The Season of Migration (5 page)

“I was just having my bath,” Decrucq said. “Would you mind if I finish it up before we talk? If I wait too long the water will be cold, and there's no sense heating up a whole other tub just for my bottom half.”

There was a half barrel near the stove that was filled with water. “Monsieur Vincent, I hope I will not offend?” Decrucq gestured to the barrel. “Of course not,” I replied. I was surprised and refreshed by Decrucq's boldness. All flesh is insignificant, after all, and all of us equal in God's eyes; naked or clothed we stand the same. Nonetheless, I thought Uncle Jan would squirm in such a moment, and the thought almost made me smile.

Hannah Decrucq sat with us at the table while Charles stripped and squatted over the tub. The wind was picking up outside, and the sacking between the wooden planks of the hut strained and flapped. It was quite pleasant inside, the room warm and faintly lit, the children asleep in the corner, the sound of the water sloshing in the tub as Decrucq plunged his hands in with the soap. I felt myself relax, and a kind of peace came over me. I always loved being in the miners' homes—during the Bible meetings that I held weekly, or when I went to visit the sick or those in need of good words. In the dim light from where we sat, it almost looked like Decrucq still had on his pants, so strong was the contrast between his washed top half and his unwashed lower. “He will bathe in front of anyone,” Hannah said with a smile and a shake of her head.

“Normally my Hannah does this part for me,” Decrucq said, smiling, bending over his legs, and scrubbing vigorously. “She got spared the job tonight because we have company.”

“Well, I think everyone's glad for that,” said Paul, laughing.

Hannah brought us cups of steaming coffee, and by the time she sat back down with us Decrucq was done washing. He dried himself vigorously, scrubbing his body almost as hard with the towel as he had with the soap. He went to the back of the room and returned in a pair of dry trousers, carrying a candle, which he set on the table between us. He had a pronounced limp, his right leg dragging behind him, as if it were lazier, somehow, than the rest of him; when he sat down, by the light of the candle, I noticed a patch on the side of his head where the hair was stripped away and a rough scar protruded like a mountain range.

“Well, Monsieur Vincent, if you wish to learn about the Borinage, you've come to the right place,” he declared. “Perhaps Paul has told you, but I am the man that the mines cannot kill.”

I looked at Paul, who smiled and shrugged. “I thought it better that he hear it straight from you,” he said to Decrucq.

“Ah,” said Decrucq, “well, it's true. Long after all these other mining men are dead, I'll still be here. I'll die when I'm old and tired, from something simple, like a cold.”

We were all silent.

“I saw you admiring my head, this here?” Decrucq angled his head toward me and pointed at the scar. In the flickering candlelight it looked savage and cracking, bulbous and yet somehow delicate, as if it were being eaten by insects from the inside. “I got this one when the pit cage dropped. We were going down one night—it was the night shift—thirty of us in the cage, and after a meter or two something just snapped and we went down. Thirty-one meters we fell. Everyone dead except me.” He gestured to Paul. “Fontaine doesn't like to hear that story.”

Paul shook his head, his face pained. “That was a horrible day,” he said.

“Anyway, this here?” he gestured to the lump bulging from the skin on his side. “Firedamp explosion. Threw me against a coal car. Three men dead. Broke three ribs. Never had 'em set right after that. They're okay, though”—he patted his side lovingly—“don't give me too much trouble. My leg, though, that's another thing.” He held his thigh, gripping it tightly, massaging it. “Crushed it when the cell I was in collapsed around me a couple years back. Trapped for five days, could barely breathe. Two men dead. No one could believe it when they finally dug me out, that I was still alive. Right, Hannie?”

She shook her head at him and sipped her coffee. Clearly she didn't like him to tell these stories, though he derived such pleasure from them that he probably told them to whoever would listen.

“Anyway, never set this one right, either, and it complains at me every day. Won't keep me from going down, though. The company can't keep me out, no matter how hard they try!”

I glanced at Paul.

