Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

“Behave yourselves, children,” my father had exhorted us, while he had lifted up my own summer hat to give me a kiss on the forehead. “Don’t give Maman any grey hairs. She has more than enough already…”

“Brute…” my mother had growled.

He had bent down to avoid her hat and kissed her behind her ear.

“We’re off,” she had finally said. She had given her sister-in-law her arm and had gone downstairs with her to the front garden, and we, my brother and I, had followed at an appropriate distance: her train-bearers, her exotic dwarves.

I could say that I remember that morning so well because this farewell, no more dramatic or trivial than in all the summers since my earliest childhood, would happen to prove our farewell to the world as we had known or imagined it up to now, and that the subsequent events serve as the acid that etched the scene of our departure deep into the engraving plates of my memory — or perhaps even the events that were happening elsewhere at that very moment, under the same azure of Europe’s last summer: the young lad who slid the bullets into the magazine of his pistol, touched the grenade in his coat pocket and maybe felt his heart pounding in his chest.

The truth is that I have never been very good at goodbyes, a greatly underestimated art. When I was still just a tot I showed, on family visits, a tendency to hide when the time came to return home. I was not driven by curiosity to be able to spy or eavesdrop on my relations to find out what they would say about us the moment we left the house. Nor did I hide because I liked those visits exceedingly. The houses of my relations, certainly on my father’s side, were invariably temples of boredom, or better: they contained so little mystery that boredom immediately lost its radioactivity and in a trice halved to dull dreariness.

Real boredom, you see, has something saturated about it — a crimson darkness, a full emptiness. It is the small valley of the shadow of death in our breast, through which we must wade to achieve resurrection. I have never read from any other reason than boredom, the limbo before paradise, and perhaps my urge as a child to consider myself impossible to find was connected with this. For I wanted not just to know, I wanted to see with my own eyes how things would look without me. I wanted to be able to view the world in the light of my absence, and I believe that I wept and stamped my feet so angrily when my parents finally pulled me out of my hiding place, because even then I realized the impossibility of that desire. And yet all my life I have gone on longing for that non-realizable salto mortale of the mind — that ineffable homesickness for an abode in my own absence.

I know what my mother would accuse me of now: “It always takes you hours to send someone on their way.” She said it often, when she asked for my homework or asked me to add something in my own hand to the letters she wrote to relations in France. “Do get to the point…”

My father on the threshold, under the sloping glass roof in the open doorway. Between the railings of the banisters around the steps that lead to her cellar domain, half hidden behind the hydrangea: Emilie’s face. Before she withdraws into her quarters, she stands ready to wave as soon as the coach leaves. Above is the blue, the deep blue that sharply outlines roofs, treetops and chimneys; I still wonder how my father would have dubbed it if it had occurred to him to play one of our favourite games: assigning a name to the morning sky according to a jointly invented and extremely arbitrary classification, and again in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening too. We had already had skies of Saxon porcelain, and the dullness of crêpe de Chine, and buttermilk skies and zinc heavens covered in plaster. Perhaps that morning, after having peered out of the window for a while with his eyes theatrically half closed, he would have called it a bleu européen , and turned to me with raised eyebrows, as if consulting an eminent colleague.

He was to follow on at the end of July to holiday with us, until from September onward the town gradually awakened from its summer sleep. In this we were following the habit of the well-to-do. Everyone, by which I mean those who populated my world, fled the town in summer and sought accommodation in the countryside. The country, which for the rest of the year I won’t say we saw as backward, but certainly as archaic, underwent a transformation in our heads as the summer months approached and became a place where life was still uncomplicated. The air was pure, the milk fresh, time twirled on its own axis.

I too was not wholly free of that enchantment. I was already longing for the imperial months of July and August. In my imagination a year took the form of a wheel or a clock face, and if you picture the twelve months of the year as the hours on that clock face, then there were two moments in the year when time in my experience moved slower: the dark months in the depths of winter, and the majestically stationary days in high summer. Every hour had its own character for me in those days, its own intensity of light, constantly changing depths of shadow and colour patterns, and no summer was ever more generous with contrasts than the summer of 1914.

On the platform my mother and Tatante had embraced again at length. This time real kisses were exchanged, since my mother had already taken her hat off in order shortly to be able to enter, without too much manoeuvring, the compartment reserved for us.

If I could go back, if the gods were to allow me to re-experience something of that day, I would content myself, and not out of nostalgia but purely for my amusement, with just the sounds of that morning — the slamming of the doors of the carriages, the porters who shouted to each other in our broad local dialect as they unloaded the luggage from the handcart and passed it to the men in the luggage car, the hissing of the locomotive which was already under steam, and now and then blew clouds of white mist from its wheels over the platform, and in the background the ever-present heartbeat of the living town, the music of which at that time did not yet consist of the roar of engines, but of the flamenco-like rhythms of horses’ hooves on cobbles.

My mother had already boarded the train. Tatante put her hands on my shoulders and gave me three kisses. Edgard, who the whole time had been nonchalantly standing, reading the papers he had quickly bought, got on behind my back. He now thought himself too old, almost eighteen, still to let himself be cuddled like a schoolboy.

“See you in September,” said Tatante. “Enjoy. What a summer.” It was a quarter past ten.

The stationmaster gave the signal for all passengers to board. The last doors were slammed shut. The driver sounded the steam whistle and with a slight judder the train started moving.

Tatante stayed on the platform, waving. I found my way to the aisle, because I knew that as soon as we were leaving the station my mother would let down the sunblind in our compartment, and I wanted to look out, feel the town sliding off me and experience the sudden transition from built-up areas to open country.

The haymaking season had begun. Between the fences the meadows lay sweltering in all gradations of green: dark and shiny where the grass had not yet been touched by the scythe, fading to yellow and white where the mown stalks lay drying in the sun. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, farm labourers and girls wearing caps or shawls against the heat were turning corn, putting it into stooks, or filling the hay wagons, which as their load piled up looked more and more like Chinese galleons. It had to be done quickly. Although it was Sunday morning, there was thunder in the air. The dew must evaporate from the stalks before the rain came.