Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I like seeing how she is preoccupied with her work, the sacred calm that emanates from her concentration when she reveals the room and me to the day. While I breakfast in bed, she takes a dress or a number of skirts and blouses out of the wardrobe, always about three so that I can choose, and when I have made my choice she looks in the drawers and boxes on the dressing table for the earrings and necklace that go with them, because “being old, Mrs Helena,” she says, “is not a disease with us”.

The suppleness of her fingers especially can delight me. As one gets older the days increasingly assume the character of light-footed barbarities, peevish conspiracies against the liturgy of habit, in which the body becomes more and more hopelessly entangled. Her dexterity is like a consecration. The way she picks the earrings out of the velvet of their boxes, fishes the necklace out of the box and runs it over the palm of her hand to smooth out any kinks or knots — and I see myself again, on afternoons that are long ago now, going into my mother’s dressing room and, in the line of light that the half-open top curtains cast over the dressing table, pulling open the drawer of the chest in which she keeps her jewels, and the way that light at the bottom of that drawer, in one of the boxes, the lid of which has shifted slightly, makes a necklace slumbering there glitter with the treacherous splendour of a poisonous snake.

*

I find it a shame that I can’t see her at work when she is preparing lunch in the kitchen, how she peels onions, elicits baroque curly peel from potatoes, cuts carrots, chops meat, just as Emilie, in her brightly lit quarters in the basement, used to carry out her own sacrifices, or the maids in the house in France around the steaming oven set in motion a ballet of spoons and skimmers and guards, which unleashed its own music — and I wonder whether, who knows, she briefly interrupts her work without thinking in order to wipe her hands on her apron, a vision which invariably filled me with a strange ecstasy.

As time goes on I miss such ostensibly insignificant details of those who are no longer there. The thousands of tokens of the camaraderie or armed truce we enter into daily with life increasingly fill me with emotion. Usually I only notice them when they have died away for ever and leave me with the feeling that a whole language has been struck dumb, the complete vocabulary with which a person closes a book or arranges a dinner service like no one before or after them; or the way my husband used to slip out of the sheets beside me and run to the bathroom in the chill of the morning, pee standing up and produce a powerful stream because he knew it gave me childish pleasure, and then come back in in his boyish nakedness, with — forgive the word, Rachida — his prick at half mast between his thighs, and finally eased his bum into his trousers and with one hand swept the change on the bedside table into his other hand.

I didn’t venerate those things enough. I didn’t anoint them enough. I betrayed the mysticism of their everyday ordinariness. I just hope it isn’t one of the thoughts that I speak out loud by mistake, which has been happening to me more and more often recently.

She didn’t hear anything. First she took away the tray with the remains of my breakfast and subjected me tactfully to the ritual of defecation and cleaning, then put me on the chair next to the bed and now she is buttoning my blouse. As she does so, she bends slightly forward, so that were are almost looking each other in the eye, but she focuses on her fingers, which squeeze the small, mother-of-pearl-covered buttons into the buttonholes.

“And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.”

“What was that, Mrs Helena?”

“Nothing, child.”

She has almost finished. “Is that not a sight to behold?”

She smiles without looking up.

Her fingers rustle under my collar, against my throat.

“Those who can behold everything go mad, Mrs Helena.”

The day my brother died I knew as soon as she knocked, and actually even before. She had only just started working for me. I had heard the telephone ring downstairs. Almost no one called any more. She had answered, it took a long time. She had taken off her apron. She was wearing that long, dark-brown blouse I had seen her in often and underneath her black trousers. Instead of the wooden-soled slippers she usually wore at work, she had put on respectable footwear, mules. Her veil, which she usually wore round her neck like a wide shawl, hung loose over her hair with its dead-straight central parting.

She knocked, came in, closed the door behind her and stayed some distance away from the bed: “Your brother Mr Edgard, Mrs Helena…”

I didn’t let her finish. “So the bastard’s gone.”

I saw her go pale.

“Yes, ma’am…”

A month or two previously he came to visit for the last time. As usual he climbed the stairs in full regalia, or rather he hoisted himself up a step at a time by the banister, with all the accoutrements befitting a gentleman of his class, with the weight of his years in his made-to-measure but by now fairly baggy suit, and especially that still-elegant but perfectly useless walking stick under his arm.

The ascent took more time each week. After the death of my husband I offered to share a house with him on various occasions. What was the point of us each occupying a huge place, and in his case such a way out of town, in that admittedly extremely convenient property surrounded by a large garden, where the windows admitted charming light reflected by the river water, and where on the carpets and Kelims in the stairwell, the library, the drawing rooms a discretion shod in the softest leather constantly crept across the floors behind my back when I was still able to visit him?

He needed a quarter of an hour to get his breath back, and sat in his chair gasping and clearing his throat, the walking stick against the arm. The other stick, the one he actually used, an aluminium shaft with a rubber cap on the bottom, rested between his legs.

Rachida brought the coffee, thank God the nice set, on the tray with the silver. Not the plastic mugs that the other, that golem, digs out of the kitchen cupboard to give me the feeling that I’m a child who spills everything.

“Is Mr Edgard well?” she had asked, carefree as always while she put the cups on the drawing-room table, the jug of cream and the sugar.

“I’m like the donkeys, child. Their legs wear out first too, it seems.”

He had poured a dash of cream in his coffee. As he stirred it, he said: “It’s about time there was an end to it, if you ask me.”

Only when I felt Rachida taking my glasses off my nose to dry the lenses and I, after she had put my glasses back on, saw my brother looking into his cup in embarrassment, did it dawn on me that I must have called out and cried.

My hands were trembling. I saw Rachida’s helplessness, she was looking furiously for a single light-hearted sentence to break the embarrassed silence, and it went right through my heart.

Finally she went away.

My brother waited till she had left the room, got up and came over to me. As usual he tried to put his fingers under my chin so that I would look up, but I turned away and stared outside while he cursed my stubbornness.

“I don’t know, Hélène,” he sighed, “what matière you’re made of inside…”

Matière , I thought, how frivolous. But I said: “Concrete.”

A few weeks later came the news that he had broken a hip and was in the hospital with a prosthesis. Later, that he was to move into a boarding house. I wondered who had arranged that for him.