“Oh, don't worry, Monsieur Vincent, Paul has heard all of this many times. He works for the company, yes, but he knows how I feel, and he will not say so but he does not disagree.” He smiled at Paul, who raised his eyebrows but said nothing. “It has reached the point now where I am sure they are
trying
to kill me. They give me the worst cells, the most dangerous parts of the mine belong to me. They don't like me because I speak out against them, but also because they can't understand how I refuse to die like everyone else.”

My eyes must have been wide. Decrucq said, “I'm sorry, Monsieur Vincent, but if you are going to live here you need to know the truth. This is why you have come, after all, I am sure of it. It is because the people here are treated not as men but as animals and you are to bring us some peace.”

It was exactly what I had hoped for, exactly what I had said to my teacher Mendes so often in Amsterdam! Long lessons with Mendes, the sun setting on our open books and pages, my frustration high and rising, he trying to get me to recite another Latin phrase, another and another, and me protesting, “But Mendes, why does one need to know these things just to bring peace?” To bring peace; yes, this was why I had come. My heart soared, but I responded with my most preacherly response. “I hope so,” I said, “but if there is peace, I am sure it won't be because of me, but because of God.”

Yes, I cringe at the statement now, just as you probably just did if you read it. Peace? PEACE? Did I really think I could bring anyone peace? Oh, Theo, it pains me to tell this story with honesty. I am trying simply to describe things as they were, but it is so much harder than it should be. Why is it so hard just to present things as they were, as they are?

Decrucq looked at me with a blank expression, as if he wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. He was probably thinking the same thing: Peace? “Yes,” he said, “well. The point is, you want to know how things work here and I'm not going to tell you lies. Life is hard here, Monsieur Vincent, men and women work like slaves, our children go down into the mines at eight years old, most of us don't live past forty, there is typhoid and consumption and lung trouble from the age of fifteen, and at the end of the day's work there is barely enough money for food. We eat bread and cheese and coffee as if there were no other food on earth. We only ever eat meat because we keep rabbits in our huts and the company can't touch them!” He stopped and lowered his voice, presumably remembering his sleeping children. “A man can work in the mines his whole life and never see a raise,” he said. “He is trapped underground for five days with no food or water and two dead bodies and then he is expected to go back to work like nothing happened, or else his family starves. Ask Fontaine if you think I exaggerate; do I speak the truth, Paul?”

“You do,” said Paul quietly. “I wish it were not so.”

“But why can't the company grant a raise?” I asked, feeling ignorant and foolish. “Don't the workers strike for more money or better conditions?”

“Oh, yes,” said Decrucq. “Many, many, many times, but there is never any change.”

At this, Hannah rose from the table and excused herself. I wondered briefly if it had been my question that annoyed her, but then I chastised myself for my vanity. “Hannie doesn't like all this talk,” Decrucq said. “She has heard it all a million times and despairs of it ever doing any good.”

Hannah went to the back of the room and sat down on the bed across from her children. Her back was hunched and she stared into the space in front of her.

Paul spoke. “Decrucq doesn't like me to say so, but I have to explain just a little of the other side of all of this. Many of the Belgian mines cost far more to operate than other mines, for here the coal is deeper and harder to reach. The coal is sold, however, at the same price from here as from any other place. This is why the workers are paid so little, and why there is so little change. The mine is on the verge of bankruptcy at all times.”

“But still the owners live in fancy estates and have cooks prepare them delicacies for dinner! I have seen it with my own eyes, Fontaine; you can't deny that it is so!”

Paul shook his head. “I do not deny it. It is complicated. But they are not getting all that money from exploiting us, that's all I'm saying.”

“I will believe it when one of them comes down here and spends a day in my shoes,” Decrucq said. “Just once I'd like to see one of those fat owners in a mining cage.”

Theo, I felt I was getting a sense, in that room, of how I was needed. While the men spoke of the company and its workers, I heard the story of suffering, and I wanted to help.

In the back of the room, Hannah lay down on the bed and let out a loud sigh, presumably aimed at the three of us, or perhaps just at her husband. She moved onto her side and pulled her knees to her chest. It seemed to me a gesture of defeat by a broken woman.

 

1880

May 12, 8:00 p.m.

