WHEN I CAN’T get to sleep, I like looking outside. I ask Rachida before she goes not to close the curtain over the window next to my bed. I want to see the teams of cleaners who work in the middle of the night in the offices on the other side of the water: the olive-coloured worker bees—veiled girls, young men with raven-black hair in light-blue smocks. I like following those kids as they go from floor to floor and make draughtsboard patterns of light and dark slide across the front of the building. In honeycombs of light they dust, scrub floors, empty waste-paper baskets, soap window glass and rub it dry, and I receive the impersonal blessing of their work as a sacrament. At such moments I have the feeling that I am calm enough to be able to survey the splendour of the earth as it is: not beautiful or ugly, but living and dying, pulsating in all its plants and animals.
I like the few hours of desolation at the crack of dawn, the emptiness and the first birds, which for a moment don’t have to share the silence with anyone, before the cars drive under the crowns of the trees into the multi-storey car park with glowing brake lights. I like listening to the rumble of the first trains, which at this early hour penetrates far into the centre of town, until the hubbub of life getting under way drowns it out: the buses, trams, cyclists, the footsteps of clusters of schoolchildren, in whose satchels pens or pencils are rattling to the cadence of their tread on the pavement—the glorious everydayness of the world and its banal, but oh-so-vital peace.
*
Then I wait till the bell goes downstairs, the signal Rachida gives me to let me know she’s in the house. It may be the other one. I can tell from the ring what awaits me. The other one doesn’t so much ring as send a shrill reproach upstairs. Then I pretend to be asleep, squeeze a half-hour’s freedom from the night, pull the blankets in a cocoon round my bones and sulk, and realize I’m like my mother, when she was young, when every month her tissues rang the hormonal alarm bell. I grant her those little resurrections now more than I used to.
If it takes a while before I hear someone coming upstairs, then I’m sure it’s Rachida who will wake me. Although she knows full well that I’ve been awake for ages and don’t really need to be woken.
I don’t want her to find me asleep. I want to say good morning to her. One day she’ll knock and there’ll be no reply. I’m far too old for an illness that drags on, so know what’s in store for me. Cerebral haemorrhage. Heart attack. She always laughs when I say it, but I know why it takes a while before she comes upstairs. First she takes her coat off and puts her apron on, but when she comes in in a moment, you must pay attention to her coiffure. There won’t be a hair out of place. She takes time to brush her long black hair. In front of the mirror in the hall she takes her hair in one hand and brushes it firmly and then arranges it over her shoulders again with the back of her hand, first over one, then over the other—that earthy, oh-so-earthy gesture. That’s how I imagine it at least: I’ve never seen her do it, and I haven’t been downstairs for ages, but I know she wants to look nice, in case I should be dead in bed or in the chair already with the beginnings of rigor mortis, with the curtains drawn, because I always ask her to draw them in the afternoon. Unlike in the past, I dislike the pedestrian light between twelve and four. Grey and twilight suit me better these days, or the sheen of the still-unblemished morning.
I like seeing how she is preoccupied with her work, the sacred calm that emanates from her concentration when she reveals the room and me to the day. While I breakfast in bed, she takes a dress or a number of skirts and blouses out of the wardrobe, always about three so that I can choose, and when I have made my choice she looks in the drawers and boxes on the dressing table for the earrings and necklace that go with them, because “being old, Mrs Helena,” she says, “is not a disease with us”.
The suppleness of her fingers especially can delight me. As one gets older the days increasingly assume the character of light-footed barbarities, peevish conspiracies against the liturgy of habit, in which the body becomes more and more hopelessly entangled. Her dexterity is like a consecration. The way she picks the earrings out of the velvet of their boxes, fishes the necklace out of the box and runs it over the palm of her hand to smooth out any kinks or knots—and I see myself again, on afternoons that are long ago now, going into my mother’s dressing room and, in the line of light that the half-open top curtains cast over the dressing table, pulling open the drawer of the chest in which she keeps her jewels, and the way that light at the bottom of that drawer, in one of the boxes, the lid of which has shifted slightly, makes a necklace slumbering there glitter with the treacherous splendour of a poisonous snake.
*
I find it a shame that I can’t see her at work when she is preparing lunch in the kitchen, how she peels onions, elicits baroque curly peel from potatoes, cuts carrots, chops meat, just as Emilie, in her brightly lit quarters in the basement, used to carry out her own sacrifices, or the maids in the house in France around the steaming oven set in motion a ballet of spoons and skimmers and guards, which unleashed its own music—and I wonder whether, who knows, she briefly interrupts her work without thinking in order to wipe her hands on her apron, a vision which invariably filled me with a strange ecstasy.
