Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

My uncle coughed politely and retorted, stirring his cup, that for that reason alone he hoped fervently for a speedy peace. “If it continues for much longer, no elephant will be safe from my sister…”

We laughed. The aunts joined us. After our arrival they had withdrawn into what they called their “boudoir” to be able to dust themselves more liberally than usual. It wasn’t every day, they said, that “ un vrai héros ” came to visit.

He actually blushed when they said this, and when I recall them now, dressed up and all, with the busy elegance of Chinese earthenware, they move me increasingly often. Whereas I used to make fun of the nest of ribbons and make-up and sentimental magazines that they spun around them, I experienced only much later the doggedness with which they preserved that frilly dream world, their own bastion — with as much assiduousness as a beaver its dam. And I believe also that they offered my uncle a charming kind of consolation: his two child women, about whom everyone speculated whether they took turns in his bed — not least my mother, who just hoped that the uncertainty surrounding that would last for a long time. I think that he saw them as pert exotic birds that from their chosen cage flew circuits through the house and sometimes moved him by landing on his finger in order to please him with their chatter. Now, after all that time, they fill me more and more deeply with melancholy. Sometimes I have to fight back my tears when I remember them as they cut the thick materials that my mother quickly ordered when war broke out, cooing and twittering. Why should the rituals with which they tried to arm themselves against the course of events be any more ridiculous than ours?

“Tell us, Colonel,” they cooed. “How long do you think it will last, the inconvenience?…”

“Impossible to say, mesdames,” he replied. “Everything is stuck, stuck fast. We stare at the military maps and think we have a full overview. But on the ground it is, well…” he shook his head and looked into his coffee.

“Chaos” was perhaps the word that he had wanted to use, or “hell”, or another term that he quickly swallowed, probably because he was thinking of my brother, and my mother’s concern.

“We’re definitely doing our best to console the poilus ,” cried my aunt. “Isn’t that right, Yolande?”

“We write letters,” nodded Yolande enthusiastically. “We wait and we hope, and we write. That is woman’s patriotic duty. Those lads are crazy about us…” They nodded simultaneously. With their plucked and accentuated eyebrows their faces were like two masks.

My uncle stretched his fingers and studied his nails at length. “Another reason, monsieur, why peace must come soon. I hope those poor devils don’t conceive the plan of visiting their marraines … They’d have the shock of their lives.”

The aunts protested.

“I’ve posted your latest epistle, Yolande, child,” my uncle sighed. “A lot can be said of you, but you’re not exactly a voluptuous brunette.”

My mother raised her right eyebrow, her moral eyebrow, meaningfully, but said nothing. She also wrote. In a much more businesslike fashion than the aunts. Letters about the energy it required to keep hearth and home more or less ticking over. “Her soldiers” replied to her communications faithfully, if fairly briefly, and usually the correspondence was short-lived. Probably her epistles offered too few illusions, and I myself was not allowed to write to soldiers who were total strangers. My task was to keep family deeper in France informed of our day-to-day lives. Corresponding with lonely trench warriors struck my mother as too risky. “It starts with sweet words on paper,” she once said archly, “and ends with lots of panting and exclamation marks on the sofa…”

“Peace,” sighed my uncle in resignation. “When the money’s gone or the people revolt. Or conversely when the people are gone and the money gets restless. A war on credit needs peace sooner or later…”

My husband nodded and mumbled, more to himself than to us: “Lives are cheap these days…”

After coffee we walked through the Lost Wood. My mother had told me to show him round a little. I led him along the winding paths through the tree trunks upward, to the edge of the treeline, from where you could look out eastwards over the landscape.

We did not say much, after the cooing of the aunts. We sometimes looked at each other from the side and smiled shyly when our glances crossed. Of course my mother had taken the opportunity to question him at table: what his father did — a doctor in a London suburb. Whether he had brothers and sisters — he was an only child. His mother? — died early, he grew up with an aunt in the north, because his stepmother didn’t like him very much. She was moved, I could see. He was now given some of the love she usually reserved for my brother.

I liked his silences. A lone wolf. Learnt to fend for himself from an early age. Busy surviving, in the lee, the shade, the twilight. When I got engaged to him, my father took me aside and asked me — the cliché blared round our ears — if I loved him.

“I love his tragic quality,” I replied.

My father asked if that was enough.

I kept the answer under consideration.

*

When we reached the top we stopped on the verge of grass under the stragglers of the tall trees, next to the field of barley that rolled down at our feet, and looked out over the countryside. Clouds hung almost motionless over the fields and wooded banks, the distant roofs. When there was an east wind we could sometimes hear the thunder of the distant front line at home, weaker than when it blew from the west, which it usually did. On clear days you could see weak plumes of smoke rising all the way on the horizon, and at night there were vague flashes of light, as if the same storm were always hanging over the earth. That afternoon it was peaceful and quiet. The wind sang in the stalks, listlessly stirring the ears.

He came and stood next to me and sought my hand.

I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Perfect setting for a kiss, monsieur?”

“Definitely…”

It wasn’t a kiss to wax lyrical about, more a short confirmation, almost businesslike, of the bond between us there had been at our first meeting. He let go of me afterwards and stood with his back to me, with his hands in his pockets looking out over the landscape.

“Looks like England,” I said. “But with a French accent…”

He turned round. “A bit like you then…” he smiled, over his shoulder.

HE SHOWED ME the fronts, later that summer. We had waited until my mother had gone with her two sisters-in-law to see relations near Paris for a few days, a trip that was quite difficult to get under way, and I approached my uncle with the excuse that “Monsieur Heirbeir” had invited me to the coast for two days because he had some leave.

“Ah, une affairette …” he had exclaimed, as he pushed back his chair and stood up from behind his desk in the library with an excited “ Finalement! ”, since his yearly attempt to subject me to a subversive education was obviously finally beginning to bear fruit.

“Two days at the seaside, two days at the seaside,” he said, pretending to sulk. “It’s a start, I assume. Be careful, ma fille , but without taking it too far… I have to say that, as ambassador of Her Maternal Excellency, but the simple libertine in me has his rights too…”

He came to pick me up early in the morning, in an open-topped car; the day was still unpolluted and smelt of grass and dew. He did not drive into the courtyard but waited a little way off to avoid the maid, Madeleine, who might be on the prowl. He had everything with him to make the cover credible: the cameras, the bags, the papers; permis for the cameras, for myself, passes for this and that, where necessary illustrated with the photos he had taken of me a few weeks earlier in the church — I only wondered much later, without ever asking him for clarification, whether he had planned everything, whether our re-encounter had been so accidental. Guests were to visit the front zone that day. We never drive in a group, he said, but spread out. “I’m risking my neck, Helen.”