speaking Yoruba before learning English. Then, Julius asks her opinion about the treatment of Arabs in Belgium, noting Farouq’s experiences. She thinks some people are too focused on their own suffering to notice the suffering of others.

Before leaving, she invites Julius to visit her and her husband in Philadelphia. While walking back to his apartment, Julius stops to look at a monument of the famously misogynistic, anti-gay, and Islamophobic French poet and playwright Paul Claudel and considers how W. H. Auden, in his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” implied that time would forgive Claudel’s bigotry in favor of the beauty of his language. He takes a bus filled with people, then ends up walking behind a woman with a stroller. It is very windy, and he keeps some construction debris from being thrown on the woman and the baby. This causes him to consider how fleeting happiness is. Back at his apartment, he lies in bed naked and listens to the rain, thinking the diverse lives it falls on equally, in a vision reminiscent of the famous closing lines of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”