“I wanted to be green, I sold my car and started going to work by metro”. At the invitation of the president of the court, Orphée Vanden Bussche recounts what happened on the morning of March 22 when her husband dropped her off at the Mérode station: “Usually, in the car, we didn’t listen to the news, we listened to nursery rhymes for my child”. It was fine that morning, she remembers, “there were people in skirts”.
I didn’t get into the first one because everyone rushed there.
The time to get off the metro, take a ticket and buy a hot coffee, it is a question of choosing the car of the train in which to get on: “jI didn’t get into the first one because everyone was rushing there. I chose the second.” What happens next, she has few memories, except that she decides to stand for fear of spilling her hot coffee on someone. A phrase uttered by an elderly lady comes to mind: “there is a bomb that exploded in Zaventem”. She doesn’t pay attention to it, not feeling really concerned, although in the Petit Sablon district where the hairdressing salon she runs is located, there are a lot of soldiers. She still remembers a lady who got into Schuman’s car, “I let her sit down because I have to get off at the next stop”.
It’s the black hole, I don’t remember anything
From there, “it’s the black hole, I don’t remember anything, my head and my body preserve me from this moment”. When she wakes up, she doesn’t realize what’s happened to her, “I am sitting at the exit of the parking lot, rue de la loi. I saw it as a painting, as if I was not concerned. I heard cries, tears. Me, I was stunned. The movement of the people was in slow motion”. She will learn later that she was found on the ground in the car, that she was trampled on and that she was not very far from the suicide bomber, “I was under a metal plate that someone lifted. I then got up and would be out.”
