While the Gods Were Sleeping (27 page)

“And now,
mon cher Matthieu
?” I asked as light-heartedly as possible when we had finished, imitating the intonation of the matron, who had left her unassailable position, probably to have lunch herself.

He was playing with the tip of his fork on his plate—something that my mother would not have taken as a sign of a good upbringing—and then looked up. “It may be some time before we see each other again,” he said. “Got meself detached.” He put the fork down. Pulled a face as if his tongue had found something unpleasant between his teeth. “Guiding spoilt, obese Americans.
I’ve had it
… I can travel with a regiment, off to Belgium as a matter of fact…”

“When?”

“Soon…” He signalled that he wanted to order coffee. “I can move more freely, Helen. Down here, it’s rules, regulations, rules… Drives me mad it does… Besides”—he tapped with his fingers on the small hand camera that lay next to him on the table—“must make the best of Mummy’s allowance…”

He meant the legacy that his mother had left him at her death. “She married down. Know what that means, ‘down’? Beneath her class, not many steps or rungs, but obviously enough to make her anathema to her blood relations, while
on her husband’s side, well-to-do but modest middle class, she proved too precious in style to win much confidence. It wasn’t exactly a huge success, that marriage…”

So after her death his father, a gynaecologist, decided—“She died of excitement, as you can imagine”—that a new house plant was better grown in more familiar compost, and that his son, if he was not at boarding school, could not thrive better than with his mother’s family.

Hence your French, I thought as I listened to him. Hence of course also the obscenities with which he liked to lard his sentences, perhaps to test me. He spoke the swear words too emphatically. They did not trip off his tongue the way they did with the chaps from the slums—who found it as difficult in their way to mask their origin. They who belonged “down”. He mixed their patois with his words the way he stirred cream into his coffee: in small doses.

I tried not to let him notice that he had thrown me. “Perhaps you’ll bump into my brother,” I said, in an attempt at lightheartedness. “He’s with the engineers now, I think.”

“One never knows,” he nodded. “It’s a small world over there,
mais peut-être un peu surpeuplé
…”

I was silent.

He saw I was finding it difficult to hide my disappointment and put his hand on mine. “Helen, look at me… We’ll write. OK? Besides, it isn’t as if I’m leaving for New Zealand, is it?”

We didn’t say much when he took me home. I wanted to store every second inside me, every movement he made at the wheel, every sideways look, every sigh, each lock of hair, wanted to register every detail.

He pulled up in the little spinney, some distance from the gate to our yard.

“Give us a kiss…”

I could have swallowed his lips.

“See you soon.”

“Be careful.”

He nodded. Reversed the car. Waved.

I turned round. It was as if my body was connected by invisible threads to the departing car.

It was about four-thirty, that vague period of the day that hesitates between afternoon and evening. I had the feeling I had been away from home not for a day and a half but a year and a half—an impression that was strengthened when I entered the gate and a few paces away the maid crossed the yard, a basket of chicken feed in her arms. Though she noticed me, she scarcely interrupted her mechanical gait and nodded rather coolly. Something unintelligible crackled from her chest.

When I entered the inner courtyard, my uncle got up from the bench under the tree, where he had obviously been sitting waiting, and came up to me with his eyes rolling. My mother, it emerged, for fear of not getting home well before dark, had returned earlier. The argument that must have flared up when she did not find me seemed to be still smouldering in the garden.

“Of course it’s all my fault,” sighed my uncle. He looked sheepish and took my hands in his. “And I shall make
wholehearted
penance. But I also think that the journey to Canossa will be long for you too, and hard. And I think your abductor had better keep a low profile for a while.”

