Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

It is the women who take the blows, he was wont to say. Imagine the look on the face of a mother with two or three sons at the front, not exactly a rarity in large farming families in the countryside. The uncertainty behind the certainty that you are knocking at her door to report the death of one of her children. She has seen you coming across the yard. Above the hedge of the front garden with the country flowers, which have been so immaculately hoed and raked, since weeding helps take her mind off the fate of her boys, she has recognized your hat. She has heard the gate creak. She would like her house to be an unassailable fortress, a thick shell. She sees you coming across the yard or up the garden path. She realizes that this time there is no blood on the lintel and side posts of her door, that the angel with the sword has not spared her house this time — all she does not yet know is which of her sons has fallen.

“Who?” is the word burning not so much on her lips as in her eyes, tell me who: our Jean or Arnaud or Rémi? The names shuttle as it were across her retina: which of the beings to whom she has given birth, whom she has felt pull out of her to the spasms of her abdominal muscles, the life that she saw grow up and nurtured, cared for, gave food and drink, beat and kissed, that caused her laughter wrinkles or grey hairs, filled her with pride with its school results or muscular strength, made her double up with anxiety when it had measles, or about its drinking or gambling habits — the top of the class or the sponger or the petty thief who joined up to avoid the cell and shame. Who is it, monsieur? The oldest or the youngest? Or the middle one, the apple of my eye? There were doors where he knocked a first time, and a second time. On the third or fourth occasion there wasn’t much more to be said.

What do you do when you have to tell a mother the last of her sons has died, or after her sons her husband too, and she doesn’t open up and you go round the back? You see her in her back kitchen with a basin on her lap, peeling potatoes so furiously that she reduces them to curls. She doesn’t even look up when you come in. What do you do then? You sit down at her table and say nothing and wait.

“It’s the women who take the blows.” He repeated it more and more often when he returned from his morbid rounds and shut himself up in his garden. “Always the same old story, we let ourselves be seduced by the high-falutin’ words of the high-ups, the sweet mouth of power, but we always forget the arsehole. Don’t stare at me so angrily, dear sister. Your daughter is old enough to listen to other things than sweetly lilting quatrains. She’s not a child any more. Look at the arsehole, ma fille . Who gets to wave the palm branch and who catches the shit? That is the question on which the whole of history turns.”

I think of my husband. He says: “It’s inevitable, Helen.” “Inevitable,” he repeats, again and again.

His voice can still make me shudder with desire, that rather drawling accent, his intonation that was always on the point of turning into a soft groan, as if speaking were lashing him with a forbidden, sexual pleasure.

“I’m not a thinker,” he said regularly on our trips.

Then he looked through the lens of his camera, and usually added: “I trust me eyes. I think with my eyes.”

“And I with my fingers,” I would reply.

THE NO MAN’S land he took me to later that day after the ruins was blooming in the summer sunshine with an exuberance that dazzled the eyes like an affront in technicolour. All that flora, which did not blossom but exploded in kilometre-long smudges of the brightest white, the deepest red or purple and shimmered in the sunlight between the pools and the mud. Butterflies rose in dense clouds above the nodding poppies and marguerites, and the wind carried them along: a paper din as if the angels were hastily leafing through the telephone books of fate — in the calm between offensives they kept count of the bullets and the dead. The unrecovered dead, whose bones in their threadbare uniform tunics lay bleaching in the sun. The unexploded projectiles that lay gleaming like the eggs of a prehistoric reptile among the plant growth.

The life that purred and buzzed. The bumble bees that helicoptered in swarms around the calyxes of the flowers seemed, when they rose, to swell into the bodies of the balloons which went on ropes far away above the horizon into the azure. Dragonflies shot between the clouds of butterflies, birds performed caprioles in flight and snapped at prey. Above, aircraft imitated the membrane wings and tentacular behaviour of the insects. Somewhere shots rang out and, above the butterflies, under the aircraft shrapnel, burst open in puffs of grey smoke. The balloons descended, submerged in the glow of the colour below.

It was as if the earth were practising revenge, an unsurpassed exercise. As if to show how nature would act in the days after the last human being, it thrust out flowers on hairy tentacles up out of its mud-brown folds, made them crane for light and the soggy ground and the corpses pulsate through their veins until their buds burst. In the muddy pools and cadavers the maggots swelled and the pupae ripened, in order when the first warmth came to strew illusions of buzzing and humming over the land.

I tried to capture that abundance with one of the cameras that he had brought for me so that I would make a credible impression that day, with the long tailored coat which I had worn on his advice, with my hair in a bun under a black hat, not too wide, and the bag of negative plates over my shoulder.

The atmosphere in the trench to which he had taken me was easy-going, since the earth was dry after a period without rain. I laughed along with the men who were on guard, Frenchmen. I did my best to add a British accent to my words and the men didn’t ask any questions. Excited by the variety my arrival brought them, they offered coffee, or the chlorine-flavoured liquid that had to pass for it.

I laughed with them when one of them, a tough chap whose cheeks had an apple glow, came crawling with the jug out of the narrow hole that they mockingly called “ la cuisine ”, and inside had obviously quickly rubbed his moustache with rancid fat or butter to impress me. While we made fun of his vanity countless gossamer-thin wings rustled around his figure. A swarm of crib sheets that had burst open landed on his shoulders, his chest, and a swarming of wings, antennae, compound eyes — perhaps the butterflies saw his uniform jacket as a huge blossom. As he put the jug down on the wooden crate that served as drawing room table, they swirled up, sailed above his crown, landed on his trunk and rolled out long, fine tongues, and combed the material of his tunic, the shine of the buttons, as if a bunch of medals came to life on his chest.

The men laughed and motioned to me that I should get a photo of him. They nodded to me, with an imaginary camera in their hands, and I did what they asked — looked at them there, arm in arm in that narrow trench, all good mates, a stump of tobacco between their lips, surrounded by a frozen swirl of white spots. When I announced that I wanted a photo of the plain, they pushed the crate against the wall of the trench, so I could stand on it and my eye was level with the peephole they had made in the top row of sandbags. The splendour of the landscape was scarcely bearable. The camera was too small, the lens too small for the view of that crazily blooming earth. It was as if the soil wanted only to have its mud-brown mug immortalized in the cold seasons, when the vegetation had withdrawn and the seeds were asleep, the larvae were overwintering in the carcasses, and the earth opened its folds to suck up the mines and the bullets and hatch them out — God knows what will stir in its skirts the day the shells break. What grimaces has it still in store for us?