IV

 

IT 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?”

“I don’t know…” I hear the child whisper. “Sounds just like a Frenchwoman.” Two seconds of silence, then the woman’s voice, unexpectedly gruff and close: “Yes?”—I hang up.

 

To Rachida I said: take the keys with you. Round up your father and your brothers and your sisters and your mother. Hire a van and take everything from the house that’s portable and not fixed. Give what you can’t use away or sell it. Divide the money between you or give it to the poor, I don’t mind, but bring me every scrap of paper and every photo you can find there.

A week later she lays a folder of blank letter paper on my bed, it still smells of the drawer in which it has been dying, the last bill for gas and water, a handful of empty envelopes without a sender or a postmark, and a pair of albums containing the same photos as mine: wedding parties, excursions, trips, babies and people celebrating anniversaries—nowhere a trace or sign of the life that must have been lived in the wings of our own, the life that was his, over which mine and that of my parents draped a cloak of silence… Not a glimpse of sweethearts, boyfriends, lovers, anything that referred to what for him must after all have been the essential thing, to the extent that there is an essence in a person, and to the extent that we could ever grasp it.

 

Perhaps someone else had beaten me to it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t carefully orchestrate his own disappearance without trace. He may, just before moving to that boarding house, have wiped the memory of his house clean, or given a confidant the task of doing the job for him. There were only two photos left, not much larger than visiting cards, which I fished out of his wallet where, judging by the folds and the frayed edges, they had been for years. In neither can he himself be recognized, unless one of the helmets in the background of that informal group portrait is his. Or did he take the photo himself? Is one of the men the one he was thinking of when he sometimes told me how pleasant it could be in spite of everything in the hole in the earth, while outside the inferno raged? “We even kissed, on the cheeks,” he said, “when the storm abated and we had survived it again, and there was nothing ambiguous about it. We created a god of brotherhood and a small liturgy of tenderness in order to have something that could raise us above the filth and the dead bodies, that was all. Don’t imagine any lewd scenes, my little gazelle, we did not want to degenerate entirely into animals.”

And yet I wonder why he himself is not in those photos. In both one face stands out above the indifference of the expressions, and I cannot shake off the feeling that he always kept those photos with him purely because of those two strangers. I don’t know if he often looked at them, perhaps it was enough to know they were in his wallet. Nor do I know if they survived or not. They may have been killed, and he may have chosen those two from all the men he had seen die, to hang his mourning and melancholy on. I remember him telling me how impossible it was to keep feeling sadness whenever someone you knew had been torn to shreds or had succumbed to his wounds.

 

Is one of them the A. Duval whose ring he must have always worn on his chest? That handsome young face in one photo perhaps, among the dozen men standing in front of the entrance to their underground shelter at sunset or early in the morning. Second from the left. Arms crossed. It was foggy at the moment when the photo was taken, so I don’t know if it really is a fine bracelet, that thread of light round the wrist of his right hand, which lies clenched in the hollow of the left arm. Above it that face: not surly, but not approachable either, rather intrigued, the most intelligent in the photo, the liveliest.

Three other figures dissolve unrecognizably in the thick fog that seems to seep in over the top of the trench—a milky-white mist that always fills me with a slight horror, because it reminds me of poison gas, which is of course nonsense. In that case they would have worn their masks and no one would have been stupid enough to pose languidly for a group portrait during a gas attack. That young chap also looks too determinedly at the unknown person who took the photo, my brother or someone else, he looks at me a lot less open-mindedly than the other face in the first photo, in the second photo—that has clearly been taken early in the morning. At bottom left a corner of a field kitchen, I suspect: a table or rack of branches tied with rope, on it tin bowls, a drinking bottle with a spout, a hunk of bread. Someone has hung a ladle on one of the vertical branches, and it hangs half in front of the chin of that face: the perky face of a young chap. Like the others, not someone who has often posed for a photo. A farmer’s son perhaps; there is an earthy soberness in his smile. The other men, five of them, look almost furtively into the lens. They have taken the butts of their cigars out of their mouths and hold them between thumb and forefinger.

Only that one chap, at the far left, looks with a kind of swank, half hidden behind that rack or table. He doesn’t seem the type that my brother would have brought with him to family gatherings or private parties at home. He seems rather to fall into the category of rascals: fellows who do not seem constantly surrounded by a cloud of language, in contrast to the well-spoken young men with whom he appeared in public, and with whom every experience first had to pass through the word, as it were—an accusation that my husband sometimes levelled at me, not to hurt me, but to make me be quiet, to seal me with his body.

 

We all mistrusted words. A combination of suspicion and bewilderment after years of ambiguous communiqués, lying newspapers, swollen propaganda and the inability of those who came back from the fronts to force what they had been through into an appropriate form, a vocabulary that would not distort, belittle, falsify their experiences.

I remember afternoons when I went to visit him with my daughter, his godchild, in his mansion just outside town. Afternoons spent sitting on the balcony on the bel étage, looking out over the large back garden, my daughter playing with her dolls at our feet, without exchanging a word, apart from the child language we used with her, the affectionate names and made-up words. Now, so many years later, I have the feeling that we wanted to submerge language in that child, as if in the source of eternal youth. I wonder: were all the disasters that we brought down on our heads ever anything more than a semantic question that got out of hand?

I could still let loose such speculations on him with the same enthusiasm, and he could listen with the same amusement as in our youth, during our walks through the town. Except that the ironic quips with which he pointed out my contradictions were often missing. There could be an undertone of bitterness in his words when he interrupted me and said: “You’re like an armchair soldier, my little gazelle. You’ve seen the battlefields once, in sunny weather, in ideal conditions, as a tourist. That’s all.” Usually he confined himself to amused chuckling while he poured us a cup of iced tea.

 

In the background, beyond the high box hedge at the bottom of the garden, on summer afternoons there was generally the measured plop-plop of a tennis game, soles crunching on gravel, exclamations of triumph or defeat from the mouths of young men who sooner or later would fall giggly and exhausted into the cane chair next to us on the balcony, legs across each other’s knees, dispensing playful blows—children.

I’ve long since forgotten their names, if I ever retained them. They seemed to me completely interchangeable. After the death of my husband I could never watch their flirting without feeling my stomach turning. The very thought that my brother could put their bodies to his lips, in passing steal something of them the way he casually plucked a grape from one of the fruit bowls in the house—while the sense of loss seethed in my bones, an ice-cold knife carved runes of mourning into the flesh of my belly, and there was so little in my growing daughter that recalled her father that I made her atone for it all her life.

With the years I have grown more tolerant. I think that he sought that youth and those bodies because their vocabulary could bring him consolation, a better translation as it were of his silences—and even if he was driven by an extremely childish desire, not so much to possess the other as to be the other, so what? Perhaps in each of those bodies he mastered a language I have never learnt, each time he sought a handful of synonyms, a metaphor of flesh and blood in which, however fleetingly, he felt his own being expressed, if not embodied.

 

I wish that he were still alive, that I could sit with him on the balcony, surrounded by those boys like playful cats on the cushions of his sofa. Then I would observe how he listens to me, with bored pleasure, with or without gleams of sarcasm in his eyes. I would keep an eye on the moustache on his top lip, to see whether the corners of his mouth remain stationary, whether the moustache moves left or right with his pouting lips in a grimace that expresses scepticism. I wonder whether he did not time and time again seek that moment of fear, the gulf of angst, excitement or icy fever that opens up in the first embrace with a stranger—the strangeness and the familiarity of a body that is animated in every fibre by a totally different spirit, houses different stories, different dreams. I try to imagine the twists and turns and intertwinings of the bodies of those rascals round his, the bony frame of that farmer’s son in one of those photos, for example. The grip of those arms, the mouth that at first resists, then opens: who gives, who takes, who drinks and allows himself to be drunk—and with each caress, bite, sigh, cry what bewilderment must have tingled through his own limbs? The rapture, the hunger, the thirst that flowed through so many embraces in those years, on both sides of the lines. All those intertwinings, forbidden or not, lewd or not, for payment or not, that makes no difference. The invisible battlefield, I mean, where a reverse war took place—the mixing, the consecration: take, eat; this is my body.

 

I see him giggling; I’m sinning against my mother’s ban on making the dead speak. He sighs: “You’ve always liked dressing up your concerns in other people’s clothes, my little gazelle. For you the world is a blank sheet that you scribble full to your heart’s content. But when the wind of history gets up a person can set their sail in the hope of being spared or perhaps taking advantage of chance. He can try walking into the storm or look for a hiding place. Who will eventually be left standing and who will be crushed under the wheels of the Moloch, no one knows, not even our dear Lord. We are mice running in the treadmill of fate and we can either take the pace or not. No sonnet ever changed the course of history. The world is the world.”