As time goes on I miss such ostensibly insignificant details of those who are no longer there. The thousands of tokens of the camaraderie or armed truce we enter into daily with life increasingly fill me with emotion. Usually I only notice them when they have died away for ever and leave me with the feeling that a whole language has been struck dumb, the complete vocabulary with which a person closes a book or arranges a dinner service like no one before or after them; or the way my husband used to slip out of the sheets beside me and run to the bathroom in the chill of the morning, pee standing up and produce a powerful stream because he knew it gave me childish pleasure, and then come back in in his boyish nakedness, with—forgive the word, Rachida—his prick at half mast between his thighs, and finally eased his bum into his trousers and with one hand swept the change on the bedside table into his other hand.
I didn’t venerate those things enough. I didn’t anoint them enough. I betrayed the mysticism of their everyday ordinariness. I just hope it isn’t one of the thoughts that I speak out loud by mistake, which has been happening to me more and more often recently.
She didn’t hear anything. First she took away the tray with the remains of my breakfast and subjected me tactfully to the ritual of defecation and cleaning, then put me on the chair next to the bed and now she is buttoning my blouse. As she does so, she bends slightly forward, so that were are almost looking each other in the eye, but she focuses on her fingers, which squeeze the small, mother-of-pearl-covered buttons into the buttonholes.
“And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.”
“What was that, Mrs Helena?”
“Nothing, child.”
She has almost finished. “Is that not a sight to behold?”
She smiles without looking up.
Her fingers rustle under my collar, against my throat.
“Those who can behold everything go mad, Mrs Helena.”
The day my brother died I knew as soon as she knocked, and actually even before. She had only just started working for me. I had heard the telephone ring downstairs. Almost no one called any more. She had answered, it took a long time. She had taken off her apron. She was wearing that long, dark-brown blouse I had seen her in often and underneath her black trousers. Instead of the wooden-soled slippers she usually wore at work, she had put on respectable footwear, mules. Her veil, which she usually wore round her neck like a wide shawl, hung loose over her hair with its dead-straight central parting.
She knocked, came in, closed the door behind her and stayed some distance away from the bed: “Your brother Mr Edgard, Mrs Helena…”
I didn’t let her finish. “So the bastard’s gone.”
I saw her go pale.
“Yes, ma’am…”
A month or two previously he came to visit for the last time. As usual he climbed the stairs in full regalia, or rather he hoisted himself up a step at a time by the banister, with all the accoutrements befitting a gentleman of his class, with the weight of his years in his made-to-measure but by now fairly baggy suit, and especially that still-elegant but perfectly useless walking stick under his arm.
The ascent took more time each week. After the death of my husband I offered to share a house with him on various occasions. What was the point of us each occupying a huge place, and in his case such a way out of town, in that admittedly extremely convenient property surrounded by a large garden, where the windows admitted charming light reflected by the river water, and where on the carpets and Kelims in the stairwell, the library, the drawing rooms a discretion shod in the softest leather constantly crept across the floors behind my back when I was still able to visit him?
He needed a quarter of an hour to get his breath back, and sat in his chair gasping and clearing his throat, the walking stick against the arm. The other stick, the one he actually used, an aluminium shaft with a rubber cap on the bottom, rested between his legs.
Rachida brought the coffee, thank God the nice set, on the tray with the silver. Not the plastic mugs that the other, that golem, digs out of the kitchen cupboard to give me the feeling that I’m a child who spills everything.
“Is Mr Edgard well?” she had asked, carefree as always while she put the cups on the drawing-room table, the jug of cream and the sugar.
“I’m like the donkeys, child. Their legs wear out first too, it seems.”
He had poured a dash of cream in his coffee. As he stirred it, he said: “It’s about time there was an end to it, if you ask me.”
Only when I felt Rachida taking my glasses off my nose to dry the lenses and I, after she had put my glasses back on, saw my brother looking into his cup in embarrassment, did it dawn on me that I must have called out and cried.
My hands were trembling. I saw Rachida’s helplessness, she was looking furiously for a single light-hearted sentence to break the embarrassed silence, and it went right through my heart.
Finally she went away.
My brother waited till she had left the room, got up and came over to me. As usual he tried to put his fingers under my chin so that I would look up, but I turned away and stared outside while he cursed my stubbornness.
“I don’t know, Hélène,” he sighed, “what matière you’re made of inside…”
Matière, I thought, how frivolous. But I said: “Concrete.”
