While the Gods Were Sleeping (35 page)

“I had to let her go, Hélène. The whole street was talking about it…”

We never saw her again. Once, in the following weeks, when my father had gone to see my mother, I thought I recognized her smile in a group of women that shot timidly past my husband and me, a glance that noticed me behind the tall, raised collar of a heavy winter coat, under a big hat or cap under which a head looked strangely bald. One of the passers-by broke into curses, hard as nails in our town dialect. The women buried themselves even farther in their coats. A little farther on they just managed to avoid a rain of well-aimed gobs of phlegm.

“The fate of the harlot,” said my husband.

I don’t know what became of her. We scarcely knew where she came from. The woman who for as long as I could remember had starched our linen, cooked our food, heated our milk, was largely a stranger to me, an insignificant source of muscle power, an anonymous workhorse. There were more bodies than usual fished out of the rivers and waterways of our town in those months, and quite a few of women in heavy coats. I still hope that she wasn’t one of them.

My father sipped his glass and wiped his mouth. “So Mum is on the mend? And Edgard?”

“He’ll pull through. The doctor said so too. He’ll make it…”

“And his leg?”

“It will be some time before he can walk normally…”

“He’s alive. That’s the main thing. We’re poor, we’re hungry. But we’re alive. I want to see them as soon as possible…”

“The railways are a mess, Dad. It’ll be complicated.”

On the way home we had passed the station, the embankment had been blown up and some rails were sticking in the air like stiffly curled ribbons. There was a rumour that the enemy had disabled as many locomotives as possible.

“If necessary, I’ll go on foot…”

My husband stretched out in his chair—he had been fighting off sleep for some time. “Perhaps something can be arranged,” he yawned.

“He’s big pals with his major,” I said. “The major fancies him…”

My father brought his glass to his mouth. Before he drank I saw for the first time since we’d been reunited the familiar chuckle playing round his lips. “If you ask me, the poor chap will have to go on fancying for a long time. Don’t you think, child?”

He left two weeks later and stayed well into January. It was freezing when he left. The night before it had snowed lightly. A biting wind shook tufts of caster sugar from the bare branches of the chestnut trees. He had had a haircut and had his moustache trimmed. We were standing in the dormer window when the driver of the car which was to take him to my mother drew up at the front garden, sounded his horn and waited next to the door of the vehicle.

“Well, well, I’m gradually feeling more important than our prime minister.” He took off his glove. Tapped on the window
to let the chauffeur know he was coming. Then he looked up at the grey, overcast heavens.

“What do you think, child? Porcelain? Murano glass? Quicklime?”

I stood close to him, raised my head and surveyed the sky for a while. “Water vapour,” I said.

Laughing, he pressed the tip of my nose with his index finger. “My daughter has grown up.”

He picked up the small suitcase standing next to him on the floor. “Off to the Great Mother. To tell her that the world has changed for good. I hope she’ll accept it. You know what she’s like. The world will have to be very sure of itself. Are you certain you want to stay here? Will it work, child? Restrain yourself a bit with the visits of your English boyfriend. You know the neighbours…”

“Dad, please!”

He was silent.

Now he laid his napkin next to the empty plate. “I’m off to bed. The master of the house is tired.” He looked around sarcastically. “Hovel seems to me a better word… If you’re planning to stay, Mister Herbert…”—he spoke the words with an exaggerated British accent; he had clearly got wind of something—“my daughter will build you a nest. Good night.”

They shook hands. He gave me a kiss on the forehead. When he had almost left the room, he turned, looked at us in turn and said in a good-natured tone: “And be good. I’m still your father.”

I arranged some blankets and pillows on the sofa downstairs. There weren’t enough mattresses in the house. When I had
finished I saw to my astonishment that my husband simply nestled on the seat and started unbuttoning his shoes.

I pulled him with me. “Idiot…”

“What? It’s me bed, isn’t it?”

“Only in the morning, honey. You’re sleeping with me…”

I pushed him upstairs, past my father’s bedroom. I could hear his regular breathing. He was deeply asleep, didn’t react at all when my husband stubbed his toe on the foot of the chest of drawers and let out a powerful swear word.

I pushed him into my room, one floor higher, closed the door behind us and peeled his shirt, his trousers, his underpants and socks off him like a fruit skin.

“Christ, Helen, it’s freezing up here. Could lose me nuts any minute…”

He caught his breath when I squeezed them in my palm.