 

They were childish, the excursions we undertook after the war, he and I, and my husband, and anyone who wanted to accompany us, during the annual return to my uncle’s house, the final destination of our ostensibly carefree trip. We took our time, chose a meandering route and picnicked on the way. When we sat on the blanket and looked out over the hills, with the hamper in the grass, the cutlery, the fine plates, the ice bucket and the pâté, we regarded ourselves as freebooters, but we were aglow with a youth that could be little more than an anachronism. We looked like a medical team enjoying itself on its day off. We were wearing shrouds or doctors’ coats, textiles on which the slightest impurity was immediately apparent. We seemed to want to show the spotless aura of our bathrooms, which in those days were less and less sumptuous annexes of the bedroom with its coital connotations, and more whitewashed private chapels intended for the rites of purification, the anointment with soap and lotion, to which we devoted ourselves with the doggedness of those who suffer from fear of infection, who scrub themselves until they bleed.

Anyone who had seen us driving around the border, and deep inland, would have taken us to be town-dwellers who regarded the world of the countryside, centripetal, cyclical, as little more than a rustic decor with which our self-importance contrasted favourably. No one could know that all that inflated light-heartedness was designed to hide the deathly quiet final destination of our journeys from ourselves.

Invariably the car would finally draw up at the familiar, dull-green painted gate, by the high wall in which the small, arch-shaped windows just below the tiles stared sceptically at the outside world, the way farmers half close their eyes when they have little confidence in the nonsense you’re talking. The gate would open. Beyond it they would be waiting for us, my uncle and his family, another year older, more bent or greyer, or still more gangling, with still more offspring in their arms, more than enough of them anyway to give us the familiar Sicilian welcome. Embraces and loud greetings. Pats on the shoulder and teasing.

They would conduct my brother and me and all those accompanying us to the table under the silver poplars, or to the big dining room. From the pantry the maid would not so much walk as stride to the table, with an air as if the soup tureen in her hands was a sacrificial lamb. Over the steaming plates they would question us about news from the north, how my father and mother were doing, and what had happened in the past year in the bends and side alleys of our extensive family network, which had its own maps, tougher than the official ones. They called us swallows because just like swallows we only fell out of the sky after the winter, town-dwellers who avoided the dark months in the countryside. The autumn and winter months that my mother and I had spent there obviously did not count as proof of the opposite. We remained northerners.

What we drank was not soup but relief. On the cutlery chest tarts with chokers of whipped cream and sugar glaze waited. When they were cut everyone knew that my brother and his companions, and often my husband too, would get up from table. With every course of dinner their impatience showed more openly on their faces, so that my uncle eventually had their portion of cake served in the smoking room, where they would withdraw after the meal.

“If the gentlemen wish to devote themselves to the really important things,” he said, “they may feel free to help themselves to my cigars. There is also port. And stronger stuff.” We wouldn’t see them again before it was time for bed. They stayed in that room deep into the night, sometimes till first light. When I went to wish them good night, and cautiously opened the door of the room, just wide enough to let myself in, there was seldom more to be heard than the crackling of the fire that they had lit to drive away the chill of the night.

Sometimes one of them would be sitting in the armchair, elbows on knees and hands folded, leaning forward towards my brother, my husband or one of their friends in the chair opposite them. Between them hung the silence created when two people break off a confidential conversation so as not to involve an outsider. They looked at the toes of their shoes on the carpet and waited. Someone else stood at the window, glass of port in hand, staring out, even though there was little to be seen but one’s own reflection against a background of nocturnal black, distorted by the curves in the window glass and the play of the flames in the hearth. Usually I gave my husband a quick kiss, wished my brother and the others good night and closed the door behind me again. My presence seemed to make them aware of an intimacy that had them more in its grip than linked them together.

I could easily walk back into the scene, as it has distilled itself from all the memories over the years. The fug of the cigars that hangs over their heads in dull-blue veils and when I open the door seems to recede in reluctant whirls before the cooler air I bring with me. The silence of those men in the room. The glass of port or cognac in one hand. The arm resting on the mantelpiece. The round table and the oil lamp on a cashmere tablecloth, an old shawl in which someone has made very symmetrical folds. The crockery in the convex glass-fronted cupboard. The cups and jugs with their female-looking handles that are almost like limp wrists, give to the silent togetherness of the men in the room something coquettish, not to say an almost sexual charge—but I am wary of dragging up such images from the quicksand of the mind and clothing them with language, with flesh. I see their figures: my husband, my brother, the friends who sometimes accompany them, sometimes not, congealed into figures of milky-white, hand-blown glass, not gaseous and not solid. I feel like a treasure-hunter who for the first time in millennia looks into a tomb and encounters the alabaster smile of a concubine. And when I ask my husband what they actually talk about, he replies: “Nothing really. Someone sometimes mentions a name and the others nod. Mostly we say nothing.”

 

My brother often said that in his dreams, too, scarcely anything was said. I think, he said, that the mind is lost for words—we always dream what we can package in words. What is wordless wakes us with fear. The body plucks us in time back to the surface of consciousness and then we say we had a nightmare.

I never dream about the dead either, he said. Or about the horror. I dream silence. The silence of the trench. The scraping of my men’s equipment against the walls left and right as they follow me, God knows where, through complete darkness. Only the sound of their equipment against the walls, their breath, their footsteps gives texture to the darkness—then there is the bright glare of a flare exposing an endless trench, a winding passage with walls of sandbags and planks—and then the solid night again that swallows us up. It always lasts hours and hours, that journey in my dreams. Finally day breaks and I smell the forest floor, the scent of pine needles. The branches dampen the morning light and the silence acquires a pleasant feel, a sigh that hangs above us whenever the wind plays in the needles.

The trench forks. The sandbags give way to walls of woven branches, tightly woven structures that reach higher and higher. More and more frequently we pass openings in the wall. To right and left there extend still more passages. Meanwhile the walls have become so high that it is as if we are roaming through a subterranean Knossos, a sunken Venice with canals full of mud—but however the dreams begin and however varied their course, sooner or later they all reach the same destination. The trench winds sharply up a hillside. Where the wall becomes lower again a valley extends down below, in which, largely obscured from view by treetops and trunks, a small town stretches out. I see chimneys from which plumes of smoke escape. The sounds of church bells and horses’ hooves resound crystal-clear in the freezing cold of a limpid winter morning that seems to me strangely familiar. I know that the destination is approaching in my dream, because I have the dream so often.

I know that over the mesh of branches and twigs in the wall of the trench a second mesh will be laid, of frozen stalactites which close more and more tightly together into walls of ice. The paths between the walls wind farther uphill and turn into ice steps. I can hear the laborious trudging of the men following me. The echo of their soles on the treads draws a long ribbon of sound behind me—and then I am always overcome by sadness, an unnameable feeling of regret, an unnameable grief, an unnameable resignation evoked by the sounds of the town down in the valley, by the smell of burning wood and coal winding up from the chimneys, and the peacefulness that the sounds and smells bring with them—that wave of regret and longing that goes through my trunk, where on earth does it come from, my little gazelle?

The steps become wider, the ice now looks almost polished, like marble. I feel the embarrassment of my men, as it were pushing me in the back, the shame, and we are carrying the stench of the mud with us. The steps lead to a wide, covered terrace which on one side looks out over the landscape and on the other merges with the ridge. Between white columns is a balustrade, behind which elegantly dressed women on deckchairs relax, smoke and drink and talk and laugh. They are making eyes at gentlemen who are standing chatting by the balustrade in groups of four or five and stretch their necks to emphasize their attractiveness. Between them waiters with trays come and go. Maids clear empty glasses or distribute newspapers. There is music, the hum of a string quartet, laughter—I see the hand of a man resting on one of those bare shoulders, his figure bending to plant a kiss on a neck. No one sees us. No one notices us. No one pays any attention to us.

Waves of rumbling rise from the valley, muted and distant—the echo provokes excitement among the company, as among people following some contest or other. Gentlemen look up simultaneously, interrupt their conversations and peer into the distance while casually putting a glass to their lips. Ladies sit up languidly in their chairs, lean bare-armed on the balustrade and also look into the distance—but what they see is only mildly interesting. A languor hangs over the terrace, a blanket of lethargy. At the same time I feel the jealousy of my men behind me, and rage wells up in me. Who is drinking our blood? Who is eating our flesh? Who throws us over the fence like chicken bones gnawed clean? And then there is that sadness again, that gnawing, amber-coloured regret—why do the years bring so much regret, my little gazelle? What loans must we repay, whose losses must we redeem? Who has lived above his station and mortgaged our existence? Usually I wake up in tears.

