The Season of Migration (20 page)

After being in the mine, I felt a new fever to try to capture what I saw; nothing could touch the darkness, of course, but I quieted the impossibility of capturing the mine by trying to draw everything else. I took my pencil and paper with me nearly everywhere, sketching what I saw: women carrying coal home from the slag heap, goats eating carrots while tied to a post, a little boy chasing a chicken, the trees standing sentinel by the mine fence. I admit there were times that I missed my duties—a sermon or a Bible class or even a scheduled visit to a parishioner—because I was out sketching and lost track of time. The sketching quieted my mind and occupied my hands. Some nights I was up all night trying to perfect an image that I had begun during the day, and although I sometimes threw these drawings into the fire in disgust, there were still more of them that I kept, neatly stacked in a pile near where I slept. I was seeing so much that I felt I could not capture in words. I would start letters to you and tear them up in frustration, all my words seemed so pedestrian, so inadequate, and so I would think instead of what drawings I would send you: Alard in his cap and jacket, Madame Denis cooking a stew. But the drawings frustrated me no less than the torn-up letters, for I couldn't do them right, either.

I dreamed of pictures—I did then and I still do now—like the ones I used to see all day in the galleries in The Hague and London and Paris. Those galleries were so much the same, paintings crawling across the walls and ceilings, hanging from every spare inch of visible space, paintings covered in brown paper and leaning on one another in the back storage room, prints and drawings and sketches piled in boxes and drawers, organized by artist and subject, with brown cards dividing them. And though I came to feel suffocated in those galleries, selling the same cheap prints day after day to people who wanted the least expensive and least inspired images to hang on their walls, pretending that their choices were good when behind me was a Maris or a Mauve overlooked on the wall, smiling through my teeth when they looked at a print I loved and called it “sentimental,” though I came to hate my days in the galleries, I see those rooms before me now. There are no pictures in the Borinage, and I have been starved for them as if they are food. All those beautiful pictures, I see them in my mind, all those gilded frames, squares of life in color and fine line hanging on the wall.

I was thinking today of Millet's picture
The Evening Angelus
, the one we spoke about back when I was living in London. I remember when I first saw a print of it—one of the Germans I stayed with before I moved to the Loyers' brought a copy of it to a café where we were all having lunch. He laid it right down on the table in front of me, and I nearly lost my breath. That was “it,” as Mauve says; that was poetry, that was beauty. A woman and a man bent gently over a bassinet in a field, the sun setting softly behind them, lighting their vigil in peaceful hues. I had admired Millet already, but that might have been the first time that I understood him, or truly felt his power. It was like I used to feel as a child, looking at the Weissenbruch print Pa kept over the mantel; I would be a boy in that landscape rather than a boy in our house. And it was like that, too, with that Millet print—suddenly I was standing on that field, the sun setting before me, and I could hear the murmurs of the child in that bassinet, the soothing coos of its mother standing over it. That was it; that is it.

Everything belongs to the world of pictures. Everything we see.

December 27

Dear Theo,

It snowed here last night; the world is white again. I am reminded of what this place looked like a year ago, when I first arrived, and remembering my awe that a landscape could look like this, all white and black, so beautiful and so full of stark contrast. It is as if the very land here expresses the state of life.

Not too long after I went down in the mine and then moved out of the Denis house, Angeline's father, Charles, was injured in a firedamp explosion. He was carried home from the mine by the black cart pulled by the white horse, a sight ubiquitous in the village, a sight of dread and fear. When the miners' wives heard the cart coming, they approached it wailing and weak-kneed, carrying babies and with toddlers clinging to their skirts. They called out to the cart as it came down the lanes, “Who is it? Who is it?” They turned from where they were gathered at the water pumps or ran from the factory store and clustered around the cart, elbowing and pushing and peering inside to see who it was that was being carried home.

