While the Gods Were Sleeping (25 page)

I mean that country road with the deep tyre tracks, an almost abstract pattern that moves in a wide arc to the horizon, where, not quite cut off by the framing, a narrow band of clouds is hanging dripping in five poplars.

I mean the hole from which the body of a missing soldier has been dug up. A corner of the tarpaulin on which the remains are placed. The sole of the boot that was left on the bottom. Farther on, higher up the slope of the hill, a few heaps of sand, the shaft of a spade. Next to each heap of sand is an identical tarpaulin.

I also mean the operating theatre in the hospital. The operating table is empty, the nurses must have just left the theatre to take the instruments to be sterilized. The surgeons have gone for lunch or a rest after what seems a quiet day. Everything is bathed in spotless white light which picks out all the more sharply the smudges of blood on the floor tiles under the operating tables,
three in number, and the dirty bandages in the shiny, enamelled buckets next to the tables, just before they were emptied.

In most of these photos you can’t see that it’s war, or that the war is just over, and yet they seem to suck all wars from all times into themselves. Whether we die in chain mail or in the flash of a bomb full of deadly rays, the vocabulary remains the same: emptiness and traces of blood and dirty bandages. Look at the arsehole. Who catches the shit? Those of whom there is no sign, just taken away, to the recuperation ward, the mortuary, the final grave after the anonymous hole in the ground? Those photos are waiting. Everything has been brought into a permanent state of readiness for our arrival, alive or dead or decimated to a hunk of meat without arms or legs. Every peace is an interval between two wars.

I can remember him taking this one, I was there. One of the early autumns a few years after the armistice, when we went back to my uncle’s house annually as a kind of pilgrimage; my husband, my brother, a handful of others, to spend a few days there. From there he and I sometimes made day trips, or went on two-day ones, always to the area of the battlefields.

That day, I remember, we were walking through a wooded section in the hills around Reims. It was the end of August, hot, late in the afternoon. We were walking some distance apart, and at a certain moment I had lost sight of him. I retraced my steps, but he was nowhere to be seen. Only when he called out my name—“By Jove,” he cried, “Helen, look at that!”—did I find him again, in a natural basin surrounded by trunks and undergrowth, where it smelt strongly of mould.

A wall of thoroughly weathered wood with a narrow doorway in it portioned off part of the basin. He stood looking inside and beckoned me as he disappeared into the cave. I followed him, but it took some time before my eyes got used to the darkness.

“
Incroyable
…” he muttered, and I heard him feeling the ceiling of the low cave with his hand.

Instead of earth or stone his fingers, to judge by the sound, met metal: the curve of a roof of corrugated iron that had been laid over the basin, then covered with a layer of earth and finally, autumn after autumn, buried under fallen leaves.

It smelt stuffy, smells I could not immediately place. My foot hit something that rolled over the ground—in the darkness I could only make out contours, unnaturally angular.

“Wait here,” he said. “Get my gear…” As if he was afraid that while he was away his discovery would vanish for ever into the earth.

We waited outside, nestled on a blanket on the edge of that little valley, and ate our sandwiches. He was waiting for the right light, the right moment. He had calculated that the sun, when it sank further, would shine through a gap in the treetops directly through the doorway inside, and that’s what happened. He went in and positioned himself with the camera against the inner wall of the wooden partition.

In the photo it really is as if he was able to trap the shafts of the evening sun while they secretly entered the underground space, furtively lit the four or five bunks against the side wall, above them the shelves with a few bottles and bandage tins, and the chair that seemed to have been hastily pushed away from a small table in the corner, and even a glimpse of the small
notebook open on top of it, the handwriting rendered illegible by seeping damp.