A few weeks later came the news that he had broken a hip and was in the hospital with a prosthesis. Later, that he was to move into a boarding house. I wondered who had arranged that for him.
A courier delivered a package. Inside were a set of keys and a note with the pre-printed heading house of evening pleasures—how deep can you fall, I thought.
“I’m sorry, my little gazelle, but I don’t think I’ll be returning to my house,” he wrote. “Keep the spare keys, you never know whether you’ll need them one day…”
I saw the question burning on Rachida’s tongue, whether I shouldn’t visit him. I sensed her disappointment, but I very much appreciated the fact that she remained silent.
My brother always cultivated a form of impermanence, a quality that made all contexts slide off him. He shrouded himself in a sniggering secrecy that reminded me just too much of a cult, and his death did not really put an end to his impermanence. It simply became absolute. I mourn for him by polishing up his mysteries.
I never knew which of the young men who regularly hung about in his house, even when he was well into old age, slept with him. Who were lovers and who were not, as far as that distinction could be made. As time went on they looked younger and younger, though they remained constantly between their mid-twenties and about thirty-five, but he himself naturally got older. They were more like symbols than people of flesh and blood. Radiant emblems of youthfulness, snooty young eels in their smart clothes, their collars starched so razor-sharp that they constituted a danger to their carotid artery, which I could see beating under their tender skin when they were introduced to me.
Nervous and polite to the point of hysteria, meticulously coiffured and manicured, at family gatherings or dinners they put their feet under the table and were silent, longing all too visibly for invisibility, having been first announced “as a friend of Edgard’s”—pronounced with all too audible quotation marks.
I wondered which of them he could stand to have with him at night, whom he admitted to his sleep and whether during their slumber they let their fingers wander to the scar on the sleeping trunk half under, half next to theirs, instinctively in search of the vein, the fracture, the line of morbid growth which ran from his hip, via his abdomen and his ribcage, to below his right shoulder, thank God the right side of his body. It looked like a careless line of welding or an aerial photo of a mountain chain. I thought it would feel scabby, dry and crumbly, but when he once allowed me to touch it, it gave way, warm and rubbery under my fingertips. I was frightened of hurting him, but he said: “Doesn’t matter, can’t feel a thing there.”
Except on stormy days, the sultry days, the days when summer seemed about to tip over into autumn. Then he had the bath filled with cold water and stretched out in it because the cold numbed the phantom pain that shot through that long vein. I wonder if his “friends” kept him company, dried his back, helped him into his dressing gown afterwards. They seemed more like tasty morsels, titbits that his tongue longed for when he was satiated with coarser fare.
There must have been others, of whom I caught no more than a glimpse. A more or less regular supply of men who were just too far “beneath” us on the ladder to let them loose at parties without turning the aura of secrecy that always surrounded him into a public scandal. Men who didn’t wear hats, but caps, and suits that more or less screamed that they were reserved for Sundays or special occasions, intended to last for years without wearing out.
I think he liked the difference, the distance, the interval, that never quite bridgeable gap between their world and his, that he sought them out for the scarce moments of complete brotherliness, more raw and pure than his more presentable boyfriends.
Whatever the case, he never wanted to move house and never suggested that I come and live with him.
“My little gazelle,” he laughed. “You have your books, I have my bad boys.”
He must have immersed himself in their lives and bodies, just as I could become completely absorbed by what my mother called “my reading matter”, a term I found derogatory enough, and even more when she used it. He had her mouth too, that wonderful, voluptuous mouth, with which she did not so much pronounce words as bid them a melancholy farewell. Her majestic French clothed itself with her lips like a boa. Whenever I think of my brother I hear her talking again, and vice versa, when I call my mother’s speech to mind, I am reminded of my brother—of his own berry mouth, the mouth of a catamite.
She found him less difficult to deal with because of course she recognized less of herself in him. But he was also a man. From a young age he enjoyed freedoms I could only dream about, but my mother always loved him more than me. I was never jealous about it. I got to know only too well the latent resentment that can exist between mothers and daughters. You have to be a woman to see through another woman. And if that other woman happens to be your own daughter the contempt proves chilliest of all, since you are looking into yourself. For my mother even innocence was a trick, and I’m not a jot better. I myself hated my daughter because she existed and was who she was, and now she is dead I hate her because she’s dead. So I accuse even chance of being an accomplice, because I call children who die before their parents greedy. I was furious when my daughter died, with hatred and misery.
