We used to go to the seaside by train. It was odd, now that I come to think of it, as in the early nineties, most families had a car. Still, we went to the seaside by train. Maybe it was a remnant of the first paid leaves for which the working class had gone on strike in the sixties when having a private vehicle was just not possible for everyone yet. It’s funny how we just mimic the previous generation’s ways without much questioning.
The park was located by the sea. In fact, it was the very end of the Belgian railway. Had the train gone any further, it would have dived into the sea, which is a comical idea since the Channel Tunnel was yet to be thought of at the time. Once you got off the train and exited the station, a queue seemed to form spontaneously to the entrance. Before even seeing the ticket booth, you would be welcomed by a big styrofoam bee with a human face and rosy cheeks, and you knew you had reached Meli Park.
Opened on the 23rd of April 1935 by Alberic-Joseph Florizoone, owner of a honey company, the park originally was nothing more than a seaside cafeteria. Florizoone, who was the fourth generation of his family in the honey business, had had in mind to try and popularize the product, whose consumption wasn’t very common amongst Belgian families. He had a Le Corbusier-like white complex built, added a pond and a small zoo, and voilà! The first Belgian amusement park was born. He picked the name Meli because it was the anagram of miel (“honey,” in French) without realising that it was the very translation of the word in Greek.
In the fifties and sixties, the park was expanded and proper rides were added, as well as French formal gardens, a miniature golf course, and a fairytale forest. In the seventies and eighties, Meli became a popular destination for school trips and Sunday excursions. I remember going there with my class when I was nine or ten, as Belgium had that tradition of dedicating the last day of the school year to a fun activity. My favourite ride was the Splash, the highest and fastest log flume of Europe at the time, which was the reason why my mother always insisted I should wear my rainproof jacket on such outings, though I was guaranteed to lose it within the first ten minutes of the trip.
To many of us, Meli was the promise of a long summer day filled with fun and thrill. The bravest would dare to ride the Piratenboot (“Pirate ship,” in Flemish) or the Vliegend Tapijt (“Magic Carpet”), but of course, the most popular attraction was the Apirama dark ride, which looked a bit like Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean except that all the characters were animated bees. The park was, all in all, the epitome of wholesomeness under the Belgian sky; nothing bad could ever happen to anyone there. It was a place for happy families, and more importantly, for happy children.
***
My childhood, like that of many other Belgians of my generation, ended on the 17th of August 1996. I was 11. It was much too early for all of us, but we weren’t given a choice. It had been a warm summer, but it was raining when my parents turned on the television to watch the prosecutor’s announcement.
The bodies of Julie Lejeune (8) and Mélissa Russo (9) had been found, a little over a year after they had been abducted. Marc Dutroux had confessed. He would be sentenced to lifelong incarceration for five counts of murder and nine counts of rape, all of which on young girls. After the trial, the police were disbanded and the state almost collapsed. Those were strange, terrifying times.
I don’t remember any of our teachers discussing the matter with us. If it affected them — and it must have; they spent their days with children, after all — they never showed any sign of it. They didn’t encourage us to be more careful, or not to talk to strangers. They never said a word about it, as far as I can remember. We did talk about it amongst ourselves though, all the time. Some of us had nightmares. Dutroux had become the bogeyman who visited us at night, while our young brains tried to process the horror of the new reality that had replaced whatever we had once thought we knew.
The summer before that was the first summer my friends and I were allowed to ride our bicycles in the village. Pierre, who lived on my street – and who had been born in the same hospital as I, just one day later – Sofia, whose parents had recently joined the Jehovah Witnesses, Rachel, who lived in a big modern house and dreamt of having a dog, and Teddy, when his mother allowed him, which seldom happened. Perhaps Juliette too, and a few others I don’t remember.
It had been a warm summer (at least, that’s how I remember it), made of long sweaty afternoons pedalling uphill and stopping at the park to sit in the shade of the elm trees, with our bicycles resting along the fence. We didn’t fight that summer; not even when someone didn’t want to share their snacks. We knew, for a reason that had not been explained to us, that we needed to look out for one another.
What we thought was our first taste of complete freedom was in fact a much-controlled endeavour. We were allowed to ride, but we had to check in at someone’s parents’ house every thirty minutes. The mothers would then phone each other to let everybody know that we were safe and sound.
***
Julie and Melissa had disappeared on the 25th of June, 1995, just as the school-year ended, and their xeroxed portraits were hung in the window of every shop, every post office and every bus. We knew their faces as if they had been our own classmates. One year forward and the pictures would be at the window of every house, with a black ribbon across them.