You would say it is a snapshot, but I saw the patience with which he waited until the light reached the walls and the vault of corrugated iron at exactly the right angle. He did not stage anything, did not pull the blankets straight so that it made the impression even more strongly that the bunks had just been made up, or arrange the pillows in such a way that the mould marks in the cotton would come out better, or put the basins or the kidney bowl with a clamp, a pair of scissors with a long bent beak in it, on that low wooden box. Everything is as we found it—apart from that one thing, a pebble he thought at first, a piece of stone in which a strip of calcite or another crystal reflected the sun’s rays too directly. He threw it to me, and I sat on the blanket waiting until he was finished. It was not much bigger than a spirit glass and there was earth caked round it. When I picked it off with my fingernails, I felt the coolness of metal, a sharp edge, albeit dented. A piece of tin, a cap, I suspected, but gradually an inscription was revealed beneath my fingers. It could only be read after I had rubbed it clean with my moistened handkerchief. It said: “Oleum infirmorum”.

Only in words can the earth tremble in reverse, through the static syllables. Only here can the joints and ligaments stir, bones return like restlessly sleeping children under a grass-green quilt. Here the springs of the earth can whine and grind, its mantle becomes a soft placenta-like mattress. It shivers till it has gooseflesh. It draws explosions together in one point and
spews out bullets and bombs. Here the house fronts can crawl out of the dust with wobbly knees, street after street, stuff door and window frames back in their gaping mouths like dentures, and have themselves measured up for hairdos of step gables and chimneys. Around their beams the fallen tiles flap in dense swarms to land on the cross laths and close up—I want everything at once.

And here I grip his fingers in mine, squeeze them and say: “Look. Look at us, Matthew Herbert!”

Without letting go of my hand, he turns round his own axis on the mattress, from his back onto his belly. I am standing against the side of the bed, opposite the tall mirror in the large wardrobe. “Look,” I repeat—and then the crown of his head brushes the side of my knee while he turns and pulls hard on my hand. His black hair scraping my pores gives way to his cheeks, his lips, the unexpectedly moist glow of his tongue. The skirt of my dress falls over his head, and his other hand glides up along the inside of my thigh, until his fingers encounter his own fluids, which make a chilly trace of tears down to the back of my knee.

And I say again: “Look!” and give him a teasing tap on the head. He giggles, pulls the material of my skirt round his face like a bonnet and surveys us in the mirror: I standing, he lying.

Behind us the half-open door. The wallpaper with the ethereal roses. The holy water vessel hanging askew. A palm branch. A row of clothes brushes on hooks under another, smaller mirror. Other people’s intimacy surrounding us.

“Look at us,” I say again. “I never want to forget this.”

“Better cover me arse then,” he giggles, taking his hand from between my thighs. And grabs behind his back for his trousers until the two white half-moons of his bottom disappear behind the khaki.

I stretch my fingers. He lays his fingers back in mine, turns my hand and strokes my nails with his thumb and now he stretches his neck to kiss my wrist, the collar of his unbuttoned shirt falls open and his shoulder is exposed.

He rolls back onto his back, stretches out his free hand and twists a lock of my hair round his finger.

“Look at us,” I repeat—the ribbon of my dress loose. My slip around my ankles. The tails of my tailored jacket creased. “
Look at us
.”

He tugs at my arm. His pupils look at me literally upside down, boyishly earnest. A hint of top teeth between his lips: “Helen?”

“What?”

“I have to pee.”

He must have found a po in one of the rooms. A minute or so later the sing-song of his water rang out in something that by the sound of it was made of metal. I heard him pull his trousers up and arrange his shirt before buttoning up again.

“All set and ready?” he beamed when he came back.

I had lain down on the bed again, and was on my back, staring at the ceiling, on which the cracks in the plaster showed a world map full of unknown continents.

He picked his belt up off the floor, put in on and sat down on the edge of the bed to put on his lace-up boots. The material of
his shirt was pulled firmly round his trunk, so that the bumps of his vertebrae were clearly defined.

I stretched out my arm to him and, as if that gesture contained a magic formula, the sunlight flared strongly behind the net curtains at the foot of the bed, and just above the window sill threw the skeleton of the bare roofs into relief against the clouds.

“We have to go now,” he muttered, without turning round. His fingers tied the laces. “Almost four o’clock… We have-to have-to-go…”

While I got ready, rubbed my thighs clean, put my slip back on, I could follow his tread across the floorboards of the other rooms. The sunlight leaked away again, abandoning the room to a sombre grey.

