While the Gods Were Sleeping (22 page)

I was reminded of the hidden pride of Madame Gaillac after one of those dark chaps had come into her liqueur shop one afternoon and with a resolute gesture had laid
twenty-five
francs—“twenty-five!” she repeated at every opportunity,
appropriate and especially inappropriate—on the counter under his rusty brown palm. The resulting confusion was only cleared up when the North African, with a gesture of the hand about which Madame Gaillac had for the sake of good taste to remain vague, indicated that he was interested not so much in a bottle of chartreuse as in Madame Gaillac herself, who, she said could “of course” not take up his offer—“What was he thinking, that sultan?”—but nevertheless found it very flattering that at her age her virtue was still worth a pretty penny.

The wood thinned out, and in the landscape that stretched out beyond it a stone cloud formation loomed up on the horizon, at first merging bluish in the sky above the rolling landscape, but more and more tangible the closer we came. A grotesque castle in the air seemed to have become so dense that it had plunged down to earth from the sky. Only because since childhood I had looked up at it almost every summer and had eaten ice cream in the shadow of the tower in the market square, did I recognize the contours of the age-old cloth hall. Iron-coloured and dark, the building no longer rose to the sky, but seemed to have begun a slow process of dripping downward. Window openings had expanded into holes, side towers and pointed arches had lost their sharpness. The erosion of dozens of centuries seemed to be concentrated in the sky clouding over above. This must be the capital of a new kingdom that was running wild over the old land, forcing its root system, its threads of mould between the joints of the walls, picking its way down to the foundations and blooming in devastation and, everywhere where it branched out over the old roads, spread its provinces and prefectures of decay.

The noise of the weapons, the salvoes, the shots could only euphemistically be called displacement of air. Walls of tangible sound clattered through the heavens. In the cloudy sky even more ruins seemed to pile up, and then crash down on the earth, set foot on the ground and coincide with the crenellated contours of the houses of the town. The deepest growl made the muscles of my abdomen quiver.

We passed the sentry post that controlled the access road. In the distance two other cars were heading for the suburbs. The sentry waved us through, probably assuming we were part of the column. My husband saluted. The sentry saluted back; it was more of a nonchalant wave. “One of ours. The French are worse. And the gendarmes in the hinterland. Corrupt as anything…”

“Aren’t we all?”

He looked at me sideways with a louche gleam in his eye. “Don’t tell me what you’re thinking of, Miss Demont… Not onions, I hope.”

The thunder subsided, the clouds drew great patches of shadow over the town, reducing the profile of the cloth hall to a black, burnt-out cinder which, however, flared up in deep bronze colours whenever the sun shone through the clouds. As we approached the silence seemed to lose its massive quality and to relax. Birds sang, wind whistled through the willow leaves that bordered the road on both sides. But when we reached the first suburbs and the narrow streets enclosed us, the purr of the engine found dozens of sounding boards in the emptiness behind the house fronts by which it was echoed.

There was no logic in the destruction, no system in the alternation of house fronts pounded totally into rubble and others that apart from the empty window frames seemed intact. With other houses the façade had been blown away but the interior had survived. Wherever the shadow of the clouds lifted, the glow of the afternoon sun flooded the surface of wall cupboards, beds and washbasins which had congealed snow-white on tables, licked at wallpaper, and brought a gleam to dusty bell jars, under which saints’ images balanced on a chimney piece as if on the edge of a ravine. The clouds seemed to be teasing us, chased their shadows ahead of us over the cobbles, cast the boredom of a summer afternoon over the town, although the smell of plaster, dry wood, dust, the irritating reek of desolation, strongly penetrated my nostrils.

A lorry drove ahead of us for a while, and four soldiers peered out from under the tarpaulin that covered the back and clapped their hands as soon as they caught sight of us. The air was filled with cries like, “Matey, havin’ a good time, are ya?” and they started to sing: “My name’s Johnny Hall, I’ve only got one ball…” The melody crumbled in a tide of rowdy laughter.

I rolled my eyes and looked away, at the houses sliding past, in the hope of suggesting the disapproval that they were probably hoping for.

“Don’t mind them, Helen. They’re lads…” We passed them and they whistled after us.