I didn't know it was Angeline's father until I went to visit the house. It was the third explosion in as many days; the miners were on edge and frightened. I heard about the accident and saw the horse and cart returning from the mine; I ran to the group of remaining women who stood in the lane, sharing in their relief that the injured was not one of their own. When I reached them, I had to stop and catch my breath, placing my hands on my knees. One of the women leaned over and asked if I was all right. She put her hand on my back and then pulled it away, exclaiming over how thin I was. “Pastor Vincent!” she exclaimed as I stood up, and shook her head at me, making a tsking sign with her mouth. “Look at you! Do you think you are a miner? Why do you starve yourself? Why do you not wash your face?”

I looked at her blankly. I did not know how to answer her; there was no time for questions like that. How could I give adequate words in the face of the constant arrival and departure of that white horse? I had lost track of what I looked like. Surely a man's appearance was the least important fact of all?

Inside the Dubois house, I found Charles lying naked on his bed, facedown; the back of him from his waist up was charred black and swollen, ridges of skin snaking up his shoulders and the back of his neck, slipping under what was left of his hair, a handful of wisps at the base of his skull. He must have taken the explosion entirely from the back, for his face against the pillow was intact, only the very edges of it disfigured.

His women surrounded him, his wife and two daughters, both of them still wearing their clothes from the mine, covered in soot, though their faces were clean. They did not look up as I came in, and I did not see that one of them was Angeline. There was a washtub near the bed with the habitual film of dirt floating at the surface. The women were gently lowering compresses soaked in oil onto the remains of the man's skin; in the dim light of the lamp near the bed I could see his eyes scrunch tightly closed as the cloths touched him. The pain must have been unbearable. The women touched him gently, and his wife and one of his daughters wept silently. At the base of the bed stood a boy of about fifteen, who seemed paralyzed. He looked on at the women working on his father as if he were watching from a great distance.

I stood by the bed for a minute or two before any of them looked up. The room was filled with love and concern, every inch of space taken up with tenderness; when I breathed in, the care filled my lungs and crawled under my fingernails. I stood in awe. There is no limit to how people can love one another.

One of the women looked up from the bed, and then I saw that it was Angeline. For a moment our eyes met in surprise. Recovering, Angeline said, “Pastor Vincent,” and then, quietly, “Mama, Monsieur Vincent is here.”

Her mother turned to me with tear-stained cheeks. “Oh, Monsieur Vincent,” she said, “thank you for coming.” She held out her hand, which was slick with the oil from the rags, and I took it in both of mine. “Madame Dubois,” I said, “God bless you. Your husband is a brave man, and he will come through this trial.”

I didn't know if I believed it, Theo, but I knew it was what she had to hear.

She shook her head. “This family has already been through so much, Monsieur Vincent.” She looked at Angeline, who kept her eyes on the bed, and for a moment I thought I felt the presence of another man in the room, the fiancé who had died in the mine. Then Madame Dubois looked at her son, still standing at the foot of the bed. “That mine just keeps taking and taking; when will it give back to us?”

Angeline's father lay still on the bed. I imagined I could hear the hissing and popping of his skin, as if it were a piece of meat frying in a skillet. How could I say to these people that the Lord works in mysterious ways? How could I tell them that this was God's will, their husband and father lying helpless on that mattress with his skin charred and sizzling? I thought of Father, tending to his parishioners all those years ago, telling those suffering people that it was God's will. I used to get so angry at him when I was a boy, listening to him say those things, and there I was, frantically trying to say the same thing.

I remembered the Reverend Laurillard, whom I had seen in Amsterdam the year before—such an impressive, capable preacher, who always seemed to know just what to say to address his congregation. I tried to conjure him, to think of how he might respond to Madame Dubois, but it was no simple thing. “Madame Dubois,” I said, “the Christian life has its dark side, and it is mainly men's work. This world is incomprehensible. Is there anything that happens that we can understand? We must be as God made us, sorrowful yet ever rejoicing. In the next world…” I stopped. She was looking at me, Theo, looking me straight in the eye, her husband lying behind her. I could not say it. For a long moment I stood there with my mouth open, struggling, and then I gave up. “I don't know, Madame Dubois,” was all I could eventually manage. I shook my head and looked away from her. “I don't know.”

