Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

In a side shed Monsieur Véclin was finishing Amélie’s coffin. The hammer blows that resounded from the workshop across the inner courtyard had something apprehensive about them, as if the silent presence of the maid Madeleine, who had taken my mother’s hint to keep an eye on things quite literally and went to look every few minutes, made such an impression that he was very restrained in handling his tools.

Only Madeleine could “stand” when she stood. She can stand still like the sun over the walls of Jericho. “She’s ‘standing’ again,” we would say when, passing the window of the dining room or walking across the yard with two buckets of kitchen scraps for the pigs, she suddenly stopped, the buckets in her hands swaying to and fro on their handles. No one could say with such relish as my mother that the maid was “standing” again. It wouldn’t surprise me if we had first heard the saying from her mouth, since it was as it were a concentrated tautology, the pinnacle of her mirror definitions. She could say “Madeleine is ‘standing’ again” with a subtle emphasis that was able to detach the verb from the sentence for a moment, so that it spread the echo of unsuspected meanings. She didn’t need metaphors. She could let the words “stand” as mysteriously as Madeleine could “stand”.

Now the maid is “standing” in a corner of the work shed, very close to the open doorway and the yard beyond, while she watches as Monsieur Véclin planes the rough planks, her rough hands in the pockets of her apron, and although she doesn’t appear to be paying attention to anything in particular, I’m certain that she registers every curl that the carpenter’s plane pushes ahead of it over the plank, from which rises the sharp smell of dry wood, the smell of the patience of trees.

Véclin wipes the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

Madeleine “stands” and watches. Soon she will report everything to my mother.

“A person feels like a big mug of cold coffee with a good spoonful of sugar,” mumbles Véclin, and adds hopefully: “…in this heat.”

Madeleine wakes from her ceramic inertia, swallows back, behind the vertical wrinkles that form a kind of throat sac between her lower jaw and her collarbone, a mouthful of spittle and from the sound of it very tough mucus, and says: “It’s too early. We don’t have coffee until later here, after the midday break. Go on working, copain . Help us bury the poor child quickly. It’ll taste twice as good.”

I wait until death dawns in objects, the naked hour when things lose their leaves and all becomes leggy and dumb, not able to clothe themselves with the habits or meanings in which we usually drape them — as if a short moment of symbolic weightlessness occurs in which the world forgets its coherence and God Himself washes his hands of creation so that everything shudders, eye to eye with itself. I wonder: is everything we do or don’t do ever anything other than modulated desperation?

At noon everyone withdrew into the twilight of the house, which seemed to rise from the cellar, where the child lay on the cold slab. Up in her room my mother has the maid help her out of her corsets — and I hear her snort in her sleep, here, in the afternoon of this story.

I wanted to sleep and stay awake at the same time, mount guard over things with the pomposity of our waking consciousness, but also to allow myself to sink into slumber, which like a good father knows us better than we want to admit and always remains realistic.

The roar of the guns, in the east, in the north, towards the south, mounted, ebbed away again, regained strength, a dull pounding, like that of giant fists on a table top far away. Sweat crept over my crown, through my hair, and ran down over the corners of my eyes, down along my nostrils. The pigs were baking in their terracotta mud bath, the cats spied on the deathly quiet explosions of the light through the keyholes of their pupils.

Only in Van Gogh did I rediscover those noons. His unstable suns and the sloppy Milky Ways in his black vibrating nights; the unbearable darkness which frightened him so much that he riddled it with stars as bright as the scorching luxuriance of the eternal noon of his madness. He knew the madness of the cats, but could not find their sleep, so the demon devoured him.

Noon is Emilie’s time. In her basement kitchen she undoes the apron, sinks down full-length on a chair which has long since given up complaining and whining about her weight, her prehistoric hips, and cools herself by waving her skirts — the sunlight makes the pans above the stove blush in their copper.

Noon is the smell of sea water, my father’s face hanging above the horizon of sleep, the bitter smell of iodine and the texture of sand that grates against my forehead in the hollow of his collarbone, between my calves and the long black hairs on his forearms — I feel his heart beating below my forehead, the beat of the artery in his neck. A little longer and the sunlight itself will clatter off all things, the photons will ricochet round like marbles — or my mother, whom I didn’t hear wake up, will pull me roughly by the shoulder and say that I am completely crazy, a religious fanatic, and isn’t one child enough to worry about, without knowing if he is still alive, if he is still unscathed and healthy.

She was not only my mother, the being who wove me from her own flesh and blood, a fleshy loom of generations. She was also, in an order beyond biology, the mother of identity. She wanted to establish me in the impatience that forces its way between us and the inexhaustibility of the world and the things in it, which as children we explore with the wings of Hermes on our ankles, and obliges us to compromise — impatience that charred in the afternoon, when praying did not help.

I’m sure that she taught me how to slaughter chickens or instructed me to help her wash the body of the little girl to point out to me that a human being cannot dawdle endlessly at the gate of infinity. One day we must turn round and, as it were, step back inside, accept the world in its external form and for convenience’s sake assume that all things are themselves: a chicken a chicken, a human being a human being — and as the chicken clucks, so a human being should obviously speak for itself.

I have never been able to become grown-up in this way and I remain astonished at the countless ceasefires that we sign daily, without reacting to the conditions with a curse or even the slightest sob, let alone a mocking laugh. But who am I? The kind of child that in the playground thinks the rules of hopscotch are for other people and convinces herself that her pathetic infringements win her admiration.

In the autumn when everyone became ill, I am helping my mother out of her underwear. While I strip her for her afternoon nap we start arguing — the only time we had a real argument. When I loosen all the hooks and laces from her corsage — the shell of belts and material falls off her, black as the wings of a bat (is it because she can breathe more freely that she bursts loose, breaks out) — I see her breasts lose their volume and spread out over her ribs. Her nipples look at me as if they want to say: forgive her, she is upset — and under the skin a soft emulsion shifts, towards the navel, around the hips (I think how beautiful she is, how bloody beautiful she is, my mother the swamp woman, certainly now she takes the pins out of her hair and her coiffure cascades with almost audible relief over her shoulder blades, a curtain of fine, long hair, a tapestry, chestnut brown stippled with grey).

I’ve forgotten why she bursts out, what exactly triggers it, why she is more sobbing that shouting, a sad rage that shivers out, through the fat on her hips, her navel, the tired breasts, the encrusted nipples (I think how beautiful you are, and why must you break down one day?). She refuses the nightdress that I hold up for her and try to pull over her head (I see her back in the mirror next to the window, the full moon of her bottom, the strand of hair that fans out above her hips). She stands there, fearful I would say, whining, eyes red, behind her back on the bedside table my father’s last letter before the war separated us. She covers her breasts with her arms — what is she trying to say, what is she shouting, what is she hurling at me in lumps, half word, half whining? She turns round, surveys herself in the mirror, pulls her hair over her breasts, Eve rejected, she looks at me with eyes swollen with tears, desperate — her hair seems to be streaming out through the window shutters (or vice versa, it is as if she wants to gather the whole battered world around her, the threadbare quilt of rows of houses, bullet holes, overgrown fields, streets with their damaged teeth of bullet-marked house fronts and the cemeteries and the graves and the dead and everything).