He pulled up in a street that farther up led into the market place, or what had once been the market place, two summers
before, in what was already in my memory a different world, still undamaged by the first labour pains that were to shudder through its surface and its lives, and from the pools and craters, from its trenches and lunar landscapes, belched forth this new world, which could move through time only in spasms and marked its episodes with explosions and collapses.

How often I have sighed, if not prayed: give us back our mealy-mouthed petit-bourgeois world and the porcelain jauntiness of Sunday tea parties and the honky-tonk of our cosy religiosity and our little hypocrisies and big injustices. Give us back the rites of the days of yore, though we know that they do not touch on any reality, as long as they protect us from a free fall into our infinite hunger.

The market was a market only in name. Only in front of the cloth hall, onto a corner of which the street issued, could something like a square be recognized, of course cleared for the passage of troops and materials past the burnt-out vaults of the cathedral and the heaps of rubble of the houses. It could have been the view of weathered rocky masses in a desert, in which for millennia the wind has hewn out volumes that purely accidentally look like vaults or the fronts of buildings. When the sun broke through the cloud cover and accentuated the devastation with blinding light, the view reminded me of prints of the Arctic ocean, in spring, when the ice fields begin to break up and in the waves surreal vessels, floating ruins, crusader castles and melting pyramids drift into each other.

He took one of the bags from the back seat of the car and hung it over his shoulder. He let a second one rest between his ankles on the cobbles while he waited for me to get out. He handed me
the strap of the second bag—“It isn’t that heavy,” he said—and I don’t think he said much more that day.

He seemed to be keeping a careful watch on me; he scarcely took his eyes off me for a moment but read my face meticulously, as if he had absorbed the sight of the destruction too often to have many thoughts or feelings about it and was now trying to evoke it again in himself via me.

When we reached the corner of the market there turned out to be another car parked on the other side of the expanse of bomb craters. The passengers were no more than black dots at the foot of the piles of rubble at which they pointed after they had got out. Their voices reached us, ethereal and shrill across the flat expanse of the square—British, going by the intonation, but too far away to be intelligible.

He pulled me by the arm, we retraced our steps and he led me into a narrow side alley, between the high walls of back gardens. The desolation descended upon me like a lead weight. At this hour—it must have been getting on for dinnertime but no church clock divided up the day—the alley should been full of the roasting smell of the ovens. The clatter of pans and crockery should have danced out onto the paving stones from the back kitchens. Our feet would have had to disturb children’s chalk drawings. Out of the windows bed sheets should have hung out to air in white tongues—not the threadbare locks of old over-curtains, faded by two years’ rain and change of season, which licked at the walls through the holes in the panes of the window frames.

Only our footsteps were audible, the creaking of the leather strap under the weight of his bag and the ticking of the negatives
in their case whenever the bag touched his hip to the rhythm of his gait.

A small gate giving onto the alleyway was ajar and he pushed it further open. Behind it lay the garden of a bourgeois house, of modest dimensions. Two narrow earth paths divided a small lawn into squares. In the sunlight that flared up and died away again an old espaliered pear tree extended its rheumatic branches against the wall under the offshoots of two lilacs. The last blooming bunches let their intoxicating perfume linger over the low outbuildings. A narrow work shed, with the handles of garden tools which had slipped lengthways obliquely along the cobweb-covered windows. Next to it an outside toilet, the door painted blue-green. Against the wall of the house a low lean-to and under it a side door that probably gave access to a pantry. In the house itself a small, bright kitchen on one side of the back door. The sun made the cream-coloured faiences on the wall glow soft yellow. Here and there a tile had been knocked out, but for the rest the room looked as good as undamaged, with the bowls and jugs and earthenware serving dishes still stacked in an orderly fashion on the two or three shelves of a butter-yellow cupboard, and on the small table opposite the sink two coffee mugs, a spoon, a cutting board, dusted with plaster that had come loose from the ceiling and lay grainy over the black floor tiles. There had been people here, to judge by the smudges and footprints in the layer of dust.

He pulled the strap of the bag over my shoulder. “C’mon, Sis, I’m starving…” We sat down on the bench under the window on the other side of the back door, the window of a dining room, with the table in the middle, against the wall a
low dresser with the doors open. The contents, napkins and tea towels, lay in disorder between the legs of chairs spread around the table.

