The prophecies of Hasselt

In the 1930s, thousands of men worked on the construction of the Kanne-Boom canal. The canal bridges were a marvel of steel and concrete, larger than anything Hasselt had ever seen. Day by day they grew taller into the sky, like giants slowly lifting themselves from the earth.

Lewie was a man from Hasselt who could not pass by. Day after day he stood along the construction site, staring at the workers, at the stones being laid, at the iron beams being welded. And day after day he asked the same endless question of everyone who passed: ’Who will be the first they carry over?’

’Who will be the first they carry over?’ — the question hung in the air like a curse. An old miller from Hasselt, who often saw Lewie there, warned him. ’Stop thinking about death, Lewie,’ he said. ’You should not think about that. You must not ask that. Dwelling on death — that attracts death to you.’

But Lewie could not stop. The question clung to his thoughts like rust to iron. ’Who will be the first?’ he whispered in his sleep at night. ’Who will be the first?’ he asked everyone in the marketplace. He could not stop, would not stop — it was like an obsession, a hunger for the answer.

Years passed. The bridge was finished. And on the day the bridge opened, what the miller had warned came to pass. Lewie — Lewie who had stood on that construction site every day, who had watched the bridge grow, who had asked a thousand times who would be the first to be carried over it — Lewie died. And on the day the canal bridge was opened, he was the first they carried over it. They carried him in a coffin.

Sooi Bottin was a carter from Hasselt, a strong man with hands like shovels and a smile that frightened no child. He transported stones and bricks for the whole region — for houses, for churches, for everything that needed to be built. Sooi was not afraid of work, not afraid of anything.

In those same years when the canal was being laid, Hasselt was also undertaking something else: a new cemetery. And who would transport the stones and bricks? Sooi Bottin, of course. For months he drove back and forth, his cart loaded with bricks, with mortar, with all the materials needed to build — a cemetery, with tomb walls, with chapels, with everything that belongs to a graveyard.

Sooi was a man with a crude sense of humor, and he loved to joke about his fate. Every time he unloaded his cart at the cemetery, he would call out laughing to anyone within earshot: ’I’m building my own cemetery! I’m hiring my own gravedigger!’

Everyone laughed. It was a funny idea — Sooi, strong and healthy, working at the place where he would one day rest. ’You’re digging your own grave, Sooi!’ his friends would call after him.

But the gods, or fate, sometimes laugh loudest. When the cemetery was completed, when the last stone was laid, when everything was ready for its first inhabitant — Sooi Bottin died. And the first person buried in Hasselt’s new cemetery was Sooi himself. His gravestone still stands there, first on the left side of the entrance. François Bottin, it reads. Sooi had passed by his fate — and in the very moment he heard it coming, it caught up with him.

The miller who told these stories always said the same thing: they were not curses, not magic, not ghosts. They were warnings, given by fate itself. People who dwell too much on their own death — people who ask about it, who seek it, who cling to it — they attract their own death to them. It is like laying a trail, and your death simply follows you.

’Lewie asked and asked and asked,’ the miller would say. ’And when the bridge was finished, his question finally had an answer. Death had listened.’

’Sooi made jokes about his own grave,’ the miller said. ’And fate laughed along — but he who laughs last, laughs best. Sooi built his own grave, and it was not meant as a jest. It was the truth.’

In Hasselt, many people still believe you should not speak of your own death. You must not ask who will go first. You must not make jokes about your grave. For in this town they know: sometimes fate listens to what you say, and more careful still — sometimes it gives you precisely what you ask for. The canal bridges of Hasselt still stand, and the cemetery still receives her dead. But no one asks anymore who will be first. Some questions, the miller said, you should not ask.