Episode 6- Welkom te België: Please fasten your seat belts
After roughly 3 hours (the African citizen in front of him had to almost perform a full striptease before being cleared) his turn finally came. The sullen customs agent nodded without looking at him, as if he was doing him a favour. Carlos smiled broadly and gave him his Tzatzikistan passport, issued in the local communal office of Kosmosibirsk in 1972. It had not occurred to him that on the photo he looked something in between Jim Morrison and The Jackal.
“Waarvan kom jij?”, said the customs agent perplexed that this country had escaped him.
“Pardon, Dirk” asked Carlos with his Tzatziki spontaneity, reading the agent’s name on his sleeve, “Vous parlez français?”, and for a moment wondered if he had gotten off at the wrong stop.
“WABLIEF?”, said the morose Politie agent approaching his rather red face to his. “FRANCAIS?” Carlos could now see his angry veins and smell an acid breath.
“What citizen you are?”, barked Dirk.
“Tzatziki! A good one!”, answered Carlos proudly, trying one more smile.
“WABLIEF?”, asked again Dirk, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You mean Greek? You think you funny?”
Dirk was actually having another bad day. He had just learnt that a French speaking employee had been hired at the airport and had just come back from his late summer, all-inclusive Jetair holidays to Greece, together with another 35 equally sullen Flemish and 2 Walloons (at least he thought so -his knowledge of French was limited to 3 belgicisms), quite irritated by the fact that Tzatzikiland (Griekenland in het Vlaams) had become so expensive compared to 1964, when he last visited with his parents and the autochthons fed them mostly for free. Moreover, he suspected that the last 3.5€ Tzatziki during The Last Supper in the cheap bouzouki restaurant -with palm trees and disguised Greeks dancing syrtaki on the tables and breaking fake dishes for fun while shouting Oopaaah!- had gotten him sick. The Tzatziki joke was definitely a bad one under the circumstances…
Carlos stood embarrassed and short of smiles in front of Dirk. His brain was turning fast, trying to think of a way of getting through Dirk and his bad breath and into Wonderland-Brussel.
Caught in a kind of last minute, airport ingenuity, at least he thought so, he looked Dirk right in the eyes and made a final honest and prideful though lethal statement:
My name is Carlos, and I am a person with problems!
Now it was Dirk that stood voiceless in front of the apparent craziness and lack of respect of the Tzatziki male citizen wearing a robe. He was used to people actually saying “Dank U!” when he nodded unpleasantly, and did not quite know what to think of this peculiar illegal –he had decided- immigrant, how to react: Arrest him? Have him deported? Beat him? All of the above? His patience grew dangerously thin…
“BEN JE OUT OF JE MIND, MANNEKE?” he shouted in Carlos’s face who could now feel Dirk’s spittle showering him.
“YES! MANNEKE PISS!”,Answered Carlos in his spontaneous albeit slightly naïve manner.
Carlos had been reading the inflight magazine of Schnellair and had come across the small statue that he planned to visit the soonest possible, hopefully the day it pisses beer. He thought that expressing admiration for the naked little statue might calm down a bit Dirk. But Dirk could not make the link and decided the moment had come to show Carlos what respect and real problems meant.
In a rare show of elasticity (his uniform had gotten a bit tight due to some fresh beer kilos) , Dirk jumped out of his cabin and, in front of the rest of the panicky "Other countries", potentially illegal immigrants that had started to run in all directions, yelled to Carlos, who was in the brink of having a panic attack and was slowly turning mauve in his pink robe with yellow spots :
“DON'T MOVE OR I'LL SHOOT! YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT! AL YOU SAY CAN BE HELD AGAINST YOU IN A COURT OF LAW!”
The airport version of “Bonanza” was playing on the hidden lounge loudspeakers and for a moment Carlos was sure he saw Dirk wearing a cow-boy hat. Happily though, despite an obvious loss of the sense of reality, he cleverly omitted asking him to translate in French once again…
And yet, for the next six hours Carlos had a hard time explaining in a mirrored room, in a credible way, the story of his life, because the more he went into it, the more these strange Politie people (there were more Dirks now in front of him) grew aggressive and the more peculiar his story sounded.
Then, in what must have probably been his only valid inspiration of that unforgettable day, he remembered the only piece of paper that could prove his innocence: the EPSO invitation to the exams in Heysel.
They had to let him go, although reluctantly.
Click here for the airport music that played while Dirk became a cowboy