I
T WAS CLEVER
, the earth, said my brother in the rare moments when he disclosed anything about his time as a soldier. Clever and jealous. When you’re piled together with ten or so others in a hole in the ground and you feel the floor, behind the planks and props of the walls, coming to life with the impact and the ghastly noise, you know how thin existence is. You have the feeling that the earth has been watching you for days and weeks. That it has been estimating your height, envying you your torso, your arms, yours legs. That it has been spying on the way you walk, counting the moments when your concentration flags as you shuffle across the planks with forty kilos of equipment on your shoulders, knowing that the slightest slip can be fatal—it is silent, smoulders and waits. Nothing can make a man feel as fragile as its convulsions when it wakes from its sleep. You can feel its motions through your intestines. The blows reduce everything to shaking and you wonder whether dimensions like life and death have any point in that hole, where the posts and planks do their best to offer something like firmness, bones, a skeleton. You can’t do anything but wait until the hell outside abates or the ground encloses you and finally appropriates your forms. You lie and you tremble with the shocks. You’re a lump of half-digested flesh in the underbelly of the world, impelled by its own peristalsis. For all you know, you could already be dead, no more than a membrane of skin and hair between the formless matter outside and the yearning formlessness
within. You think: I’m just a shell standing in the way of the merger of mush with mush.

Now and then he puffed at the cigar that he always lit up over coffee. Every few minutes he brought it to his mouth, sucked in the smoke, kept it under his palate for a while and exhaled. Meanwhile he spoke, eventually more to himself than to me—a trance-like incantation. He could sometimes interrupt his dreamy monologue when he came back to reality. If you write down what I’m telling you, you’ll see, he grinned. You’ll want to dig your own foxhole in that massive, formless sea.

It’s so clever, the earth. Capable of summoning up its particles to form a mass, operas and symphonies of mud and collapses and landslides, but it imposes itself equally when you wipe your bum and you feel its grains scratching your arsehole. It grinds between your teeth when you eat your soggy bread. When everything is jolting and screaming, and you briefly stroke the face of the chap huddled up against you, on the narrow bunk, to feel life, the texture of his unshaven cheeks—even then its hunger doesn’t let go of you, because your fingers are dry with its mud. It has nestled in your tiniest folds. Garrisons, regiments, battalions are hidden in the wrinkles of your fingers and language too tastes of sand, because when you speak it comes away from your lips and works its way inside. We ate soil, we shat soil and we were soil, a bag of bones and skin filled with soil. It was only a question of time before we tore and emptied, and the earth would have its way.

And when your mate shifts position on the bunk next to you and momentarily digs you in the thigh while his feet search for a place next to yours, on the plank under the dirty, mud-saturated
blanket that you share with him, he might just as well be dead. As dead as the knee or shoulder, the arm or leg in the swill above the lean-to that protects the entrance to the foxhole and on which you hear the clods and the limbs dancing. You think: how much longer, when will we be dancing as lifelessly along with them, or are we already? If you call that horror, you don’t know what horror is. Horror is the earth in itself if you like, which out of the 100 men who slogged after you between the craters along the paths and the narrow planks, swallowed up thirty or forty en route without a cry or a sigh. It adapts the syntax of its hunger. Where necessary as fluidly as water. Elsewhere as tough as dough or thick porridge that never lets go of you. Some guys compared it to an octopus, a many-armed monster, but I’m not sure, I’m not sure—I had respect for it, a form of respect, the way an antelope grazes peacefully near a pride of sleeping lions: apparently unconcerned, in reality alert from snout to tail to the slightest movement that may reveal that the hunt is on. You don’t blame it, it’s hungry.

I looked at its new undulations and grooves when we crawled out of its hole after the night. At the geography it had fashioned for itself in the last few hours, and which the following night it was able to shake off in boredom. The stubble of the tree trunks. The body that during the most recent tempest it had hurled from its layers and placed on the gentle slope that was not there the previous day: on its belly, arms under the chest, one leg stretched, the other raised, in no way distinguishable from yourself when you crawled out of the trench and splashed through the mud on all fours. The earth that reduced us to creeping creatures, mud-jumpers, that cast us back in time and declared nature’s memory to be the playground of its fantasies,
grabbed our bones to hang its formless flesh on and delighted in sending us through the sediment of a beach at low tide like a troop of crabs, just before the deluge—wherever you put your hand, if at the whistle of an approaching howitzer shell you plunged your head in its waters, it burped in your face and exuded the stench of the undigested dead in its bowels. History wobbled and listed. A person should not crawl, my little gazelle; do you know enough to write it down now?