We all got very tan that summer of 1995, and with all the cycling we did, our bodies started to shed the roundness of childhood. I think there were a few budding romances, but we probably didn’t know what to make of them at the time, and I am fairly sure no one acted upon them afterwards. At least, not that I know. “What do you suppose happened to them?”, Sofia once asked as we were making daisy bracelets in the park. None of us had an answer, but we definitely knew about whom she was talking. “Perhaps they just ran away,” someone suggested. It was what we all wanted to believe, because any other explanation was way too scary for us to say out loud. “Let’s go to my house,” I said. “My mum has made waffles.”
At the end of August, two other girls, An Marchal (17) and Eefje Lambrecks (19) disappeared after leaving a party with their friends in the region of Ostende. We went back to school and weren’t allowed to go on our cycling expeditions as often as in the summer. “Do your homework first, then we’ll see,” all of our parents said.
***
The Christmas holidays came and went. Then spring, and still there was no news of Julie, Melissa, An and Eefje. Worse: in May, another girl, Sabine Dardenne (12) disappeared on her way to school in Tournai. The police received daily reports of alleged sightings from here to the south of Spain. The evening news hardly covered anything else, except perhaps the war in Yugoslavia.
My dad, his brother and a neighbour were digging up the old concrete patio to build a fancier one, made of tiles. The neighbour across the street was also doing some renovations, but as he was much wealthier than we were, he had hired contractors. One day, one of the contractors came over to my dad and told him that he could give him a hand with the digging up, as his machine was there anyway and that he was ok with being paid under the table. My dad politely declined his offer, and my mum was fairly surprised to learn that our neighbour was having work done by undeclared workers. Both of them were flabbergasted when that contractor’s face appeared on the news a few months later.
In August, Laetitia Delhez (14) was abducted near the swimming pool of Bertrix. By then, we didn’t even ask if we could take our bicycles for a spin with the others. We just stayed home. I am only assuming that our parents wouldn’t have said yes, but we simply didn’t feel like asking. We knew something was terribly wrong. Maybe it was even worse for us, the girls, as we now had to live with the very concrete reality that sometimes, girls just disappeared. I still went to my friends’, but my mum insisted on walking me there if I was going somewhere outside of my own street where she couldn’t see me reach my destination. All the mothers did.
All in all, our friendships were more limited than they had been the previous summer. We spent a lot of time on the phone with each other, but the parents never shouted at us when they received the bill anymore. We watched a lot of daytime television — I remember reruns of McGyver and a French TV show for kids that purported to make science cool — and waited impatiently for the ice cream truck to come by. Daniel would always tell me which of my friends had asked him to say hi and which ice cream they had had. I explored the garden and became fascinated with snails; the adventures I lived, though fantastic in my imagination, were confined to the gates of our backyard.
***
And then it happened.
On the 13th of August 1996, four days after the disappearance of Laetitia Delhez, and fourteen months after that of Julie and Melissa, a suspect was arrested. His name was Marc Dutroux. On the 17th, he told the police where the bodies of the first victims were buried. They had been dead since March. The detectives who were in charge of the case had visited his house a few weeks before and found nothing. At the time, Julie and Melissa were alive but hidden in a cache whose door was concealed behind a cupboard in the cellar. They didn’t hear the children scream. Or maybe the little girls were already too weak to scream by then.
Even over twenty years later, there are no words to describe the shock we all felt when the news broke. We sat in silence, watching the coverage in disbelief. I saw my parents cry. Everybody’s parents cried. I do not remember if we, the children, did.
The forensic doctor who conducted the post-mortem lived in the village where I grew up (you have to understand that Belgium is a very small country). The little bodies had been damaged to the extent that it was difficult for him to reach a definitive conclusion as to the cause of death. We learnt that Julie and Melissa had been raped and starved. Julie seems to have died before Melissa, but they were buried at the same time. An and Efje were raped, drugged, starved and either buried alive or asphyxiated. The horror, it seemed, would never subside.
Obviously, our parents tried to hide the newspapers and to turn down the radio. But we still managed to read and to hear the news. We filled the blanks with the bits our friends had heard at home, and in the end, we had a sort of incomplete tale, the patchwork of a story that was a little too real, and a little too traumatising for us to see it as anything else than a story.
Sabine and Laetitia were found alive. Barely so, but alive. They soon reached the status of modern saints among Belgians, their very existence galvanizing whatever little hope we had left. The media harassed them, just like they did with the deceased victim’s parents, the detectives, the prosecutor and pretty much everyone involved in the investigation.
The shock went well beyond an emotional response from the population of Belgium. On the 20th of October, La Marche Blanche (“The White Walk”) was organised in Brussels. Julie, Melissa, An and Efje’s parents asked the political parties to abstain from using the tragedy for their own advancement. They complied, for the first and only time in the History of our country. Everyone was dressed in white, the colour the parents had chosen to symbolise the martyrdom of children — theirs and others. With six hundred thousand people marching, La Marche Blanche still is, to this day, the biggest social movement Belgium has seen since World War II. The silence in the streets of Brussels was deafening.