It had started to rain, a friendly licking and pattering against the window. We lay listening to the town, where the din of the festivities abated only slowly, occasionally giggling when below us in the street a drunk wandered burbling down the footpath, in a drink-sodden medley of numerous national anthems.

“I’m knackered, ma’am.”

I giggled, drank in the sharp smell of his armpits. His head rested on my breast.

“And now?” I asked teasingly.

“Off to Brussels in the morning. Be back in a couple o’ days… Rather fancy the idea of setting me gear up in the cellar…”

“And then?”

“Dunno. Stay here. Shan’t go back. No way, love. Job with the press perhaps… Suppose that’d be nice. No need to worry,
for the time being…” He raised his head, gave me a playful bite in the skin under my chin. “Mummy’s allowance, remember? And you, love?”

I was silent. Thought. “Studying,” I said. “Reading. Seeing the world. You must show me the world…”

“If you say so, love.”

“And I want your child, eventually…”

“Oh God…” He gave a sigh and cuddled up still closer. “Better start with ham and eggs then, in the mornin’…”

I laid my hand on his cheek. Kissed him on the crown of his head. In his hair.

He was soon asleep.

“
Y
OU HAVEN’T RESTED AGAIN
,” Rachida chides me when she pushes open the door of the room to check whether I’m still snoozing, and now she sees that I’m wide awake she contracts her eyebrows into a frown of feigned anger. She can never get angry with me, and she knows that I know, and also that I’m quite capable of exploiting it.

She walks round the bed, meanwhile laughing and wagging her finger: “You’re a rascal, Mrs Helena.”

“Thank you, child. Always have been.”

In passing, on her way to the window, where she opens the blinds, she catches sight of the exercise book at my side. “You should turn the light on if you want to read or write. You’ll ruin your eyes otherwise.”

She opens the window. The smell of the summer evening. The residual warmth of the day in the stones on the front of the building. The scent of asphalt, grass, the acid aroma of the tame chestnut trees in the street without a breath of wind.

“I’m as blind as a bat anyway, child.”

She takes the tray off the bedside table, stops at the edge of my bed and gives a leisurely, theatrical sigh. “Again you’ve not eaten anything… just half a sandwich this morning and now just some cold soup. You must eat, Mrs Helena.”

She walks round the bed again, towards the door. “Eat and sleep. That’s what Dr Vanneste says.”

Dr Vanneste. The new one. Fresh from university, still wet behind the ears. God knows what’s happened to the old one. Perhaps he collapsed or tripped over his bag on the stairs and broke his neck. One can but hope.

The new one came in, put out his hand and said, undoubtedly because it’s in the course on
How to Break the Ice with the Patient
: “Hallo. I’m Yannick Vanneste.”

“And I’ve got migraine,” I said.

“I’m doing a practical internship.” He put the pressure gauge round my upper arm and pumped the air in so hard that my lower arm almost came out of the elbow socket. “But next year I shall be qualified.”

Twenty-six or twenty-seven. Solid, tall. A real hunk, but in his head there was a little boy throwing walnuts. When he pushed the thermometer into my mouth I instinctively sucked down on his fingers with my whole palate and he muttered something like “those little chompers of yours are still in good shape, little lady”—meanwhile checked the blood pressure and said to Rachida that it was on the high side: “Fifteen…” He took the thermometer out of my mouth. “And you’ve got a wee bit of a temperature…”

Wee bit of a temperature. Little lady. Baby talk: verbal dummies. If I were his age, I’d give him a proper temperature.

“Is she eating enough? Is she sleeping enough?” He asked Rachida. Then bent over the bed and winked: “Let’s have a listen.”

He slid the stethoscope across my ribcage over the thin material of my nightdress. Those fingers. The intent listening. The supple wrinkles on his forehead, which do not yet make lasting furrows.

“Looks good.” He took the stethoscope out of his ears. “Is her liquid intake sufficient?”

I ostentatiously coughed up some phlegm from my windpipe and muttered: “I have been suffering from vaginal dryness for quite some time.”

I saw Rachida’s jaw muscles tensing, her eyes didn’t know where to look. Dr Vanneste went pale.

“You’re blushing, doctor.”

He blinked, recovered and opened his bag. “I’ll prescribe diazine, for the blood pressure. One tablet twice a day… There you are.”

Rachida took the prescription and let him out.

“Liquid, liquid… If I were sixty years younger, I’d have shown him what liquid is… What do you say to that, child?”

