Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

The din died away again.

He pushed a handkerchief towards me. Khaki.

“Thank you, sir.”

I accepted the handkerchief, dried my eyes with it and was about to return it to the stranger, but he waved away my gesture. He was twenty-five at most, as big a child as I was, now I look back on it.

When I translated what he had said for my mother—“the cannon, the cannon of Diksmuide, Maman, he says there’s no danger”—he switched effortlessly into a French in which only a slight accent gave him away as British.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Force of habit.” He straightened his back to shake hands formally with my mother and me. “Matthew. Mathew Herbert.”

“Marianne Demont. And this is my daughter Hélène. She’s a serious young lady, Monsieur Heirbeir, but today she seems to find everything très amusant .” She was still upset, like me.

“It’s all right,” he smiled. “They’re aiming for Dunkirk, mademoiselle. They’re trying to hit the harbour.” He looked up for a moment and glanced through the window behind our back, in the direction where the town must be. “People will be having their tea in the cellar today, I fear.”

I could see that my mother wanted to ask him something, but at that moment the panes started vibrating again. The matron grabbed the side of her lectern, almost without thinking. The maid quickly stretched out to push a stack of plates deeper onto the shelf. The waiters sought the proximity of the walls.

“It’s all right…” he repeated, as he came and sat on the chair next to me, and when the ticking of the windows changed to clattering and everything juddered again, he laid his hand on mine, a gesture that did not escape my mother, and gazed into my eyes.

I looked at the raven-black curls on his forehead, the slightly pursed lips, pronounced cheekbones, and his deep-brown, almost anthracite-coloured eyes, which focused steadily on mine.

“It’s all right,” I read on his lips, since the din drowned out his words. And for the third time I heard the iron wings coming down over us, and felt the shivers from the bottom creeping into me, moving from the floorboards into the walls, from the walls into the ceiling, and from the ceiling into the candelabra over our table. And it was as if I too came to a halt. I felt his fingertips pressing so hard on mine that they had white blotches when he withdrew his hand.

“It’s all right,” his lips repeated.

HE CAME TO COLLECT US that evening, a little after dark, after asking us before he took his leave if we would like to accompany him on a little excursion to the roof of the old casino at the top of the hill. “We do it frequently, madame, for special guests. It breaks the routine a bit and I can smuggle you in.”

We were to wait in the drawing room of our boarding house, since civilians were not allowed in the street unaccompanied after sunset. My mother was suspicious, even though he had told her that his intentions were completely honourable. When after eleven a party of ten people, five of whom were civilians, gathered in the square in front of our boarding house, she was reassured.

“As you can see, Madame Demont,” he said, “I have two arms in good health, and two legs. And…” he winked at me, “while my legs are carrying me upward, my arms are available for you and your daughter, to give support, of course, should the walk prove too strenuous. At times it is on the steep side…” He spoke with a hint of his native tongue in his words, and the slight emphasis on all syllables of someone in whose mouth a foreign language does not undergo the wear and tear of daily conversations. He was also shy and tried to hide it.

“You need as many words as my daughter to explain something,” laughed my mother. “And you’re forgetting that I’m from this area. I must have climbed that mountain a hundred times before you were born.”

She pulled her gloves on jauntily and as she descended to the pavement past him she added breezily: “ Allons-y, mon enfant .”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” he retorted, clearly charmed.

The party got moving. We walked ahead of my mother, next to each other, and giggled conspiratorially at the conversation that developed between her and one of the soldiers, who had decided to keep her company. He treated her to such platitudes about the “wonderful evening” and the “splendid view” that lay in store for us, without considering that my mother spoke scarcely a word of English.

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying, jeune homme ,” she replied stoically in French. “But I’m sure we agree.”

The evening could indeed be described as more or less wonderful . The full moon hung above the rooftops and gave the contours of the blacked-out houses the look of massive objects, all equally colourless, bathed in tints of grey and white like us, who seemed to be walking not through a real world, but a world of used-up light that must once have been reflected from things and was now travelling, more and more ethereal, through space and time.

We said little. Sometimes I felt he was looking at me and sometimes I looked at him — the moonlight made his face pale and his eyes even darker. When our eyes happened to meet, we exchanged a shy smile, and we listened to the sound of the footsteps on the cobbles.

Now that the slope was getting steeper and we gradually began to climb above the roofs, the conversations petered out. Only somewhere at the front did an imposing lady, an American who by the sound of it was reporting for some magazine or other, go on indefatigably expanding on the other towns close to the front, which she and a taciturn thin man, who seemed to stand in the same relationship to her as a flagpole to the flag, had obviously previously called at. She regularly voiced exclamations such as “Thrilling, dear captain!” or “Ghastly!”—eruptions at which the two of us giggled every time, more to feed our own silent understanding than out of pleasure.

I liked him. I liked his serious fun, or his funny seriousness. Later, when he told me about his life, I seemed to know everything already, as if his story had been able to transport itself to my mind, perhaps via my fingers, that afternoon, and was waiting there until he stuck words on it.

Undoubtedly my mother would have said now that I need a lot of words to make clear what is obvious: “You’re in love, child. A blind man could tell you that.” But what does that word mean? Once, twice or three times in your life you meet a person who rearranges your molecules in a trice, someone who manifests themselves as the question to answers piled up in you from long before you yourself could think, and whose existence you had never before suspected. And the only choice you’re given is to answer the question or ignore it.

“Are you getting tired, patriot?” asked my mother sarcastically. “You are getting under my feet a lot. If you need my arm, just call…”

He laughed. “I’m fine, madame.”

The houses gave way to trees, coolness and the enclosed smell of the forest floor. The front of the casino gleamed between the treetops, almost bright white in the moonlight.

“Almost there, off we go…” said the soldier walking next to my mother.

I had often been there in my childhood. Sun-drenched Sunday mornings with parades by the brass band on the small promenade in front of the terrace, and afterwards lemon sorbet or lemonade. My father liked it here. The spot, I think, stood as a symbol of his marriage, his love of my mother, whom he was fond of calling jokingly “ La Belle Flamande ”, just to hear her protest — she thought herself as French as Camembert.

“ Vive le Roi Soleil ,” she would cry because, had Louis XIV been a little less hungry for land and wealth, she would indeed have been a beautiful Flemish woman. Our families were located more or less within the borders of the old County of Flanders, invisible, many times redrawn by history, that eloquent expression of chance, where Latin and Germanic mingled promiscuously. Without the Peace of Nijmegen they might have remained compatriots, and my mother would have had to appeal to different mythologies to distinguish her from us. But I was as fond of the spot as she was, because my double origin lay at my feet there and that hill marked the watershed in my soul — the externalization of my own creation myth.