The government collapsed. The national police were dismantled in an effort to chase down the participants in an alleged conspiracy that kept the media busy for years. I think we’ll never know whether or not it was true. Everything changed. Nothing changed. But we never went to Meli Park again.
***
The children who were born afterwards could not have been any different from us if they had been from a different planet. They never got to enjoy the sort of relative freedom we did, nor any kind of freedom, for that matter. Their parents looked at them with anxiety, and never let them out of sight, even for a minute.
As the century was coming to an end, so was our childhood — and so was Meli Park. It had been on the decline for a couple of years, with Disneyland Paris opening just a train ride away, which diverted visitors from the Flemish destination, coupled with a few bad investments. And honey was never a very exciting theme, to begin with. On the 4th of October, 1999, Plopsaland S.A. took control of the park and closed it for transformations.
The bees were gone. In their stead, Plop, a gnome from a popular Flemish children’s TV show, and his friends, Mega Mindy and Piet Piraat. All shows were syndicated in Wallonia and dubbed in French. I remember that my younger cousins really were into those shows for a while. For the first time, I experienced being out of touch. I wasn’t Plop’s target audience; I was simply too old.
Interestingly, Plopsaland kept one reference to bees in one of its zones: Mayaland, an area of the park dedicated to the German character Maya the Bee. I suppose it was a sound financial decision aimed at recycling some of the rides and props that had been in use during the glory days of Meli Park. Perhaps market research had shown that older customers would enjoy indulging in some nostalgia. Who knows.
I never went to Plopsaland.
The ripples from the Dutroux case never really ceased to have effects beyond the surface. From time to time, Flemish supporters still chant “Walloons are paedophiles” during football games. We are a divided country. We have always been. Maybe the events of the nineties did not really worsen the situation, but they certainly did not help make it better. We go years without having an elected government with full powers because compromises are impossible. We are different. We do not want the same things. We disagree on social benefits, on immigration; even on what we want for the future of our country.
Sometimes it feels like just as the park I knew disappeared, the country in which I was born will cease to exist in my lifetime. I do not know if it is a bad thing. Maybe the Belgian nineties have ingrained in me the feeling that all things come to an end, that sometimes, bad things happen to good people for no reason, and that there’s really nothing you can do about it.
***
My generation is not special. It’s not better educated or worse than the previous one. It doesn’t struggle any more or less than the one after. We do not particularly feel or express any sense of kinship because of the collective trauma we went through. In fact, we never speak of what happened to those children back then. No one does. We do not talk about it with our parents or among us. We don’t say the name of anyone involved in the case. It is not as if it had never happened; we haven’t forgotten, but it has become an unspoken topic. Not really a taboo, no — something else entirely.
Maybe it is just the Belgian way. Maybe it’s always been like that. Sometimes, white is the colour of mourning. Governments fall. Everything changes, but nothing changes. Tragedies fade in the background of more pressing preoccupations. We know we have to be wary of white vans, even if we don’t always immediately remember why. We know monsters are real. Statues of long-dead kings are splashed in red paint at night. Scandals emerge. Debates last for weeks. And then, what? Honeymakers and gnomes come and go.
Occasionally, one of the criminals involved in the Julie and Melissa case asks for parole, and people are irate for a couple of days, with the help of a certain press that never misses the opportunity to stir rage and indignation (after all, anger makes people click and share), but it soon calms down. The truth is, we do not really believe that someday, they will have served their sentence and will need to be released. But it will happen. I do not think that it will ever be possible for any of them to actually pay their debt to society and to the children whose lives they took. But at some point, the judicial system will have to free them because there is nothing else it can do. I do not know what will happen to them afterwards.
I sometimes think of a hot-blooded neighbour of mine who, at the time, used to say that he’d kill Dutroux if he ever went out of jail. I know many people said that sort of thing, all those years ago. I wonder how many of them are still as determined as they were and whether they would actually be capable of killing a man, as much of a monster he might be. I suppose there will be an answer to that at some point, as a life sentence in Belgium is only really for life as long as no request for parole is introduced, and all inmates have a right to introduce such a request after a third of their sentence has been completed. His first request, in 2013, was denied. But as I am writing these lines, the courts are awaiting a full psychiatric report to make a decision on his 2019 request for conditional release.
***
It’s funny how memory works; I hadn’t thought of my childhood friends in ages, though I now am wondering whether they remember the summer of 1995 or the day trips to Meli Park. They must have gone to Plopsaland with their own children, and I am fairly sure that they looked at the gnomes with some sort of longing for a time when styrofoam bees stood in the background of our innocence.
This story is dedicated to the children we once were, and to those who did not get to grow up.
