While the Gods Were Sleeping (13 page)

The silence became still more oppressive. There was no salvo or cannon shot to be heard, there was only that glow of
lines of light, crooked needles above the landscape, and here and there the short-lived flash of what must be explosions, but without a boom or echo, and we looked at them as if at a natural phenomenon, as if down below on the plain the earth’s crust were tearing open and two pieces of land were grinding into each other or trying to separate.

At a certain moment almost the whole line was suddenly ablaze. Red and green flashes flared up from the coast to inland, new bullets drew tentacles of light through the night.

Someone behind us muttered, “Poor buggers,” realized there were ladies present and collected himself. “Poor chaps…” It seemed more intended to marshal what we knew with our intelligence against the fairy-tale beauty of those polyps of light, to remove us from the enchantment.

“
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu
,” repeated my mother.

We waited, he and I, while the others descended the steps. The sentry relaxed and, indifferent to the light show that was in full swing down below, lit up a cigarette, inhaled and blew out a cloud of smoke.

My mother was already on her way downstairs, too upset to keep an eye on me.

“What’s wrong with madame?” he asked.

“My brother’s at the front, monsieur. Somewhere there perhaps. The last thing we heard was that he had to go to Le Havre. We don’t get much post. My brother isn’t a letter-writer…”

He nodded. “Le Havre?”

“We’re Belgian, monsieur. And we can’t go home, to my father…”

“Sorry to hear that,” he said, as he closed the door behind us and the sentry bolted it on the other side.

I shrugged. “You get used to everything, monsieur.”

The rest of the party was stumbling downstairs some way below us. It was dark in the stairwell, after the moonlit night on the terrace.

He noticed that I was moving uncertainly down the steps. Occasionally our hands touched. I giggled and he giggled back, and I was glad it was dark as I felt foolish.

Somewhere on a landing he took me by the arm, I thought in order to guide me downstairs, but he pushed me unexpectedly against the wall. It went too fast for me to protest, or even to be surprised. I could feel the buttons of his uniform pushing against my ribcage through my overcoat and his own ribcage swelling and contracting to the rhythm of his breathing while he put his head next to mine and rubbed my cheek with his, and his breath blew warm in my ear.

I had put one hand on his back in astonishment, while he kept the other wedged against the wall, with his palm over mine. The only other man to whom I had been so physically close until then was my father, when I was a child, during the afternoons at the seaside, when he wanted to protect me from the waves or a biting wind, but my father had cherished me. His body had never hungered or sought for anything,

There was something childlike about him. I moved my hand from his back to the nape of his neck and stroked the back of his head.

He was trying not to kiss.

Just standing there.

Stroking my cheek with his.

I smelt his smell, which condensed on the wall behind us and in the hair on my neck.

Then he let go of me and went downstairs. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it sounded as if he had a frog in his throat.

I heard him stop on the landing. The rest of the party must have reached the ground floor by now as the stumbling faded away.

“
I’m sorry
,” he stammered again when I had caught up with him. “So sorry. I didn’t mean to, Miss, I mean madame… mademoiselle.”

I sought his hand in the dark. “It’s all right,” I said.

W
E HAD LEFT
the summer before on 28 June, early in the morning, in splendid weather, the beginning of a Sunday like a generous almsgiving. In accordance with the annual custom my mother, together with Emilie, had filled all kinds of cabin trunks and suitcases weeks in advance. A stream of luggage had gone on ahead and the day after our arrival a second stream would follow us, besides what we took with us on the day itself. My mother was not someone who went on trips, she moved as it were with atmosphere and all. Once the first stream of cases was delivered, the maids in my uncle’s house, who after the death of the matriarch were in charge of business matters, would unpack our clothes, put our sheets on the beds and store our table linen in the chests of drawers in the guest quarters, so that as soon as we ourselves arrived she could move into a world governed by her familiar natural laws.