Outside there was the purr of an aircraft, a little later there was the sputter of artillery. The purring grew fainter, but on the other side of the house, the front, the sound of footsteps swelled, and men’s voices. On top of that a dull sighing, a nasal-sounding hum.

When I went to see what was going on, the English soldiers whom we had overtaken on the way here were walking past; they didn’t notice us. I could only see the top of their headgear, and the chairs with turned legs and velour seats that a few of them were lugging with them in stacks of two.

They were chatting as they walked along. In the middle of their informal procession, four men were pulling a dusty harmonium. Every few steps air puffed through the bellows, so that it sounded as if the instrument was urging them on with grumpy orders.

They disappeared from sight. Farther on, near the corner of the street, the lorry stood waiting for them with engine running. Their fading footsteps were drowned out by the cannon, which seemed to be beginning a new series of salvoes. The small panes in the window of the room gave a soft tinkle of lament, like girls ashamed of their own fear.

“We really must leave,” he repeated. As he walked past, he stroked my hip with his hand and I followed him.

We were driving again. “Everything all right, Guv’nor?” he grinned.

I had turned round in the car to see the contours of the town, merging with the air saturated with damp, disappearing behind the gently rolling hills.

I don’t know if I felt “all right”. I was certainly alive—my body suddenly clearly demarcated in the space around me, well-thumbed by his caresses; his lips in my neck, between my breasts, on my nipples, in my navel. His fingers between my thighs. The fuss with his trouser buttons. The smell of his hair. The pleasure—but wasn’t it more of a throbbing pain, a fist that clenched in my belly?—when his head sank between my legs and he had planted his knees, first the left then the right, on my shoulders. The glorious rawness or raw glory of another body. The rawness of his sex, which if I’m honest I’d never imagined so hard, so covered in blood vessels, and so inclined to turn blue, badly informed as I was by puerile paintings of statues full of
pudeur
. I had an attack of the giggles when I saw it dangling so close before my eyes, above the balls in their touching brown case under the cleft in his buttocks, where it was enclosed by rough black hair. When I pulled the skin over the head of his
penis everything had shrunk—I had a second fit of giggling. The third overcame me when his hips were nestling between my legs and I felt his sex lose its way in the fold of my thigh, until he squeezed a hand between us. “Just a minor inconvenience, happens all the time…” he had grinned, largely to hide his own embarrassment, I saw, before his eyes glazed over and the pain centred on my pelvis—the shivers and spasms. The smell of his seed, at once salty and sickly sweet. And his breath, rushing in my ear.

“You’re staring, love…”—a hint of freckles around his nose, and the deep, glowing, breathtaking black of his eyes.

I had turned round again, and was sitting looking at him as we drove on and the vault of treetops over the road drew a Morse code of light and shadow over the car.

I would have liked to know him as a schoolboy, and as a lad of, say, eighteen, trailing reluctantly to church after the aunt with whom he grew up, a hymn book under his arm. There in the north, where boredom, he said, submerged the days in the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon with showers.

I would have liked to see his room. The long, narrow window that divided the North Sea horizontally into two colours: grey and less grey. Have liked to know his first girlfriends, and also the more serious sweethearts, suitable for dull conversation in aunt’s veranda, the Mauds and Margarets about whom he gave little away—a woman wants everything. I wonder: do men mourn differently? Does the rat of grief gnaw a great hole in their insides too? Why do women double up when they mourn, and men seem to fall apart?

It was getting on for evening when he brought me back from the trenches, relieved that nothing serious had happened. I was tired, confused, filled with impressions. In my head the broad strips of colour and buzzing in no man’s land alternated with sudden, almost tactile impressions of his body. His taut midriff. The birthmark on his belly, just below the ribs. The texture of his nipples. His sex, which shrank after the ecstasy between his thighs—then the bright white of the wooden crosses in that landscape of poppies and mud pools. All those impressions seemed to be leaking out of my head, evaporating out of my eyes and mingling with the outside world.