Belgium is the destination Marijke de Wandaleer chooses when she agrees to leave Buenos Aires, and the country where her son Jan finds the political belonging he had sought in Europe. The move brings a divided family across the Atlantic: Marijke intends to join her brother in Flanders, while Jan imagines Germany, and his siblings resist the journey. Belgium thus enters the novel not simply as a place of refuge, but as a contested answer to what home should mean.

A family’s move to Europe

In 1936, after the death of her husband Klaus Schmitt, Marijke was grieving, financially secure enough to sell her share of the business, and surrounded in Buenos Aires by reminders of widowhood. Persuaded by Jan, she agreed to return to Europe, but not to Germany, where she had neither family nor friends. She chose Flanders, where her brother Geert lived. Jan invoked his father’s memory and accepted her decision, consoling himself that Antwerp would put him closer to their cousins in Hamburg than Buenos Aires had.

The choice did not unite the family in its hopes. Martin laughed at the prospect of moving to Belgium and remained attached to his life in Buenos Aires; eighteen-year-old Josefine accompanied her mother and brothers but spent the voyage shut in her cabin, listening to Carlos Gardel records and mourning both her destination and the singer’s death. Marijke, meanwhile, was losing the companionship of Jan, her principal comfort after Josefine’s withdrawal. The crossing carried the family together, but not toward a shared sense of belonging.

From arrival to political home

Jan’s attachment to Belgium developed quickly. In May 1936, only twenty days after he had begun living in Europe, the ultranationalist, pro-Nazi Flemish National Union won sixteen seats in the general election, while the more powerful Walloon Rex Party won twenty-one. Jan read the results as a promise of future glory and as a sign that he might belong. Antwerp, he concluded, was as suitable as anywhere for fighting for a Europe united under the Führer, and he abandoned his plan to move to Hamburg.

His eventual enlistment in the Flemish Legion made that allegiance concrete. When an officer explained that his language skills would be recorded and that commanders would decide how to use them, Jan pressed to know whether he would be sent to Russia, to the Leningrad front. The officer completed and stamped his form, retained the original, and handed Jan the copy confirming his enlistment under all his surnames. Jan saluted fascistically and thought of his father, wishing Klaus could have stood there with him. Belgium had become the ground on which Jan enacted a political identity as a European soldier.

Belonging, separation, and exile

For Jan, the move was also a way out of Buenos Aires and toward an imagined German and European destiny. Marijke’s choice of Flanders had been rooted in family ties, while Jan’s sense of home increasingly depended on the political cause he embraced. His phrase to his mother on returning home, that he was now a soldier of Europe, joined filial longing to ideological commitment: he wanted her pride as well as the posthumous approval he believed his father would have given.

The family’s separation continued after arrival. In 1939, Josefine fled, leaving a note in Spanish saying not to worry, that Martin would look after her, and that she could not live there. Jan was furious, but Marijke forbade him to involve the police; she preferred distance to the hatred of two of her children. Belgium therefore anchors both Jan’s chosen allegiance and the family fractures that allegiance cannot repair.

Borders as a recurring condition

Elsewhere in the novel, crossing borders is less a chosen search for political belonging than a response to danger. Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s return to Spain in 1946 took him through Gibraltar because the French border was closed and a clandestine mountain crossing risked injury that could compromise his mission. He entered under the cover of an American visiting his parents’ homeland, while the sight of La Línea stirred a sense of returning home that his passport could not disclose. Earlier, in Geneva, he had worked under the assumed name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, meeting foreign representatives and sending reports to Taplow.

This later geography throws Jan’s migration into relief. The move to Belgium begins as a family decision and becomes, for Jan, an embraced political destination; later journeys are constrained by closed frontiers, covert work, and identities that must conceal their bearers’ histories. In the novel’s wider pattern, a country can be both a place to settle and a position from which a new life—or another displacement—begins.