I always thought that I was the only woman in Edgard’s life, at least the only woman with whom he shared an intimacy which perhaps went further than that between a wife and her husband, because she respected secrets and had little need for mutual confessions, and because the body did not stand between us as a gigantic kink in the cable. We did not immerse our demons in the holy-water fonts of language; we understood each other without words. That was the fantasy where I housed our understanding.
When one day he confided to me that he had known women, at least one, I felt almost deceived and I still don’t know why he suddenly told me.
“And did I know her?”
He nodded.
I started running through my friends, reeled off the names of cousins, second cousins and aunts, and even great-aunts, whom I didn’t think I could possibly suspect of such frivolities.
“You’re too much among the roses and carnations, my little gazelle. You’re forgetting in a manner of speaking the bunch of wild flowers…”
I must have stared at him uncomprehendingly, because he continued. “Do I have to draw you a picture, Hélène?”
When it dawned on me, I went deep red. “Bastard,” I stammered.
“She was the boss. She gave the sign, Sis. If she came home and didn’t pull my bedroom door shut as she passed, on her way to her cubby hole upstairs, I knew she was”—he took my hand in his—“pour parler diplomatiquement, she was ‘disponible’.”
“I wonder what Mama would have done, if she’d known.”
“Papa knew. Or at least something. One day he gave me a talking-to about it, down in the front room. You know that kind of conversation. A man is a man and will always remain so. That there are ‘certain solutions’, but you had to be careful because not all those ‘remedies’ were meticulous about hygiene. And there were alternatives, more discreet, comme on dit a bit closer to home, a lot cheaper and with less of a risk of ‘certaines misères’… So he knew.”
“She must have known too, Edgard. She was always a restless sleeper.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps, perhaps not.”
I was stunned. My father, the man who called me his little girl, his positive little princess, the apple of his eye, his heart-stealer, and my father who gave his son advice to take good care what sexual washtub he dunked his sensitive organ into in order to unload his excess spunk, so as not, let’s call a spade a spade, to catch—take a deep breath, Rachida—the clap or the pox…
I disliked the way he enjoyed telling me about his escapades. I could see that from the light-footed tread with which he left my house afterwards, and the way, as he walked through the front garden to the street, that he cheerfully laid his walking stick on his shoulder like a sword or a rifle.
No, he didn’t need to draw a picture. I did that for myself, with an uncomfortable feeling of guilt because I dared imagine it, a hand still clutches my throat when I recall the scene. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, and, if it is, at which of the two of them it is directed: Emilie, naked on her bed, her hair undoubtedly in thick cascades of lava flows on her pillow, a fleshy, maternal image, a drunk, steaming, woman-shaped stain; or my brother, fifteen or sixteen years old, half man, half child, squeezing his way between her thighs, letting his arse be grasped by her fists and fastening on her nipples.
I try to suppress the image. I can’t bear its incestuous reticence, the more or less obscene idyll that my imagination makes of it: she putting him to her breast like a son and he shooting his come into her like a lover, and then arising from her tissues unmanned: a worm, an emptied father, melted Icarus, who had penetrated too close to the primordial formlessness of the female.
He liked showing off his body, to me too, in his room, after swimming or rowing, while he apparently casually admired himself in the mirror but equally relished my own, not even hidden adoration.
Women don’t have a body, Rachida child. We are walking yolk sacs that, as if by a miracle, push male bodies out of our tissues, imbued with an almost mathematical clarity, a Euclidean perfection, satiated in every fibre with directness and sharp concentration—while I, I am the sea, and you too and all women. Sandbanks on which sons and lovers are shipwrecked. Strips of mud of the kind that a man can only release himself from by leaving one of his boots behind.
My brother on the other hand was my demigod, fortuitously produced by, I felt to their own consternation, an accidentally passionate copulation of a rich French farmer’s daughter and a quite wealthy Flemish dealer in copperware, basic kitchen utensils, matches and handmade nails.
He had straw-blond hair when he was young, in thick, almost chiselled curls. He had eyes of a blue you would have thought impossible, and blond lashes, and from about the age of fifteen the endearing beginnings of a moustache, a milk-white nimbus on his upper lip.
I saw how my mother silently idolized him. She could look at him as he ate, played a bored tune on the piano or sat reading, with a satisfaction not entirely devoid of sensuality. I saw how she concluded with satisfaction that he had a good character, that a balanced young man seemed to be slowly emerging from his puppy fat, of more than average intelligence, and socially with enough suppleness to ensure him an interesting bride sooner or later—an expectation she never relinquished and which over the years went stale in her breast and became a resigned disappointment.
