Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Etienne Leboeuf never drowned in the mud, rather the reverse: it is his small, compact body, the body of a bull calf, which sucked up the mud into itself. I imagine him in the trench during a howitzer attack, passively silent, pressed against the wall of his hiding place, under the rattling corrugated iron which makes only a thin division between his squat figure and the hell above his head. Etienne Leboeuf must have seen pagodas of clods of earth, the short-lived Maya temples of earth and old corpses, tree trunks and roof tiles and foundations and cadavers that rose up where the projectiles landed and exploded with a force that no one could imagine, not even Etienne Leboeuf himself, who, passive as a calf during a storm, sat out the tempest, crouched in his hollow in the ground, and did not move, just squeezed his eyes against the seething earth or the splodges of intestine of the man — the only incident Etienne Leboeuf ever talked about — whom he literally saw blown to pieces next to him.

Etienne Leboeuf counted himself lucky when my uncle took him on as a hand on the farm after the war, excited as we were about anyone who still had all his organs, and he was grateful to my uncle that, unlike lots of other farmers, he didn’t worry when he sometimes took off during threshing or when one of the horses was being shod with chilly hammer blows — sometimes, during the food break, outside at the long table during the harvest, Etienne Leboeuf would drop his knife or spoon onto his plate and run to the barn, during churning or the beating of the threshing machine in which the stalks were ground up. He left everything behind and disappeared for a few hours. Who will point the finger at the girls, the young widows, the others, all those women, who eventually found out where he hid and strolled furtively across the farmyard to the hayloft, climbed the ladder and only had to see the blanket of dry grass under which the lad had hidden shivering under the juddering that seized his limbs, the tremors with which the war, his war, offered itself in vain to his memory, wanted to rid itself of his tissue and blood vessels to be finally born in language — the flesh that weeps and trembles before the word, but the word that cannot deal with that quaking fear.

Who will speak ill of the women who stripped Etienne Leboeuf from the hay like a newborn infant from its membranes, and took his head in their hands, close to their sultry bosoms, and cradled him, and stroked his forehead, and kissed his turned-up nose, and at the same time ran a hand over his belly and unbuttoned his fly to knead his sex until it was purple and throbbed in their palms, and pulled up their skirts and sat astride him in order to rock the deaf-and-dumb wound in his body to sleep in themselves — Etienne Leboeuf, who fed on sex like an infant on its mother’s milk. Who knows how many times his life was saved by copulating, in the barn, behind the fence or in a stall where a girl perhaps found him hiccupping with fear under the limbs of a cow, half slumped on the milking stool, fingers frozen round the udder? It happened to me more than once that I quietly retraced my steps because in the dark, under the low beams among the cattle, I heard stammering, groaning, the whispering voice of the woman who pulled his trousers down over his buttocks there against the feeding trough and with her hand took him inside her — and who knows in how many spots, hidden or not, furtive or not, the same thing happened? Countless times probably, the crucifixes or holy water fonts merrily bouncing along on their nails in the wooden attic wall with the pounding head end of the bed beneath, on which one body found protection in another body, the dance of two terrified monkeys.

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My brother said later: the brothels are doing even better business than during the war — the whore was the last refuge for the man without a leg or hands, or the dribbling Cyclops who was once the best-looking man in the street. Who will deny him the consolation of knowing himself squeezed by warm, wet flesh, and dare to find it ridiculous that the poor man grasps the all in all far more divine trembling before his glands empty, and seizes the short moment of oblivion, as gratefully as Socrates his cup of hemlock? I know what I’m talking about, in that respect I have not fought without glory — there should be monuments for them, for the countless men like Etienne Leboeuf and their consolers, Etienne Leboeuf who, as it happens, later married one of his mistresses and in his fear fertilized her no less than nine times. I still see him coming out of church on Sunday in the village where his family lived, his wife on his arm and surrounded by his family: girls who look like their mother and sons with the same squat body, in their eyes the same innocent calf’s melancholy as their father, around whom they throng to wheedle a few cents for sweets — and Etienne Leboeuf himself, who at that moment sees me standing under the lime trees in the church square and greets me shyly from behind his bastion of children: still just as taciturn, but calmer, because safe.

It should be a warm, pulsating monument for him and his motherly mistresses, and all those they represent: a memorial that honours the ecstasy and the slightly laughable banality of our copulations; and anyone who threatens to find this suggestion obscene should ask himself which one he chooses of the two reactions to which that stupid war led, for which the bed and the war cemetery can happily serve as symbols. When that deluge of ammunition and mud and rubble finally ebbed, it left shipwrecked people behind for whom the world had collapsed and who had understood the message: that it’s better to seek salvation by crawling away from history, either in calm happiness, or in the wombs of the masses, the sweet anaesthesia of the collective. That is the land I saw being revealed after the blood and destruction, and fortunately this time God was wise enough not to stretch a rainbow over the new earth.

Obscene is the word that I reserve for the view of a market square where, after the bang of the fatal impact has died way and the worst of the groaning has fallen silent, the sparrows are copulating again on the shoulders of the statue, and in its fixed place in the sun, on the window sill of a bourgeois house, above the smudges of blood on the pavement, the cat licks its coat clean as if nothing has happened. Obscene the rows of soldiers’ helmets that I see on a dyke in the first few months after peace breaks out. My husband helps me through the omnipresent mud. He warns me to put my feet where he has first put his and not to deviate from the slippery path of planks, under which I can hear the sodden earth sighing at each step. He carries his camera on his shoulders and looks to see where he can place the tripod. The water that flows past under the dyke has the same grey vocabulary as the landscape through which it is seeking a path: ochre-coloured, dull green, dull brown under a cloudless, obscenely brilliant sky — it doesn’t seem like water, but like gastric juices, fermenting under the lead weight of the sky in earth shot bare. Nowhere does a roof line or row of trees disturb or punctuate the horizon. Everything that could delight me about that countryside has gone: the long, long processions of poplars, the trunks and tops bending obliquely with the wind like a procession of the blind leading the blind, and the shy villages that huddle around the church towers like piglets searching for their mothers’ nipples.

The helmets lie in rows on the slope of a dyke; I don’t even know if they are Belgian helmets or German. I think that we are near Diksmuide, the place from where the salvoes boomed through the coastal plain the day I met my husband, under iron angels’ wings and the clattering and my hysterical laughter. The fronts were right next to each other, divided only by the river, at most about thirty metres. I point out the helmets. They remind me of turtles that have crawled ashore to dig a hole in that earth that you can’t really call formless, rather disgustingly pregnant with every conceivable form, and lay their eggs — as if, as if I definitely say, the earth, monstrous placenta, is kneading new life forms, unimaginable hybrid creatures from the mud and the bodies it has sucked in, to populate its bare, obscenely bare surface. Perhaps he can photograph them, because I still believe that you can’t suggest anything better in pictures than in a picture from which the main thing is missing — but what is the main thing? He has to photograph the war, but how can you capture the nervation in an upheaval that not only travels through the ground, but through millions who have been left without sons, fathers, brothers, fiancés and husbands?