I give him his bread. He took great bites out of it. I watched the way his jaw muscles worked as his teeth ground up the hunks. He was looking around him, over the garden walls, to the roofline of the adjoining houses, in which there were big holes everywhere. Chimneys had been smashed, roof tiles shattered in heaps in the gutters under the naked roof-beam. He seemed to be studying it intently.

“Looks different every time,” he said, between two mouthfuls. “Never a dull moment visiting bloody glorious Ypres…”

I asked him if he came here so often then, and the casualness of my question, as if he had taken me to his local café, sounded so absurd to me that I had to giggle immediately.

“Every Sunday afternoon after Mass, mademoiselle…” He swallowed, blew a sarcastic sigh out of his nose, “weather permitting…”, then looked sideways, shot me a grin and said, with exaggerated preciosity: “It does look rather unsettled this morning, doesn’t it, Miss Honeysuckle?”

I prodded him in the side and stuck my hand out for a piece of bread. He got a drinking bottle out of the bag, unscrewed it, put it to his mouth, drank big mouthfuls, while his Adam’s apple rose and fell behind the khaki collar of his shirt.

“Better make haste now.” He got up and brushed the crumbs out of his lap, then looked at the sky. The sun was half hidden by what was left of a church tower and the tall, slender candlesticks of a group of poplars next to it, some of them bare, others with a scanty covering of leaves. With each cloud that moved in front of the sun the glaring afternoon light changed
abruptly to grey. Shadows shifted across the back wall of the house and the bullet holes on the top floor.

He put the bags on the bench, opened the largest one and inspected the large wooden camera.

I went towards the back door.

He called after me not to go too far away. “This isn’t a safe place, Helen, really.”

Usually he avoided addressing me by my first name, keeping mostly to “Sis” or “Mademoiselle”, a teasing “Sweetheart”, and very occasionally “Darling”. I too often hesitated about addressing him as Matthew. I realized how much irony was necessary to make “Monsieur Heirbeir” sound less formal, and made eager use of my mother’s awkward pronunciation of English, or addressed him as she did, as “patriot” or “soldier”. Our names seemed too definitive, too perfect, almost too apodictic, not to say all too solemn, like an oath or a promise, unsuited to the playful and provisional tone that characterized our relationship in those days, as if we would have appropriated too much of each other. Certainly here, in the heart of a town in ruins, words like house, roof or room carried an unintentionally devastating sarcasm with them. So when he used my first name I knew he was really concerned. I also saw it in his eyes, when I turned round for a second, just before the devils returned to his eyes and he smiled, looking up as he slid a negative plate into the camera: “Besides, I want your portrait… Call it ‘Lost Girl from Flanders…’ What d’you say?”

The door did not give. Old newspapers, a calendar, loose sheets slid on their underside over the floor tiles. A classic
bourgeois house: tall hall with two front rooms leading into it, and the kitchen at the back, opposite the small dining room where the family probably ate their meals every day when there were no visitors.

On the left the stairs to the upper floors, under the stairs the cellar. On the landing where the stairs made a bend a tall, narrow window was open. There wouldn’t have been much point in closing it, since there were no panes in the window frames, just as with the top window above the front door. The blue glass lay in slivers on the floor of the hall and seemed to have been subsequently squashed flat under shoe soles—by looters and perhaps by the residents themselves, when they had left the house.

I tried to imagine them. The kind of people that my mother would probably have called “proper”, the word with which she usually described petits bourgeois who lived in houses like this: more or less replicas of more spacious gentlemen’s houses but smaller in scale. The man of the house probably didn’t work with his hands, but somewhere as an assistant or clerk, proper and affluent enough to pay a maid for half-days, who came at the crack of dawn to bank up the stove, made breakfast, visited the market, washed the floors and before she went home in the early afternoon left a couple of cold dishes on the basement shelf, for supper. Perhaps a gardener came every so often to trim the hedges, or the man of the house did it himself, on Sunday afternoon, by way of a hobby, while his wife and family laid the coffee table against the wall in the shade. In the evenings they would stroll on the old town walls. The mother and her daughters, if they were there, under parasols. The father and his sons with straw hats, as they walked chatting under the trees
in the gentle evening light, with ducks that swerved above the ramparts and landed among the water lilies.