There aren’t words enough. It sucks words up as greedily as bodies. You can’t imagine a language that has not sunk into its folds like a shipwreck. All our words are magic formulas. We remain savages who after a storm shoot at the sky to punish the gods for their anger or dance in circles to beg for rain. The earth grinned and burped in my face; do you know enough now? That’s how far we’ve come, I thought. That’s what all that steel is for, and the cannon and the tanks, the iron Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the copper bombs—to rid the earth of the skin disease of life and the last human being. It helped to give it a name, call it an octopus, or clever and jealous. The coats of the rats that crawled over my legs at night and that I vainly tried to chase away had an unearthly softness—do you know enough now? I remember thinking what neat creatures rats were; how did they keep their fur so clean?

In sultry weather his scar played up. Not excruciating pain, he said, more an obstinate itch that bursts out, from my armpit across my chest and the side of my trunk to my right hip. I lie tossing and turning in my sleep, sticky with sweat. I turn from one side to the other, onto my belly, my back. Sooner or later I doze off, usually towards morning, but the pain keeps my sleep
light, it draws nerves through my dreams. And there is always a moment at which the pain joins up, a long line of itch that feels as cold as burning to the touch. Then I start scratching with both hands. I turn onto my back and kick off the sheets. Sweat is gushing out of my pores. The itch starts to concentrate in nodules on my chest, as if it is trying to tear something out of me, as if my skin is no longer anything more than a membrane. The harder I scratch, the more restlessly I toss and turn, the more intensely the itch burns in the scar. And sooner or later I feel my skin giving way under my hands. I am splitting open, as it were, with an immense feeling of relief, as the itch and the pain immediately start to subside. Perhaps it is because of the bedding that I have pulled loose, perhaps, the undersheet stuck to my back evokes a hallucination, but my skin seems like a shell which crumbles and gives way to the texture of thick material, leather, brass buttons, a belt, a clasp—the harder I toss and turn or scratch, the more I expose my old uniform.

Sometimes I wake in despair, bottomless despair, when the uniform is my kit from the trenches: the kepi, the long, thick coat and the leather pouches for ammunition round my waist, my drinking bottle and the blanket secured over my shoulder with a strap, and the small shovel for digging a foxhole in the stinking earth, whose smell takes hold of me again. On other nights it is my engineer’s uniform, as brand new as the day I was finally allowed to put it on, and was finally transferred, and I feel as much relief as then, as much euphoria, because I was finally allowed to escape the hell in the trenches, and the mud, I think, hasn’t got me—that nice dark uniform with the red braid, and the black collar shields with the helmet of Minerva on them in gold. I can’t describe the elation to you, the calm
but complete relief of being able to have a good night’s sleep again in a more or less respectable bed and have regular meals, farther away from the front. I didn’t know then that it’s patient, the earth, that it would wait until I was nearby again. Weird what our dreams do with us, what we do in our dreams, he reflected.

His soldier’s uniform always remained part of him, he was never really able to sweat it out of his system for good. By his tread alone I could invariably deduce which of the two dream figures was smouldering in his tissues. If he was in a light-hearted mood one caught a glimpse of the figure of the trainee officer in the engineers and he was imbued with relief at being able to live a more or less normal life, in a branch of the army where one was regularly allowed a freer rein and a person was more than a hunk of disciplined flesh, fodder for the mud that finally got him anyway. I could hear from his cheerful whistling when he came to call, his simple happiness that the world and fate were in an approachable mood. After the war his life had the character of a long holiday. Fortunately he was not so stupid that he thought a person should make an incision in a stone or leave his initials on a bark for the short time he has to plod around here. Nor like me, who could sometimes get so irritated with him because I was basically jealous of him. Of his light-heartedness, his superficiality, his hunger for young, elegant bodies, supple surfaces of people—but was he really so volatile and frivolous?