“You were very very naughty, Mrs Helena,” she says, putting the tray down and coming and sitting on the edge of my bed. “I’ll boil an egg. I’ll pour you a glass of milk and do you a sandwich. And then…” She pats the blankets with the flat of her hand. “Then I shall come and sit with you and I shan’t go away until you’ve finished everything… Otherwise we shall get very angry.”

She gets up. Pulls me upright. Arranges the pillow behind my back. “I’ll tell a story. While you eat, I’ll tell you a story for a change.” She pulls the sheet over my legs and smoothes it out. “Is that OK? The story of Said with the Lovely Eyes.”

“Who’s that? A desert prince who turns old women into salamanders?”

She giggles. “I shall tell his story the way my mother always told it to me. But if you stop eating…” She takes her hands off the sheet and holds them at shoulder height with fingers spread
wide… “Then I’ll stop talking at once. You’ll have to decide for yourself how it ends.”

She adjusts my nightdress, straightens the collar with a few strokes of her index finger, then goes over to my chair, folds the blanket up and shakes out the cushions.

The ending. Why always that last dessert? Why that elaborate laying of the table, that juggling with cutlery, that measuring of the distance between the glass and the plate, that elegant folding of napkins, setting out bouquets and polishing candlesticks? I like table tops covered in crumbs and smeared with jam, and the casually folded newspaper which equally casually counts its fatalities and crimes—a chance form for the formless chance of every day.

The words and the voice of my mother, and the silence of the body, and the war, which never let itself be embraced by its name. When I was young I wanted to be able to capture it in one light, call down the consolation of completion upon things and my thoughts. But I couldn’t. I thought I was still too green, too impatient, and now I don’t want it any more. No more consolation, no rest. Just sleep without sleep.

There comes an age, Rachida child, at which I won’t say you hunger for death, but you are ready to await it. To be able to become old enough, so that you can await death with the same casualness with which you wait for the bus at the corner of the street, without excitement or hope—it would be my idea of bliss, if I still worried my head about such things. I’m already in seventh heaven if I can keep all my teeth in my mouth while you watch how I eat.

My finiteness, or what is left of it, can still, albeit seldom, fill me with fear and dismay, but at the same time in the certainty of death there is a dim vision of an impersonal consolation which is not necessarily at right angles to life and may be a close continuation. The certainty of one day no longer having to eat or drink or sleep, or, despite all hormonal dryness and fragile bones, fanning the fire of desire—no longer having to go round in circles or send best wishes to people whose birthday I always forgot anyway, but freed from time to return to the great scheme of things.

“If I were young now, I would go out of town, Rachida my girl. Cycle out of town and swim in one of the old river branches. I would go into the water in my bare feet through the reeds on the bank, to be able to feel the mud like a soft cushion under my soles. And then I would say: it’s just dead earth, dead, soulless earth. An old mountain range, a tombstone that has worn away.”

I take her hands in mine. Stroke, as my mother’s ancient grandmother once did, with my thumb over the backs of her beautiful olive-coloured fingers, so soft and smooth in my calloused claws.

“I can dab them with iodine,” she says. “That will make those spots paler.”

I thought for far too long that words have nothing more to say, but it is so good that they do not completely fit with things and lead a life of their own. Did I say it aloud? She’s smiling, but I can see that she’s not really listening. Perhaps she thinks I’m starting to wander. She frees herself from my hands, retrieves the hairbrush from the drawer of the bedside table and runs it through my hair—or what’s left of it.

“It’s almost music, the cadence of your brush in my hair. I should stick words on it. Listen, pull it slightly slower through my hair and listen: ‘The lamp had to burn far too long in the vacuum…’ When I used to go walking with my father I always made up sentences that fitted into the rhythm of our footsteps.”

She draws the brush with long strokes across my crown, keeps her eyes fixed on me, snorts a laugh. I can see her thinking: she’ll come round. But she says: “You’re dreaming aloud again, Mrs Helena. That’s what happens when you get so little sleep.”

“No, child, I’m wide awake. We’re apes, we preen each other with words. Listen to what your brush sings: ‘Time… to break bread… on the table again.’”

“That’s what I like to hear,” she smiles. “I’ll put plenty of butter on.”

When I was young I regarded words as compact, stable units, intriguing stones that I collected so as not to be
empty-handed
in the face of the world. I made breakwaters from them against the spring tide of light and colour, of smell and sound that could sometimes descend overwhelmingly on me—the world in its brutal splendour, its breathtaking selfhood, which would overpower me and annex me in the tumult of its constant becoming. In other words I was afraid I would die of pleasure.