 

He stops talking and brings the cigar to his mouth, shrugs his shoulders sheepishly and smiles faintly. All his life he remained an adolescent, a lad who as years went by could stare out at me more and more perplexed from that old body, in which he seemed locked like a passenger on a train which to his horror goes past the expected destination. His cigars, his walking stick, his unwrinkled clothes—the icing on his refined, fickle despair. He brings the cigar to his mouth and, as he takes a last puff, on his top lip his fine blond moustache squeezes round the smoked-up stub—the mouth of my mother, her catamite’s mouth grinning at me on the train to De Panne, where we go to visit him in hospital. Between her eyebrows the permanent crease of contempt at my escapade of the summer before has softened a little. When I look up I see her avert her gaze, and on her lips the grin with which she must have been peering at me while I was reading fades. She looks outside, rocking along with the jolting of the wheels on the tracks. Resignation is what I see as her eyes wander over the farmland, the villages with their worm-eaten roofs and walls and cemeteries in which the crosses proliferate like weeds. There is no longer a cemetery to be found that is not bursting at the seams.

It is already getting on for the end of the afternoon. There were so many hold-ups that day. The eternal whining of military transports to which we had to give precedence. The umpteenth check of the transport permits, certificates, permissions which she extracts from her big bag of rough material, each time with a hint of fear that she will be told: the papers are not in order, this or that stamp is missing, this or that official should have put his signature. I see us sitting in the light, growing stale, of that September day, waiting for the carriage to start moving again, for the invisible elastic walls with which the war is dividing the country into compartments to recede so that we can proceed. I see us sitting there in our sturdy clothes of stiff textiles, cut from the materials that we quickly purchased when it had become clear, three years earlier, that we wouldn’t be able to return home immediately, and I feel the same regret, the same pity.

She looks at me and I recognize the regret in her smile, which is now mine. Then she takes a deep breath, blows the regret away and creates hope. After almost three years she will see her son again.

 

FOR MONTHS SHE SAID NOTHING about my adventure. When she was angry she seemed to find words inadequate as vehicles for her anger—too rough, too blunt, or on the contrary far too articulate. She folded open inwards as it were, and from her folds that deathly silent language welled up, which annexed everything around her in its magnetism. Everything radiated contempt and reproach.

At home she counted on my father to translate her voltages into human words, usually at breakfast. He sat wedged between us at table and spoke to me, alternately emollient and admonishing, sometimes bending over to my side, sometimes back to hers: a needle that leapt pitifully to and fro in response to our capricious alternating currents. My brother would make his escape as soon as possible, taking his plate upstairs with him, and as he climbed the stairs we could hear him sighing: “Oh là là… Oh là là-là là!”

As long as her eyebrows did not announce new icy waves, my father tried to speak to me in a conciliatory way, and in the opposite case, when her silence crackled with cold, he would always keep half an eye on her during his sermon to see whether her eyes were wandering to the paper next to her plate. Her increasing lack of interest usually heralded the thaw.

Without him she had lost her domestic toolbox. My uncle had proved that he could not serve as a replacement and I myself had also betrayed her. She no longer walked quite upright now things no longer moved in accordance with her thermal energy. To keep on her feet, and to punish herself, she had the maid tighten her corset until it became an eye-level fortress, a breathing suit of armour.

 

I see her mending clothes, in the winter after my escapade, when she kept me close to her day after day. She allowed me at most an hour, in the library or when I had to look after the chickens, outside her force field. It was bitterly cold; the days crept by beneath a tin sky. All that could be heard was the rumbling of the weapons, distant or close by, depending on the direction of the wind, and the enervating ripping sound when she, by the light of the candle we had to share, tore open the seams of old shirts or trousers. She grasped the material in both fists, pressed her lips together and pulled the seam open, having first loosened the stitching, in a single tug. She would repair or cut up the pieces. Everything can serve a turn sooner or later. I don’t know if she herself felt the threat in those words.

Under the table top in the kitchen, next to the oven, in the chest in her room, the drawers bulged with everything that in her view might one day come in handy: bottle-stoppers, strips of greaseproof paper or barbed wire—her amulets. Without my father, equally anxious, she stored up all her resentments in her bastion of whalebone, which gave her the form of a still, in which her frustrations were so concentrated and purified that the words she could direct at me unexpectedly seemed more a discharge than a question or an order.

She straightens her shoulders. Here, in this paper afterlife, she grasps both halves of the back of an old coat in her hands, but the material does not give.

I read the annoyance in her face, which is about more than the stiffness of the material. The imminence of her saying something hangs in the air, the silence announces it.

“The scissors, Hélène,” she snaps at me.

 

Her glory, which was the glory of that summer, the summer of 1914, which in my memory is compressed into the sun-drenched afternoon of the day after our arrival. In the summer house of silver poplars the maids are laying the long table. The tinkling of the cutlery on the trays seems to come from the light itself. She in her summer dress: that intense, glaring white shot through with a hint of blue in the long grass of June, and above the deckchair in which my brother is sitting reading in the shade—of course he immediately went to sleep—the energy, the almost suicidal passion of the sunlight that plunges into the treetops and explodes among the leaves: a fountain of slivers, light pearls, drops, sparks. I feel it swelling when, upstairs in my uncle’s library, I look up from the book that I have laid on the reading table and am staring through the open window.

I hear the wind stirring the curtains, the farmworkers washing their hands outside by the pump for the approaching meal, the snorting when they throw a splash of water in their faces, and the giggling of the kitchen girls below, interrupted by the deep growl of the maid, Madeleine, who keeps a strict order among her chicks, and with her deeply sunken eye sockets and heavily arched eyebrows reminds me of an ancestral statue from Easter Island. And there is that light, the white horses of light when the wind tosses about in the treetops outside the window; the surf, the flood, I feel it pulling through my midriff, picking me up and putting me down again as it ebbs and splashes against wall behind me. And now too, here, I hear my mother’s voice, laughing and good-humoured: “Stop all those chinoiseries, child, and come to table finally.”

 

What does it matter, now I close the book and run downstairs, startling the mice in the courtyard and chasing the lizards like a blush over the yellow-ochre side wall—what does it matter that of all the people who have gathered round the table I am the only one still alive? The farmhands have laid their caps in their laps and look sheepishly at their still-empty plates while my uncle, according to his annual custom in honour of my mother, makes an overblown speech of welcome to my brother and me. The children impatiently knead chunks of bread into balls. The aunts, dressed up with ribbons and earrings like temple bells, look like grotesque Bodhisattvas, to the right and left of uncle in the middle of the long table. The kitchen maids are waiting with the soup tureen and step increasingly often from one foot to the other, as if needing urgently to pee. The swarming of the leaves, my mother’s dazzling figure, the glasses that are raised and the laughter and chatter in the warm noon of the penultimate day of June 1914. In the papers the commotion about the tragic incident has subsided to a narrow column in which the word “war” is used fairly dutifully—“the umpteenth storm in a teacup” is my brother’s opinion.

 

Three summers later, when we visit him, one of the three sisters can remember that she was on duty when they brought him in. “We have to cut most of them out of their uniforms. He was lucky. His wounds are deep but nowhere did the grenade hit an organ and the stomach wall is intact. We saw that when we cut his clothes loose and washed away the black blood and mud. They were able to bring him here quickly. Three others were dead on arrival. We put them over there in the corner under a blanket while we cleaned the wounded for the operation. One of the others lay here on the floor on the stretcher. He’d lost a forearm and the explosion had torn his feet from his ankles. They were hanging from his lower legs just by the tendons and when he went into a convulsion on the stretcher, his feet dragged across the floorboards as if they were attached to his shins by suspenders—but actually I shouldn’t say anything about that and I think you’d better keep quiet about it to your mother. She looks upset enough already.”

 

I think of the sea, the jade-green sea, the surf that was like molten tin when the waves broke and with foam fingers churned up the sand the day my mother and I went to visit him: it was the first time that she set foot on Belgian soil again. The sea and the pale upper bodies of the bathing men, and their uniforms that lay in heaps on the dry part of the beach, below the promenade—dotted lines of khaki and boots in the ochre sand.

The salt air, the rising of the voices when a wave lifted the bathers up: their heads, trunks and arms rose with the water level and sank again when the waves slid underneath them, rose, arched their backs, then toppled and tumbled into the sand.

Farther out to sea, hazy because of the mist above the water: the contours of ships, just close enough to be able to see the sailors walking to and fro on deck and salvoes like light flashes spewing from the barrels of the cannon.

The sound came later, a wave of thunder that found its own surf in the cheers of the soldiers on the promenade. They threw their caps in the air or waved with both arms. It wasn’t clear whether they were replying to the salvoes or shouting at the men below, who braced themselves for the waves constantly rolling in, went under and came up again roaring with laughter.

After each cannonade the ships changed position, back, farther out to sea, far from the coastline where the men, at the call of their leader, all left the water together, ran up the beach shivering and snorting, scores of stark-naked men on their way to the clothes that were theirs, their dot in the sand below the promenade.

The soldiers around us started laughing and whistling. Some clapped their hands. On the horizon the ships’ cannon were spewing new pinpricks of light, followed by thick curtains of smoke.

 

“C’est un spectacle triste, un homme sans ses vêtements, je trouve…” I hear my mother whisper, as if unaware that she is thinking aloud. “Ça me semble si slovenly. Surtout quand il n’est pas, comme on dit, excité…” She looks at me, as if seeking confirmation, and I glance up somewhat taken aback, as are a couple of soldiers peering at us over their shoulders and laughing as they give each other a dig with their elbows.

