I woke up at half past one in the morning, got up and went downstairs to the living room. I saw an orange star through the southwest window. Or was it a planet? Was it Mars? Yes, Mars attacks! It attacks my feelings.

I put on my jacket and went for a walk around Boitsfort, a Brussels neighbourhood to which I had recently moved. As soon as I closed the lemon yellow garden gate behind me, I saw a beautiful fox. She stepped silently, her tail casting a large shadow on the cobble stones in my street.

I walked around the famous tree nursery called the Pépinières de Boitsfort and slipped into a large communal garden, where I hoped to find enough darkness to observe the stars. I found out that the northwestern third of the sky was lost – the glow over Brussels mercilessly erases the stars. Fortunately, two-thirds to the southeast were still alive, nourished by the darkness of the Sonic Forest (as I like to call the Sonian Forest, or the Forêt de Soignes, which is easily the size of the whole of Brussels). Well, two-thirds of a living sky – take it or leave it.

I crossed a dimly lit street and disappeared into the darkness of one of the many narrow paths that interweave the entire neighbourhood. They run between private and communal gardens, sometimes expanding into unexpected, well-hidden orchards or meadows. I’m attracted to this maze – my plan is to explore and map every meter of it. And I hope it will take me a long time.

I reached a hill called the Trois Tilleuils, sneaked through a half-open rusty gate and stepped into a beautifully shabby athletic stadium, where my famous compatriot Emil Zátopek set a world record on ten thousand meters in the early summer of 1954. A fox was sitting in the stands.

Then I ran down the hill, until I arrived at the Boitsfort city hall, where my dear friend Karel, a poet and diplomat now lost somewhere in the Amazon, had married many years ago. I also went to a nearby house, in the strangely irregular windows of which I photographed cheeky wedding guests back then, and in which a certain Aude from Paris was so unforgettably descending the cherry red stairs.

After a while I set out along the Boulevard Sovereign, lined with several rows of massive plane trees. It was strange to perceive the absolute silence, the absence of any movement – during the day the boulevard is filled by an endless stream of cars, trams and cyclists. Now, in the middle of the night, there were only two moving objects – me and a young snail, which slid over the black asphalt and silver tracks, heading towards the forest. The traffic lights silently changed from red to green and back again, ignoring the absence of any audience.

When I got tired of the Sovereign, I turned back into the darkness and ascended to a somewhat awkward statue called The Souls – Birds (Les Âmes – Oiseaux). Those birds look more like fish, sitting on their long scaly fins, and their souls have the expression of the poor fellow in Munch’s Scream. Surrealism has always been thriving in Brussels, after all.

Not far from the birdfish, I came across two zebras curiously crossing each other. A curiosity not to be missed by any photographer.

On my way home, I made a detour to the narrow streets of Floréal, a garden city designed after the First World War as a modern social housing project. The oldest core of the project, which includes several hundreds of rather minimalist family houses in a unified style, is now protected cultural heritage. And it is as beautifully shabby as the Zátopek stadium is. In one house, a red-painted attic room shone into the night, with two huge red lamps hanging over the table. I didn’t see the writer – maybe she was already asleep under the table.

Before I got back to my street, I met my third fox. We watched each other for a moment, then each of us went our separate ways. Two happy guardians of the night.

Eventually, I found out that the best darkness for watching the stars was right behind my house, in the middle of a sakura orchard. Sakuras and stars. Per aspera ad astra.

Filip Kubík

Photo by the author