As time went on I came to see them increasingly as mirrors or lenses, or prisms which dissect the white, undifferentiated glow of the world—as my father was wont to reflect when, at home after a storm, I stood next to him at the window, looking at the rainbow over the wet roofs: “And to think that such
splendour consists solely of refracted light…” Carnival in hell was what Emilie called such weather, when the sun shone and it rained at the same time.

I regard them as mini solar systems, words, atomic nuclei around which the electrons of meaning charge, like little planets with weak gravitational fields, the ethereal atmospheric layers, and deep down in their geology a messy memory, although unlike this planet they have no core, not even a figurative one. All I try is to order them in such a way that their constellations evoke figures that otherwise would remain unseen and unknown. I have never filled all those exercise books with their signs for any other reason than in the act of writing to squeeze my foot in the door of the definitive, like a pushy door-to-door salesman of magic cleaning products.

“The time is finally ripe, child, to clear the last shelves. Put everything in boxes and take them away. Distribute them, all those written sheets. Do what you want with them, but make sure their fate is uncertain.”

“First I’m going to boil your egg, Mrs Helena. We still have time.”

“I’d like to be buried in those bookshelves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to pull them off the wall and make a nice coffin of them?”

“For that you’d need to shrink a lot. At least forty centimetres. Now I know why you eat so little.”

The books, the dead, my mother’s voice in my sleep and the garden without limits; in my head they open more and more grandly that space without location, where a time prevails outside
time, and which since childhood I never have stepped out of with more than one leg. The greater part of our mind is an Indian god stretched out in the alert sleep of a cat, dumbstruck, but far from deaf, and if necessary all-seeing. As we get older, Rachida my child, I’m not ranting, as we get older everything we do or don’t do, and say or keep silent about, is drowned out ever more loudly by the breath of that alert sleep in us, which we try in vain to tuck in with words, but which also drives our words. We all speak from
horror vacui
.

“Do you want me to take the photo of your mother too, Mrs Helena?” she asks casually, treacherously casually. I know that she’s testing me, that she thinks: she won’t go through with it. How many times have I resolved finally to clear the decks, and how many times has she hoisted me up on the tough thread of her
joie de vivre
?

My mother. She now hangs in a distant corner of my mind; in the dust clouds and gassy mists that make up memory she is a dark, burnt-out star. Her messages reach me as a radiation that is not light, more an energy with different wavelengths, travelling from a tangible absence. All I can do is demarcate a space in which her dull echo can resonate.

She becomes even less material when she occasionally appears in my dreams, whereas I still associate my father with the material, with words like wall, buttress, rafter—my father, who was basically more maternal than she was, the head of the family, the man who formed the mould from which she derived her severe figure. I have never seen anyone as helpless as she was when he died. Even I never equalled her when I lost my husband in
turn, but maybe I did with my daughter—when I received the news that she was dead, I broke into a rage that was perhaps nothing but desperation turned on its head. How strange, the manoeuvrability of our emotions. Pain becomes pleasure. Fear euphoria. Love hatred.

When on my last reluctant walks through town I passed places to which memories were attached, I was no longer seized by the melancholy that I experienced until I was about fifty, the years when youth seemed about to tip over into old age. I recognized the fronts of houses where I had once partied and dined. The bourgeois ostentation of cornices and balustrades in wrought iron had a museum-like feel. Some of those houses had become shops, wine merchants’ premises or restaurants, or clothing outlets in whose windows one glimpsed the unmoving elegance of mannequins. Some were still inhabited and had remained more or less unchanged, paintwork a little flakier, stones a little more impregnated with rust, and divided up into student rooms. Sometimes, through an open window, I could see a bit of ceiling, a rosette in stucco, meanwhile stripped of the chandelier under whose arms I had raised glasses, sung, danced, argued, and hushed up forbidden loves. Or I saw a section of a mantelpiece, meanwhile painted in different colours, a corner of a poster in the place where once a tall mirror hung which long ago confronted me with my own reflection like a satirical poem. There was where the pianola must have stood whose melodies we sang, and over there the sofa where I was unfaithful under subdued lighting, or the palm plant in the stairwell, under which I blubbed at my own restlessness and shame, while I bobbed merrily along on the weightlessness of
those centrifugal years between the two wars, when I finally escaped from under my mother’s wing by marrying—against her will, but without her sulking.