Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

My wrists are getting stiff. Rachida, child, bring me some fresh tea and rub my hands warm. You must know those districts better than I do. In my later years I asked my daughter to take me on trips through town in the car. My legs were already too bad even to walk to the tram stop.

I remember the children playing on the pavement, as lively and rowdy as when I was actually a child myself. They squatted on the kerbs, intoxicated by a total sadness, as only children can abandon themselves to a melancholy which cannot, yet, be measured out in the liqueur glasses of our words.

From the doorways and open windows on mild days smoky kitchen smells still drifted out, not of potatoes or milk, but spicier, more piquant aromas. Spicy and piquant as the conversations that drifted out into the street with the smells — women’s voices, hand-clapping, everything was as full of life as it used to be, nylon summer jackets, and shopping bags that swayed above the pavement slabs next to bare ankles. In the pubs the men still hung around the bar, although less beer was served, and I remember a chubby chap coming waddling out of one of those pubs, with the most beatific smile on his coarse face that I had seen for ages, and opening his arms wide, looking up at the sun, and saying with a laugh, “Türkiye. Türkiye, madam. In Türkiye always so warm.”

“But Mrs Helena. I’m Moroccan,” she laughs in alarm, Rachida, and I reassure her: “I know, child, I know…”

When we walked past under the fortress-like walls of those factories, we could hear the machines out in the street. The hissing of valves letting off steam, sirens that marked an end or a beginning. The roar of engines. The tapping, the clanking, the universal rattling. But the town was so fragmented that scarcely a couple of bends farther on a sober gatehouse hid a different microcosm. Perhaps frenetic bustle prevailed there, but a lot quieter and more minuscule: the buzzing of God’s worker bees. How unreal to suddenly walk there under the treetops without a breath of wind, dripping in the lifting fog, and to hear deep snorting and grass being pulled out of firm ground, and jaws that chewed it all up and to see the shoulders of cows’ bodies resting under a deciduous tree; ruminating, ruminating, with a touch of nirvana in their pupils — and then to hear the clocks in the houses around the meadow striking the hour.

Elsewhere too there was the sound of carillons. Despite iconoclastic furies and other disasters there were enough monasteries and abbeys along the waterways of our town to shake out sackfuls of bell-ringing over the roofs at set times. It was reminiscent of the ethereal aerial combat of songbirds at dawn, the daily dividing-up of the firmament. And it was quite possible that the bells above the churches and convents were also doing battle, not with each other, but with the shrill whistle of the locomotives or the wailing factory siren, a music that threatened to disrupt the precious circular melodies of the divine.

I could try out all my speculations quite freely on Edgard. I believe he took pleasure in listening to me, amused by my increasing breathlessness — unlike my mother. Whenever during the gatherings of her sewing group I gave myself over aloud to my reflections, she usually said firstly that she couldn’t make head or tail of the nonsense I was coming out with, which of course pleased me, and secondly that I wasn’t allowed to philosophize until I was better at embroidery. According to her it was the same thing. In both cases there was a beautiful pattern and I simply made a mess.

For my mother everything revolved around substance. While substance, Rachida my girl, get this clear, is the least interesting thing about a person, an impure ore like any other; and nothing astonished me so much as the industry of the blast furnaces and the production lines for the assembly of the new man in the decades after the war.

Everything to do with what was holy was cyclical in those days. A symbolic representation of the unchanging quite simply has to bite its own tail if it is to evoke eternity. Even my brother and I unconsciously adjusted our pace when we walked through the narrow streets of that béguinage , arm in arm past the houses with the names of saints on their doors. In that closed universe even simple walking took on the character of worship.

The female inhabitants of this mysterious enclave rarely showed themselves even within the shelter of their walls. Yet there were places where high windows let in an abundance of light, and there you could sometimes see them at work, at first sight as still as the statues of the saints with which they seemed to surround themselves everywhere. With their heads in white linen wimples, so fine that they almost resembled pieces of milk-white mist, they bent over the pincushions on their laps, faces smoothed by deep concentration, and appeared to regard with detached amazement the work of their own hands, which, as still as the rest of their figures remained, juggled with bobbins of yarn, moved pins brightly and went on juggling.

Slowly their work gave birth to something best compared to what a spider would produce as a web, if it were suddenly seized by artistic pretensions: a gossamer-thin tissue that expressed, not only in every thread but most of all where those threads were absent, the essence of mysticism, and as such represented one of the greatest realizations of the artistic genius of humankind.

*

Nowhere, except perhaps in poetry and very occasionally in music, have I experienced a more intimate interweaving of something with nothing than in the lacework that there in the béguinages spilt from the ladies’ pincushions and descended in milk-white waterfalls to the woven baskets at their feet, flowed over the edge and fanned out across the floorboards, so that, in particular on days of very thick fog, those rooms, where only the gentle ticking of the bobbins could be heard, seemed to me nothing less than the secret maternity wards of our national mist.

Compared with this scholastic finesse of needle and thread, the sewing work of my mother and her friends represented little more than clumsy popular devotion, but more especially it seemed to me only logical that Belgium was not a country of embroidery or knitwear, but of lace. In a place where the art of lacking was practised so exuberantly and ubiquitously, something like Belgium was bound to be born sooner or later: a nation that was constantly playing on the fringes of its own emptiness, just as all of us, driven by our soul, our most intimate vacuum, have continually to knit ourselves together.

That was more or less the conclusion of our historians. They filled bulky volumes with explanations for the creation of our fatherland, wedged between north and south, east and west: a region whose specific feature was mainly the absence of specific features, where different spheres of influence operated as capriciously as the high- and low-pressure areas in their hopeless struggle in the sky above our heads. Those learned gentlemen usually came to the conclusion that if Belgium had not been invented, someone would have had to discover it.

*

“Helena, child, my little gazelle,” laughed my brother after a while. “Your mental gymnastics always make me thirsty. Shall we have a drink somewhere?”

We usually went to the cafés around one of the stations, never to the establishments which of course he only frequented when the night gave the streets a salutary anonymity. It did us good to feel our tiredness, the pain in our legs from the long walk, and we sank contentedly onto one of the terraces to be able to sit and absorb the life around the station square.

We liked the fragmentary nature of our home town, because we wanted to be fragmentary ourselves, free of the corsets into which the older generation wanted to force us, and I wonder why I should glue the pieces together here. In the museums, where Edgard and I sometimes sheltered from an unexpected cloudburst, the mouth or wing of a seraph on a shard of a stained-glass window from the Middle Ages evoked its figure more tangibly than if the angel had arisen full-length in front of us, high in the transept of the cathedral, where a stone or cannon shot had shattered it.