Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

“Looks different every time,” he said, between two mouthfuls. “Never a dull moment visiting bloody glorious Ypres…”

I asked him if he came here so often then, and the casualness of my question, as if he had taken me to his local café, sounded so absurd to me that I had to giggle immediately.

“Every Sunday afternoon after Mass, mademoiselle…” He swallowed, blew a sarcastic sigh out of his nose, “weather permitting…”, then looked sideways, shot me a grin and said, with exaggerated preciosity: “It does look rather unsettled this morning, doesn’t it, Miss Honeysuckle?”

I prodded him in the side and stuck my hand out for a piece of bread. He got a drinking bottle out of the bag, unscrewed it, put it to his mouth, drank big mouthfuls, while his Adam’s apple rose and fell behind the khaki collar of his shirt.

“Better make haste now.” He got up and brushed the crumbs out of his lap, then looked at the sky. The sun was half hidden by what was left of a church tower and the tall, slender candlesticks of a group of poplars next to it, some of them bare, others with a scanty covering of leaves. With each cloud that moved in front of the sun the glaring afternoon light changed abruptly to grey. Shadows shifted across the back wall of the house and the bullet holes on the top floor.

He put the bags on the bench, opened the largest one and inspected the large wooden camera.

I went towards the back door.

He called after me not to go too far away. “This isn’t a safe place, Helen, really.”

Usually he avoided addressing me by my first name, keeping mostly to “Sis” or “Mademoiselle”, a teasing “Sweetheart”, and very occasionally “Darling”. I too often hesitated about addressing him as Matthew. I realized how much irony was necessary to make “Monsieur Heirbeir” sound less formal, and made eager use of my mother’s awkward pronunciation of English, or addressed him as she did, as “patriot” or “soldier”. Our names seemed too definitive, too perfect, almost too apodictic, not to say all too solemn, like an oath or a promise, unsuited to the playful and provisional tone that characterized our relationship in those days, as if we would have appropriated too much of each other. Certainly here, in the heart of a town in ruins, words like house, roof or room carried an unintentionally devastating sarcasm with them. So when he used my first name I knew he was really concerned. I also saw it in his eyes, when I turned round for a second, just before the devils returned to his eyes and he smiled, looking up as he slid a negative plate into the camera: “Besides, I want your portrait… Call it ‘Lost Girl from Flanders…’ What d’you say?”

The door did not give. Old newspapers, a calendar, loose sheets slid on their underside over the floor tiles. A classic bourgeois house: tall hall with two front rooms leading into it, and the kitchen at the back, opposite the small dining room where the family probably ate their meals every day when there were no visitors.

On the left the stairs to the upper floors, under the stairs the cellar. On the landing where the stairs made a bend a tall, narrow window was open. There wouldn’t have been much point in closing it, since there were no panes in the window frames, just as with the top window above the front door. The blue glass lay in slivers on the floor of the hall and seemed to have been subsequently squashed flat under shoe soles — by looters and perhaps by the residents themselves, when they had left the house.

I tried to imagine them. The kind of people that my mother would probably have called “proper”, the word with which she usually described petits bourgeois who lived in houses like this: more or less replicas of more spacious gentlemen’s houses but smaller in scale. The man of the house probably didn’t work with his hands, but somewhere as an assistant or clerk, proper and affluent enough to pay a maid for half-days, who came at the crack of dawn to bank up the stove, made breakfast, visited the market, washed the floors and before she went home in the early afternoon left a couple of cold dishes on the basement shelf, for supper. Perhaps a gardener came every so often to trim the hedges, or the man of the house did it himself, on Sunday afternoon, by way of a hobby, while his wife and family laid the coffee table against the wall in the shade. In the evenings they would stroll on the old town walls. The mother and her daughters, if they were there, under parasols. The father and his sons with straw hats, as they walked chatting under the trees in the gentle evening light, with ducks that swerved above the ramparts and landed among the water lilies.

I had to swallow down a lump in my throat. I would have liked to see this house as it lay dozing on a Sunday evening like that, after hours of full sun, to see the light in the rooms fading and the decorative earthenware on the dresser lose its shine until it hung pale in the twilight — but the front room, the entertaining room, was a mess. Instead of the window on the street side there was a hole. The window, woodwork and all, had been knocked out of the house front and blown inwards, over and onto the table, where between sections of lath and plaster the crystal tears of a chandelier gleamed. Through the hole in the front wall I could see the house fronts on the other side. In the doorways the rubble lay all the way to the street as if the houses had spewed out their interiors, as if an epidemic attacking houses had moved through street after street.

I turned round. The light had faded, outside it looked rainy. Don’t ask me if it was because of the wind, which was audibly rising, or the series of bursts of fire that exploded above the roofs with a thunderous sound that seemed to rise somewhere outside the town walls from the depths of the earth, and above the roofs built a dome of pandemonium, under which the town seemed to shrink — and I don’t know either whether the gust of wind that somewhere on the upstairs floor slammed a door shut came together with the noise that made everything tremble, the walls, the floors, made the windows at the back judder in their frames and shook plaster from the ceiling in white trails of dust. All I know is that, just as I turned round, the noise above my head turned the sky to iron — everywhere doors closed and window panes shook. In the back kitchen all the crockery fell out of the wall cupboard with a diabolical crash, the slivers jumping up the walls.

I must have screamed with the shock; the next moment I felt an arm round my waist and he pulled me away, of course worried about the ceiling. We both fell against the stairs. I could feel the treads in my back, the carpet cushioned our fall.

“It’s all right. Don’t worry…” he panted, his breath warm against my collarbone. “It’s quite a way off. It’s just the noise… They’re ours.” He seemed to be saying it just as much to himself, just as much to calm himself. He was lying half on top of me.

A second series of salvoes exploded. He made as if to get up, but I pulled him to me, put my lips against the skin beneath his ear, by the corner of his jaw — the banisters trembled, and somewhere a tread creaked.

I took his head in both hands, his lips slid over my nose. I sucked in his tongue, held his head frantically tight, his face so doggedly against mine that his kepi fell off and rolled down beside us.

I wanted to feel his living, breathing, hectically breathing, body, the ribs that in my arms under the thick military material separated when he filled his lungs, his trunk and his hips, the soft belly that pushed into mine to the rhythm, the hectic rhythm of his breath, and his tongue, the fleshiness of his lips. The thundering receded, the shock wave subsided. It became quiet.