When he was a young man, the plus fours and sweaters with their deep V-necks, the sporting style that came across from England after the war, seemed to have been waiting for his limbs. We were no longer swathed in the dark clothes of those who had brought us up, suiting their sombre and cluttered interiors, with their rigid timetables and clockwork habits. We wore white, childish white. We were mad about light-footed patterns in pastel shades on light materials, the christening clothes of a new age. Their loose cut seemed perfectly suited to trips in the car, which freed us from the rectilinear railway and allowed us to follow meandering routes through a land that was licking its wounds.
“It sounds dreadful,” I said to him one day. “But actually the war is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
We were sitting upstairs in this room by the window. Our chairs were more or less opposite each other, in the bay window. My daughter, whose godfather he was, was playing at our feet with her blocks, and as usual it annoyed me that she never built towers with them, but, as an omen of the cobalt-blue hatred she would later arouse in me, arranged them with the same coloured side upward in boring squares on the parquet floor.
He leant over slightly and brought his lips close to my ear. “Do you know what, my little gazelle?” he whispered. “Me too.”
WHEN HE HAD to take me out for a walk, he was generally a lot less fastidious in his choice of routes than my father. Our walks took us through more neighbourhoods and districts than usual: areas where in street after street one parade of introverted gables followed another. Our town was a spongy tissue of alleys and passages, little squares, shady steps under footbridges over which monks must have once glided from one quadrangle to another, or bridges under which dawdled the water of the two rivers, which did not so much converge as fall asleep in each other’s arms in our town. You could easily wander its passageways for half a day, crossing the world every square kilometre, and lose all sense of direction. Most of those quarters were linked by a few streets to the rest of the town, which seemed to have been washed in loose fragments on the islets between the countless branches of the river.
We liked to leave our route to chance. I think my brother also liked imagining himself detached from all context as we walked through the streets, over the cobbles, gleaming with precipitation, under roof lines that were lost in the clouds, while we listened to the cadence of our heels on the stones, turned into an alley at random here, retraced our steps there to take a different route. Often we were the only living souls who seemed to venture outside.
Sometimes a gothic gateway detached itself from the fog, an arch crowned by cornucopias in clay or flamboyant stones. Elsewhere, squeezed in between two houses, the remains of a buttress suggested the existence, once, of a chapel or a church, the house of worship of an ancient guild or monastic order, swept away by the Iconoclastic Fury or the Revolution, or simply by a fallen candelabra. Although we never pointed out to each other what struck us, I knew that my brother looked at those fragments as I did; and I also think, looking back, that not only for me but also for him they were much more than purely arbitrary wanderings, but were definitions of space—our own space.
In the shadow of the huge chimneys that towered above the factory buildings round the new harbour, we could imagine ourselves travellers through a forest of prehistoric trees, or, according to our whim, suddenly surrounded by a Forum Romanum that had set down its rows of columns amid our northern step gables and saddle roofs. In the courtyards at the foot of those high, cavernous structures there was always more life to be detected, summer or winter, wet or dry, than in the better districts near the heart of town. The closer you came to the squares and parks of the centre, the more reserved and aware of their façades the buildings became—while on the threshold of those hovels on the outskirts of town, resting more against each other than on their foundations, there were always children under the nodding rooflines and gouty walls playing with a top or bobbin, or crouched together whispering like guinea pigs in an open doorway, from where the smell of boiling potatoes or buttermilk floated into the street.
Through those areas, where my father would never have ventured with me, even when they were quiet and deserted, a restlessness also roamed that I can only describe as tentacular: the rustle of antennae, jaw segments or legs that you could listen to on calm days around large anthills in pine woods.
Here a kind of humanity survived that “our kind” regarded as a more or less amorphous mass, useful as a worker-ant colony, feared as a potential cause of pandemonium: the army of insects that had far too many children and fortunately buried most of them almost immediately afterwards. In the mornings swallowed up by the factory gates at the crack of dawn, and there, behind those walls, beneath the chimneys and their crowns of smoke, they knotted thread to thread, crept between the equally insect-like rattling spinning machines and looms, and in the evenings got drunk, fought out disputes and settled feuds. But in the dark it still provided our fathers and brothers and sons with their share of tarts, and in daylight it supplied our households with linen maids, kitchen maids and laundry maids, and maids of all work—at least if they could be extricated early from the those alleyways, preferably as children, before the dirt had penetrated their soul, or before socialists and other rabble had filled them with too much knowledge and hunger, especially hunger.
