While the Gods Were Sleeping (20 page)

She says, I feel hot. I say, it’s freezing outside, Maman, it’s never been so cold. She lets me pull the nightdress over her head after all; I hear her moaning in the folds: “Why don’t I have normal arguments with my daughter?” She pulls the material over her trunk herself, and straightens the ribbons. “About flowers, fashion, theatre. Instead of over…” She looks up again into the mirror, her eyes fill with tears again, her chin trembles, she scrabbles for a word, “…consonants!”

I burst out laughing. She sent me a look like a projectile, went to her bed and pulled the blankets off while leaning on the bed with one arm. I went over to her, bent over to tuck her in, but she gripped both my wrists and gazed directly into my eyes.

I have never heard anyone whisper so sweetly, manage to spew her gall so viciously in my face, well aimed, with the finesse of a cobra: “
T’as sacrifié ta prudence à ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir, n’est-ce pas, chérie?
”

I turned round, walked towards the door—I thought, she’s got a temperature, she too, she’s delirious.

She waited until I was almost outside before giving me the fatal blow, in the back. Deliberately in the mixture of French and Flemish she always used when mocking me, she snapped at me: “
Ne me dites pas des blaaskes, mamzel. Je le sens
.” These “blaaskes” or bubbles were my transparent fibs.

I
SAW HIM AGAIN
a year after the death of the child. One afternoon the door of the church porch swung open and he disturbed my reflections, in the darkness of the aisle to which I often retreated when my mother sent me downstairs, to post letters, run errands or to deliver eggs to the elderly—jobs that I did quickly in order to take some time for myself, and I liked whiling away those few moments of freedom in the church because it was cool and dark in summer, and quiet when there were no services.

Since the impact of the projectiles, workmen had provisionally closed the hole in the high choir with lengths of wood and dull-green tarpaulin and swept the rubble aside, against the wall of the aisle, perhaps to be able to use a sieve to recover plasterwork or other usable ornaments—for later, when everything was over and we woke up from the impermanence that had all of us in its grip.

Someone had put the saints that had been blown down by the blast and whose stone feet still rested on the plinths, at an angle against the wall, next to the improvised high altar in the transept. The first service that Abbé Foulard had held there had been for the child, five days after her death, on the last day of the summer—the wind turned that morning and all through the Mass made a loose corner of the tarpaulin flap languorously, like a lame green wing. As we sat round the coffin, the planks of which my mother counted, the first rain kept gushing over the floor whenever the wind lifted the tarpaulin.

He was carrying three bags on long straps over his shoulders, and under his arm a small wooden valise, and walked past me up the aisle to the high choir, attracted by the light that slid through the gaps in the roofing of tarpaulin and laths over the walls and fell in shafts onto the cleared rubble and the saints’ statues.

He stood there for a while, laden as he was, looked around, sought a suitable viewpoint for catching that light, then put down the bags on a couple of chairs, just before the high choir, kept an eye on the play of light, bent over one of the bags, opened the wooden valise, and only when he stood up again, with a folding camera in his hand, did he catch sight of me. I was sitting in the shadow. He did not recognize me to begin with, frowned, then smiled: “Mademoiselle Demont… What a pleasant surprise,” and came towards me with his hand outstretched.

After that first meeting and the little incident in the casino at night I wrote him no letters, made no enquires about him, who he was, whether anyone knew him, where he was. If something was to happen the opportunity would present itself. My mother called me hyper-romantic because of that attitude, and perhaps she is right. Love has always made me lame, fatalistic. If it does not have the character equally of fate and of a blessing, it leaves me cold—or rather, it is not love at all.

He took photos for people whom he called with mocking emphasis “my clients”. People associated with the papers across the Channel, who were always short of material, preferably obtained from other sources than the official war photographers. He said that they were crazy about ruins of churches and children—“Works miracles, it seems, a good ruin in the dailies.”

