Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

The sun was already sinking deep in the west and colouring the damp in the air bright orange. Thunderclouds which rose from the horizon, with their deep blue tending to black, provided a sharp contrast and laid over the treetops and trunks along the road, over the convoys of lorries and horses and men which again surrounded us, a dull, silvery glow. There was something unreal about it, reinforced by the constant rumble of the weaponry — I was also much too hot. It was oppressively hot and my stomach was playing up.

In the villages a suggestion of night was already roaming around, in which the headgear of North Africans on horseback brought an unexpected ghostly manifestation of colour, which for a moment enlivened the ubiquitous khaki. The swirling of the capes that they had wrapped round their uniforms conjured the beat of bird wings in the dusk. The cadence of the hoof beats left a long echo.

Above the horizon there now hung a long band of copper-yellow evening light, above which the black clouds had gathered. The dull-yellow squares of cornfields absorbed the grey of the sky and were beginning to wrap themselves up in night — and everywhere troops were on the move. The marching songs that they whistled or sang with deep voices floated in snatches on the rising wind.

We reached Poperinge just in time, the narrow streets were as good as deserted, and everywhere there were closed shutters and lowered blinds, because there was an evening curfew. We were audibly closer to the front again. The report of the guns sounded fuller, everywhere houses showed traces of destruction, whether or not patched up without enthusiasm.

He manoeuvred the car through empty streets, narrow alleyways. It had rained, water splashed from under the wheels. Somewhere behind one of the house fronts there was the sound of music, laughter, singing, but apart from that the town seemed dead.

We slowed at a wooden gate. He got out, pushed it open and immediately closed it again after we had come to a halt. The coach house where we now were led to a cloister around a rather fussy inner garden with bolting rose bushes, shrubs and a flaking statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Give us a hand, love,” he called to me; he was unloading.

I followed him, laden with a couple of bags, through the cloister, to a flight of steps that led to a long corridor with identical doors on one side at a regular distance from each other.

There was an intense smell of life, occupation, the scent of starch and linen; the towels, handkerchiefs, pillowslips, which lay in orderly piles in one of the rooms, the door of which was open — but the hollow echo of our steps in the deserted rooms contradicted me. I had the impression that I was walking through the inside of a clock that had stopped. The floor beneath my feet was worn away under the tread of countless soles. The twilight hung like dark cobwebs in the corners of the vaulting in window alcoves, and seemed to remember the habits that must have swept against calves or ankles here day in, day out.

He said there was a concierge, “ une gardienne , sort of”, who didn’t live on the premises. Anyway, there wasn’t much for us to be frightened of. He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and gave me his grin.

And again I wondered how often he’d been here before, and with whom, whether he was following a familiar scenario. He reminded me of a stray cat, something that moved in the shadows, on the fringe, on the edge, as he had, I suspected, since his childhood, first in the difficult household of his father and stepmother, then with his religious aunt “up north”, crept agilely around the other person, approachable when it suited him, shy when he found them oppressive — but I wondered what I was to him: someone he saw as his equal, or no more than a naive mouse?

“Hungry, dear?” He had taken off the luggage in a room with a bed under low beams, a bedside table and a tall, narrow wardrobe.

I wasn’t hungry. I was exhausted.

He went back downstairs to fetch the cameras from the car.

The room looked out over a series of back gardens. At the dark windows a candle flame occasionally went past and disappeared again. Above the roofline the clouds reflected the flashes of the distant artillery, the echo of which rumbled through the streets in waves.

It was already pretty dark, and I must have fallen asleep on the bed, a fragmentary slumber. In slivers of dreams I saw my fingers gliding over the rough material of his shirt, the buttons creeping out of the buttonholes, and his ribcage, the soft field of his belly coming into view, so concrete and close-up that I started awake.

He stroked my cheeks with the back of his hand and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “It’s all right, love…” It was completely dark now.

I got up, undressed and crept under the sheets with him. He slid an arm under my neck and put the other round my waist. I laid my back against his chest, and heard him giggle when I felt his sex swelling, followed by a sniggering “Beg your pardon, Corp’ral…”—but I stretched out my arm and pushed his buttocks closer to me.

We lay silently listening to the noise on the horizon. Occasionally the reflection of the artillery bathed the room in greenish light for a few seconds. Once we were woken when a heavy hit somewhere made everything shake. We craned our necks, expectantly, but that one bang was all. The rain swelled into a downpour, and the lapping of the gutters lulled us to sleep.

I MUST HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN, with the sort of awareness that can seize us beyond all knowledge, that I would be the one left behind, would never know him at, say, seventy, would not see him become much older than fifty or sixty and would never recognize in the wrinkles of the old man the chap whom I knew, as soon as I met him, was the one, he alone. I have always known that it would not be granted me to discover whether the old man I saw in him when we were still young, so young, corresponded with reality.

We all carry our ages with us, from the beginning. They sleep deep inside us and whether they reveal themselves or are doomed as unborn children to perish with our tissue, no one knows — but I have always known, and always been waiting for it, with each of his trips thought: I’ll never see him again. Whenever he was away, when the phone or the doorbell rang I would always whisper: that’s it, my great happiness is over.

Because he was my great happiness, I never deceived anyone as exuberantly as him. In so doing I wanted to take a generous advance against grief. I absorbed the unbearable otherness of other bodies while he was still there, and I let the deathly quiet clashes, the soft despair while talking to strangers who resembled him, although I knew they were strangers and my behaviour was absurd, jolt through me while he was still alive — to be ready, not unprepared, to pay off the outstanding debt in advance.

Still, after all those years, and always unexpected, at the most idiotic times, loss can hit me, through all the floors of this ridiculously old body — waking just before dawn, or, more frequently still, after my afternoon nap, with, on my palms, as if the body has a memory of its own, the memory of his naked young shoulders: their curve that rests in the hollow of my hand when I sit astride his hips and, when he tries to sit up, push him back into the pillow with his upper arms in my palms.

If only I could rub his body back into being, model it with all its textures and volumes from the air itself. The movement of muscles under his pale skin, when he tenses his buttocks, the hollows in his flanks where I can lay my fists, and his look, his jet-black look in those narrow eyes, narrowed by pleasure when we have a pillow fight that morning, and roll over and over on the bed — his neck, his chin, arms, legs, armpit hair, his balls, his arse, his laugh, and his head, which in the amniotic sheets that envelop us rests on my belly, swelling with my breath. And me pushing him away because his stubble tickles, and him jumping giggling out of bed, going over with sheets and all to the little window under the low ceiling, the bedding in one fist around his waist, a bridal gown of linen and embroidery, while with his other arm he leans against the window frame and looks out, in the light of early morning above the little courtyard garden that plays timidly around him, and when with an accomplice’s grin he picks one of my pubic hairs out of his teeth, the linen sliding down from his hips over his calves, his trunk, his legs. If only I could read his whole young, supple body and drink in every unevenness, every peculiarity with my eyes and my fingers: the blotches on his shoulder blades, the rough pores on the skin of his arse, the six or seven short black hairs that grow to a point just above the cleft in his buttocks, and the architecture of his ribs when he leans against the window frame with arm outstretched and with his other hand picks my most secret hair from his teeth, and his smile: half shy, half conspiratorial, as he turns his head away from the window and takes me in, naked on the bed — if there must be an eternity, dear God, give me this one.