While the Gods Were Sleeping (34 page)

I hear my mother’s dictates echoing through the void. “For goodness’ sake, cut some Gordian knots, and put a few full stops here and there. A sentence isn’t a sausage. It always takes hours for you to get a story off the ground. If a chicken doesn’t lay, in the pot it goes. We can’t hang about hanging about.” How long do I want to tremble before the last word?

In the late summer before peace she fell ill, the first of many, and one of the lucky ones who survived, but her long sickbed heralded a winter in which in the mornings the tenants of the surrounding farms carried the stiffened corpses of their dead children up the garden path to the gate, where the cart would pick them up because there wasn’t enough wood to make coffins, or time for a funeral service. I thought of Amélie Bonnard in her box of hastily planed planks. At least half the teenagers and giggling girls who a couple of summers before had lured her to the meadow next to the church, that afternoon when
she lost her life, now lay in at most a sewn-up sheet around her in the stony subsoil.

My brother, who had returned a few months earlier, still stiff and unsteady, fell ill shortly after my mother, and he also just made it. The aunts got it, too weak with the coughing and the fever to clothe themselves in theatrical nightdresses, as they would doubtless have done otherwise. My uncle and I walked bewildered through the house that was in a delirium around us, coughing up its lungs. The maids criss-crossed the corridors with basins and cold compresses, then the maids also fell ill, one by one, and the youngest died. Only Madeleine was unaffected, her basalt organism obviously indigestible for germs. My uncle said: “What play are we in? What is this, dear niece, a tragedy or a hard-hitting farce? I can understand that those little creatures don’t fancy me or the housekeeper, they like young flesh. Who can blame them, but you, my child…”

He was worried. For most of the day we withdrew to his library on the top floor, to the bored ticking of the small coal stove, as if he hoped I was high enough there to escape the clutches of the creatures or the miasmas, or whatever it was roaming through the rooms downstairs. And when the rumours about an armistice became more and more persistent, I said: “As soon as I can, I’m going back home.”

He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t protest. “I’ll fight it out with your mother,” he said. “But how do you propose getting there?”

“I have a chauffeur,” I said.

For weeks the world had been bathing in the melancholy of a long Indian summer, the umpteenth copper-coloured day was easing its way out of the dew as we were already on our way,
he and I, in one of the cars of his major. Ahead of us the fallen leaves of the elms or planes above our heads stuck in absent-minded yellow footprints to the stones of the road surface. The rising sun gilded the fog; here and there in the hop fields the diagonal stakes combed the timid light.

“Everything all right, love?” he asked—it had become our motto.

“I’m fine, monsieur.”

I nestled deep in the thick army greatcoat he had given me, listened to the purring of the engine, sniffed the smell of the fuel that welled up from the insides of the car: chemical, sharp, yet pleasant. Around us: lushness and undulations, and above all silence now that the guns had stopped firing for good. It seemed to be hanging over the earth in streamers, that silence.

I watched how he used the wheel, changed gear, accelerated, and slowed down, adjusting the tempo with the gear shift or the pedal. If every journey is a story, every route a saga, he was a good story-teller. I could have watched him for hours, but the journey was short, so short. In my head our town and my uncle’s house had grown farther and farther apart over the years, two continents adrift, separated by an ever-wider ocean. Now it looked as if my fatherland, all those years, apart from a postage-stamp-sized piece of land in the extreme west, having been absorbed by the expansive elusiveness of that deaf-and-dumb word “war”, had suddenly been forced back within its familiar narrow boundaries.

Even with the countless checkpoints we would be at our destination well before sunset, because everywhere the gendarme or sentry, after glancing at the papers my husband
handed him, sprang to attention and almost dislocated his arm saluting.

“The major’s ordered unhindered movement. Nice chap he is.” A wink. “I think he fancies me…”

“Who wouldn’t?”