She had looked breathtaking that morning. She had been in a good humour for weeks. In the months before our departure her menstruation pains had subsided from rancorous symphonies to string quartets full of rainy melancholy. It was no longer unknown territory to me. Just over a year previously I myself had started bleeding, very late according to her, but nevertheless in synch with budding nature and the mid-Lent fair. I still attribute it to the roundabouts. Their centrifugal forces unleashed my chemistry, opened the polonaise of the molecules. My mother
had reacted with a strange tenderness. She immediately put me to bed for three days. Perhaps she secretly hoped that I would join her monthly revolt, but did not turn into a monument of irritability, until later after the birth of my daughter.

I myself had thought the business at times stupid and at other times a melancholy premonition of death. I leaked periodically like a draughty sow. I felt mushy, overripe, a sack of rust-coloured blood which was torn somewhere. My body was no longer a body, it had become a carcass. I cried easily. I was suddenly a sentimental booby, and I was annoyed with myself.

Emilie came to my room every morning to fill the water jug. “From now on, mamzel,” she said the first time, “you’ll have to put up with that misery every four weeks.” She called it “ministrations”. I think it was a bastardized form of “menstruation”. She had spoken the word in a tone that betrayed complicity. We were now clearly sisters.

My mother too had come and sat two or three times a day on the edge of my bed, taken my book out of my hands to be able to stroke my cheeks unimpeded and look me in the eye with a beatific pity that I had never suspected in her and distrusted, since in my view it contained an implicit form of triumph, as if she were rubbing it in: “You see. You too. Look at you there, with all your castles in the air. Look at woman, shackled to her treacherous body.” But of course she had said something completely different: “The fresh air will do you good, my child.”

She had called the approaching holiday “our last summer”. My brother had left school at Easter. After the hot months he would start work in my father’s warehouses, to gain experience and, my parents hoped, to acquire a taste for bourgeois life before
he had to do his military service. As far as I was concerned, she felt that I had spent long enough under the skirts of the nuns to be able to behave like a well-brought-up young lady, knew sufficient foreign languages to say my piece everywhere, and though my French conjugations and sewing left something to be desired, my periods had made it clear that I had entered irreversibly the phase of life in which, as she put it with some aplomb, “a woman becomes a woman”.

She was crazy about circular reasoning, trains of thought that by way of conclusion wound up at their starting point. The tension there has always been between us was based on a fundamental difference in the way our souls were constructed. Ideas for my mother were a kind of lid, her medium was tautology, while the engine of my own mind is driven by the hydraulics of paradox, in which thought, how shall I say, can release its excess pressure—more or less as a steam machine is equipped with valves with which it can discharge to prevent it being destroyed by its own power. And when I think back to our departure, it would be nonsense to try to convince you or myself that, hidden behind the easy-going bustle of that glorious morning, I suspected the crash of the whole machinery that kept our world in existence, the fatal forces that were piling up, so that the whole system of communicating balances was imperceptibly at the point of exploding. I would be doing violence to the truth and above all be seeing the outbreak of the misery that was to hold us hostage for four years as a natural given: some physiological phenomenon or other, like a sneezing fit or a fart, unique to the organism of time or history, and it was not. It was a stupidity such as only our species can commit.

The town lay under a dome of azure, and in my memory smells of soap and caustic soda. The evening before our
joyeuse sortie
, Emilie had quickly washed the hall, so that when the front door opened the sunlight seemed to slip on the gleaming floor tiles. We had had breakfast and I had waited downstairs until my mother descended the staircase in full regalia, followed by Emilie lugging a set of bags, and bringing up the rear my brother, with a pile of hurriedly grabbed books in his arms, because just before we left he invariably had an attack of hunger for print and felt he should make use of the summer months to brush up his reading.

