Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Obscene is the word I repeat. Obscene the trick they played in one of the photos I took of my husband, much later, in the first weeks of the peace, when my mother was lying in bed gravely ill.

I snapped him that afternoon without his knowing it, when we had stopped in the middle of that bare plain between the old fronts, right on the spot where according to the map there should have been a hamlet, but where there was only emptiness, and a stream on a bed of frozen earth and ice. No sketch or photograph can ever capture the silence that prevailed there, ghostly since there was no longer a house front or alley in which our voices and footsteps could echo. Every sound was concrete, self-contained, and, now the concert of cannon barrels had fallen silent, was a scratch on the grey-white canvas of silence. The crunch when my foot shot through the steamed-up spectacles of ice in the puddles. Our voices that seemed to float lost on the steam of our breath in the chilly air.

He wanted a photo of that spot. I had followed a few steps behind him along a path by the stream, which led to a deserted trench. I snapped him from behind, just before he jumped over a ditch that flowed into the stream. It was a photo for my own pleasure, I wanted to catch the irrepressible keenness with which he went to work on his trips. And I could never get enough of his broad shoulders and especially his back, which I so liked holding in both arms, to knead his neck and feel my way down the slope to his buttocks when he lay on top of me and buried his face in my neck.

Only in the improvised darkroom which he had rigged up here at home in the cellar did it become clear what I had really captured that day.

In the red light first his back in that winter coat took shape on the paper. He understood at once the associations that the image evoked in me, our moments of stolen intimacy — but we fell silent when, at the bottom in the undulation of caved-in mud just above the surface of the water, a forearm suddenly appeared, unmistakably, and then a second, the two hands, folded in a lap, and a head, bent and obscured by the helmet. A man, a soldier, whom the mud, obscenely drained of colour, only seemed to want to expose in that photo — a caricature of a dead man who appeared to be waiting agreeably for the tram; hands in his lap, slumped on the bench, as he dozed, overwhelmed by earth and covered with a glaze of ice.

As the liquid ate more and more meaning into the paper we saw, farther away, on the bank of the stream into which the ditch flowed, between a pair of snapped, submerged tree trunks, a trunk standing, a torso, one arm raised; and above that arm, under a helmet, mostly merged with the mush of earth and glistening with ice, the arc of an eyebrow, the bridge of a nose and an eye socket which, darker and darker as the paper continued changing colour, stared at us with an expression of disgust and reproach, so it seemed: how can you allow me to be brought to light so — obscenely is the word?

I wonder whether those bodies were ever recovered. Perhaps the earth swallowed them up, in the days following, when the thaw set in. Perhaps only the freezing cold maintained an impression of their bodies, and when the iced crystals in the soil became liquid again their tissue seeped away around their skeletons that became stuck in the ground as the land dried out and formed a second body around their bones.

Season after season the ploughshare must have spread their remains even farther, dispersed the 200 or so screws and bolts and props of which the human frame consists underground. I wished I could let their fragments run through my hands. That I could, as archaeologists do with the skeletons of monarchs or plague victims from old mass graves, spread them out on a table, with everything in place, from cranium to fibula. And that they would not only let one read the history of their diseases, the osteoporosis, the tuberculosis, the bullet wound or the fatal sword stroke in their vertebrae, but that, as it were, their hiatuses would come to life and lead us to suspect a whole semantic system — as in our words, which I sometimes compare with false teeth, the echo of other words rattles through their syllables, in which other words awaken, and so on, so that whoever pronounces one word, if he listens hard, can hear the teeth of a whole language chattering in it.

“It’s inevitable, Helen,” repeats my husband, sliding a plate into the camera, and adjusting a lens. “What if I’d been killed, or your brother? If they hadn’t been able to evacuate him in time, and he had bled to death there in the mud and his body had never been found? Wouldn’t you want to see the spot where he spent his last moments? And if some farmer were to discover his rattling bones, what would you prefer? A nice tomb, or his empty eye sockets staring at you from under the glass of a shrine that commemorates the catastrophe that cost him his life? It’s inevitable, love. Inevitable.”

I thought of the incident during our second visit to “bloody, glorious Ypres”, of which by now scarcely a stone was left standing. When I stood up in the car, I had a view of virtually the whole town: a grey expanse of rubble that lay in the middle of rolling fields like a huge bird dropping. There was no trace to be found of the house where we had sheltered and made love. In the extensive plain of heaps of stone that with the best will in the world could no longer be called ruins, it was impossible to point to within ten metres of where it must have been.

My husband had got out and walked over to the soldiers and workmen who, at the foot of the cloth hall, almost the only structure that retained a certain recognizability, were clearing rubble. He wanted to take a picture of their work. In the shapeless masses of stone, over which, here and there, a buttress of the cathedral, a corner of the old guild houses stuck out, they had made themselves a path and somewhere in the shadow of the tower they were using tackle to remove heavier fragments.

I had followed him at a distance, meanwhile looking round, in my mind rebuilding the market square from my memories. When I got closer a commotion broke out in their ranks, the tackle was set aside. The men bent down and seemed to be pointing at something at the bottom of a wide ditch they had opened up at the foot of the tower.

My husband also leant forward, in order, between the trunks, the legs, the gesticulating arms, to get a view of what had made the men stop work.

I saw him lift up the tripod of the camera, take it with him and go and stand close to the men — when I joined him he hissed at me: “Don’t look now, sweetheart. Take a stroll, dear. Be with you in a wink.”

I did as he asked, but not without first, when the men stood to the left and right against the wall of the ditch to give him room, peering into the hole that had been uncovered when the tackle had moved a heavy stone and a more or less concave opening had appeared. In it lay four soldiers, by the look of their uniforms British, entwined arm in arm.

They awakened associations in me of hungry chicks in the narrow, round space of their nest. Probably they had crawled from the crypt that became their tomb up a slope of fragments to near this hole. It must have closed before their eyes when the bombardment, which had driven them into the crypt or whatever it was, pulverized the spire and the falling masonry cut off their escape.

Perhaps they had tried to dig out the hole with their bare hands, but in vain — no one could have dislodged the block of stone that lay inert in the tackle by muscle power alone. It looked as if they had gasped for breath, stretched their necks as the fire of the burning town above their heads sucked all the oxygen to itself, through every chink and gap that proved too narrow for them. The skin of their lips had dried to yellow parchment round their teeth.