My wrists are getting stiff. Rachida, child, bring me some fresh tea and rub my hands warm. You must know those districts better than I do. In my later years I asked my daughter to take me on trips through town in the car. My legs were already too bad even to walk to the tram stop.
I remember the children playing on the pavement, as lively and rowdy as when I was actually a child myself. They squatted on the kerbs, intoxicated by a total sadness, as only children can abandon themselves to a melancholy which cannot, yet, be measured out in the liqueur glasses of our words.
From the doorways and open windows on mild days smoky kitchen smells still drifted out, not of potatoes or milk, but spicier, more piquant aromas. Spicy and piquant as the conversations that drifted out into the street with the smells—women’s voices, hand-clapping, everything was as full of life as it used to be, nylon summer jackets, and shopping bags that swayed above the pavement slabs next to bare ankles. In the pubs the men still hung around the bar, although less beer was served, and I remember a chubby chap coming waddling out of one of those pubs, with the most beatific smile on his coarse face that I had seen for ages, and opening his arms wide, looking up at the sun, and saying with a laugh, “Türkiye. Türkiye, madam. In Türkiye always so warm.”
“But Mrs Helena. I’m Moroccan,” she laughs in alarm, Rachida, and I reassure her: “I know, child, I know…”
When we walked past under the fortress-like walls of those factories, we could hear the machines out in the street. The hissing of valves letting off steam, sirens that marked an end or a beginning. The roar of engines. The tapping, the clanking, the universal rattling. But the town was so fragmented that scarcely a couple of bends farther on a sober gatehouse hid a different microcosm. Perhaps frenetic bustle prevailed there, but a lot quieter and more minuscule: the buzzing of God’s worker bees. How unreal to suddenly walk there under the treetops without a breath of wind, dripping in the lifting fog, and to hear deep snorting and grass being pulled out of firm ground, and jaws that chewed it all up and to see the shoulders of cows’ bodies resting under a deciduous tree; ruminating, ruminating, with a touch of nirvana in their pupils—and then to hear the clocks in the houses around the meadow striking the hour.
Elsewhere too there was the sound of carillons. Despite iconoclastic furies and other disasters there were enough monasteries and abbeys along the waterways of our town to shake out sackfuls of bell-ringing over the roofs at set times. It was reminiscent of the ethereal aerial combat of songbirds at dawn, the daily dividing-up of the firmament. And it was quite possible that the bells above the churches and convents were also doing battle, not with each other, but with the shrill whistle of the locomotives or the wailing factory siren, a music that threatened to disrupt the precious circular melodies of the divine.
I could try out all my speculations quite freely on Edgard. I believe he took pleasure in listening to me, amused by my increasing breathlessness—unlike my mother. Whenever during the gatherings of her sewing group I gave myself over aloud to my reflections, she usually said firstly that she couldn’t make head or tail of the nonsense I was coming out with, which of course pleased me, and secondly that I wasn’t allowed to philosophize until I was better at embroidery. According to her it was the same thing. In both cases there was a beautiful pattern and I simply made a mess.
For my mother everything revolved around substance. While substance, Rachida my girl, get this clear, is the least interesting thing about a person, an impure ore like any other; and nothing astonished me so much as the industry of the blast furnaces and the production lines for the assembly of the new man in the decades after the war.
Everything to do with what was holy was cyclical in those days. A symbolic representation of the unchanging quite simply has to bite its own tail if it is to evoke eternity. Even my brother and I unconsciously adjusted our pace when we walked through the narrow streets of that béguinage, arm in arm past the houses with the names of saints on their doors. In that closed universe even simple walking took on the character of worship.
The female inhabitants of this mysterious enclave rarely showed themselves even within the shelter of their walls. Yet there were places where high windows let in an abundance of light, and there you could sometimes see them at work, at first sight as still as the statues of the saints with which they seemed to surround themselves everywhere. With their heads in white linen wimples, so fine that they almost resembled pieces of milk-white mist, they bent over the pincushions on their laps, faces smoothed by deep concentration, and appeared to regard with detached amazement the work of their own hands, which, as still as the rest of their figures remained, juggled with bobbins of yarn, moved pins brightly and went on juggling.
Slowly their work gave birth to something best compared to what a spider would produce as a web, if it were suddenly seized by artistic pretensions: a gossamer-thin tissue that expressed, not only in every thread but most of all where those threads were absent, the essence of mysticism, and as such represented one of the greatest realizations of the artistic genius of humankind.
