Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

On the south side the land seemed to descend to the Mediterranean. The sun, I imagined, already had in it something of the bright light of Provence, cicadas, cypresses and the myth of Van Gogh, who sought the essence of colour, beyond pigments, and whom I discovered only much later. Above the landscape that extended to the north of the hilltop the sky had an Arctic clarity, and, in the autumn, when the sunlight fell lower on the earth, the melancholy of summers close to the pole, where the nights dawdle in a sunset that spans the whole horizon.

When we were small my father would take my brother and me on his arm, help us onto the balustrade on the edge of the plateau and show us the old Roman highways that left the town like the arms of a star and cut through the landscape of the south in straight lines. On the other side, which he called “our side”, he pointed out the towns of the north. On clear days you could see them like brown-yellow dots in the plain below us, shimmering in the hot summer air: right in the distance Nieuwpoort, under the blue-white haze of the coastline. A little farther down, Diksmuide. Farther south-east the towers of Ypres. Below that Veurne and, closer, Poperinge.

That night the plain was bathed in the alabaster moonlight. Fog banks hung like vaults above places where ponds or streams wound round woods and spires with dew. There was an unearthly peace, the almost continuous thunder of the war was absent — we again knew what silence was.

We were taken to the entrance to the casino. Someone asked us to be quiet: “The boys are well asleep.”

A door opened, that of the gaming room which I vaguely remembered from earlier years. There was a smell of sleeping bodies. The high windows cast oblique shafts of moonlight onto the floors, retrieved from the darkness the folded patterns of blankets, a sleeve, a hand, a head. On all sides soldiers were lying sleeping, alone or having crawled together. From their footwear, which lay against the gaming tables on which their rucksacks were resting, the smell of earth, summer earth, of tent canvas, oiled steel and grass rose up to the ceiling with its frivolous plasterwork, which hung surreally above the sleeping figures.

*

“Careful, mademoiselle…” He took me by the arm when I almost stumbled over a pair of boots. As we went on, one of the sleeping soldiers sat up and whispered loudly: “Blimey, George. There’s a fucking fairy hovering about…” I was suddenly very glad that my mother didn’t understand English.

“Shut up, John. Get some sleep, willya,” grunted someone else.

”If you say so, sweetheart.” And the figure lay down again, huddling up against the other, because it was noticeably cooler up there than below in the alleys of the town, where the house fronts retained the heat of the day.

A second door opened and gave onto another room, where still more soldiers were sleeping, but less lit by the moon, which did not shine in directly here, but played in the tops of the trees. I heard the party climbing a staircase in front of us, a long set of steps, to the roof, it turned out, after we’d had to wait for a moment before the sentry allowed us to go farther.

When we arrived at the top the strapping American had already taken up a position by the parapet, where she was looking at the dark roofs below us. Exclamations like “Unimaginably peaceful!” shot through the night and each time the man next to her, who obviously never left her side, mumbled something affirmative from under his white moustache, though without much enthusiasm.

My mother had her companion lead her over to the other side of the roof terrace and we followed her. Before our eyes the northern plain stretched out under the haze of fog that was drifting inland, and shrank villages and towns which in one place we could locate in that blanket of mist and in another not. Areas of woodland and rows of trees created the impression that we were looking down at a model, with the cosy attention to detail one finds in them.

“Almost picturesque, Walter dear, wouldn’t you say?” blared the American woman behind us, and we giggled, and I thought of what my uncle had said. It was splendid. Splendid, but a shame.

My mother put a handkerchief to her nose and said to the soldier next to her that it was surprisingly cool up here.

“Quite so,” he replied, without having a clue what she was talking about. I knew she was thinking of my father, and my brother.

Then, in the far north towards the coast, more or less in the spot where my father had pointed out to us as children that Nieuwpoort should be, a red glow suddenly flared out of the mist. The fog banks reflected the flickering, which went out almost immediately.

Then bright white points of light shot hither and thither, though roughly in a crooked line from north-west to south-east, up to the zenith, and descended slowly as they extinguished, before suddenly dying out again — and again, now closer to us, then more towards the coast.

My mother kept holding the handkerchief under her nose, and I heard her sigh: “ Mon Dieu, mon Dieu …”

“Flares,” someone said. “They’re firing flares over the lines.”

No one spoke. Even the burly American woman had fallen silent and was standing close to the railing, staring at the spectacle through her lorgnette.

The silence became still more oppressive. There was no salvo or cannon shot to be heard, there was only that glow of lines of light, crooked needles above the landscape, and here and there the short-lived flash of what must be explosions, but without a boom or echo, and we looked at them as if at a natural phenomenon, as if down below on the plain the earth’s crust were tearing open and two pieces of land were grinding into each other or trying to separate.

At a certain moment almost the whole line was suddenly ablaze. Red and green flashes flared up from the coast to inland, new bullets drew tentacles of light through the night.

Someone behind us muttered, “Poor buggers,” realized there were ladies present and collected himself. “Poor chaps…” It seemed more intended to marshal what we knew with our intelligence against the fairy-tale beauty of those polyps of light, to remove us from the enchantment.

“ Mon Dieu, mon Dieu ,” repeated my mother.

We waited, he and I, while the others descended the steps. The sentry relaxed and, indifferent to the light show that was in full swing down below, lit up a cigarette, inhaled and blew out a cloud of smoke.

My mother was already on her way downstairs, too upset to keep an eye on me.

“What’s wrong with madame?” he asked.

“My brother’s at the front, monsieur. Somewhere there perhaps. The last thing we heard was that he had to go to Le Havre. We don’t get much post. My brother isn’t a letter-writer…”

He nodded. “Le Havre?”

“We’re Belgian, monsieur. And we can’t go home, to my father…”

“Sorry to hear that,” he said, as he closed the door behind us and the sentry bolted it on the other side.

I shrugged. “You get used to everything, monsieur.”

The rest of the party was stumbling downstairs some way below us. It was dark in the stairwell, after the moonlit night on the terrace.

He noticed that I was moving uncertainly down the steps. Occasionally our hands touched. I giggled and he giggled back, and I was glad it was dark as I felt foolish.

Somewhere on a landing he took me by the arm, I thought in order to guide me downstairs, but he pushed me unexpectedly against the wall. It went too fast for me to protest, or even to be surprised. I could feel the buttons of his uniform pushing against my ribcage through my overcoat and his own ribcage swelling and contracting to the rhythm of his breathing while he put his head next to mine and rubbed my cheek with his, and his breath blew warm in my ear.