He does not have a map, and now he realizes too late that he should have asked the farmer who took him in where he was. He's in France, that much he knows, but in which direction should he be going? He thinks that he should be able to ask someone where his brother lives, and have them point the way. He resolves to speak to the next person he sees on the road, accepting that he might walk for miles before he sees a single soul.

His stomach is rumbling again; he ducks behind a barn to relieve himself. In a pasture just beyond him there are two horses, one white and one black, their tails swishing casually as they nose at the grass. The white one stands close to the other, his muzzle nearly touching the dark one's flank. He looks as if he needs the dark one, somehow. The dark one takes a step, and soon after the white one follows. He puts his head to the grass, takes a bite, and then raises it up and seems to sniff at the dark one, making sure he's still there. There is a curious milkiness to the white one's eyes.

Standing, Vincent takes a few steps toward the horses, moving slowly so as not to startle them. The dark one snorts and shakes his head, stamping his hooves once, twice; he does not want Vincent to approach. Vincent holds up his hands in surrender and stops. The white horse raises its head, its nose angled to the sky. Its eyes are blank and vacant, save a vague quality of fear. There is no question: It cannot see.

He stands for a few more minutes, watching them. The dark horse, when he sees Vincent is no longer approaching, quiets again and slowly moves away into the pasture, the white one following close behind. Vincent sees them as if on a canvas, the white one's eyes made with dabs of white paint.

He used to feel that way about his brother, he thinks. He used to want to protect him, to give him sight, to lead him through every pasture and wood. But Theo no longer needs his eyes, and so to whom shall he give them? He wonders about the letters he is carrying in his knapsack; he should pull them out and look at them to make sure they were not ruined by the rain, but he cannot bring himself to do so. What if they are destroyed? All the letters he has written to Theo since his visit nine months ago, the whole story of his time in the Borinage, carried on his back. What would he do if he reached Theo's door and had nothing to give to him, no account of himself aside from his own stammering? He does not want to think of it, not now.

On the way back to the road, Vincent passes by the barn and glances at the cottage nearby: window shutters open, blue curtain blowing gently out of one window. From inside the house comes the sound of a child laughing. He walks on, thinking of the Denis house, Alard running inside with rosy cheeks and a drooping begonia flower in his hand; Alard helping his father bake, his face and clothes strewn with white powder, sprinkling flour on large pans and lifting loaves off wooden trays straight from the oven.

He thinks of his own father, of the trips he used to take with him to visit his parishioners in their homes, peasant cottages spread all over the Zundert countryside. The house where Vincent was born was not one of the thatched country cottages, but sat in the center of town, near the church where his father preached. It was in those cottages, though, like the one he just passed, that he always felt most at home. He felt a comfort in the peasant houses that he did not feel in his own, and he always had to resist the urge to curl right up on their sanded floors in front of the hearth until his father's next return.

In the peasant cottages, the children were barefoot, and as he and his father crossed the first threshold Vincent would remove his shoes and socks. Outside in the yards, he stood with the peasant boys and girls by the chicken coops, watching the hens cluck over their eggs—a sea of moving brown feathers, a din of squawks, and in the nests a few round delicate peach ovals. The peasant boys showed him where the chickens were beheaded—a stain of red across a patch of sandy earth, a row of bodies hanging upside down on hooks, below them little buckets full of blood. In one yard, a chicken with no head chased him, running wildly after him; Vincent ran and then dropped to his knees in terror, the thing running wildly past him and then dropping to the mud. The peasant boys weren't his friends, not really—he stood and observed their games, and always he had to follow his father away from them when he called—but still he felt a kinship with them.

When he and his father ducked into the parishioners' cottages together, Vincent watched the men rise from their looms to greet his father; he was a good man, and they were glad to see him. Shepherds crossed their fields to shake his hand and share a moment with him, to ask his counsel; flocks of sheep surrounded them as the men talked. Vincent loved those moments, the sky holding the sun, his father tending to his flock as the sheep nudged quietly and not impatiently at the grass. The sheep trotted away from him when Vincent reached to touch them, their matted hair flinching and contracting in spasms if he managed to brush his fingertips along their necks.