Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

“Is she asleep?” asked my brother.

“I think so…”

He got up and carefully pulled open the door of our compartment.

“Full bladder,” he whispered. “Got to take young Jim for a walk.”

“I heard you,” growled my mother, without opening her eyes, but her eyebrows expressed enough disapproval.

Only late in the afternoon, when we were eating something in the station buffet of the place where we were waiting for a connection, did we notice that the commotion in the square might be about more than Sunday exuberance. On and around the terraces of the cafés people were conversing animatedly.

“I’ll go and see what’s going on,” said my brother, getting up from our table.

“Probably much ado about nothing,” said my mother soothingly.

He was gone quite a while.

“It seems the Crown Prince has been murdered,” he said when he came back.

“Ours?” my mother responded in disbelief.

“The Austrian one. In Serbia. He and his wife. Some lunatic shot them down.”

He sat down again, folded his napkin in his lap and took a bite of his roll. “There’ll be another storm in the east.”

“There are always storms,” said my mother light-heartedly. “ Quand même , it remains tragic. Poor souls. No one deserves that.”

I did my best to find it tragic, but I couldn’t manage to retrieve the human being from the few photographs and prints from the paper. They showed a tall fellow with fairly puffy cheeks, a full moustache and a clearly delineated paunch around the navel. I thought he was a dopey-looking sort, certainly in dress uniform, with a helmet on his head crowned by a dead chicken. He had according to the press no mistresses, or other habits that required discretion, or the accompanying loose-tongued behaviour.

“ Enfin , we’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow,” concluded my mother, and I sensed in her words an undertone of eagerness that she usually showed when she read out the society section from the dailies, as if she were regularly invited to tea at every royal court. She called herself a full-blooded republican. “But if you’ve got kings anyway,” she was fond of saying, with her predilection for circular arguments, “you’ve got them.”

In her eyes our own queen, whom she sometimes sneeringly called that Wittelsbach field mouse, did not behave regally enough at all, but my father would then usually add: “They’re all odd birds in that aviary. People don’t grow up normally in a palace.” Only the Austrian Crown Prince, whom he had once seen on the promenade at Blankenberge, did he find a perfectly ordinary chap. “Absolutely no airs and graces. He greeted me as naturally as anyone of my own class.”

I tried to imagine them, the archduke and his wife, just arrived in death’s realm, side by side, each in an open coffin, hands folded, eyes shut, the horror of the fatal moment perhaps congealed in their flesh that had grown cold, but my brother disturbed my daydreaming.

“Excellent piece of roast beef,” he sighed, imitating my father. He had finished his roll and laid his napkin next to his plate. “And apart from that, there are plenty of Habsburgs, there in Vienna. It’s not the first horse they’ve had to replace.”

WE ARRIVED LATE in the evening. A servant of my uncle’s was waiting for us with a coach and there was another carriage for our luggage. As soon as she got out, the same transformation had taken place in my mother as happened every year. Her usual surly air had gone. I saw a lively woman who chatted cheerfully with the stationmaster, gave the porters a generous tip and actually spoke to the servants in the familiar “ tu ” form, in a French that sounded a lot less precious than at home, where it seemed constantly imbued with an undoubtedly didactic precision. Now, suddenly, the terse, clipped diction of her native region broke through in her sentences.

Even when the servant, after we had got in, handed her a basket containing a jug of wine and three tin beakers, she did not refuse the offer in an aloof tone but passed the basket to my brother. “Come on, mon ami . Pour us a drink…”

The servant pulled on the reins, and the coach began moving. The grinding of the wheels over the cobbles echoed with a hollow sound against the walls of the houses in the streets, where downstairs, behind the window, glass lamps were being lit, and upstairs open windows let in cool air and oxygen. In the market the chairs for that afternoon’s concert stood folded in rows against the walls of the kiosk and on the terrace of the local brasserie the last customers were emptying their glasses while behind their backs, in the illuminated restaurant, the landlord was wiping the chairs and putting them on the tables.

*

The evening was turning blue. It was not long before we had left the houses behind and the coach was taking us through the fields beyond the fringe of woodland that surrounded the town. There the smell of summer hit my nose, the specific odour of sand and grass and corn. The landscape rolled gently and in the shallow valleys the mist was creeping up behind the alders lining ditches and streams.

I took deep breaths and saw my mother observing me contentedly. She seemed to be revelling in the unanimity she presumed between us, delighted as she was herself to be able to return to the spots where she must have spent so many happy hours during her childhood. Perhaps she returned every year out of nostalgia, and although I took over the ritual from her for as long as the house in France existed — I accompanied it, like her, to its deathbed — it was never nostalgia for a bygone age that drove me there, or the longing to house the past in more durable accommodation than transient flesh or eroding stones. It demands an equally intense labour of the imagination to live in the present, as it does to evoke the past or probe the contours of the future. We make room, we create space. No one can appropriate time without accommodating it in an architecture of hope, or at least in the pavilions of fantasy, in order to provide it with rhythm and proportions, since everything is music. The beauty of the landscape that surrounded me that evening might, according to my uncle, be unintentional, secondary, but it filled me with great contentment — and if I could talk to him now, I would say that what stretched out all around me was indeed not purely natural beauty, but was beauty. Nothing was untouched by human hands, from the land itself, where the first inhabitants of these regions had picked up the roughest stones to make the soil workable, to the church towers, and all of that formed a vast, horizontal cathedral, on which men had laboured for centuries and which remained for ever unfinished.

“Aren’t you getting cold, child?” asked my mother. She got out a blanket and laid it across my and her knees. “We’re almost there.”

“I’ll keep warm, don’t worry about me,” said my brother, with feigned anger that he had to make do without a blanket. He refilled his beaker, and my mother did her best to look piqued, but she was too good-humoured to be convincing.

Meanwhile the road was climbing the familiar, gently undulating slope. The fields and the blooming verge, full of singing crickets, gave way to trees under which it was already dark. Farther along, where the wood thinned out again, we had our first glimpse, blue-grey in the twilight, of the wall with the gate and, just below the eaves, the small arched windows of the stables which during the day let a small amount of light in, so that it always seemed like night-time there. When I was very small nothing could fill me with such sublime fear as the eternal darkness in there, where you regularly heard chains clank, and something that breathed or snorted and stamped with heavy feet on the brick floor. And there was always that moment of breathless astonishment, of expectation and terror, when the grooms entered the stables and a little later came out leading horses by the reins — creatures that seemed not so much horses as locomotives of muscles and manes, and strangely sensitive skin which was constantly shot through with nervous twitches. They were huge, mechanical animals, Trojan horses, whose nostrils issued steam on cold mornings. Beside them the horse that pulled our coach seemed a frail ballerina. The animal began to snort and picked up speed now the destination was near. The servant whistled, behind the wall dogs started barking. The gate opened for us.