He had to do it secretly and also more or less anonymously; he had no official access but knew the way. He had connections, he said, at the press bureau where he was the errand boy for some big noise or other: “Thanks to Daddy. Friends in high places…” He seemed to regret it. “Not that he’s asked me anything. Wouldn’t want to see his little boy blown to smithereens, somewhere in the mud of Flanders or the…” in irritation his fingers drummed on the camera the rhythm in which he spat out the words, “…bloody fucking Dar-da-nelles…”

When I told him about Amélie, and said he should have come a year earlier, he gave a sarcastic guffaw. “No dead kiddies, Miss. No corpses. Such an inconvenience, to have people actually dying in war… unless of course if they manage to do so gracefully. Saw one of those a couple of weeks ago, near Ypres. Doesn’t happen that often. Such elegance, the fellow looked like bloody Michelangelo’s Adam the way he’d fallen. As naked too, I’m afraid. Another inconvenience. No nudity! If you happen to die in this war, Miss Demont…” He looked straight at me: “Please do keep your frock on…”

“I’ll try my best, monsieur.”

He took a few photos of the interior, the deserted choir with the hole, the temporary high altar in the transept, but he also wanted a couple of me.

“I wouldn’t want to find myself in your newspapers,” I protested, all too coquettishly.

He refused to be discouraged. “It’s for my personal collection…”

I asked him if he kept all his conquests in albums.

“Sure, piles of them.” He winked. “Have stopped counting altogether…”

He took two or three, with the small camera that he would later give me as a present. “You seem quite a pensive person,” he grinned as he pressed the shutter, came closer and made as if to shoot again. “A penny for your thoughts, as we say in England.”

“I was thinking, Mister Herbert, that if you were an onion, I’d like to peel you.”

He paused, waited till I was looking straight into the lens. “Well, I’m relieved you don’t see me as a fruitcake.” He took another photo. “Though if I were an onion, Miss Demont, I’d make you cry.”

We got up. I helped carry a couple of his bags and invited him for coffee. He offered me a ride in the car which he had parked in the church square. While half the village stood gaping he held the door open for me like a good chauffeur, loaded his things and took me home. My mother was glad to see him. She had the coffee table laid outside in the shade of the trees. As she poured I saw how she enjoyed being able to be the worldly-wise bourgeoise again for a moment.

“One advantage of the war,
mon cher monsieur
,” she chuckled as she offered him the dish of biscuits, “is that I’m no longer afraid of mice. What a triumph!”

My uncle coughed politely and retorted, stirring his cup, that for that reason alone he hoped fervently for a speedy peace. “If it continues for much longer, no elephant will be safe from my sister…”

We laughed. The aunts joined us. After our arrival they had withdrawn into what they called their “boudoir” to be able to
dust themselves more liberally than usual. It wasn’t every day, they said, that “
un vrai héros
” came to visit.

He actually blushed when they said this, and when I recall them now, dressed up and all, with the busy elegance of Chinese earthenware, they move me increasingly often. Whereas I used to make fun of the nest of ribbons and make-up and sentimental magazines that they spun around them, I experienced only much later the doggedness with which they preserved that frilly dream world, their own bastion—with as much assiduousness as a beaver its dam. And I believe also that they offered my uncle a charming kind of consolation: his two child women, about whom everyone speculated whether they took turns in his bed—not least my mother, who just hoped that the uncertainty surrounding that would last for a long time. I think that he saw them as pert exotic birds that from their chosen cage flew circuits through the house and sometimes moved him by landing on his finger in order to please him with their chatter. Now, after all that time, they fill me more and more deeply with melancholy. Sometimes I have to fight back my tears when I remember them as they cut the thick materials that my mother quickly ordered when war broke out, cooing and twittering. Why should the rituals with which they tried to arm themselves against the course of events be any more ridiculous than ours?

“Tell us, Colonel,” they cooed. “How long do you think it will last, the inconvenience?…”

“Impossible to say, mesdames,” he replied. “Everything is stuck, stuck fast. We stare at the military maps and think we have a full overview. But on the ground it is, well…” he shook his head and looked into his coffee.

