Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

In sultry weather his scar played up. Not excruciating pain, he said, more an obstinate itch that bursts out, from my armpit across my chest and the side of my trunk to my right hip. I lie tossing and turning in my sleep, sticky with sweat. I turn from one side to the other, onto my belly, my back. Sooner or later I doze off, usually towards morning, but the pain keeps my sleep light, it draws nerves through my dreams. And there is always a moment at which the pain joins up, a long line of itch that feels as cold as burning to the touch. Then I start scratching with both hands. I turn onto my back and kick off the sheets. Sweat is gushing out of my pores. The itch starts to concentrate in nodules on my chest, as if it is trying to tear something out of me, as if my skin is no longer anything more than a membrane. The harder I scratch, the more restlessly I toss and turn, the more intensely the itch burns in the scar. And sooner or later I feel my skin giving way under my hands. I am splitting open, as it were, with an immense feeling of relief, as the itch and the pain immediately start to subside. Perhaps it is because of the bedding that I have pulled loose, perhaps, the undersheet stuck to my back evokes a hallucination, but my skin seems like a shell which crumbles and gives way to the texture of thick material, leather, brass buttons, a belt, a clasp — the harder I toss and turn or scratch, the more I expose my old uniform.

Sometimes I wake in despair, bottomless despair, when the uniform is my kit from the trenches: the kepi, the long, thick coat and the leather pouches for ammunition round my waist, my drinking bottle and the blanket secured over my shoulder with a strap, and the small shovel for digging a foxhole in the stinking earth, whose smell takes hold of me again. On other nights it is my engineer’s uniform, as brand new as the day I was finally allowed to put it on, and was finally transferred, and I feel as much relief as then, as much euphoria, because I was finally allowed to escape the hell in the trenches, and the mud, I think, hasn’t got me — that nice dark uniform with the red braid, and the black collar shields with the helmet of Minerva on them in gold. I can’t describe the elation to you, the calm but complete relief of being able to have a good night’s sleep again in a more or less respectable bed and have regular meals, farther away from the front. I didn’t know then that it’s patient, the earth, that it would wait until I was nearby again. Weird what our dreams do with us, what we do in our dreams, he reflected.

His soldier’s uniform always remained part of him, he was never really able to sweat it out of his system for good. By his tread alone I could invariably deduce which of the two dream figures was smouldering in his tissues. If he was in a light-hearted mood one caught a glimpse of the figure of the trainee officer in the engineers and he was imbued with relief at being able to live a more or less normal life, in a branch of the army where one was regularly allowed a freer rein and a person was more than a hunk of disciplined flesh, fodder for the mud that finally got him anyway. I could hear from his cheerful whistling when he came to call, his simple happiness that the world and fate were in an approachable mood. After the war his life had the character of a long holiday. Fortunately he was not so stupid that he thought a person should make an incision in a stone or leave his initials on a bark for the short time he has to plod around here. Nor like me, who could sometimes get so irritated with him because I was basically jealous of him. Of his light-heartedness, his superficiality, his hunger for young, elegant bodies, supple surfaces of people — but was he really so volatile and frivolous?

There were days when that other figure, the shadow side, the soldier in the mud-caked uniform of the infantry, had the upper hand in him, certainly when that scar played up. Then he walked slightly hunched and used his walking stick to lean on laboriously at each step and not just for decoration. He made an emaciated impression and appeared to be putting almost all his weight on that walking stick: bent forward, shoulders hunched, head buried in them — his eyes seemed larger than usual.

It was not so much a cramped position, more a reflex, as if he wanted to wrap his whole body around that line of wild flesh in order to protect it from unexpected contacts, however insensitive it might be apart from those phantom pains. But even on his good days there could be moments, unguarded moments, even if they lasted only a fraction of a second, when his pupils seemed to emit no light, or darkness, rather an intense emptiness, as if the world and its impressions found no life at all behind the blue gates of his irises, and were unable to evoke any spark or impulse.

I recognize it here in the first portrait in which we are all together again, he, my father, my mother and I. For a long time it was in the front room on one of the side tables, perhaps to make it clear to our guests that we had survived everything more or less unscathed. My mother is wearing one of those ponderous dresses in dark bombazine that she favoured after the war. She already looks a lot flabbier and fuller than in my childhood: she is becoming a real matron. The flu of the last year of the war unleashed a hunger in her that she was actually never able to assuage again. Around her mouth there is a more or less permanent doggedness, her lips are compressed into a pen stroke of sobriety.

An utter resignation emanates from her body and infuses the tableau; there is something about us like stuffed animals under glass. Not only my brother, who has begun cultivating his downy moustache into a proper handlebar, so that a white streak of mist curls between his lips and nostrils. Because of his blond hair, combed smooth, and that attempt at a moustache the contrast with his skin, pale and downy, still that of the baby lamb, is all the greater. Only his eyes, those steel-blue eyes, seem old. Older than those of my father and mother, older than mine, which with a gleam of triumph, or is it desperation, glow among the curls of my coiffure, which is cut more or less level with my jaw line.

Looking back, my euphoria seems close to bewilderment. We are perfect mirages, imbued with the frivolous belief that the world would never again rock on its foundations, while it was doing nothing but licking its wounds and gathering strength for the next round. I look like a slut. In the following years frocks became longer again, much to my mother’s relief. Europe lowered the skirt length, perhaps in the hope of turning the tide, but tripped over the hem.

It is as though he foresees it all in that photo, beyond every wishful fantasy, every hope — with his eyes full of that emptiness from where he kept descending into the world of everyday, more or less happy with life as it was, so long as it lasted.

After his death a box of his personal effects was delivered to me. There was almost nothing from those years. His wristwatch. His bracelet. Around his neck he must have worn a silver chain with a ring hanging from it, with a name engraved on the inside: A. Duval. It’s not impossible that someone somewhere wore a ring with my brother’s name on it on his finger or on his chest, who can say?

His handkerchiefs — why hadn’t the people in the boarding house given them to the rag-and-bone man together with his clothes? Why were handkerchiefs more intimate than socks or a tie or underpants? A thin pile of postcards with an elastic band round them, addressed to him. Views of Trier, Chicago, Berlin. One of them struck me because the message on the reverse side went further than the expected fatuities about the weather and the best wishes. “Thank you for taking us on board your silver-lined cloud. Eagerly awaiting a second passage. Love, Paul.” Postmark Manchester, no surname.