While the Gods Were Sleeping (17 page)

The helmets lie in rows on the slope of a dyke; I don’t even know if they are Belgian helmets or German. I think that we are near Diksmuide, the place from where the salvoes boomed through the coastal plain the day I met my husband, under iron angels’ wings and the clattering and my hysterical laughter. The fronts were right next to each other, divided only by the river, at most about thirty metres. I point out the helmets. They remind me of turtles that have crawled ashore to dig a hole in that earth that you can’t really call formless, rather disgustingly pregnant with every conceivable form, and lay their eggs—as if, as if I definitely say, the earth, monstrous placenta, is kneading new life forms, unimaginable hybrid creatures from the mud and the bodies it has sucked in, to populate its bare, obscenely bare surface. Perhaps he can photograph them, because I still believe that you can’t suggest anything better in pictures than in a picture from which the main thing is missing—but what is the main thing? He has to photograph the war, but how can you capture the nervation in an upheaval that not only travels through the ground, but through millions who have been left without sons, fathers, brothers, fiancés and husbands?

Years later, years and years later, in the time when my husband and I were the only ones to return each summer, we are looking out over one of the meadows on the slopes of the observation mounds near the border. The earth has healed, is green again,
planted with young trees, cattle are grazing again, but a local farmer says that the earth is still full. “If all who are lying were to stand up, it would move, the ground,” he says, “like a bedspread on a bed full of playing children.”

During the annual trips that I take after my husband’s death, to that same house, long since sold and standing empty, I dig for something like regret or pity deep down in myself. But all I find in my cavities is a vague kind of resentment, an ore that cannot be transformed into another mineral, innocent sadness, melancholy if you will, which I can use, and make my child pay for my inability. With an emphasis she cannot escape from, I ask her again and again if she will take me there. Since her father’s death I can no longer bring myself to drive.

We seldom speak while we are en route. She holds the steering wheel in her hands, stiffly upright, the kind of driver that can never relax, and I sit next to her, map on my lap, although we both know we’re going to get lost. It might be the familiar ritual that colours intimate friendships, constantly supposedly not knowing the way and then the other person says: I recognize that junction, that chapel before those two lime trees, we must go left here according to me. But we remain tight-lipped and I never look at the map.

As soon as we approach the border area I rely on the silhouette of the hills. At their feet the roads dawdle, fork and become increasingly narrow, capillaries in the landscape, as if to smuggle us unseen to the other side. No cloud of dust betrays our route.

Sometimes a guffaw escapes me, equally dismayed and sarcastic, and I see that my child is too stubborn to ask what there is to laugh about. I can see it from the desperate grip of
her hands on the steering wheel. I can feel it by the brusqueness with which she accelerates or decelerates or changes gear, and I think: here we are then, a mother and her daughter, the only fruit of my loins that I have ever pushed out of my pelvis, while the grinding, millstone silence of fathers and sons crushes us to dust—two women side by side, two pictograms of resentment.

The map on my lap is no more than a fig leaf, the cloth in which we break our bitter bread. I want to get lost and my daughter knows it. She brakes too abruptly and takes the bends too fast, to make me sick, but I don’t turn a hair. Every relationship composes its own soundtrack. If the drumming of hail is ours, so be it.

I wait and say nothing because I know that she’ll get fed up with it sooner or later, and will park the car somewhere in the greenery, get out, put her transistor on the bonnet, spread the blanket on the grass, unload the picnic hamper and position herself with a book in her folding chair, as if she is actually enjoying the excursion. I will sit down on the blanket, take a generous helping of cold chicken and, to spice up her horror a little more, prattle about the soil on which her strapped heels are reluctantly resting: my beloved land, dredged up from sea water and crumbling away, as my father always told us, keeps sinking back into the waves, and is pushed up again, like a laundry maid dips the linen into the suds, and pulls it out again, wrings it out and submerges it again, scores, hundreds of times in the terrifying time that doesn’t remember our own stories even as an itch—and then I think, again and again: everything is one big cemetery. What do you think, my child, is the world incredibly ancient or on the contrary very young? What do you think of
yourself when you see those smudges of chalky soil through the topsoil, there and there and there? Of a cadaver like mine, shrinking skin, gradually bared bones? Or is the world finally, finally getting its first teeth again, milk teeth, piercing through smooth gums? Tell me, what do you think? Fold open the map with which you like everyone else designate, invoke, deform or combat the obtuse bedrock of existence. And I still don’t know why I take out my bitterness on her, and where that sour sadness comes from, or why I am so bitter in a time of peace and was so peaceful when I saw the war passing, in the blazing summer, between the wine-red brick houses, the hedges and willows, so close and far away.