*
Nowhere, except perhaps in poetry and very occasionally in music, have I experienced a more intimate interweaving of something with nothing than in the lacework that there in the béguinages spilt from the ladies’ pincushions and descended in milk-white waterfalls to the woven baskets at their feet, flowed over the edge and fanned out across the floorboards, so that, in particular on days of very thick fog, those rooms, where only the gentle ticking of the bobbins could be heard, seemed to me nothing less than the secret maternity wards of our national mist.
Compared with this scholastic finesse of needle and thread, the sewing work of my mother and her friends represented little more than clumsy popular devotion, but more especially it seemed to me only logical that Belgium was not a country of embroidery or knitwear, but of lace. In a place where the art of lacking was practised so exuberantly and ubiquitously, something like Belgium was bound to be born sooner or later: a nation that was constantly playing on the fringes of its own emptiness, just as all of us, driven by our soul, our most intimate vacuum, have continually to knit ourselves together.
That was more or less the conclusion of our historians. They filled bulky volumes with explanations for the creation of our fatherland, wedged between north and south, east and west: a region whose specific feature was mainly the absence of specific features, where different spheres of influence operated as capriciously as the high- and low-pressure areas in their hopeless struggle in the sky above our heads. Those learned gentlemen usually came to the conclusion that if Belgium had not been invented, someone would have had to discover it.
*
“Helena, child, my little gazelle,” laughed my brother after a while. “Your mental gymnastics always make me thirsty. Shall we have a drink somewhere?”
We usually went to the cafés around one of the stations, never to the establishments which of course he only frequented when the night gave the streets a salutary anonymity. It did us good to feel our tiredness, the pain in our legs from the long walk, and we sank contentedly onto one of the terraces to be able to sit and absorb the life around the station square.
We liked the fragmentary nature of our home town, because we wanted to be fragmentary ourselves, free of the corsets into which the older generation wanted to force us, and I wonder why I should glue the pieces together here. In the museums, where Edgard and I sometimes sheltered from an unexpected cloudburst, the mouth or wing of a seraph on a shard of a stained-glass window from the Middle Ages evoked its figure more tangibly than if the angel had arisen full-length in front of us, high in the transept of the cathedral, where a stone or cannon shot had shattered it.
Why should it be different with people, or with the words that I see clinging together here with some disgust? It is as if I have never been able to shake off my mother’s admonition that I was hopeless at needlework. A firm tissue laces itself as if automatically to the pincushion of this page. I see my thoughts take the form of sentence constructions that accommodate an enervating abundance of furniture, curtaining and supporting cushions like the stuffed interiors in which I grew up. Even the voices of my father, my mother, my brother and myself start speaking again as we thought we should speak to each other: with an eloquence that betrayed how closely we listened to ourselves.
Maintenir was the key concept of our class. We didn’t have conversations in those days, cultured people maintained them. We didn’t give dinner parties, we maintained a table. We did not enjoy reading, we maintained our knowledge of literature. We didn’t have friendships, but formed affectionate attachments, maintained the best relations, strengthened connections; we maintained, we maintained and we told ourselves that this was in no way a duty, or a mission, or even a choice. It was quite simply a fact that with the deaf and dumb inexorability of gravity worked equally on all things at once.
And from all that maintenir the whole edifice of civilization rose up almost as a matter of course, as natural and unconsidered as the wax that honey bees secrete, and of which their honeycombs are made. Although without the diligence of our own class, we thought, this fine-meshed labyrinth of wrought iron and plate glass, all that architectural know-how, would naturally never have got off the ground. We regarded ourselves without any hesitation as the salutary middle way. Without us the world could only go under in the anarchistic tumult of the mass below us, or evaporate in the drawl of nobility and old money in the stratosphere above—we kept things in balance.
“So God, if I’ve got it straight,” laughed my brother, when I talked to him about my personal theodicy over a glass of mint water, “has actually created the ideal thermostat in the bourgeois.”
I laughed heartily with him.
*
However butterfly-light and refined that vanished world considered itself, it had a weight. It weighed on me and on everyone. Everywhere, whether we want to or not, we always carry a whole globe on our shoulders. And, just as in my childhood I regularly visited our basement kitchen to find a less artificial dimension of life in Emilie, our maid, not least in her rough dialect, which, I felt, sounded “more real” than our language, so almost everyone longed, secretly or not, for a form of release from the sophisticated lacework that we at the same time “maintained”.
There was a hidden thirst for some form or other of ritual laxative: a collective cleansing that would greatly benefit the metabolism of our civilization. We obviously had to remind ourselves at regular intervals that, all things considered, we remained apes with clothes on, who in a circus of our own making jumped through hoops and threatened to forget that we were basically swinging on creepers and eating bananas. That would greatly improve our health, though admittedly we lost sight of the fact that a person, besides being too sick, can sometimes turn out healthier than is good for him.
