The Weekly Screed (#677)

The tragic tale of poor Serge, 
the one-fork, one-eyed Belgian
By David Benjamin

PARIS — At a café last week, Hotlips and I found that our waiter had provided us, to eat our repast, a single fork. This oversight, swiftly repaired, recalled a memory from my distant past, when I spent six weeks in Brussels.

At the time, I knew a Belge named Serge, a Francophone Walloon who had grown up desperately poor in the wretchedest ghetto of Flanderdam, a bigoted village in Dutch-speaking Flanders. His mother, after giving birth to nine emaciated and sickly children, began dying of consumption at age 28 and continued to do so, bedridden and coughing great gobbets of blood and lung tissue, for the next 22 years. Serge’s father, Levi, was a well-meaning but hapless entrepreneur who opened, in the heart of the village, a tavern called the Walloon Saloon — named so in a spasm of ethnic pride. However, the prosperous French-hating Flemish citizens of the village shunned the tavern, leaving only a handful of jobless Walloons to squander the odd sou or centime on the cheapest of rotgut booze.

So poor was Serge’s family that, when they could afford to eat at all, they had but one fork to share among them. Often a meal consisted of just one bean and one wilted sprig of pissonlit per child. The fork would go ‘round the table ‘til all the pathetic provender was gone. To relieve the crushing pathos at these moments, Serge — the eldest — invented little twirls and flourishes whenever he passed the fork, amusing his siblings so richly that, now and then, one of them smiled.

As time passed, Serge became extraordinarily clever with his forkery, spinning the fourchette, bouncing it off the table, tossing it and catching it behind his back, making it dance on his fingers like a silvery elf. His brothers and sisters now smiled frequently, but Serge’s mother was frightened.

“Oh, Serge, don’t do that. The fork is so sharp,” she would say. “You could put your eye out.”

But Serge persevered, practicing daily, long into the clammy Belgian night. One day, daringly, he sneaked the family fork out of the house, to a street corner in downtown Flanderdam. There, he took the fork from his tattered waistcoat and began to perform, turning the humble utensil into a veritable blur of flashing reflections and cutlery choreography.

A few passersby managed to stifle their anti-Wallonian prejudice long enough to pause, and watch Serge’s dazzling prestidigitation. One Flemish observer even smiled. Most amazing to Serge was that one tossed a centime at him.

Soon, Serge was known throughout Flanderdam as “Forkboy.” He was able to take home, after eight or nine hours of street-corner fourchetterie, as much as seven precious centimes. Each child’s bean ration rose, some days, as high as four.

But then, tragedy struck. Attempting a perilous maneuver — which required a one-hand cartwheel while he tossed his fork high in the air, after which he would catch it in his teeth, head thrown back, in the classic croise derriere position — Serge miscalculated and put his eye out.

For months after, Serge — wearing a eye patch — languished at his father’s saloon, wallowing in self-pity. He was little consoled when the national health service provided him with a used glass eye, plucked from the corpse of a cyclopean gypsy palm-reader.

But one day, half-drunk and bored, Serge popped out his glass eye, drew the family fork from a pocket and began to juggle the two unlikely objects above the bar. It came to him naturally. Soon, a crowd of clochards and dipsos surrounded Serge, oohing, aahing and occasionally coughing stertorously. Suddenly, Serge realized that, by putting out his eye, he had come up with a new and better act.

He took it to the street. Within days, he was standing on the old corner, in the midst of a cheering throng, juggling his fork, his eye and any number of objects he was able to find in the vicinity — a paving stone, a wine bottle, a baguette, an umbrella, a bicycle, a lapdog.

Finally, one day, he had collected so many centimes in his hat that he was able to go to Flanderdam’s biggest box store, Flem-Mart, and buy — for each member of his family — a brand, shiny new stainless-steel fork of their very own.

From that moment, Serge knew that Flanderdam was too small for his wondrous forkery. He got on the bus and moved to Brussels, where he soon graduated from street busker to cabaret act. At first, he worked only in grubby bars and burlesque theaters. But one night, he was spotted by a scout from the Schmeling Bros. Bavarian Circus, the greatest show in all of Holland, Belgium, France and Germany.

Serge joined the circus and, in a few years, he was commanding the center ring, with his family (except for his consumptive mother, still dying back in Flanderdam) in the front row, all wearing crisp new overalls from Flem-Mart. After the show, Serge proudly introduced his father and his eight siblings to his fiancée, Valerie Voluptua, Europe’s most beautiful trapeze artist.

Valerie’s act, which required her — without a net — to somersault ten times in mid-air and then extend a single hand to be seized by her partner, lest she plunge to her death in the dirt below, was so captivating and graceful that she had become the toast of the continent. And yet, she loved humble Serge, the one-eyed, one-fork Walloon from the wrong side of the Scheldt.

Serge couldn’t believe his good fortune.

But it lasted only ‘til his wedding night.

They had the Bridal Suite, in Brussels’ finest hotel. The wondrous Valerie, still a virgin, lay atop the sheets, demurely unfastening her gold lamé trapeze outfit. Mad with love, Serge burst from the salle de bain, wearing nothing but a crimson eye patch and a heart-shaped tattoo inscribed with a “V.” With unerring skill, Serge juggled his glass eye and a champagne bottle in one hand while, with the other hand, he thrust his glistening fork playfully at Valerie’s last unopened button.

Valerie recoiled in horror.

“Eek!” quoth Valerie. “Sick, sick, sick! You forking pervert! Don’t touch me with that thing!” and she fled into the bathroom, locking the door.

Hours later, having failed to coax his newlywed darling out of hiding, Serge was at his wit’s end. He called hotel security. The house dick arrived and assessed the situation instantly. He’d seen it a hundred times before.

He laid a fatherly arm on Serge’s shoulder and offered him a smoke. “Kid, I hate to tell ya, but this marriage is done,” he said. “Stick a fork in it.”