There were days when that other figure, the shadow side, the soldier in the mud-caked uniform of the infantry, had the upper hand in him, certainly when that scar played up. Then he walked slightly hunched and used his walking stick to lean on
laboriously at each step and not just for decoration. He made an emaciated impression and appeared to be putting almost all his weight on that walking stick: bent forward, shoulders hunched, head buried in them—his eyes seemed larger than usual.

It was not so much a cramped position, more a reflex, as if he wanted to wrap his whole body around that line of wild flesh in order to protect it from unexpected contacts, however insensitive it might be apart from those phantom pains. But even on his good days there could be moments, unguarded moments, even if they lasted only a fraction of a second, when his pupils seemed to emit no light, or darkness, rather an intense emptiness, as if the world and its impressions found no life at all behind the blue gates of his irises, and were unable to evoke any spark or impulse.

I recognize it here in the first portrait in which we are all together again, he, my father, my mother and I. For a long time it was in the front room on one of the side tables, perhaps to make it clear to our guests that we had survived everything more or less unscathed. My mother is wearing one of those ponderous dresses in dark bombazine that she favoured after the war. She already looks a lot flabbier and fuller than in my childhood: she is becoming a real matron. The flu of the last year of the war unleashed a hunger in her that she was actually never able to assuage again. Around her mouth there is a more or less permanent doggedness, her lips are compressed into a pen stroke of sobriety.

An utter resignation emanates from her body and infuses the tableau; there is something about us like stuffed animals under glass. Not only my brother, who has begun cultivating his downy
moustache into a proper handlebar, so that a white streak of mist curls between his lips and nostrils. Because of his blond hair, combed smooth, and that attempt at a moustache the contrast with his skin, pale and downy, still that of the baby lamb, is all the greater. Only his eyes, those steel-blue eyes, seem old. Older than those of my father and mother, older than mine, which with a gleam of triumph, or is it desperation, glow among the curls of my coiffure, which is cut more or less level with my jaw line.

Looking back, my euphoria seems close to bewilderment. We are perfect mirages, imbued with the frivolous belief that the world would never again rock on its foundations, while it was doing nothing but licking its wounds and gathering strength for the next round. I look like a slut. In the following years frocks became longer again, much to my mother’s relief. Europe lowered the skirt length, perhaps in the hope of turning the tide, but tripped over the hem.

It is as though he foresees it all in that photo, beyond every wishful fantasy, every hope—with his eyes full of that emptiness from where he kept descending into the world of everyday, more or less happy with life as it was, so long as it lasted.

After his death a box of his personal effects was delivered to me. There was almost nothing from those years. His wristwatch. His bracelet. Around his neck he must have worn a silver chain with a ring hanging from it, with a name engraved on the inside: A. Duval. It’s not impossible that someone somewhere wore a ring with my brother’s name on it on his finger or on his chest, who can say?

His handkerchiefs—why hadn’t the people in the boarding house given them to the rag-and-bone man together with his
clothes? Why were handkerchiefs more intimate than socks or a tie or underpants? A thin pile of postcards with an elastic band round them, addressed to him. Views of Trier, Chicago, Berlin. One of them struck me because the message on the reverse side went further than the expected fatuities about the weather and the best wishes. “Thank you for taking us on board your
silver-lined
cloud. Eagerly awaiting a second passage. Love, Paul.” Postmark Manchester, no surname.

The wallet: passport, banknotes. On a strip of crumpled paper at the bottom, probably long forgotten by himself: a telephone number with no name, somewhere in the depths of the countryside. When I ring a girl answers: “Veronique here…” In the background, with a questioning intonation, a woman’s voice: “Who is it?”