A
NOTHER OBSCENE DEATH
was that of Amélie Bonnard, struck down as if from nowhere, little Amélie, the youngest child of Marie and Alberic Bonnard, always in her winter coat, like that sun-drenched early evening at the end of August when she ceased to exist—perhaps she kept that coat on all the time because they were not very well off at home, or perhaps she just liked that item of clothing, despite the thick woollen material and huge great buttons, much too warm for a summer’s day, and she liked strolling round in it coquettishly, with those precious dainty steps, which always struck me when I saw her going to the baker’s or to school, as if she had no muscles, but her skin hid a mechanism of springs—perhaps she had put her coat on when the girls who lived nearby came to ask if she could come out to play, in the meadow behind the church, the old cemetery near the brook, in the lee of the thorn hedge, because she felt like a pretty, pert little madam. You know what girls are like, irresistibly attracted to braids and ribbons and pins and chains and their mother’s secret box of rouge, which on the sly they smear, as a still unpractised womanhood, too lavishly on their cheeks.

She made herself up clumsily and girlishly that afternoon, little Amélie Bonnard. Since her father works on the railway and her Maman does odd jobs at the butcher’s and the
boulangerie
, where she rinses the remains of dough out of kettles or cleans the chopping block, there is nobody to keep an eye
on Amélie—how would you be yourself if you are home at a stolen hour and the wall clock strikes boredom and the arms of the copper candelabra above the table in the dining room serve as a trapeze for the acrobatics of the equally bored flies? Who would be able to control themselves, who wouldn’t display Maman’s treasures on that table, under the bored flies, flick open the hand mirror and open the box of rouge, pure gold dust in your eyes, incense and myrrh, and smear the powder generously, all too generously over your face, until you look like a porcelain doll and you think you’re ravishing?

And when the girls from the area and some other mites from the village, teenagers with thick knees and socks round their ankles, come and tap on the window, giggling: “Are you coming, Amélie, to play hide-and-seek round the church and drop the handkerchief by the brook?”, who wouldn’t be tempted to put on Maman’s best earrings, to be able to trip madame-like after the bigger girls and feel the luxurious weight of those huge great sapphires, you imagine, which pull your ear lobes down to your shoulders at every step you take? She must have felt regal and rich and quite a girl, Amélie Bonnard, and perhaps she didn’t notice anything when she ran after her friends across the grass and suppressed the urge to catch them up quickly because she definitely didn’t want to lose her mother’s earrings as she hopped over the tussocks—perhaps she was so absorbed that she didn’t even feel pain when the piece of shrapnel hit her in the neck and the girls on the other side of the field dispersed in panic.

My mother and I were on our way to the village, “down”, as we were wont to say, because the village centre was on the plain,
at the foot of the slope in which the house where my mother was born lay hidden, relatively safe, naturally protected by the slope which behind the house continued upward to the Lost Wood, as my brother and I called the section of woodland that stretched from behind the house to the top of the hill. We had taken the narrow path that descended from the outermost orchard to a side street of the market square, for since almost all our horses had been requisitioned we had to rely mainly on our own two feet for getting about. It is strange to experience something for four years that would later be called a world war, while the war for us reduced the world to a village and the farm where we were staying.