And we must look odd in our coats that are far too heavy for the season. It is the beginning of September 1917, a Wednesday, and a warm late-summer afternoon, but we seem to be dressed for a harsh winter, in those coats of tough, indestructible material which the aunts made for us when it became clear that we would not be able to return home soon. When it occurs to me that the big bag that my mother has placed at her feet also contains a pair of boots as large as frigates, I can’t control myself either and have to giggle.

She turns round, grabs the bag by its large handles and asks what there is to laugh about.

“Nothing, Maman. I think we have to go this way…”

“Fancy a drink, Miss?” a voice calls after us, but she pretends she has not heard anything and gives a tug on the bag like a coachman tightening the reins of his horses.

 

We walked on along the promenade, among the soldiers spread out over the beach to enjoy the evening sun. No one seemed to hear the constant rat-tat-tat of the light artillery in the background, on the plain behind the line of dunes, and the rumbling farther away, the echoes of the cannon, both out at sea and deeper inland. The growl of an aircraft made a few heads look up, but the plane was too far away to be seen, and when a little later crackling erupted and here and there white smoke clouds burst open in the azure, someone shouted: “That’ll teach ’em, bloody Boches…” followed by laughter; but apart from that everyone continued as normal, and the sentries in the dunes remained motionless in the silver-green marram grass. She wasn’t interested; she wanted to go to the hospital. Again she pulled roughly at the bag.

 

I can still feel the violence of that gesture pulling through my forearm into my shoulders. All states of mind that were considered too violent or too coarse for a lady—rage, passion, lust for revenge—she accommodated in a deaf-and-dumb language of her own making, a vocabulary of twists and turns and looks. Only later did I begin to grasp the hidden syntax of her gestures and could I read the restlessness in them, the despair, the disappointment I must have evoked in her, after I had, however inevitably, bitten through the last umbilical cord still joining us. I myself only tasted the feeling of desolation that wells up when a descendant goes her own way with my own daughter. I felt humiliated by the ruthless pragmatism of life, which in our youth lionizes us, but one fine day drops us like a toy that has lost its shine. Naturally I reproached my child with all kinds of things, and I regret it now. September is still the time of year when that regret is at its ripest. It has assumed the colours that the early autumn sun imposes on the world at that season, and it hangs like a heavy travel bag between me and the dead. Its elusive weight seals our union.

I could not live without the dead, believe me, Rachida, my girl. I would feel empty if I could not fill their goblets with my funereal gifts: words that I put in their mouths, which I pour as libations over their altars.

 

How strange that she, who did not believe in a higher realm and practised a mainly dutiful piety, probably so as not to be out of step, ascribed a kind of hereafter to the dead—because if they really are nowhere any more then we no longer need to show any respect to their absence. If we do, God is still in us, a ponderous emptiness that turns round and round in our caverns. He counts the days and waits in boredom for the handful of hymns with which we might evoke Him. It is purely a matter of vocabulary, or as my mother invariably said to me when we squabbled: “For goodness’ sake stop turning words on their heads, Hélène. Soon you’ll be taking the world off its hinges and the poles will change places…”

 

I could make her descend from eternity, let her trickle down onto this sheet of paper in order to reprimand me posthumously for my digressions, but I won’t. I recall her as we lay together in that bed, in that attic room in the hotel on the promenade in De Panne that served as a hospital. When the shooting stopped the sun had already set and we could no longer go out in the street to find lodgings, so we had been assigned a room in the roof, a room for nurses on night shift, who would only be coming to bed towards morning.

“It’s not the Ritz, I know,” Miss Schliess had said, the sister who had to take us upstairs, when she saw my mother looking around her in the narrow room with thin wooden planks for walls, and the two small iron beds under the dormer window, with a few knick-knacks on the window sill, a small vase, a few shells, an empty glass. It could have been a servant’s room, Emilie’s magpie’s nest under the rafters at home.

My mother put her bag on one of the beds and whispered: “Thank you, ma soeur. My daughter and I are very grateful to you.” She had opened the bag, taken out a small handkerchief and dipped it in the basin which stood on a narrow washstand in a corner of the room under a mirror, and sat down on the chair between the two beds with the wet cloth in her hands.

“Perhaps Madam would like a nice cuppa…”

“Would you like some tea, Maman?”

She shook her head, and muttered: “Please go” and pushed her face into the wet handkerchief.

 

She looked pale, that evening, and was still trembling from the after-effects of the shock. We had scarcely been able to have a brief glimpse of my brother, in one of the long huts that had been built around the old boarding house, before we had to leave him again.

He was asleep when the orderly took us to him. In the bed next to his a man with lots of cream on his hair, which was combed in a strict centre parting, had been observing us.

“Il a eu de la chance, celui-ci,” he had said. “Il dort beaucoup, pauvre type… It does no harm of course. Un bon sommeil, no one has ever been the worse for that.”

My mother had nodded and listened intently to my brother’s breathing: deep, peaceful, regular. He was more or less unrecognizable because of the thick bandage round his head, which left only a tuft of hair on the crown free. A second covered the whole right side of his face apart from his eye and a third surrounded his neck and right shoulder. Under his pyjama top his trunk was also hidden by gauze and bandage.

She had opened her bag, retrieved a tin of biscuits from it, a couple of apples and a small bottle of wine, and put everything on the bedside table. We hadn’t paid attention to the fact that meanwhile the noise of the guns had grown louder and louder. Nurses were walking to and fro between the beds and the rustle of their long blue dresses and white caps and the energetic cadence of their steps on the floorboards made a nervous impression.

Outside there had been whistling, then a bang—the beams and the wooden floors trembled. The sisters did not seem so much nervous because of the shooting as concerned about the patients; and when, quite close to judge by the intensity, there was a second bang, loud, dry, more a vicious hiss than an explosion, one of the patients, a few beds farther on, had started whining and another, on the other side of the long ward, had jumped up from the sheets, meanwhile tugging at the buttons of his pyjama top as if in a trance. A couple of orderlies tried to calm him down and to button up his pyjamas again, while the nurses attempted to calm the other man in bed—he was all arms and legs and shrank into a ball when a new thud sounded.

 

A few windows, left ajar to let in the cool evening air, flew open, the light bulbs rocked to and fro on their leads above the beds. Somewhere a few stools fell over, a metal basin spun across the floorboards and came to a clattering halt. More and more patients crawled upright in their beds.

My brother went on sleeping. Meanwhile the air was filled with crackling, salvoes rattling through the evening sky like Morse code messages, deeper thuds, a long-drawn-out whistle followed by a new bang, farther away this time. Only when a new impact, close this time, seemed to lift up the whole hut for a moment did he wake up, but then an orderly pulled us away with him. We had to go to the main building, he said.

 

He had taken us through a labyrinth of corridors to the central hall, downstairs, in the old hotel, where we were supposed to wait till the shooting stopped. Around us male and female nurses walked to and fro, doctors in flapping white coats ran up and down staircases. My mother sat silently beside me, the bag at her feet, her hat on her lap, eyes closed. The artillery continued to fire, the day was fading visibly, and by the time the violence finally seemed to be abating it was already quite dark, too late to find accommodation elsewhere. One of the senior sisters finally beckoned to Miss Schliess and said, not without an undertone of sarcasm: “We have guests this evening. Take them upstairs.”

As we followed her up the stairs, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the old guest rooms, since all the doors had been removed. Beds, most empty, were lit up by the distant explosions. It had already struck us when we arrived. Most wards were deserted. Behind open doors and windows broom handles danced in the hands of orderlies. Bedding, languid as dollops of cream, spilt over the edge of big wicker skips. Elsewhere tough women cleaners were beating mattresses.

Miss Schliess said that the British high command was not fond of this hospital, independent as it was, which admitted both civilians and soldiers, friend and foe.

“Thanks to that little queen of yours,” she said, “and her husband’s penchant for neutrality.”

She took us all the way upstairs, under the rafters of the building, the upper storeys of which looked out over the scores of wards that had been put up around it, even close to the big window, down on the promenade, of the restaurant where we had eaten so often in previous summers, with a view of the sand and the waves.

In one of the other attics the figure of a nurse stood in the twilight, peering outside, where the sky was criss-crossed by the beams of searchlights. There were still the sounds of shooting and thundering, and the growl of aircraft, but farther away. The nurse watched and meanwhile buttoned up her apron by sense of touch. Perhaps she would be on night shift soon, like Miss Schliess, who took me to the fifth floor, where an area served as a rest room.

 

In the windows the day, apart from a faint glow far out to sea, was completely extinguished. Somewhere above the distant waves stipples of light sparkled and immediately disappeared. Above the land the searchlights still slid to and fro between the horizon and the clouds.

