Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

My mother was curt that afternoon. She felt I should also make myself useful in some way in times like these and to her taste I was doing so with too little enthusiasm. A few weeks before she had entrusted to me, under her supervision, the care of the chickens in the basse-cour : cleaning out their runs, giving them fresh water, feeding them, collecting the eggs and counting the chicks. I told her that I thought chickens were stupid creatures, almost as stupid as turkeys. She retorted that chickens were not reared for conversation: “You’ve far too many posh sentiments, dear child,” she had concluded, in a tone that suggested good nature but had been audibly marinated in vitriol for several days. She was wearing a straw hat and held it on her head with one hand as she ticked me off. The hedge on either side of the narrow, uneven path sometimes came up to our ears and the twigs threatened to pull the hat off her crown. I myself wasn’t wearing any headgear. Summer had passed its climax; blackberries were ripening in the hedge. It was the time of the spiders, and they were already hanging like treacherous stars in their silk necklaces, rocking back and forth on the branches in a lazy breeze.

After a while we had fallen silent. My mother’s irritation had ebbed away. When we were on holiday her angry turns were generally more fleeting than during the rest of the year, and in all those years that we were separated from my father, her periods never assumed the dimensions they did when we were at home, as if her whole being at that time was imbued with the deep concentration which also seized her the afternoon that Amélie Bonnard died, while we descended along the path and she watched where she put her feet, so as not to stumble and to avoid her skirt getting caught in the hedge.

Below us the village lay glowing in the afternoon. The roofs reflected the sunlight, which was already beginning to take on an evening hue, and just outside the built-up area the clouds cast patches of shadow on the meadows and the ruminating cattle, which themselves seemed scattered like rusty brown patches in the grassland under the azure. Beyond the village, in the west, above the coastline which on some days I could see even without a telescope, above the invisible sea, the sky was deeper in colour — a blue like a guttural sound.

I can understand why my daughter, later, during the next war, on that Sunday morning when we are standing together at the window in the drawing room below, waiting for lunch, and are looking out, to where spring on heat is blowing an abstract painting of chestnut blossom down the street — I understand why she says: “I thought it would rain any day…” As if war is just as much a meteorological phenomenon and the heavens supply our tragedies with fitting decors — but it is a deathly still afternoon at the end of the summer of 1915. In the hedge alongside the path the first crickets are starting to chirp, among the lowest twigs behind the nettles and the grass sounds the call of the shrew, ready to hunt beetles or worms.

First we had heard whistling and we both looked up, and stretched above the top of the hedge, but saw nothing. Then a bang followed, and another: short, hard, dry. Instinctively we dived for cover behind the hedge, and when we looked up again there rose from beyond the roofs of the houses round the church at the edge of the village two fountains of rubble and smoke, I can’t describe them any differently, two claws that for a few seconds climbed above the roof line and then subsided.

As the impact reverberated there was other noise: fragments landing on roofs, breaking glass, barking dogs, voices calling to each other, not in panic, more excited. My mother and I hurried down, attracted by the commotion and without stopping to think if we might be running a risk. We reached the first back gardens, where the path forced its way between two houses, to the square around the mairie —and I remember that I suddenly found it all so ridiculous, Madame Ducarne’s vegetables in their straight beds behind the hedge, the last runner beans and the young winter leeks and the bolted radishes with their flowers, an armada of butterflies sailing around them, next to Madame Ducarne’s ever-open back door; on the lid of the rainwater drain under the window of her kitchen the wooden bucket and the eternal hoe.

*

Between the houses: the boiling square, women walking past with their aprons, stained from their daily activities, still on. Men point to something in the sky — the place where the impact blew away a chimney and smashed it on the cobbles below, as it turns out when my mother and I arrive breathless in the square, just in time to see the girls. The oldest are carrying the youngest, the youngest are crying, the oldest are putting a brave face on it and calling out: “Amélie. Amélie Bonnard fell and she’s lying there…There!” Arms are outstretched, fingers point in the direction of the church, a few side streets farther on, in the square with the lime trees. The women walk in that direction, my mother and I in the rear. The girls follow, calm the fear of the little ones, and dry their tears.

Above the back of the church there hangs a cloud of dust, ethereal dull red, yellow ochre, grey-white. “In the field there,” cry the girls. “She’s lying in the field.” Only when we walk past the church onto the lawn do we see the hole that has been knocked in the wall, and the lopsided crosses on the tombs, and the smoke rising from the nave of the church — one of the bombs must have fallen right next to the choir, on the narrow gravel path that divided the back of the chapel from the first row of graves. I heard later that Monsieur Bossuges, who had been buried about three weeks before, Monsieur Bossuges, a gentleman of private means, self-appointed dignitary, who had had a tomb built while he was alive in which the accumulation of cherubs and other feathered creatures supported the assumption that he expected a certain esteem in the hereafter also — Monsieur Bossuges, it was said, was hurled out of the hole that one of the bombs had made in his pathetic one-man mausoleum and was found in his best suit, without footwear, hanging right across the tomb of Mademoiselle Bernier, former schoolmistress, as if he had tried to clamber over a stone fence to lie beside her, which in my uncle’s opinion wasn’t even that improbable. Monsieur Bossuges and Mademoiselle Bernier lived very close together and when they were alive, all kinds of things were whispered about them which, my mother felt, would have been a lot less interesting if people had simply said them out loud. “In any case, dear sister,” my uncle commented, by way of conclusion, “who on earth has himself buried with his glasses in his inside pocket?” What truth there was to all this I never knew, my uncle was not averse to exaggeration, and when we bury Amélie Bonnard a few days later, the mairie has had all the rubble cleared and the craters have been filled with it. The glazed tips of the wings of Monsieur Bossuges’s angels gleam like children’s teeth in the sand.

Because of the rouge it looks as if Amélie Bonnard is not dead at all. Because of the rouge and the earrings, and thick winter coat over her summer dress, she looks like a child very accurately playing dead. It takes a while to find her, flat on her back, an unsightly bundle of blue-grey serge amid the copper-coloured grass of the falling evening. She must have turned round at the last, wanting to retrace her steps, because she is lying with her feet in the direction of the gate in the hedge and the dusty country road, arms next to her trunk, a last convulsion still in her fingers under the thick sleeves of her coat. The eyes, vacant, stare at the clear sky without seeing the clogs and socks, the grazed knees, the skirts of the women, or the face of my mother, who kneels down by her and superfluously, since everyone knows that Amélie is dead, puts the back of her hand against the child’s cheeks, the powdered cheeks, and then turns her hand over, and strokes Amélie’s forehead to close her eyes, and then with the chin in the hollow of her palm pushes it against Amélie’s upper jaw. “Someone should tell Marie,” she says without looking up, and when she gets up again I see she is close to tears — but it isn’t necessary to call Marie, more people are approaching down the country road. Above the voices and the footsteps Madame Bonnard calls, “Amélie, Amélie! Where are you?” as she walks towards us and wipes her hands on her apron, covered in smears of fat from her work at the butcher’s, and pushes her way through the people, the men who keep an embarrassed distance, the children whom she pulls brusquely aside until she is standing next to my mother and in turn sinks to her knees by her daughter, blushing from the rouge, the earrings glistening in the grass—“Silly child…” she hisses in a voice that is breaking.