Be that as it may, I liked the evening hours, especially in early summer, when the blue turning to purple moved in from east to west behind the increasingly elongated sunset, and in the cafés and restaurants around the station the lights were turned on, while it was not yet completely dark outside—the moment when the pigeons go to sleep and the bats wake up. The city became an area of transition, a twilight zone on the unstable boundary between day and night. The bow was a little less taut, the yoke lifted from the shoulders.
*
“And soon the minister will put his nightcap on,” I said to my brother as we both sipped our supposedly well-earned refreshment. “And the market-stall lady, and the bishop and the greengrocer. And then the curtain will fall, and the rest is silence.”
My brother was silent, but under his nose his milky moustache went to and fro in a lively way on his top lip, an expression of my father’s which he must have noticed and which he may have been deliberately imitating. He liked to make an impression of worldly wisdom on me. When I said something, I saw him thinking and running through a large number of possible answers in his head—for or against, usually against.
He brought his glass to his lips, drank a mouthful and looked out over the square in front of the station, where the last street trader was loading his wares onto a handcart, and sniggered without looking at me. “Dear girl, dear girl,” he chortled. “Either your eyes are full of shit, or you don’t get out enough. When it gets dark is when the show starts.”
He knew more parts of town, more layers and hemispheres than I and perhaps my mother. He was probably less familiar with the establishments that seldom advertised themselves as such on the outside, but behind their closed fronts hid a world of abundant plush, subdued red lighting, intimate boudoirs and painted girls, than with the meat market, which at once more and less visibly took place around the kiosk in the town park, in the vicinity of certain urinals or in certain cafés where an unwritten code of behaviour, facial expressions and phrases gave a double meaning to everything said or not said.
Later, after the war, he would point it out to me as we walked arm in arm through the park. What to look out for. What the signals were. Ways of hanging about. All too furtive glances. Where you sat down, on what bench and how.
I don’t know if he told me everything. Perhaps he sometimes pulled my leg, so that in almost every gesture, every detail of clothing I suspected a fascinating iconography of male lust.
“The advantage of the war,” he said to me one day, “is that there’s always enough meat to be had nowadays.” We had sat down on the bench near one of the smaller ponds in the park. He still found it difficult to walk. For the time being long walks were out.
The “meat” in question had gathered on the other side of the pond, on the shadier benches under the trees. It was getting on for evening, a twilit evening in late spring, hesitating between winter and summer. Soon it would become too cool to sit still.
Much battered flesh. Armless or legless. On crutches or, like my brother, forced to use a walking stick, whether or not permanently. Some of them looked very young. With the only hand he had left, a chap who I think was my age, in his early twenties, a flare of straw-blond hair in the blue shadow, was rolling tobacco in a cigarette paper that he pressed tight with a lively interplay of his fingers, brought to his mouth, moistened, pressed again and—it was almost like juggling—rolled over his thigh for a moment with his palm, and put to his lips again. Then, again with fingers like a busy spider, he dug a match out of a box in his coat pocket. Only when he lifted his leg and scraped the match over the sole of his shoe to light it, did I see from the folds in his other trouser leg that he had a wooden leg. He brought the flame to his cigarette, sucked it into the tobacco, and leant back while he simultaneously exhaled a first cloud of smoke and extinguished the match by waving his fingers.
“He’s one of the lucky ones,” was the reaction of my brother, who like me had sat and observed the whole scene.
I thought that by the less fortunate he meant the dead. But he shook his head and said. “That’s something else. Dead is dead. They have wounds. They can blame their misfortune, strange enough perhaps, on the arm or leg they are missing. Or on their scars, like”—he smiled faintly—“this old horse here next to you.”
He shifted position. Planted his walking stick deeper in the gravel and leant on it with both hands, presumably to take the weight off his trunk a little. He gave a subdued groan. “Never thought pain could be a blessing, my little gazelle. The others, who supposedly have nothing wrong with them, they’re real poor devils. They never get the bombs out of their body.”
It got chilly. He wanted to get up. The blond chap on the other side of the pond had smoked his cigarette and ground out the glowing end under his one shoe sole.
As I helped my brother up, I saw them exchange a glance.
The chap sent him a smile, broad and long enough to call ambiguous. I was gradually beginning to crack the code.
“You can have a prize if you want,” I said.
“Always,” grinned my brother, and offered me his arm.