Miss Schliess lit a small candle and brought us tea. The faint candlelight made the white cuffs which she had fished from somewhere in her apron stand out against the calm blue of her dress. She had noticed the bewilderment when I saw her lacing those stiff linen bands around her wrists, just before we entered the room. “Dress code,” she had replied. “It’s a real convent here, mademoiselle… Dress like a nun, behave like a nun.”

She poured tea. The pale pot hung like a ghostly manifestation in her hand. “So you’re visiting your brother then?” she asked as she sat down opposite me at the narrow table.

“My brother. And someone else. A friend… Though Mum’s not to know…” I drank a mouthful. The tea was lukewarm. “It’s a secret…”

“Ah, a sweetheart, a soldier sweetheart…” Miss Schliess held her tea mug near her mouth, hiding her lips, but I could hear from her voice that she was moved.

“Can’t blame you, dear. Not too badly injured, I hope?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Light injuries according to his letter.” In reality it was more a postcard scribbled all over, for safety’s sake put in an envelope and addressed to my uncle. “Haven’t seen him yet. Went to see my brother first.”

“Nothing serious, probably… There are others. Haven’t been so lucky myself, mademoiselle. Lost me darlin’ Henry two years ago…” She tried to sound breezy, but I could hear that she was finding it difficult.

She put her tea mug on the table, and clasped it with both hands. “Sometimes I dream that it’s a great big body that we have to put back together. One big mess of bowels and limbs. One long table full of arms, legs, eyeballs, lungs…” She hesitated. “Testicles…”

She brought the mug to her lips again. Behind her back, out to sea, a fierce light flared up momentarily, which briefly silhouetted the outline of her wimple, her ear, her neck. A little later a faint thunder reached the beach. “It’s ages since I’ve seen a chap with everything in its right place, mademoiselle… And these hands…” She put the mug back on the table and spread her left and right on the table top. “The places they’ve been… Ever had to stack someone’s liver back in place, Miss?” She looked at her own fingers and shook her head. “Smelt the smell of an open belly? Filled a hole as big as a football in someone’s thigh with gauze, kept your sick down despite the stench of wound fever?”

She looked at me, she had pressed her lips together. I saw that her eyes were moist. “Saw a bunch of our boys bathing, this afternoon.” She nodded in the direction of the beach. “Couldn’t take my eyes off them. Must have stared at them with me mouth wide open, mademoiselle. The others laughed their heads off… Seen a saint, Elsie, dear? Our Lord Jesus walking the waves?” She tried to smile and brought the mug to her lips again. “Wish I had…”

Beneath her hands, which were not so much holding as supporting the tea mug, there was the glow of the white cuffs. They seemed to surround her wrists like haloes, to support her hands like pedestals, but also to separate them from her body, as if they were infected by the knowledge they had acquired, the arms, legs, groins that she had washed, the wounds and cavities she had entered to remove bandages dripping with blood, to pour scorching carbolic acid onto flesh attacked by germs, pushing eyeballs back in their sockets, rearranging intestines under the midriff.

I drank another mouthful of tea. It tasted bitter, more like an infusion of tobacco than of tea. “I’m sorry, Miss. About your loss, I mean.” I was aware of how inadequate my words sounded.

“Never mind, love. Anyway…” She got up, produced a small watch from her breast pocket and glanced at it. “Duty calls. And you go back to your mother, mademoiselle.”

 

SHE LAY ON THE BED, the wet cloth on her face gave her the look of a dead person under a shroud. Her arms lay idle by her body, hands on the belly, between the two sides of her coat, which she had unbuttoned but not taken off.

“Is that you Helena?” when I sat on the other bed, which with its creaking augured a sleepless night. “Is that you, Helena?” It must have been the first time in three years that she directed words at me that did not end in an exclamation mark.

“Yes, Maman, it’s me.”

She said nothing else. Between us, on the floor, stood the dark material of her bag.

I lay down, the bed protested weakly. The mattress seemed to be trying to shake me off it and, through the rags with which it was filled, to push ribs or vertebrae into my back. I looked at my mother, at the wet cloth on her face and the square silhouette of light with which the dormer window framed her head and shoulders whenever the sky outside lit up because of a flare or a searchlight, and I thought of home, of my father.

 

What was he doing at this moment, unaware that we were in the same country again, separated by a long scar of trenches and barbed wire, of dead people and hospitals and bare earth? I knew that my mother carried with her somewhere in her bag the few letters that had managed to get through to us. The breeziness with which he had written that it would all be over by Christmas, and that, if people wanted to repeat the adventure of 1870, we couldn’t be in a better place than with his in-laws. In our lost backwater of the Republic no one would trouble us, he believed. Sometime later my uncle had also handed over the other letter, which my father had sent at the same time: “Should it come to it again, my wife and children could not be better off anywhere than with you, my dear Theo. According to the rumours they will pass through our country this time. I’m not deaf, or blind. I saw the sort of stuff that was being transported by rail when I was in Germany recently.”

I had read those words so often that I knew them by heart. I reread them to be able to hear his voice, his calm concern for our welfare. “Be prepared for Edgard to volunteer,” he also said in that letter to my uncle. “He won’t wait. I know my brood. I don’t expect you to put up more resistance than necessary, and my son will have enough to handle with his mother. What would we do, assuming we were still young, dear brother-in-law? Hide away and afterwards brave the scorn, sit out the shame until everyone has had his say, and then be branded a coward for the rest of one’s life? Or fight and hope that we survive the whole affair without too much damage? Let Marianne read this letter, should it be necessary. Tell her that I hope the best for her, and hope that our daughter will give her support. If the worst comes to the worst, they cannot do better than wait until this inconvenience has passed over us, with you and Josine and Yolande.”

 

She had slammed doors in the days before my brother left, probably in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn. She had resisted with all the means at her disposal. When he didn’t appear at breakfast that day, for a moment she was no longer my mother, but a gaping breach in the wall of her own severity. My uncle had bashfully pushed that letter towards her, and she had withdrawn to her room for three days. Not until the fourth morning had she reappeared downstairs, pulled tight and laced up from head to toe. “Bon!” she had said before sitting down. “We shall take that inconvenience as it comes.”

After that we always spoke about “that inconvenience”. “It’s taking its time, that inconvenience,” she would invariably comment when going through the papers, whose reports she tried to decipher like oracles. “We’re going forward, we’re going backward, we’re standing still, but we’re still winning, for three years!” But even in the newspaper articles there was growing weariness perceptible between the lines, the tiredness of an increasingly lethargic war, which more and more frequently struck me as little more than a thoroughly spoilt child. It had set out its army of toy soldiers neatly on the floor and then abandoned them, frozen them in their positions, and its only pleasure seemed to be to crush them underfoot in seething swipes.

“Now they’re going to turn the world inside out, that’s how desperate they are,” she had sneered a few months before, when in the early morning of an early summer day the earth suddenly shook, the hens clucked indignantly in their runs, the pigs kicked their troughs in annoyance and the dogs stared in dismay at the ground beneath their feet while the quake continued under them. “That will do a lot of good!” she had exclaimed sarcastically, sticking a needle into a sock, since there would not be much more question of sleeping in the house.

My uncle’s outings also became more lethargic, as he took his ill tidings round the village and hamlets more and more slowly, a nemesis yawning with boredom. The funeral services for the fallen were lethargic, with or without a coffin in the church, the sermons of the Abbé were more and more lethargic, the lethargic process of mourning and the sluggish march of the columns, which I saw shuffling past in the telescope in the attic, under the bare trees in the rains of November, or the troops who sometimes made a temporary camp in the barn, their lethargic bartering for eggs, potatoes, ham or bacon—everything creaked with tiredness, in everything there was a hidden painful joint, everything suffered from chilly bones.

Even in that attic room, that evening in September, under the eaves of the old hotel, the artillery sounded lethargic. The salvoes resounded in bored routine, the searchlights slid grumpily through the sky, the flares were like languorous birds with a long tail, too heavy for an elegant flight—and even the bang, the huge bang which, without the roar first swelling, shook the rafters above our heads and blew the glass from the dormer window over us in a rain of slivers, even it had something lame, something gutless about it.

 

I saw my mother sit up, pull the cloth from her face in alarm, and shake a few slivers from her lap. She was about to say something when a second impact, close by, ear-shattering, made the woodwork of the windows whine and slammed the frames against the side wall.

A drop of blood was running from the corner of her mouth over her chin. She grabbed for the bag, meanwhile pressed the cloth against her lips, and had only just bent down when another bang smashed window glass elsewhere and blew the washbasin in the corner of our room off its base. We dived for cover, each behind the foot of our bed. I saw that she was pressing her cheeks hard against the rails of the bed and was stretching in order to pull the bag, which was still standing between the beds, towards her over the floorboards. Outside planes were growling everywhere, invisible in the sky, among the rat-tat-tat of the antiaircraft guns. The searchlights had come to life, and were keenly sweeping the sky. Shrapnel clattered over the roof tiles above our heads into the gutters. Below us, in the stairwell, a woman’s voice called: “Everyone downstairs! Everyone downstairs!”