The coach was brought round to the front of the house. Tatante, my father’s sister, had walked through the front garden, the tails of her long, wide summer coat waving behind her, and in the hall had said hello to my mother, who had meanwhile crowned her own proliferation of ribbons and gloves with a formidable sunhat, even more imposing than her sister-in-law’s. The kisses with which they had welcomed each other hung in limbo somewhere under the broad brims of their hats. It reminded me of the greeting of the Holy Virgin by her cousin Elizabeth, as you can see in late-medieval or early-Renaissance paintings: two tall female figures bending towards each other, but at the same time keeping their heads some distance apart—so as not to crease their haloes.

My father had stood looking on, with that eternal half smile on his lips, and my brother had provided a little apotheosis by dropping all his books at the bottom of the stairs and unexpectedly letting loose a violent oath, which under other circumstances would have made my mother sway like a standing lamp that had been nudged by a brush handle, but she had
turned round, looked at the books on the floor, and then at my brother and giggled sarcastically: “A good start,
mon ami
. It’s sealed with God’s name!”

“Behave yourselves, children,” my father had exhorted us, while he had lifted up my own summer hat to give me a kiss on the forehead. “Don’t give Maman any grey hairs. She has more than enough already…”

“Brute…” my mother had growled.

He had bent down to avoid her hat and kissed her behind her ear.

“We’re off,” she had finally said. She had given her sister-in-law her arm and had gone downstairs with her to the front garden, and we, my brother and I, had followed at an appropriate distance: her train-bearers, her exotic dwarves.

I could say that I remember that morning so well because this farewell, no more dramatic or trivial than in all the summers since my earliest childhood, would happen to prove our farewell to the world as we had known or imagined it up to now, and that the subsequent events serve as the acid that etched the scene of our departure deep into the engraving plates of my memory—or perhaps even the events that were happening elsewhere at that very moment, under the same azure of Europe’s last summer: the young lad who slid the bullets into the magazine of his pistol, touched the grenade in his coat pocket and maybe felt his heart pounding in his chest.

The truth is that I have never been very good at goodbyes, a greatly underestimated art. When I was still just a tot I showed, on family visits, a tendency to hide when the time came to return home. I was not driven by curiosity to be able to spy or eavesdrop
on my relations to find out what they would say about us the moment we left the house. Nor did I hide because I liked those visits exceedingly. The houses of my relations, certainly on my father’s side, were invariably temples of boredom, or better: they contained so little mystery that boredom immediately lost its radioactivity and in a trice halved to dull dreariness.

Real boredom, you see, has something saturated about it—a crimson darkness, a full emptiness. It is the small valley of the shadow of death in our breast, through which we must wade to achieve resurrection. I have never read from any other reason than boredom, the limbo before paradise, and perhaps my urge as a child to consider myself impossible to find was connected with this. For I wanted not just to know, I wanted to see with my own eyes how things would look without me. I wanted to be able to view the world in the light of my absence, and I believe that I wept and stamped my feet so angrily when my parents finally pulled me out of my hiding place, because even then I realized the impossibility of that desire. And yet all my life I have gone on longing for that non-realizable
salto mortale
of the mind—that ineffable homesickness for an abode in my own absence.

I know what my mother would accuse me of now: “It always takes you hours to send someone on their way.” She said it often, when she asked for my homework or asked me to add something in my own hand to the letters she wrote to relations in France. “Do get to the point…”

My father on the threshold, under the sloping glass roof in the open doorway. Between the railings of the banisters around
the steps that lead to her cellar domain, half hidden behind the hydrangea: Emilie’s face. Before she withdraws into her quarters, she stands ready to wave as soon as the coach leaves. Above is the blue, the deep blue that sharply outlines roofs, treetops and chimneys; I still wonder how my father would have dubbed it if it had occurred to him to play one of our favourite games: assigning a name to the morning sky according to a jointly invented and extremely arbitrary classification, and again in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening too. We had already had skies of Saxon porcelain, and the dullness of crêpe de Chine, and buttermilk skies and zinc heavens covered in plaster. Perhaps that morning, after having peered out of the window for a while with his eyes theatrically half closed, he would have called it a
bleu européen
, and turned to me with raised eyebrows, as if consulting an eminent colleague.