We saw the ruins of Ypres, a miserable, rotten set of teeth in the rolling hills, where the grass was already tending towards the brown of winter. In the plain between the old front lines the summer’s plant growth had already largely withdrawn back into the earth, restoring the landscape to its bleak nakedness. We passed woods that were more like fields full of stubble than woods. Emergency wooden bridges took us over rivers and streams full of water which, under the weight of grey sediment, crept forward onto banks that did not seem to consist of earth, but of the mixed-up contents of hundreds of travel chests and suitcases. After a while the first foundations emerged from the ground left and right on the verge, under the mist as it was lifted and illuminated by the sun—a brick spring seemed to burst forth as the road took us farther and farther from the old war zone, houses, streets, whole villages that were hesitantly rebuilding themselves, first erecting empty walls, then trying roof beams, decorating themselves cautiously with rows of tiles, uncertainly, tentatively, there were still occasional gaps, but gradually everything closed up, a haze of net curtains hung at the windows, doors stood open, women were walking down the street in clogs, women in thick woollen shawls were standing peering at the church clock. And I don’t know how far we’d come, but the landscape that surrounded us looked unscathed, and we were driving under a canopy of sturdy oaks which let
their shed leaves dance over the road; then everywhere in the surrounding land, from the clumsy towers, the slender spires, the belfry windows and bell chambers, the ringing burst forth, the carillons, the bronze sigh of relief.

“It’s over,” said my husband, without looking up from the steering wheel. “It’s over, love.”

We were silent. I felt a lump in my throat and looked outside, at the meadows and the wooded banks and the exhausted fields, at the consolation that emanated from the indifferent world.

In the villages where the church tower had been destroyed or the bells had been stolen for their bronze, the priests sent the acolytes out into the street with rattles. In the market squares in the bandstands brass bands and ensembles were playing drunken waltzes for the frantic dancing of the frantic masses. The tricolour was flying everywhere. Children shouted, “
Vive le Roi! Vive la Belgique!
” and banged on the bonnet, tapped on the window, pulled faces, waved and screamed when my husband sounded the horn to tease them. Sometimes we made slow headway, and I was reminded of the resigned columns, the sea of khaki, of all the faces that had shuffled past me, stared at me furtively, winked, smiled, when I had last sat beside my husband in the car, under a sky full of sledgehammers. Peace was like the absence of gravity, as if the figures milling round our car were the same as all those others, two years before, finally freed from the cohesion of discipline: the anonymous ranks, dancing and drifting about in a Brownian motion of the purest ecstasy, swarming as far as the eye could see as, towards evening, we approached my home town and along the roads troops advancing on the capital were still marching past the
lines of civilians, at the side of the road. The women who, with one hand on their breast clutching their shawls, were not staring at tower clocks, but at the faces of the soldiers going past, surveying their figures one by one, to the point of desperation, since there were so many—and is he among them? And is he coming home? And is he well? Where is he? Occasionally there was a child hiding in their skirts, looking up shyly at that strange procession.

I asked him to stop on the sandy ridge near the stream next to the windmill where we had often driven as children with my father on Sunday rides in a hired coach. The sails of the mill lay strewn on the grass, except for one, which was raised in a lonely salute under what was by now a heavily overcast sky. From the windows of the miller’s house a trace of soot licked up towards the eaves; around the roof beam there were nothing but bare, charred timbers.

I got out. So did he. Went for a pee against a tree. I heard the wind whistling in the tufts of grass, and a late bird tweeted a tripping melody somewhere in the pollarded willows by the side of the stream.

I looked to the east, over rows of poplars that had gone grey, at the familiar profile of my town on the horizon, the old towers, unscathed.

He came and stood behind me, and put his arm round my waist. “What you looking at, love?”

“Home,” I said.

The town suddenly rising round us, a profusion of brightly lit windows in the blue darkness, the glow of lanterns on the
railings of the emergency bridges over the canals, the gleam of the abandoned artillery, the dull-coloured sandbags; and while we drove through the working-class districts the streets were swarming with people. In the pubs and cafés the
partygoers
were bursting out of every door and window, spasms of euphoria vibrated to the strains of the Brabançonne through the packed bodies. But at home it was dark. We parked the car under the chestnut trees across the street. No lamp or candle exposed the familiar ceilings of the rooms behind the window glass.

