Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

We didn’t say much when he took me home. I wanted to store every second inside me, every movement he made at the wheel, every sideways look, every sigh, each lock of hair, wanted to register every detail.

He pulled up in the little spinney, some distance from the gate to our yard.

“Give us a kiss…”

I could have swallowed his lips.

“See you soon.”

“Be careful.”

He nodded. Reversed the car. Waved.

I turned round. It was as if my body was connected by invisible threads to the departing car.

It was about four-thirty, that vague period of the day that hesitates between afternoon and evening. I had the feeling I had been away from home not for a day and a half but a year and a half — an impression that was strengthened when I entered the gate and a few paces away the maid crossed the yard, a basket of chicken feed in her arms. Though she noticed me, she scarcely interrupted her mechanical gait and nodded rather coolly. Something unintelligible crackled from her chest.

When I entered the inner courtyard, my uncle got up from the bench under the tree, where he had obviously been sitting waiting, and came up to me with his eyes rolling. My mother, it emerged, for fear of not getting home well before dark, had returned earlier. The argument that must have flared up when she did not find me seemed to be still smouldering in the garden.

“Of course it’s all my fault,” sighed my uncle. He looked sheepish and took my hands in his. “And I shall make wholehearted penance. But I also think that the journey to Canossa will be long for you too, and hard. And I think your abductor had better keep a low profile for a while.”

IT WAS CLEVER, the earth, said my brother in the rare moments when he disclosed anything about his time as a soldier. Clever and jealous. When you’re piled together with ten or so others in a hole in the ground and you feel the floor, behind the planks and props of the walls, coming to life with the impact and the ghastly noise, you know how thin existence is. You have the feeling that the earth has been watching you for days and weeks. That it has been estimating your height, envying you your torso, your arms, yours legs. That it has been spying on the way you walk, counting the moments when your concentration flags as you shuffle across the planks with forty kilos of equipment on your shoulders, knowing that the slightest slip can be fatal — it is silent, smoulders and waits. Nothing can make a man feel as fragile as its convulsions when it wakes from its sleep. You can feel its motions through your intestines. The blows reduce everything to shaking and you wonder whether dimensions like life and death have any point in that hole, where the posts and planks do their best to offer something like firmness, bones, a skeleton. You can’t do anything but wait until the hell outside abates or the ground encloses you and finally appropriates your forms. You lie and you tremble with the shocks. You’re a lump of half-digested flesh in the underbelly of the world, impelled by its own peristalsis. For all you know, you could already be dead, no more than a membrane of skin and hair between the formless matter outside and the yearning formlessness within. You think: I’m just a shell standing in the way of the merger of mush with mush.

Now and then he puffed at the cigar that he always lit up over coffee. Every few minutes he brought it to his mouth, sucked in the smoke, kept it under his palate for a while and exhaled. Meanwhile he spoke, eventually more to himself than to me — a trance-like incantation. He could sometimes interrupt his dreamy monologue when he came back to reality. If you write down what I’m telling you, you’ll see, he grinned. You’ll want to dig your own foxhole in that massive, formless sea.

It’s so clever, the earth. Capable of summoning up its particles to form a mass, operas and symphonies of mud and collapses and landslides, but it imposes itself equally when you wipe your bum and you feel its grains scratching your arsehole. It grinds between your teeth when you eat your soggy bread. When everything is jolting and screaming, and you briefly stroke the face of the chap huddled up against you, on the narrow bunk, to feel life, the texture of his unshaven cheeks — even then its hunger doesn’t let go of you, because your fingers are dry with its mud. It has nestled in your tiniest folds. Garrisons, regiments, battalions are hidden in the wrinkles of your fingers and language too tastes of sand, because when you speak it comes away from your lips and works its way inside. We ate soil, we shat soil and we were soil, a bag of bones and skin filled with soil. It was only a question of time before we tore and emptied, and the earth would have its way.

And when your mate shifts position on the bunk next to you and momentarily digs you in the thigh while his feet search for a place next to yours, on the plank under the dirty, mud-saturated blanket that you share with him, he might just as well be dead. As dead as the knee or shoulder, the arm or leg in the swill above the lean-to that protects the entrance to the foxhole and on which you hear the clods and the limbs dancing. You think: how much longer, when will we be dancing as lifelessly along with them, or are we already? If you call that horror, you don’t know what horror is. Horror is the earth in itself if you like, which out of the 100 men who slogged after you between the craters along the paths and the narrow planks, swallowed up thirty or forty en route without a cry or a sigh. It adapts the syntax of its hunger. Where necessary as fluidly as water. Elsewhere as tough as dough or thick porridge that never lets go of you. Some guys compared it to an octopus, a many-armed monster, but I’m not sure, I’m not sure — I had respect for it, a form of respect, the way an antelope grazes peacefully near a pride of sleeping lions: apparently unconcerned, in reality alert from snout to tail to the slightest movement that may reveal that the hunt is on. You don’t blame it, it’s hungry.

I looked at its new undulations and grooves when we crawled out of its hole after the night. At the geography it had fashioned for itself in the last few hours, and which the following night it was able to shake off in boredom. The stubble of the tree trunks. The body that during the most recent tempest it had hurled from its layers and placed on the gentle slope that was not there the previous day: on its belly, arms under the chest, one leg stretched, the other raised, in no way distinguishable from yourself when you crawled out of the trench and splashed through the mud on all fours. The earth that reduced us to creeping creatures, mud-jumpers, that cast us back in time and declared nature’s memory to be the playground of its fantasies, grabbed our bones to hang its formless flesh on and delighted in sending us through the sediment of a beach at low tide like a troop of crabs, just before the deluge — wherever you put your hand, if at the whistle of an approaching howitzer shell you plunged your head in its waters, it burped in your face and exuded the stench of the undigested dead in its bowels. History wobbled and listed. A person should not crawl, my little gazelle; do you know enough to write it down now?

There aren’t words enough. It sucks words up as greedily as bodies. You can’t imagine a language that has not sunk into its folds like a shipwreck. All our words are magic formulas. We remain savages who after a storm shoot at the sky to punish the gods for their anger or dance in circles to beg for rain. The earth grinned and burped in my face; do you know enough now? That’s how far we’ve come, I thought. That’s what all that steel is for, and the cannon and the tanks, the iron Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the copper bombs — to rid the earth of the skin disease of life and the last human being. It helped to give it a name, call it an octopus, or clever and jealous. The coats of the rats that crawled over my legs at night and that I vainly tried to chase away had an unearthly softness — do you know enough now? I remember thinking what neat creatures rats were; how did they keep their fur so clean?