*   *   *

Later that night there was a knock on the door of my hut. I had never had a visitor; I opened the door with surprise, expecting Father perhaps, or you, I hoped, and then was even more surprised when I saw that it was Angeline. “Hello,” she said shyly. She could barely meet my eyes. “I'm sorry to bother you. I hope it's all right.”

“Of course!” I said. “I was just reading. Come in, please.”

We sat on the floor by the hearth. I had only one chair, and a rickety old table that I had taken out of one of the abandoned miners' cabins in the village; I offered her the chair, but she said she preferred the floor. Together we watched the bird in his cage; I had taken to calling him Cricket, for he reminded me in a way I cannot explain of summer evenings in Zundert, the crickets singing and the birds chirping their last songs for the night. He watched us, in turn, quietly, curious.

I had to remind myself that Angeline was only seventeen. The Borinage ages people early, and I could see it in Angeline, who had been through more than many. Women at twenty-five in the Borinage have already spent years in the mine and then birthed five or six children. They are used up and spent, hollow and sagging, and there is no second birth for them. But sitting in front of the fire in my little hovel, I could see that Angeline was just a girl. Her skin was perfect and radiant, her features unlined and fresh, but nonetheless her face carried such pain. It is always difficult to see someone so young struggling to bear such weight.

“I just didn't know who to talk to,” she said after a time. “I needed to get out of that house, but I didn't want to be alone.”

“I understand,” I said. “You're always welcome.”

We sat for quite a long time in silence. The fire crackled and hissed, and I thought of her father's skin in the dark hut, his burns lit up in patches of shadow.

“He's so quiet,” she said about the bird.

“I know,” I said. “Paul brought him back for me from the mine. I guess he's not used to living aboveground. Isn't that so strange for a bird? He has let out a few chirps since I got him; I'm hoping to learn what he likes. This is Angeline,” I said to the bird. “Say hello! Hello!” Cricket was quiet, but he was listening.

Angeline stood to inspect the bird in his cage, standing before it quietly for some moments. “See the feathers on the bottom of the cage?” she said without turning around. “This bird is molting.”

“Really?” I stood up and joined her at the cage.

“Yes,” she said. “That is probably why it is quiet. When birds are molting, they often don't sing. He might start to sing in a few months, when the molting period is over. Unless,” she added, “this bird is female. Female canaries often don't sing much at all.”

“Oh!” We looked in together at Cricket, who stood on his one leg, looking back at us calmly. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.

“My father bred canaries for a while when I was a child. We used to raise them until they were old enough to go down in the mines. I used to help him take care of them, clean out their cages and things like that. My father loves birds.” She stopped, as if thinking about her father was dragging her elsewhere, somewhere she didn't want to go. She turned and sat down again before the hearth and was quiet. I joined her on the floor and waited for her to speak again.

“Monsieur Vincent,” Angeline said after a while, “will you tell me about other places?”

I was confused at first; what kind of places did she mean? Was I to speak as the pastor and tell her of Heaven, promise her a future life beyond this one of suffering, or ought I speak to her as a mere man? As I had with her mother, I thought carefully about how to answer her. I tried, Theo, I tried to answer the way I thought Father might want me to. I was quiet for a time, and then began: “Perhaps when we long for other places, we are in fact longing to reach the Lord, for there is a house of the Father in which there are ‘many mansions,' and ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are the pure in heart,' who long to reach them.”

She looked at me then with patience but shook her head. “I don't mean heavenly places,” she said, “just anywhere, just someplace other than this. You've been to other places, I assume, to Brussels, to Paris? I've never been away from here. What are those other places like? What is it like where you are from?”