“We have to go, Maman. We have to go at once…”

She nodded, pulled the bag towards her across the floor and crawled out ahead of me into the narrow central corridor—the floorboards were strewn with slivers of glass and fragments of knick-knacks that had been hurled from the window sills and wall racks, and everywhere we were surrounded by the noise of aircraft; their bluebottle-like buzzing and the crackling salvoes sounded louder and closer now that not a single pane of glass remained whole.

We crawled to our feet, shuffling on along the central corridor bent double. Above our heads, seemingly grazing the roof beam, a projectile with an ethereal whistle drew a trail of light through the night. A few seconds later a fireball formed, and the front of a burning house stood out like a mask in the dark.

“We must hurry, Maman, It’s far too dangerous here.” I pulled her with me into the stairwell. Below us, a few floors down, others must be making the descent. I heard voices and the bump of soles on the treads. We had to find our way in the dark. I clasped her hand in mine, she did not let go of the bag with the other, and we must have been about halfway down when with a huge thud the whole building seemed to stretch from roof beam to cellar, groaning in all its screws, bolts, seams and ligaments, and then subsided.

My mother had let out a cry and a cascade of jars, flacons and preserves had tumbled out of her bag over the steps. She wanted to bend down and pick everything up, but I pulled her with me. “We haven’t got time. We must get downstairs. We’ll pick it up later.”

 

The downstairs corridor was swarming with people: soldiers, civilians, kitchen staff, cleaners and the teeming blue-and-white shapes of the nurses bringing patients from all directions in their bare feet, in pale pyjamas to chairs or sofas. Most, I saw, only had wounds to the arms or upper body, and perhaps precisely because of that were being treated in the old boarding house—if necessary they could take flight downstairs under their own steam. We tried to make our way through the throng, to find a place where we could sit down or at least stand and lean against the wall. Outside the storm seemed to be abating, there were still explosions and rattling, but less intense and farther away, farther inland.

“Edgard,” muttered my mother. “Where’s Edgard?”

Doors flew open. Wounded patients streamed in. A woman with a screeching child in her arms wrapped in a soiled sling. A woman staunching the flow of blood from a wound on the side of her head with her scarf. A small boy, deathly quiet, with eyes wide open on a stretcher, apparently insensible to the pain which one of his knees, little more than a bloody mass, must have been causing him. An old woman worked her way into the corridor, hair dishevelled, the sleeves of her coat torn to shreds. “Never thought my corset would save me,” I heard her say to a man, probably her husband, who with one hand was holding in place a tea towel wrapped round his other hand.

*

My mother seemed not to see any of this. She kept craning her neck, regularly held her handkerchief under her nose, surveying all the bustle. It was Edgard she was looking for. She was becoming more restless by the minute.

A second stretcher was brought in. Between the two stretcher-bearers the white and blue of three nurses, busily trying to keep the wounded man under control. A hand grabbed at their skirts. An arm grasped at thin air between their figures. A foot, the thick sole of a lace-up boot, slid doggedly back and forth over the wood of the stretcher. There was a chest rattle, an exclamation smothered in gurgling. The foot kicked the stretcher, the arms grabbed.

Someone shouted: “For the love of Christ, Elsie, keep ’em down!” A second scream. One of the nurses leapt back with unexpected coquettishness, but could not prevent a splash of blood landing on her apron. She looked up for a moment and I recognized the eyes of Miss Schliess. She saw me, and she saw my mother. As she bent back over the wounded man, she said quickly: “Your brother is safe. They’ve got their own shelter outside. Tell her. It’ll put her mind at rest.”

 

The stretcher-bearer brought the stretcher farther into the corridor. On one of the staircases meanwhile an elderly man appeared, in slippers and pyjamas, with a kepi on his head. His face was stormy. From under his thick moustache a rain of orders descended on everyone’s heads in barking French. Order returned. Logic. Gravity. Wounded over there. Others that way. Sheep were separated from goats, pyjamas from overcoats. The wounded were taken farther into the corridor, where the operating theatres were. The turmoil subsided.

I took my mother to an empty spot on a sofa against one of the inside walls. “Just sit down here, Maman.” Miss Schliess’s announcement had calmed her down somewhat. Outside the storm seemed to be nearing its end. The thuds sounded duller and duller. Now and then a distant bang made the lamps tremble and our abdominal membranes quiver.

 

My mother sat down, pressing the now empty bag on her lap against her body. A man next to her, a chap in a trilby hat who, resting his hands on his knees, feet apart, was looking around, turned to her and said: “Some weather tonight, isn’t it?” The look she gave him immediately froze his smile.

I left her alone, strolled down the corridor, avoiding groups of people. The faces that looked at me looked empty, broken, and weren’t anything like the restlessness behind the eyes of the refugees who in the first months of the war had been given shelter for the night in barns and stalls. The first came from my fatherland, the villages and towns of Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg and, besides carts and small carriages with hastily collected children and household effects, brought stories about looting and murder which my uncle had kept as far as possible from my mother, until the papers had taken them up with mouth-watering eagerness. The drama of Dinant. The fire of Leuven. It seemed so far away. We heard only the creaking of the cartwheels in the sand of the road, the dragging soles, the requests for milk, a raw egg for a child or a pregnant woman, and permission to light fires, to heat up their scanty food. “Only in the yard,” my uncle had decreed. “Not in the stables or barns. There are enough houses on fire already.”

*

I looked at the faces around me. A few women, huddled next to each other at the foot of one of the walls, made an all too colourful impression. Under their overcoats shone pearls or gold jewellery, their caps only half hid their coquettishly coiffured hair. I don’t know if what made them look away was shame, and if it was shame, I hope it wasn’t me that provoked it in them.

I thought of the garishness of all too brightly coloured boas, depilated calves, blood-red lips, and the high-pitched cooing chorus of tarts, the bar floozies, the flora of the night and the boudoirs, which rose stronger and louder from all the people cheering on the soldiers, in those first days of August, when stickers had suddenly announced general mobilization everywhere and my mother had cried out in dismay, “War! War!”, as if history was in service with us and had been caught in the wine cellar with the bottle at his lips.

She had sent Edgard and me off in the coach, to see if it was still possible to catch a train in the nearest town with a main station. In the square in front of the station building men were hastily donning their uniforms, the blue waistcoat, the shockingred trousers, and meanwhile kissing crying children, embracing sobbing wives, sweethearts, mothers, sisters. The tarts cooed, threw flowers and I think even underwear at the cannon fodder that marched in closed ranks from the barracks into the square in the unforgivably sweet sun of that August.

I stood upright in the coach. I asked why they were cheering so, the whores. My brother looked up at me, a frown of bemused surprise on his forehead, and nodded in the direction of the departing soldiers. “If that lot don’t do their work, my little gazelle, they may soon be opening their legs for the Prussians. But whether they’ll get paid for it remains to be seen.”

He had watched for a while longer. There were no more trains; war was now rolling over the tracks. “All civilian traffic cancelled,” cried a stationmaster through a mass of mobilized men.

“We might as well go back,” he had decided. He had clicked his tongue and slapped the reins along the horse’s flanks. At home my mother had listened to us with perplexed astonishment. If she had been able she would have sacked history on the spot.

 

I walked on. At one end of the corridor, on the stairs that led to our attic room, a group of patients were sitting chatting. The sisters had left them there to keep the corridor as far as possible for civilians and the badly wounded. They reminded me of big chicks, in their white pyjamas, with bandages around their heads or hands. I thought: I must not go too close; doubtless my mother wasn’t letting me out of her sight for a second. And I was about to turn round when one figure struck me and my heart was in my mouth.

 

I walked towards the stairs. A few of the others looked up, but he didn’t see me, preoccupied as he was with an orange that lay on a napkin on his lap. His left hand was in a bandage and was resting in a sling knotted around his neck. With the elbow of his immobile arm he was trying to keep the fruit in place, while with the thumb of his other hand he was endeavouring to pick the skin open. He seemed to notice nothing of the noise outside, the people in the corridor, the languorous fear, the lethargy.

I came closer. The fruit shot out from under his elbow. I heard him swear under his breath. Under his pyjama bottoms his toes curled against the wood of the stair tread.

He pushed the orange back under one arm, and I was about to speak when the fruit completely escaped him and rolled over his knees down the stairs. It came to a halt against my foot, and I bent down to pick it up.

He saw my hand, raised his eyes at the same time as me and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Miss Demont… Helen… You keep surprising us…” His face brightened, with that childlike, all-embracing laugh of his.

I should have liked to throw my arms round his neck, but I restrained myself. My mother was watching, doubtless. So I said: “So do you, Mister Herbert. Peeling an orange with one hand… That would be an achievement…”

“Dunno Darling…” He conjured his grin onto his lips. “I’ve achieved lots of things with just one hand in my young life…”

He winked, stuffed the napkin into the palm of his left hand and threw it to me.

