Amberes is both a place of political belonging and a point of departure. For Jan Schmitt, it becomes a home in Europe under the authority of the Führer; for his mother Marijke, it is the city from which she flees back to Buenos Aires after recognizing the danger in her son’s devotion. The city’s later appearances connect this family rupture to the novel’s wider histories of clandestine movement and exile.

A political home for Jan

In May 1936, only twenty days after arriving in Europe, Jan saw the electoral success of two new ultranationalist, pro-Nazi parties as a promise of future glory. The Flemish National Union won sixteen seats, while the more powerful Walloon branch, the Rexist Party, won twenty-one. Their results gave Jan the sign he had been waiting for: Amberes could make him feel at home. He soon abandoned his plan to move to Hamburg, convinced that the city was as suitable as any other for the struggle for a united Europe under the Führer.

That commitment culminates in his enlistment. On 20 September 1941, an officer in Amberes welcomes Jan and processes his recruitment. Once the form is signed and stamped, Jan receives his copy and is declared a soldier of the Flemish Legion, with all his surnames. He stands to attention, gives the fascist salute, and thinks of his father, Klaus, whom he imagines would have been delighted to share the moment. Returning home, he embraces Marijke and asks her to be proud of him too.

Marijke’s departure

Marijke does not share her son’s pride. Since Jan’s sister Josefine abandoned her in Amberes, Jan has been her comfort and only companion. But his enlistment changes the meaning of that closeness: she returns his embrace and kisses without answering, afraid for his fate and more deeply frightened by what she sees in his eyes. The city that had become Jan’s political home now feels to her like the place where she has lost both her children.

Her regret is sharpened by memory of Buenos Aires, where she was born and raised, married, and had been happy. The decision to leave Amberes is swift and practical: she buys a first-class ticket on the first transatlantic ship sailing from the city toward the Río de la Plata, and never returns. Amberes is therefore not simply the setting of a family separation; it is the point from which Marijke reverses her migration, choosing distance from the hatred she fears between her children.

A city in the novel’s geography of flight

The novel returns to Amberes in other histories of movement across Europe. In the summer of 1939, Manuel Arroyo lives in Geneva in exile, far from the earlier life that had made him popular in London and without Meg Williams, whom he misses in the city where they had once been happy. His later return to Spain comes by way of Gibraltar on 10 September 1946: France’s closed border makes the less conspicuous route unavailable, and crossing the mountains with a clandestine guide could imperil his mission. These journeys place Amberes within a wider landscape in which borders, political defeat, and assumed identities determine where characters can live and how they can move.

The city’s significance reaches beyond wartime Europe. After the Argentine dictatorship begins its terror on 24 March 1976, Spanish Republican exiles who had built new lives across the ocean face another forced exile, returning to Spain as foreigners and empty-handed. Against that later history, Marijke’s departure from Amberes stands as an earlier, personal return across the same Atlantic divide: movement homeward does not undo what has been lost, and a city can become the place from which a family’s estrangement begins.