My mother was curt that afternoon. She felt I should also make myself useful in some way in times like these and to her taste I was doing so with too little enthusiasm. A few weeks before she had entrusted to me, under her supervision, the care of the chickens in the
basse-cour
: cleaning out their runs, giving them fresh water, feeding them, collecting the eggs and counting the chicks. I told her that I thought chickens were stupid creatures, almost as stupid as turkeys. She retorted that chickens were not reared for conversation: “You’ve far too many posh sentiments, dear child,” she had concluded, in a tone that suggested good nature but had been audibly marinated in vitriol for several days. She was wearing a straw hat and held it on her head with one hand as she ticked me off. The hedge on either side of the narrow, uneven path sometimes came up to our ears and the twigs threatened to pull the hat off her crown. I myself wasn’t wearing any headgear. Summer had passed its climax; blackberries were ripening in the hedge. It was the time of the
spiders, and they were already hanging like treacherous stars in their silk necklaces, rocking back and forth on the branches in a lazy breeze.

After a while we had fallen silent. My mother’s irritation had ebbed away. When we were on holiday her angry turns were generally more fleeting than during the rest of the year, and in all those years that we were separated from my father, her periods never assumed the dimensions they did when we were at home, as if her whole being at that time was imbued with the deep concentration which also seized her the afternoon that Amélie Bonnard died, while we descended along the path and she watched where she put her feet, so as not to stumble and to avoid her skirt getting caught in the hedge.

Below us the village lay glowing in the afternoon. The roofs reflected the sunlight, which was already beginning to take on an evening hue, and just outside the built-up area the clouds cast patches of shadow on the meadows and the ruminating cattle, which themselves seemed scattered like rusty brown patches in the grassland under the azure. Beyond the village, in the west, above the coastline which on some days I could see even without a telescope, above the invisible sea, the sky was deeper in colour—a blue like a guttural sound.

I can understand why my daughter, later, during the next war, on that Sunday morning when we are standing together at the window in the drawing room below, waiting for lunch, and are looking out, to where spring on heat is blowing an abstract painting of chestnut blossom down the street—I understand why she says: “I thought it would rain any day…” As if war is
just as much a meteorological phenomenon and the heavens supply our tragedies with fitting decors—but it is a deathly still afternoon at the end of the summer of 1915. In the hedge alongside the path the first crickets are starting to chirp, among the lowest twigs behind the nettles and the grass sounds the call of the shrew, ready to hunt beetles or worms.

First we had heard whistling and we both looked up, and stretched above the top of the hedge, but saw nothing. Then a bang followed, and another: short, hard, dry. Instinctively we dived for cover behind the hedge, and when we looked up again there rose from beyond the roofs of the houses round the church at the edge of the village two fountains of rubble and smoke, I can’t describe them any differently, two claws that for a few seconds climbed above the roof line and then subsided.

As the impact reverberated there was other noise: fragments landing on roofs, breaking glass, barking dogs, voices calling to each other, not in panic, more excited. My mother and I hurried down, attracted by the commotion and without stopping to think if we might be running a risk. We reached the first back gardens, where the path forced its way between two houses, to the square around the
mairie
—and I remember that I suddenly found it all so ridiculous, Madame Ducarne’s vegetables in their straight beds behind the hedge, the last runner beans and the young winter leeks and the bolted radishes with their flowers, an armada of butterflies sailing around them, next to Madame Ducarne’s ever-open back door; on the lid of the rainwater drain under the window of her kitchen the wooden bucket and the eternal hoe.

Between the houses: the boiling square, women walking past with their aprons, stained from their daily activities, still on. Men point to something in the sky—the place where the impact blew away a chimney and smashed it on the cobbles below, as it turns out when my mother and I arrive breathless in the square, just in time to see the girls. The oldest are carrying the youngest, the youngest are crying, the oldest are putting a brave face on it and calling out: “Amélie. Amélie Bonnard fell and she’s lying there…There!” Arms are outstretched, fingers point in the direction of the church, a few side streets farther on, in the square with the lime trees. The women walk in that direction, my mother and I in the rear. The girls follow, calm the fear of the little ones, and dry their tears.