I found an empty spot, a few steps below his, and sat down. “Writing clearly isn’t one of them…” It sounded more piqued than I intended.

 

I spread the napkin on my lap, put the orange in it and began peeling it. I hadn’t eaten oranges for ages, let alone seen or smelt any; it must have been since the last Christmas before the war. The bitter smell of the oils that were released when I buried my thumbnail in the tough skin, and the sweetness when it gave way and the white membrane and the fruit were exposed, overwhelmed me. I felt tears rolling down my cheeks and tried to hide it by bending more deeply over the fruit, but the smell and the relief of seeing him after all those weeks were too much for me.

“Oh come on, love… It’s not an onion, it’s an orange!” he laughed. It sounded both flippant and helpless.

I tried to smile, but it was stronger than me and his quip upset me even more.

“Oh God, Helen…” He made as if to come and sit next to me.

I raised my hand. “Don’t… Mother’s here.” I nodded in her direction. “We were visiting my brother actually.”

“I see… La Mère audacieuse…” He pulled a face. I saw he was watching her. “Did she make that coat herself? She looks like bloody fucking St Paul’s she does…”

“My aunts made it…” I mumbled.

The sadness lifted. I took a deep breath, divided the orange into segments and handed him the napkin.

“At least you had the decency to write and tell me you were dying…”

“Minor wounds, I said, Helen. That’s all. Didn’t want you to worry…” He offered me a segment. I couldn’t get angry, I was too relieved at seeing him relatively unscathed.

“What happened?”

“I just slipped…”

I giggled.

“I did…” He had wanted to snap a troop of Canadians, by the side of the road. He had stepped onto the brick edge of a small bridge over a ditch leading to a field. “And I slipped. Ruined me arm, me wooden camera and some of me precious ribs… So here’s your war hero for you, Miss Demont. What d’ya say?”

“You deserve a statue in Trafalgar Square.”

He laughed, but I detected frustration in his pleasure. Greater honour could be gained with different wounds. “At least it got me a medal. It’s in here somewhere…” With his free hand he started feeling the pockets of his pyjamas. “They hand ’em out like biscuits these days.” The thing looked fairly paltry, a limp ribbon in blue material, on which a metal coin was visibly ashamed of itself.

 

It had become oppressively hot. Outside there was thunder. My mother was fanning herself with an old newspaper and doing her best not to glower too blatantly in our direction. The man next to her had fallen asleep. The first thunderclaps drowned out the increasingly faint noise of the guns.

“And next?” I asked.

“Back to London, probably, to recover. Daddy’s Mighty Arm pulling me back across the Channel. Visit Auntie Margaret. Have tea and ginger biscuits in the parlour. Sing hymns. Walk on the beach. Eternal boredom…”

“Sounds great. Will you come back?”

“Of course, love. Can’t stand Albion any more. Nothing there. It’s like living on a ship. Besides…” He flashed his grin again. “I’d like to try a few more Belgian delicacies…”

“I’ll keep you to your word, Mister Herbert.”

A sentry came into the corridor and shouted, “All clear!” The people got up, straightened their coats and adjusted their hats or caps. The patients around us scrambled to their feet.

“See you in the morning?”

I nodded. “We have to leave after lunch.”

I left him and went to my mother.

“Well, well,” she said sarcastically. “Isn’t that ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir? What a coincidence!”

 

We went upstairs. The room was wet. The rain was leaking in through the smashed window. We slid the beds away from the window, towards each other. She lay down and pulled the bag under her head as a pillow. I cuddled up to her on the other side. She had kept her coat and her shoes on like me.

I waited for her breathing to become calmer, and waves of sleep to come over her, but after a while the mattress began to shake softly. She was sobbing.

I put an arm round her trunk. Through the thick material of her coat I was met by the whalebones of her corset, as if it were not my mother, a living being that I felt under my palm, but a creature of steel. I knew that she didn’t want me to say anything, so I just pressed my arm more firmly against her ribcage.

Outside there was the sound of men’s voices. Glass slivers being swept into a heap. The faint thunder.

She had stopped sobbing. Sniffed.

“Try to get some sleep, Maman,” I said.

She said nothing, but shifted position.

“You do know, child,” she said suddenly, “that I brought you along so that you could see him?”

I wondered how she knew. Had the aunts got wind of it?

“Your uncle won’t hide many more secrets from his dear sister,” she said, as if she had read my thoughts.

She took a deep breath and I could feel her lungs swell under the laces of her corset. She swallowed. “And I can’t see you eating yourself up with worry, Hélène. I’m not a monster.”

She turned onto her side, arranged the bag under her ear and the weight of her armoured body drew me along in her wake.

 

ONE OF THE TORPEDOES had left a deep crater in the sand between the wards, torn the head off one of the sentries, riddled another with shrapnel, and blown tiles off the surrounding roofs, smashed windows and left a bas-relief of scorings and impact holes in the walls; and when that morning we, my husband and I, rolled my brother on his wicker bed on wheels, like a grotesque pram, to the promenade, soldiers and orderlies were still pushing glass slivers ahead of their brooms across the floors of the wards. One of the projectiles hadn’t exploded and was lying asleep in the sand, surrounded by barbed wire, flanked by a sentry who occasionally looked at the thing as if he were taking his dog for a walk and waiting impatiently for him to do his business.

It was a mild, sunny morning. My mother, after breakfast and a short chat with Edgard, had gone for a rest, and the nurses said that, if I liked, I could take my brother out. Most patients were taken to the promenade or the dunes in fine weather, to expose their healing wounds to the sun and the disinfectant iodine in the sea air under a thin, protective gauze. They sat on benches against the sides of the walls, looking out over the road to the promenade, some at first sight unscathed, others sometimes no more than a torso on which a head looked round alertly, with so many decorations on their pyjama tops that I wondered what the current exchange rate was: how many grams of metal for how many pounds of lost flesh?

“Poor devils,” said my brother, who felt himself rather hard done by with his Croix Léopold, however prestigious that decoration supposedly was; but nevertheless he had pinned the thing prominently on his breast pocket and now let himself be wheeled around by my husband and me like a reliquary in a procession. I pushed, my husband pulled with his free hand on the front of the wicker crate to guide the wheels more smoothly through the soft sand.

Everyone wanted to enjoy the September sunshine that morning. Ahead of us, far away over the broad, flat expanse of wet sand, under the supervision of a man on horseback, figures were marching to the music of a small brass band, and the sea wind carried snatches of the melody across the beach. Around us nurses were walking along, chatting arm in arm, and a child, a girl of about ten, under whose skirts only one leg stuck out and whose head, with flapping plaits, was like that of a doll with a paralysed neck, wobbled alarmingly to and fro as she limped enthusiastically on two crutches towards the beach, observed some distance away by a slim woman in an elegantly tailored coat, probably the mother.

It was quite simply a peaceful scene, and an equally peaceful, melancholy September morning, and for the umpteenth time during that war I was amazed at how quickly we, having just a few hours before hidden from fate’s wings, threw the everyday routine like a tough carpet over the craters and the dead—and I still don’t know whether I found that a form of grace, a sign of indomitability, or a kind of self-anaesthetizing, the calm of a sheep that, in the vicinity of a pack of wolves, too close to escape, summons up a glorious fatalism and looks its fate calmly in the eyes.

*

We found a quiet spot, out of the wind, backing onto one of the wards close to the promenade, looking out over the sand, and parked the basket chair against the wooden wall.

“Now, my little gazelle,” said Edgar, sitting up. “Your brother would like to test whether his legs can still carry him…” He spread his arms wide, signalling that he expected us to help him out of the basket.

“Is that a good idea, Edgard?” I asked, because I could see that he was weak. His face, half hidden under the gauze, had that white, fragile glow of frosted glass which long-term pain makes show beneath someone’s features and which seems to push the eyes deeper into their sockets; and when we had helped him out of the basket chair—it had been an effort, since he could scarcely move his right leg and he had raised it from the blankets with a single swing—it was now obvious that he was having a dizzy spell. He stood getting his breath back, hips leaning against that carriage, and looking around, at the beach, blinked vulnerably with his blond eyelids into the sunlight, and muttered: “Christ, vertical again at last…”

“I think we deserve a souvenir,” said my husband. He rummaged in the pocket of his pyjama tops, produced one of his small cameras and threw it to me. They stood next to each other, against the edge of the wicker basket, my husband so enthusiastically that he took my brother by the hip with his free arm and pulled him close, which produced a suppressed cry of pain from Edgard.

