Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I pushed him on his side, lifted his chin with my forefinger. He looked into my eyes; his face seemed different, smoothed out, happy.

He took my hand by the wrist, led my fingers down across his belly and put them in his crotch. I could feel his blood pulsing, the hardness of his sex under his fly frightened me. He could tell from my look and smiled sheepishly.

Then somewhere above us there was a dry bang; something shook on its hinges, followed by a slight ticking that swelled and subsided, till a second bang resounded and it began anew.

We both looked up at the same time.

Against the wall beside the section of stairs that led from the landing to the upstairs rooms, packed as closely together as a nest of bats awakening from their diurnal sleep, a dozen or so small frames, round, oval or square, with faces in them that we did not recognize — gentlemen with moustaches and side-whiskers, ladies’ necks above lace collars and toddlers with the perplexed look of owl chicks under their blond quiffs — started, whenever the window frame banged against the wall, swaying to and fro on their nails, and the corners of the frames tapped against the wall.

They came to rest, but reawakened with every gust of wind. Swaying. Dangling. Tapped frantically against the wall for a while. Calmed down.

“They’re in panic,” I said. “They’ve almost been eaten away by the rain. They’re telegraphing for us to rescue them.”

“Bet they are…” He took my hand out of his crotch, put it against his cheek and pushed his tongue into the bottom of my palm.

The window frame banged against the wall, the frames tapped.

“ Ils sont jaloux ,” he whispered, with his lips in my hand.

HE FREQUENTLY TOOK me on trips with him when the war was over and he meticulously documented what I call the congealing, the great levelling, in all respects after the ravages and the euphoria of peace. The smoothing-over of the tormented earth. The cemeteries where the fallen were gradually put in straighter and straighter ranks, disciplined even in death. The wooden crosses which were replaced by polished stone tombs in charming cemeteries beneath the subdued melancholy of weeping-willow leaves or pine needles — it struck me as a wry euphemism, not to say a sad paradox, that in order to keep the memory of the destruction and oceans of blood alive, they mowed the lawns immaculately, constructed solemn temples, carved mourning statues, lit eternal flames. Over the bones and the corpses and the countless shattered lives an arcadia stretched out that was itself constantly struggling against becoming overgrown, a process that would have spread like wildfire if they had not, out of piety, or out of shame, left the ravaged earth in peace and declared the whole area a cemetery.

But I also remember the rage that seized me when, in the early summer of 1919, we were in Alsace, a part of the front zone where we had not been before. En route I had been dozing in the car, lulled to sleep by the mild temperatures and the pristine green of nature renewing itself. When I woke because the car slowed down, at the bottom of the valley that unfolded before us, at some distance from the road between woody clumps and fields, a broad scar of earth churned into hills and gullies stretched as far as the eye could see.

It was not the sight of it that I found chilling, but the swarming of scores, hundreds, of human figures, white and dark dolls that clambered chaotically over the heaps of earth like foraging ants. Young men supported their wives or fiancées as they helped them jump from ridges. Sucking contentedly on their pipes, fathers pointed out old foxholes and barbed wire, tanks stranded in the earth and abandoned artillery, or they stood on top of all those masses of ground with their hands on their hips, looking out over their surroundings.

It was that easy-going atmosphere that filled me with fury. The swarms of summer hats and parasols. The improvised signposts on the verge. The cars and carriages parked in the fields near the edge of the wood which suggested an open-air fair, complete with pedlars not offering refreshments but grenade fragments or polished bullets engraved with place names and landscapes or decorative motifs — the pleasure I mean, which was not even hidden behind horror or bewilderment. The pleasure of bewilderment in itself, the eagerness of horror that I saw there. But my husband said: “I think it’s inevitable, Helen.”

He got his camera from the case on the back of the car, opened the tripod and planted it in the soft, mild-smelling forest earth on the edge of the valley. “Are we that much better?” He prepared the camera to capture the scene.

Time gives greater complexity to the texture of the facial expressions on those prints. Their readability has become less unambiguous — like my own. Look at those two women standing there arm in arm on one of the countless paths that the stream of disaster tourists has worn between the mounds of earth and the old bomb craters. They seem to be sisters. Perhaps twins, given their almost identical clothing and coquettish hats, and the fact that they are walking arm in arm.

But why is one of them carrying a bunch of flowers in one hand? Not a hastily picked bunch of wild flowers but a carefully arranged bouquet, as the ribbon that binds the stalks leads one to suspect — where did they lay it? In the nearby cemetery perhaps, or on the approximate spot from where a man, a fiancé, a brother or father, whose body had not been found and perhaps never would be, had sent his last letter?

And even now when I see those solid heads of families again who, holding their children by the hand, stroll between the broom and the briars as if they were at the zoo, I find it harder to get worked up than before. I know by now what weird forms desperation can take in a human being, how the pleasure of bewilderment carefully shields us from a fear or despair that might totally destroy us — what a strange emotion fear remains. The most alchemical of emotions, now turning to lead, now to gold. Isn’t each pleasure a hasty prayer, Rachida my girl, an invocation?

I’m reminded of my uncle, who every few days dropped by the mairie to open the official dispatches. He considered it his duty to inform the families affected of the death of a son or a brother, a father or husband.

So once every so many mornings he went “down”. In the adjacent café he first had a coffee and spirits while he went through the papers, before entering the mairie in order, as he only ever said out loud at home with us, to “bring in the sad harvest”. He had several times sat on the town council and was doing it from a kind of noblesse oblige , a task that he took over from the official town crier who would normally convey the message, but who turned out to be drunk more and more often because he couldn’t stand it any longer.

My uncle had the envelopes cut open, at each name gave a melancholy sigh, which became more routine each month, and set forth. Eventually everyone knew what it meant when he was seen leaving the mairie and crossing the market square. People held their breath. What side road would he take? People soon realized that he arranged the names in his head according to the houses he would have to visit, that he turned his walk into a circular route which began in the market square and ended at our house. There he would lower himself onto the bench under the tree and did not want to be disturbed until lunchtime.

As soon as he took a particular route one side of the village breathed easier with relief — you could hear the relief creeping through the house fronts that he turned his back on. The joints in the walls seemed to expand as if the stones had braced themselves, and you could see the houses by whose door or front garden he stopped almost cringe. Because everyone knew the purpose of his knocking he did not need to say much. When the door opened and from the darkness beyond a fearful questioning look met his, it was mostly sufficient to nod — unless several men in the same family had been called up.