I crossed the front garden, hurried up the steps to the front door and rang the bell. The jangling died away across the floor of the hall and no one came to open up. I tried again.

No one.

“Probably out in town. Celebrating the peace,” said my husband. I asked him to wait outside, went down the steps behind the hydrangea to the basement kitchen, Emilie’s vault. The door was not locked.

There was a penetrating smell of drink gone flat in her kitchen, around the oven above which not a single pan was still on the hooks. In the fading light a mountain of empty glasses shone, in the washing-up bowls, in the corners, on the chopping block. On the table, next to a candle-holder with a stump of candle in it, next to a plate and fork, a cooking pot containing a vague mush still felt lukewarm. There must definitely be someone around.

I went upstairs. In the hall the lamp fittings had been torn out of the wall, the palms had been stripped of their brass
pot-holders
, the chandelier had been replaced by a miserable bulb. In the anteroom the chairs were piled on top of each other in
a corner and in the middle of the room was my brother’s bed in all its glory without a mattress.

I opened the front door. “No one home,” I said. “But someone has been eating.”

“Mind if I put me things inside, love?” He returned to the car.

I went back inside. There was no metal to be found anywhere in the house, apart from that one cooking pot and a couple of saucepans. All the expensive cutlery had disappeared. All the tin. Every cook’s knife, every ladle. Most of the earthenware, almost all the carpets. The house seemed to have been cleaned out. In the back garden someone, Emilie perhaps, had dug over the small lawn. In the increasing darkness I saw strictly demarcated vegetable beds, pale, faded potato tops above heaped earth, compact, globular cabbages. In the house I could hear my husband lugging his things about.

“Might go and join the party as well,” he said when everything was in the antechamber, his cases, his cameras, the bread and the eggs, and the various jars of preserves Madeleine had given us to bring. “What d’you think?”

“We’ll wait,” I said, in the darkness of the drawing room. “I know some tricks to entertain us, Monsieur Heirbeir.”

I pushed him onto the sofa, fell and met his lips and forced him back in the cushions.

We had dozed off when someone was fiddling at the front door lock, whereupon he leapt up, pushed his shirt into his trousers, buttoned his fly while I buttoned my blouse; in the hall there was the echo of coughing, and his familiar tread across the floor. I got up and left the living room in my stocking feet.

I saw him, by the weak light of the window above the front door, putting his bowler hat on the rack, taking his scarf off his
shoulders. And when I said softly: “Papa… it’s me, Helena…” his hand hung in mid-air above the hook of the hallstand.

We ate an improvised meal of eggs and bottled vegetables, after my husband had got the oven going with the last firewood and I had beaten the eggs. Somewhere in a side cellar my father had unearthed a full bottle of wine.

We clinked glasses.

“
La Paix!
” he cried. He was still moved.

“Here, here,” echoed my husband.

“Good heavens, dear child, I’ve never enjoyed a simple omelette so much.”

He looked as if he’d lost weight. Bags under his eyes, a dull gleam in his wrinkles. He coughed a lot. He’d also caught flu.

“I had to go to the hospital. There was nothing else for it. They’ve been hard years, child, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt lonelier than when I stood there on the threshold of that hospital, shaking with fever, with my pathetic little case, my pyjamas and my shaving kit in front of a nun who wanted to blast me off the paving stones with one look. The wards were full to bursting…”

“And Emilie?” I asked.

He sighed, looked furtively at the mountain of empty bottles behind us. “Let’s say that she got on quite well with the Germanic element in the house…”

I looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“The German who was billeted here… He slept in the anteroom. The first one was all right. Wernher. Good family man. Three children. He was also looking forward to when the misery would be over, and to his wife’s liver noodles. But
the second one… I think it’s best if I say nothing. There are respectable ladies in the company.”

“Oh, the young lady has been through the war,” I said. “She knows what the world’s like.”

I saw his eyes dart from me to my husband. Surprised. Not unfriendly.