Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I won’t deny that the sight delighted me, but the countryside has always been more to me than a charming set, although that day it was doing its level best to look like a set, complete with the wings of wooded banks and distant fields sliding slowly past the windows. When I was still a child my mother’s older brother had shown me, during the evening walks he went on with me around our summer house, that everything that surrounded me there existed in the first place for its usefulness, and the beauty that I worshipped in them was rather a by-product of use, a nice extra, yes, but unintentional. No tree or bush, but it would be uprooted sooner or later to provide wood for beams or tools, or twigs for weaving the multiplicity of baskets in which eggs, vegetables, fruit and poultry were taken to market. Even the hedges that divided up the landscape into pleasant rooms served first and foremost to keep pests off the fields and to protect the crops from the heaviest buffeting of the sea breeze, not to please me or my father, who in the countryside sought mainly the proof of the accuracy of the paintings he liked — which naturally pandered to his tastes. The canvases of young painters, on the other hand, who in the years just before the war began increasingly to knead their peasants and fishwives in paint, who made the paint into a dark clay in which they modelled figures, he called crude and rough, as I gaped at them open-mouthed. For me they precisely showed the soul of the land, the impersonal clay of which we are all made. Breathlessly I observed the work of time on those canvases. Over the years I saw their areas of colour crumble away as slowly as a landscape, thunderclouds become even more thundery and the ploughing or contemplating figures weather under those skies into animate lumps of matter.

Of course I was jealous, and I still am. Jealous of the painters, of their vocabulary of colour. Jealous that I can’t grind language fine in a mortar and make it fluid or thick as I see fit by mixing it with oil, or create a new colour by adding some powder from one word to some powder from another word. Jealous, too, because there is no language with which you can first apply a base, which continues to glow though the tissue of colour that you apply on top. Jealous because I would like a language that carries no meaning, but above all intensity, a meaning that transcends meaning, and which you must not so much read as survey, with the literacy of the eye, the erudition of the retina. I would not house those words and stories in a notebook, but in a kind of album: a sketchbook in which as you turn the pages you come across a miniature, then a genre piece, pages full of studies; fantasies in grisaille, marine skies in watercolour, so ethereal that the texture of the paper contributes — and then again sheets full of shadow, rooms at night, darkened rooms on the edge of abstraction, where a doorknob pierces the darkness with a pinhead of light, as realistic as the glitter of the watch chain that struck me in the darkness of one of the compartments, when I turned round in the aisle after my mother had sighed, “Helena, come and sit with us. You’ll look so much you’ll go cross-eyed.”

If she had been able to read the preceding lines, she would undoubtedly have taken off in annoyance the small pair of reading glasses she needed in her later years and grasped them impatiently in her fist as she said to me in pique: “Do cut a few Gordian knots, and put some full stops here and there. A sentence isn’t a sausage.”

The rocking of the carriage and the music of the wheels on the tracks had put everyone in a sleepy trance, that mixture of waiting and expectation, impermanence and tempered impatience that goes with travel.

I sat down. My mother was reading the book she took with her every year, some Guide pittoresque des chemins de fer , containing all the sights we passed en route. Obviously she didn’t mind not being able to see any of it, behind the lowered sunscreen.

My brother had dozed off. I took the papers off his lap without waking him.

“Is there anything in them?” asked my mother.

I shook my head. “Not much. Just love scandals.”

“Oh, well…” She giggled and shrugged her shoulders. “If there’s anything worthwhile, read it out to me.”

There wasn’t much. The boredom of the summer seeped through the columns. Adverts for boarding houses on the coast. The calendar of brass-band concerts in the park and the names of artistes of the umpteenth class who would be performing at the casino, with medleys and popular operettas. A short announcement that His Majesty had left for Switzerland for a few days. A letter in which a boastful gentleman, who was organizing a sports festival at the seaside, praised the soul-strengthening effect of “gymnastic clubs” on what he called “our young generations”, which immediately prepared them for the burden of working life and the discipline of the barracks. “In particular,” I pronounced the words with some sarcasm, because they sounded so official, “in particular the moral aspect of gymnastics must be stressed, since anyone who puts steel in his muscles will almost automatically be proof against the temptation of late-night bars and drinking dens, where so many young men can have only unhealthy ideas, caused”—I cleared my throat—“by a siren call of immoral and anti-government principles…”

“Bravo!” concurred my mother.

“Where is that festival?” asked my brother, sitting up languidly and rubbing his eyes.

“Ostend…”

“God, then we’re going entirely the wrong way again…”

It became hot. Behind the sunscreen the noon light blazed and the dry air in our compartment smelt more and more strongly of the woodwork and the velvet of the seats. My mother had sunk back a little and had closed her eyes. I rested my head against the side of the carriage, so that I could see the landscape gliding past between the sunblind and the window. Sometimes the train slowed and came to a halt at a main station, to take on fuel and water. Then there was a swarm of children’s heads thronging beneath the window, blond quiffs, pigtails, fingers tapping the bottom of the window glass — until the stationmaster chased away the young devils simply with the severity of his uniform.

Sunday in the country. Peasants in their Easter best, waiting on the platform under the lean-to. White starched shirts, black suits, caps. Behind the station usually a square, dazzling in the noonday sun, a small garden, crowded cafés, gleaming roofs and, invariably rising above them, a spire. During the week you could have heard the shuffle and hollow ring of clogs on the paving stones, certainly early in the morning, when the farmers’ wives went off to sell their wares at the markets, and you would also have seen the young men going to work in town. If they had wanted to, they could easily have travelled almost right through the country in a day, and nevertheless be back in their own beds the same evening. The railways in my fatherland, which had branch lines going even to the most remote hamlets, guaranteed everyone optimum mobility, with the paradoxical aim of keeping everyone as far as possible in their place. That’s how it seemed that Sunday. Everything had its place, everything its time.

I looked at my mother, dozing on the seat, the index finger of her right hand between the pages of the book in her lap. In her later years she would become the kind of expanding matron who to her last breath squeezed her shape into the old harness. At the last, when she was ill, hollow-eyed and grey because of the cancer eating away her insides, it was as if she had no bones any more, but was only kept upright by the fencing of her underwear, from which her body, whenever I undid those hooks and buttons, seeped out almost like mush.