“Sorry, mate…”

 

And that’s how I saved them for posterity, one in salmon-red striped pyjamas, the other in grey and white, stuck together in front of the wooden wall, my brother more or less overwhelmed by the tall, thin figure next to him, the angular shoulders, the slender arms, the long, long fingers in the material of his pyjama top, pale and unsteady in contrast to the healthy complexion and that aura of boyish invulnerability which would never leave him, who was to become my other half, would make him immortal while he was alive—and when my husband said: “I could kill for a puff” and I handed him the packet of cigarettes I had bought the day before at the station, and he offered my brother one and then held the burning match between them like a restless moth fluttering in the lantern of his fingers; and when the match, his last one, went out and he held his own cigarette against the glowing tip of that of my brother, who was a good head shorter—he looked like a stork chick being fed from its mother’s beak—I took another snap of them, and I saw how my brother absorbed with his eyes that serene face, the closed eyes that concentrated on the cigarette, the hand resting lightly on his shoulder, the two medals that seemed to be trying to outdo each other, one red, the other blue—he etched it on the copper plates of memory, looked lovingly at that mouth, my husband’s mouth; the lips that pursed round the cigarette end as they sucked oxygen through the glow, and then suddenly released spurts of white smoke. And I turned round, and I still don’t know why my heart swelled in my breast, why the distant sea, the jade-green sea, the white lacework of breaking waves, the constant din of the surf, the empty beach, that vast nothingness, that breath of space, filled me with almost desperate euphoria—why, why? Are my eyes wet, Rachida? Are my glasses misting up? Why? Do you know that line of flotsam on the beach after a storm, have you ever seen that? The long, winding ribbon of pieces of wood sculpted by sea worms and cutting sand, that pure chance, that narrow congregation of bottles, the leg of a doll, the arm of a pair of glasses, the bladderwrack, shell grit, the sea anemones and lengths of rope at the furthest point reached by the waves the night before? As a child I tried to read them, I wanted to break their Morse code, to recognize in all that had been washed up a single sanctifying connection that would breathe life into all that had been drowned. Why can’t I free myself from that image, so long ago, that afternoon, also on the beach, the first of the many excursions that we were to make that summer, we thought, without knowing that it would be the last excursion for years? Why do I hear again the calm rushing sound, the seagulls, the ethereal rustling of the pages of the newspaper that my brother is sitting reading in his beach chair? I see only his legs sticking out of that upright wicker basket, his bare feet and his toes that are rooting nonchalantly about in the sand while, at the extremity of his rolled-up sleeves, the wind stirs the paper in his fingers. In the distance I see children in their navy-blue swimming costumes under straw hats with ribbons splashing through the tidal pools, and on the handle of the parasol that she has planted firmly in the sand my mother’s palms resting, while, leaning a little forward, she looks out with her slender neck, over the butter-yellow sand, the azure, the sea: content, not to say happy—and it is as if I hear my father’s breath, the rush of the air in his lungs, beneath my ear, under the material of his bathing suit rough with salt, my father who, so we still thought, for a little while yet, would be joining us in about ten days. And I can also hear the sigh my mother let out when, that evening, after we had dined on the promenade, eaten ice cream, taken a last walk, she and I arm in arm, my uncle came to collect us in the coach. My uncle, not the coachman, because he had been called up—and my mother had let out that sigh.

 

I hear her voice; she is saying: “Ah, this is where the sunworshippers have hidden themselves…” as she comes round the corner of the ward, Miss Schliess, looking deathly tired under the white sail of her wimple, next to her with arms folded.

“I’m going to put you back in your box,” says Miss Schliess to my brother. “You must lie down. I don’t want to see you bleed again. Do you, monsieur? No? Good. Then let me tuck you in, love…”

My mother motions that I can go. “Take your knight for a tour. He likes that, I think. Can you manage by yourself, patriot?”

“Sure I can, ma’am. Sure I can…”

 

We walked along the beach, some way from the houses, in the direction of France, past the villas reserved for His Majesty in the silver-green dune grass.

“With any luck they’ll kick ’em back out the same way his grandfather came in, les Boches,” he said and took my arm.

“What do you think about my brother?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno… Will take some time to get straight… Convalescence, probably. Deeper inland. If they’ve got a job for him, at some desk or other, they’ll keep him and otherwise your mum will be seeing him again very soon. Permanent sick leave or something…”

“And you?”

“I’ll be back… Soon as I can. I’ve only spent one of me nine lives, Miss.” He looked at me and smiled. “You haven’t got rid of me yet… Back to being the press boy. I’ve had my share of shells by now…”

We continued in silence, I liked the nearness of his body, his hip that occasionally touched my trunk, as we adjusted our gait to each other, his arm under my palm.

“I still have to thank you for being such a knowledgeable guide, the other day.”

“I’m sure the pleasure was mostly mine, Miss.”

“Should try it again then…”

“By all means…” His familiar grin reappeared round his mouth. He took a puff on his cigarette, stretched his neck, pursed his lips, blew out the smoke. “I like you, Helen… I really, really do… But I wouldn’t want to hurt you in any way… Can’t see me lingering on a sofa one day, comfy slippers on me feet, the missus boiling the kettle. Know what I mean, love?”

“We have staff to deal with that, don’t we?”

“You know what I mean, Helen.”

I knew. Every minute we had been together I had weighed his soul in my hand, tested its density, tried to detect its lightness, its darkness, and however little I knew of him, I liked his specific gravity.

“We’ll see. One thing at a time. Perhaps one day we’ll discover we’ve silently made our arrangements, without the slightest annoyance…”

He bent his head, lifted my chin with his index finger. Briefly pressed his lips on mine.

“Arrangements, Miss?”

“You know what I mean.”

We turned round and walked back along the beach. In front of us lay the old hotel. The belvedere on the roof, surmounted by a dome. Above the wards at the foot of the building was the windowless side wall, with the lettering “Grand Hôtel de L’Océan. Prix Modérés.”

We both looked at it at the same time, and though we said nothing, we knew we had more or less the same thought: that the price we’d had to pay up to now had been pretty reasonable.

 

WE WENT BACK regularly later, when the pavilions had been demolished, the doors of the guest rooms had been hung back on their hinges and on the tables silver and earthenware replaced the surgical clamps and trepans. We always went at either end of the season, the loose ends of summer when in most establishments the tables and chairs were under canvas, sunk in their winter sleep, or in the last days of spring, while everything was still waiting a week or two for the great awakening. It seemed to suit him and me, and we became creatures of in-between times.

We said: in a hundred years’ time the war that was ours will have worn away as completely around the monuments, the photos, the diaries, the letters and the tombs as the bones of the dead in the ground, leaving at most a discoloration in the sand. We didn’t yet know that meanwhile the soldiers for the next conflict were sleeping in their cradles and that tomorrow’s cut-throats were hanging on their nannies’ skirts, playing with blocks or in shabby attic rooms licking their wounds and writing bitter treatises in the lethal ink of resentment. We said: if we could come back in a hundred years, we would no longer recognize the war, its elusiveness, its totality which made countless small lives dance like needles in its magnetic field, would meanwhile have been reduced to a handful of images, numbers with no flesh on their bones, place names and data—can’t we ever do anything except sooner or later tell fairy tales burdened by footnotes?

“I don’t know if I’d like to live to be 100,” said my brother, who sometimes accompanied us to the place where my husband and I had stayed; but I was the only one to experience the fact that you don’t even have to grow very old to see the silent erosion spreading, to see the veterans of that time, that ever-thinning row of crutches, artificial legs and wheelchairs, jingling with medals, give a shaky salute around an eternal flame or a cenotaph, while His Majesty, himself wobbly on his feet because of his new plastic hip, lays a wreath of mourning among the names of the dead and missing.

 

My husband would definitely have put his hand on mine at this point and concluded: “It’s inevitable, love. Inevitable.” On one of those trips we saw Miss Schliess again, at a table by the big window of the restaurant; against a plaster sky she was feeding spoonfuls of pudding to two babies who, with their copper-coloured hair and freckles, seemed to be the spitting image of the strapping fellow next to her, the type of Englishman that radiated the blushing good humour of a good side of roast beef. Obviously she had put her Henry to bed for good, and I never dared ask her if he had a grave somewhere or was one of the others whose names are engraved on a marble wall.

We need tombs, something tangible that covers the dead person, blocks our entry into Hades, a sacrificial table or a dish of incense in which we can burn the feeling of guilt after we, in the caverns of our mind, have shot the dead, who have already died once, in the back, in order to be able to carry on. How many have spent the rest of their days crying in back rooms, while working in the kitchen, in their sleep, surrounded by dead ones without a cradle because the urns burst at the seams and the Dies irae sounded puny in a world which, without help from above, had brought to life with flair the horrific medieval visions of the Day of Judgement? And here I lie, on my back, on the bed, on a slow afternoon, in a distant corner of the globe where for the time being it is sunny, virtually cloudless, the streets cooled by the gentle, refreshing breeze that the weatherman predicted primly this morning, while under my window life goes calmly on somewhere halfway between nine and five—how risky and salutary our capacity for forgetting is. But how many dead people have I myself kept alive for too long and condemned to the twilight? Why are there so many absent people in my dreams? Why do they still not enter the rooms that are waiting for them there?

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.

“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.