Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Why should it be different with people, or with the words that I see clinging together here with some disgust? It is as if I have never been able to shake off my mother’s admonition that I was hopeless at needlework. A firm tissue laces itself as if automatically to the pincushion of this page. I see my thoughts take the form of sentence constructions that accommodate an enervating abundance of furniture, curtaining and supporting cushions like the stuffed interiors in which I grew up. Even the voices of my father, my mother, my brother and myself start speaking again as we thought we should speak to each other: with an eloquence that betrayed how closely we listened to ourselves.

Maintenir was the key concept of our class. We didn’t have conversations in those days, cultured people maintained them. We didn’t give dinner parties, we maintained a table. We did not enjoy reading, we maintained our knowledge of literature. We didn’t have friendships, but formed affectionate attachments, maintained the best relations, strengthened connections; we maintained, we maintained and we told ourselves that this was in no way a duty, or a mission, or even a choice. It was quite simply a fact that with the deaf and dumb inexorability of gravity worked equally on all things at once.

And from all that maintenir the whole edifice of civilization rose up almost as a matter of course, as natural and unconsidered as the wax that honey bees secrete, and of which their honeycombs are made. Although without the diligence of our own class, we thought, this fine-meshed labyrinth of wrought iron and plate glass, all that architectural know-how, would naturally never have got off the ground. We regarded ourselves without any hesitation as the salutary middle way. Without us the world could only go under in the anarchistic tumult of the mass below us, or evaporate in the drawl of nobility and old money in the stratosphere above — we kept things in balance.

“So God, if I’ve got it straight,” laughed my brother, when I talked to him about my personal theodicy over a glass of mint water, “has actually created the ideal thermostat in the bourgeois.”

I laughed heartily with him.

*

However butterfly-light and refined that vanished world considered itself, it had a weight. It weighed on me and on everyone. Everywhere, whether we want to or not, we always carry a whole globe on our shoulders. And, just as in my childhood I regularly visited our basement kitchen to find a less artificial dimension of life in Emilie, our maid, not least in her rough dialect, which, I felt, sounded “more real” than our language, so almost everyone longed, secretly or not, for a form of release from the sophisticated lacework that we at the same time “maintained”.

There was a hidden thirst for some form or other of ritual laxative: a collective cleansing that would greatly benefit the metabolism of our civilization. We obviously had to remind ourselves at regular intervals that, all things considered, we remained apes with clothes on, who in a circus of our own making jumped through hoops and threatened to forget that we were basically swinging on creepers and eating bananas. That would greatly improve our health, though admittedly we lost sight of the fact that a person, besides being too sick, can sometimes turn out healthier than is good for him.

Be that as it may, I liked the evening hours, especially in early summer, when the blue turning to purple moved in from east to west behind the increasingly elongated sunset, and in the cafés and restaurants around the station the lights were turned on, while it was not yet completely dark outside — the moment when the pigeons go to sleep and the bats wake up. The city became an area of transition, a twilight zone on the unstable boundary between day and night. The bow was a little less taut, the yoke lifted from the shoulders.

*

“And soon the minister will put his nightcap on,” I said to my brother as we both sipped our supposedly well-earned refreshment. “And the market-stall lady, and the bishop and the greengrocer. And then the curtain will fall, and the rest is silence.”

My brother was silent, but under his nose his milky moustache went to and fro in a lively way on his top lip, an expression of my father’s which he must have noticed and which he may have been deliberately imitating. He liked to make an impression of worldly wisdom on me. When I said something, I saw him thinking and running through a large number of possible answers in his head — for or against, usually against.

He brought his glass to his lips, drank a mouthful and looked out over the square in front of the station, where the last street trader was loading his wares onto a handcart, and sniggered without looking at me. “Dear girl, dear girl,” he chortled. “Either your eyes are full of shit, or you don’t get out enough. When it gets dark is when the show starts.”

He knew more parts of town, more layers and hemispheres than I and perhaps my mother. He was probably less familiar with the establishments that seldom advertised themselves as such on the outside, but behind their closed fronts hid a world of abundant plush, subdued red lighting, intimate boudoirs and painted girls, than with the meat market, which at once more and less visibly took place around the kiosk in the town park, in the vicinity of certain urinals or in certain cafés where an unwritten code of behaviour, facial expressions and phrases gave a double meaning to everything said or not said.

Later, after the war, he would point it out to me as we walked arm in arm through the park. What to look out for. What the signals were. Ways of hanging about. All too furtive glances. Where you sat down, on what bench and how.

I don’t know if he told me everything. Perhaps he sometimes pulled my leg, so that in almost every gesture, every detail of clothing I suspected a fascinating iconography of male lust.

“The advantage of the war,” he said to me one day, “is that there’s always enough meat to be had nowadays.” We had sat down on the bench near one of the smaller ponds in the park. He still found it difficult to walk. For the time being long walks were out.

The “meat” in question had gathered on the other side of the pond, on the shadier benches under the trees. It was getting on for evening, a twilit evening in late spring, hesitating between winter and summer. Soon it would become too cool to sit still.

Much battered flesh. Armless or legless. On crutches or, like my brother, forced to use a walking stick, whether or not permanently. Some of them looked very young. With the only hand he had left, a chap who I think was my age, in his early twenties, a flare of straw-blond hair in the blue shadow, was rolling tobacco in a cigarette paper that he pressed tight with a lively interplay of his fingers, brought to his mouth, moistened, pressed again and — it was almost like juggling — rolled over his thigh for a moment with his palm, and put to his lips again. Then, again with fingers like a busy spider, he dug a match out of a box in his coat pocket. Only when he lifted his leg and scraped the match over the sole of his shoe to light it, did I see from the folds in his other trouser leg that he had a wooden leg. He brought the flame to his cigarette, sucked it into the tobacco, and leant back while he simultaneously exhaled a first cloud of smoke and extinguished the match by waving his fingers.

“Poor devil…” I said.

“He’s one of the lucky ones,” was the reaction of my brother, who like me had sat and observed the whole scene.

I thought that by the less fortunate he meant the dead. But he shook his head and said. “That’s something else. Dead is dead. They have wounds. They can blame their misfortune, strange enough perhaps, on the arm or leg they are missing. Or on their scars, like”—he smiled faintly—“this old horse here next to you.”