Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

Probably they had been lying in their catacomb since shortly after the outbreak of war, and they had lain for four years in that cellar while around them people tried as best they could to lead regular lives in the town, which with every barrage had collapsed a little more.

I waited by the car until my husband returned. He said there must be more down there, they had been able to see them vaguely in the darkness, at least fifteen or twenty, maybe even more. He shook his head. “Poor devils…”

“You want it all ways,” I said to him when he showed me the prints later. The careful framing. The tackle with the block of stone. The men left and right against the slanting wall of excavated earth, between them the mouth of that subterranean vault, almost slap in the middle. In the darkness of the hole the pale skulls of those soldiers, like a grotesque multiple birth, four foetuses stranded during birth.

“You allow those poor souls a grave, but you snap them in their death agony. For all the world to see. How inevitable’s that? You want it both ways, Monsieur Heirbeir.”

He pulled the prints out of my fingers with feigned indignation, took my chin in the hollow of his hand and gave me a fleeting kiss.

“And I think, Miss Demont, I’m not half as perfidious as you and your precious little words. You want it all, you greedy monster, in every possible way, you do…”

He pulled me off the sofa, put his arm round my waist and whispered, as we sailed laughing across the parquet floor to the couch in the bay window: “We’re two of a kind, madame.”

ILIKE PHOTOS more the less there is to see in them, when they leave all avenues open. That one pile he kept in a separate drawer, in large, flat boxes. They must have been outside his work for him too, or maybe the reverse: perhaps they were the hidden heart of it, more and at the same time less populated than the scenes of the living and the dead that he immortalized for press bureaus and newspapers; their all-too-fleeting, noisy ink.

I mean that country road with the deep tyre tracks, an almost abstract pattern that moves in a wide arc to the horizon, where, not quite cut off by the framing, a narrow band of clouds is hanging dripping in five poplars.

I mean the hole from which the body of a missing soldier has been dug up. A corner of the tarpaulin on which the remains are placed. The sole of the boot that was left on the bottom. Farther on, higher up the slope of the hill, a few heaps of sand, the shaft of a spade. Next to each heap of sand is an identical tarpaulin.

I also mean the operating theatre in the hospital. The operating table is empty, the nurses must have just left the theatre to take the instruments to be sterilized. The surgeons have gone for lunch or a rest after what seems a quiet day. Everything is bathed in spotless white light which picks out all the more sharply the smudges of blood on the floor tiles under the operating tables, three in number, and the dirty bandages in the shiny, enamelled buckets next to the tables, just before they were emptied.

In most of these photos you can’t see that it’s war, or that the war is just over, and yet they seem to suck all wars from all times into themselves. Whether we die in chain mail or in the flash of a bomb full of deadly rays, the vocabulary remains the same: emptiness and traces of blood and dirty bandages. Look at the arsehole. Who catches the shit? Those of whom there is no sign, just taken away, to the recuperation ward, the mortuary, the final grave after the anonymous hole in the ground? Those photos are waiting. Everything has been brought into a permanent state of readiness for our arrival, alive or dead or decimated to a hunk of meat without arms or legs. Every peace is an interval between two wars.

I can remember him taking this one, I was there. One of the early autumns a few years after the armistice, when we went back to my uncle’s house annually as a kind of pilgrimage; my husband, my brother, a handful of others, to spend a few days there. From there he and I sometimes made day trips, or went on two-day ones, always to the area of the battlefields.

That day, I remember, we were walking through a wooded section in the hills around Reims. It was the end of August, hot, late in the afternoon. We were walking some distance apart, and at a certain moment I had lost sight of him. I retraced my steps, but he was nowhere to be seen. Only when he called out my name—“By Jove,” he cried, “Helen, look at that!”—did I find him again, in a natural basin surrounded by trunks and undergrowth, where it smelt strongly of mould.

A wall of thoroughly weathered wood with a narrow doorway in it portioned off part of the basin. He stood looking inside and beckoned me as he disappeared into the cave. I followed him, but it took some time before my eyes got used to the darkness.

“ Incroyable …” he muttered, and I heard him feeling the ceiling of the low cave with his hand.

Instead of earth or stone his fingers, to judge by the sound, met metal: the curve of a roof of corrugated iron that had been laid over the basin, then covered with a layer of earth and finally, autumn after autumn, buried under fallen leaves.

It smelt stuffy, smells I could not immediately place. My foot hit something that rolled over the ground — in the darkness I could only make out contours, unnaturally angular.

“Wait here,” he said. “Get my gear…” As if he was afraid that while he was away his discovery would vanish for ever into the earth.

We waited outside, nestled on a blanket on the edge of that little valley, and ate our sandwiches. He was waiting for the right light, the right moment. He had calculated that the sun, when it sank further, would shine through a gap in the treetops directly through the doorway inside, and that’s what happened. He went in and positioned himself with the camera against the inner wall of the wooden partition.

In the photo it really is as if he was able to trap the shafts of the evening sun while they secretly entered the underground space, furtively lit the four or five bunks against the side wall, above them the shelves with a few bottles and bandage tins, and the chair that seemed to have been hastily pushed away from a small table in the corner, and even a glimpse of the small notebook open on top of it, the handwriting rendered illegible by seeping damp.

You would say it is a snapshot, but I saw the patience with which he waited until the light reached the walls and the vault of corrugated iron at exactly the right angle. He did not stage anything, did not pull the blankets straight so that it made the impression even more strongly that the bunks had just been made up, or arrange the pillows in such a way that the mould marks in the cotton would come out better, or put the basins or the kidney bowl with a clamp, a pair of scissors with a long bent beak in it, on that low wooden box. Everything is as we found it — apart from that one thing, a pebble he thought at first, a piece of stone in which a strip of calcite or another crystal reflected the sun’s rays too directly. He threw it to me, and I sat on the blanket waiting until he was finished. It was not much bigger than a spirit glass and there was earth caked round it. When I picked it off with my fingernails, I felt the coolness of metal, a sharp edge, albeit dented. A piece of tin, a cap, I suspected, but gradually an inscription was revealed beneath my fingers. It could only be read after I had rubbed it clean with my moistened handkerchief. It said: “Oleum infirmorum”.

Only in words can the earth tremble in reverse, through the static syllables. Only here can the joints and ligaments stir, bones return like restlessly sleeping children under a grass-green quilt. Here the springs of the earth can whine and grind, its mantle becomes a soft placenta-like mattress. It shivers till it has gooseflesh. It draws explosions together in one point and spews out bullets and bombs. Here the house fronts can crawl out of the dust with wobbly knees, street after street, stuff door and window frames back in their gaping mouths like dentures, and have themselves measured up for hairdos of step gables and chimneys. Around their beams the fallen tiles flap in dense swarms to land on the cross laths and close up — I want everything at once.