Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Older boys watched with their hands in their pockets as the soldiers cleaned their rifles, fascinated as boys are by everything that opens on a hinge, clicks, switches and ejaculates. On their faces one could read regret. Their lower lips quivered with impatience because they were still too young to join the armies. The chaos that reigned there had only at first sight a festive air. The melodies were lifeless, the jokes dour. No one waved or lost themselves in teasing. Even the children were no longer curious, but worked the tents routinely, to the point of rudeness, to exchange an egg or a piece of bacon for some money or a jewel. The soldiers waved them away like flies. Above the treetops, the roads and the farmland hung the virtually continuous roar and thunder of the front; the sound was much less dull than at home. There was more texture, not to say architecture in the booming, which created invisible buildings in the heavens, domes, stone bubbles that immediately crumbled.

We left the hill country. Suddenly the frantic activity ceased and the plain was there, past the last board on the verge, repeating in raucous capitals the ban on hooting. The plain and its rows of trees, its slow processions of crowns. Its monk trees, its own parade of trunks. Beneath them clusters of men emerging from the crowds behind us, laden with backpack and blanket, helmet and rifle, on the way to relieve other troops. Somewhere out there, on the plain.

The plain that I no longer recognized, or only half, because it was no longer, or not completely, the plain where we used to come on excursions by coach with my uncle and the aunts, under the parasols of August, to the villages where we drank the idleness of summer from earthenware jugs, the bitter beer.

The villages with their towers, their sun-scorched squares, their ochre spires, which now seemed different villages, different towers; toy villages that had fallen out of the overfull toy box of a giant child while it had been lugging it across fields in boredom where old corn lay snapped over the earth, overgrown with grass tussocks and thistles. Roofs showed their skeletons, seemed to have rejected their tiles. Window shutters hung loose from the window frames in walls riddled with bullet holes. Somewhere there was a bluestone door frame still standing, there was something clownish, stoical about it, keeping up the appearance of a house in a heap of pulverized bricks out of which the beams stuck like bones. The battered houses, the towers from which a huge bird had pecked a piece, lay staring at each other across the wooded banks that had been largely shot to pieces like schoolchildren still panting after a skirmish, collar ripped loose, glasses trampled underfoot, sleeves torn at the seams — everyone was perplexed.

A wall of straw bales slid between us and the landscape, a dull-yellow wall glided past the car in places where the enemy had an unimpeded view and without that barrier would have shot at everything that moved, certainly cars, I learnt later.

I calmed my thoughts a little, looked at him, my husband-to-be, while he kept an eye on the road, the steering wheel loosely in his hand. I liked looking at him. I liked absorbing his profile, the nose and the lips and the chin, the hair that stuck out of his kepi and, behind his ear, shaved short, lay close to his skin. I liked waiting for him to look back, turn his head half towards me and say something, it didn’t matter what.

The straw wall gave way to trees, the road cut through a low hill. It was cool and dark, and seemed to be deserted. I don’t know how many we had passed before I recognized, in the patchwork of light and shadow patches in the undergrowth, not only tree trunks and bushes. Only when I detected movement out of the corner of my eye did I distinguish their figures in the shades of brown and green that slid past us. They must have pulled back onto the side of the road to let us pass. I had not seen them at first because they almost did not look like people, rather beings in whom transubstantiation from earth into flesh had not yet been completed. Almost-humans hiding under the trees in order to harden off safely in earthen clothing, earthen helmets, earthen cocoons.

Leaning against a tree trunk a boy with earthen fists screwed open a drinking bottle and brought it to his lips — how am I to describe the flash that animated his whole figure. The dark pupils did not look up but sparkled between the caked-together eyelashes, under the modelled eyebrows, from that face when he stopped what he was doing and raised an arm. At the moment he called something — I don’t know what, but the audible relief, the simple joy of being alive needed no language — his lips made fine cracks in his earthen mask, which flaked off and exposed the skin of his cheeks. A skin as dark as the night.

I remembered the shameless curiosity with which we had gaped at the “Negroes” when the war began and troops fairly regularly passed through the village and rested in the square in front of the mairie —the intimidating splendour of the cavalry with their multicoloured uniforms, their blood-red hooded cloaks and ornamentally harnessed horses, and the look in their eyes, by which every woman felt pierced as a dubious threat to her very ovaries. Even my mother proved not wholly insensitive to them. “It has to be said,” she said one day in a throwaway tone, “they’re definitely not unattractive, those savages.”

I was reminded of the hidden pride of Madame Gaillac after one of those dark chaps had come into her liqueur shop one afternoon and with a resolute gesture had laid twenty-five francs—“twenty-five!” she repeated at every opportunity, appropriate and especially inappropriate — on the counter under his rusty brown palm. The resulting confusion was only cleared up when the North African, with a gesture of the hand about which Madame Gaillac had for the sake of good taste to remain vague, indicated that he was interested not so much in a bottle of chartreuse as in Madame Gaillac herself, who, she said could “of course” not take up his offer—“What was he thinking, that sultan?”—but nevertheless found it very flattering that at her age her virtue was still worth a pretty penny.

The wood thinned out, and in the landscape that stretched out beyond it a stone cloud formation loomed up on the horizon, at first merging bluish in the sky above the rolling landscape, but more and more tangible the closer we came. A grotesque castle in the air seemed to have become so dense that it had plunged down to earth from the sky. Only because since childhood I had looked up at it almost every summer and had eaten ice cream in the shadow of the tower in the market square, did I recognize the contours of the age-old cloth hall. Iron-coloured and dark, the building no longer rose to the sky, but seemed to have begun a slow process of dripping downward. Window openings had expanded into holes, side towers and pointed arches had lost their sharpness. The erosion of dozens of centuries seemed to be concentrated in the sky clouding over above. This must be the capital of a new kingdom that was running wild over the old land, forcing its root system, its threads of mould between the joints of the walls, picking its way down to the foundations and blooming in devastation and, everywhere where it branched out over the old roads, spread its provinces and prefectures of decay.

The noise of the weapons, the salvoes, the shots could only euphemistically be called displacement of air. Walls of tangible sound clattered through the heavens. In the cloudy sky even more ruins seemed to pile up, and then crash down on the earth, set foot on the ground and coincide with the crenellated contours of the houses of the town. The deepest growl made the muscles of my abdomen quiver.

We passed the sentry post that controlled the access road. In the distance two other cars were heading for the suburbs. The sentry waved us through, probably assuming we were part of the column. My husband saluted. The sentry saluted back; it was more of a nonchalant wave. “One of ours. The French are worse. And the gendarmes in the hinterland. Corrupt as anything…”