“Chaos” was perhaps the word that he had wanted to use, or “hell”, or another term that he quickly swallowed, probably because he was thinking of my brother, and my mother’s concern.

“We’re definitely doing our best to console the
poilus
,” cried my aunt. “Isn’t that right, Yolande?”

“We write letters,” nodded Yolande enthusiastically. “We wait and we hope, and we write. That is woman’s patriotic duty. Those lads are crazy about us…” They nodded simultaneously. With their plucked and accentuated eyebrows their faces were like two masks.

My uncle stretched his fingers and studied his nails at length. “Another reason, monsieur, why peace must come soon. I hope those poor devils don’t conceive the plan of visiting their
marraines
… They’d have the shock of their lives.”

The aunts protested.

“I’ve posted your latest epistle, Yolande, child,” my uncle sighed. “A lot can be said of you, but you’re not exactly a voluptuous brunette.”

My mother raised her right eyebrow, her moral eyebrow, meaningfully, but said nothing. She also wrote. In a much more businesslike fashion than the aunts. Letters about the energy it required to keep hearth and home more or less ticking over. “Her soldiers” replied to her communications faithfully, if fairly briefly, and usually the correspondence was short-lived. Probably her epistles offered too few illusions, and I myself was not allowed to write to soldiers who were total strangers. My task was to keep family deeper in France informed of our day-to-day lives. Corresponding with lonely trench warriors struck my mother as too risky. “It starts with sweet words on
paper,” she once said archly, “and ends with lots of panting and exclamation marks on the sofa…”

“Peace,” sighed my uncle in resignation. “When the money’s gone or the people revolt. Or conversely when the people are gone and the money gets restless. A war on credit needs peace sooner or later…”

My husband nodded and mumbled, more to himself than to us: “Lives are cheap these days…”

After coffee we walked through the Lost Wood. My mother had told me to show him round a little. I led him along the winding paths through the tree trunks upward, to the edge of the treeline, from where you could look out eastwards over the landscape.

We did not say much, after the cooing of the aunts. We sometimes looked at each other from the side and smiled shyly when our glances crossed. Of course my mother had taken the opportunity to question him at table: what his father did—a doctor in a London suburb. Whether he had brothers and sisters—he was an only child. His mother?—died early, he grew up with an aunt in the north, because his stepmother didn’t like him very much. She was moved, I could see. He was now given some of the love she usually reserved for my brother.

I liked his silences. A lone wolf. Learnt to fend for himself from an early age. Busy surviving, in the lee, the shade, the twilight. When I got engaged to him, my father took me aside and asked me—the cliché blared round our ears—if I loved him.

“I love his tragic quality,” I replied.

My father asked if that was enough.

I kept the answer under consideration.

When we reached the top we stopped on the verge of grass under the stragglers of the tall trees, next to the field of barley that rolled down at our feet, and looked out over the countryside. Clouds hung almost motionless over the fields and wooded banks, the distant roofs. When there was an east wind we could sometimes hear the thunder of the distant front line at home, weaker than when it blew from the west, which it usually did. On clear days you could see weak plumes of smoke rising all the way on the horizon, and at night there were vague flashes of light, as if the same storm were always hanging over the earth. That afternoon it was peaceful and quiet. The wind sang in the stalks, listlessly stirring the ears.

He came and stood next to me and sought my hand.

I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Perfect setting for a kiss, monsieur?”

“Definitely…”

It wasn’t a kiss to wax lyrical about, more a short confirmation, almost businesslike, of the bond between us there had been at our first meeting. He let go of me afterwards and stood with his back to me, with his hands in his pockets looking out over the landscape.

“Looks like England,” I said. “But with a French accent…”

He turned round. “A bit like you then…” he smiled, over his shoulder.

H
E SHOWED ME
the fronts, later that summer. We had waited until my mother had gone with her two sisters-in-law to see relations near Paris for a few days, a trip that was quite difficult to get under way, and I approached my uncle with the excuse that “Monsieur Heirbeir” had invited me to the coast for two days because he had some leave.