Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

The wallet: passport, banknotes. On a strip of crumpled paper at the bottom, probably long forgotten by himself: a telephone number with no name, somewhere in the depths of the countryside. When I ring a girl answers: “Veronique here…” In the background, with a questioning intonation, a woman’s voice: “Who is it?”

“I don’t know…” I hear the child whisper. “Sounds just like a Frenchwoman.” Two seconds of silence, then the woman’s voice, unexpectedly gruff and close: “Yes?”—I hang up.

To Rachida I said: take the keys with you. Round up your father and your brothers and your sisters and your mother. Hire a van and take everything from the house that’s portable and not fixed. Give what you can’t use away or sell it. Divide the money between you or give it to the poor, I don’t mind, but bring me every scrap of paper and every photo you can find there.

A week later she lays a folder of blank letter paper on my bed, it still smells of the drawer in which it has been dying, the last bill for gas and water, a handful of empty envelopes without a sender or a postmark, and a pair of albums containing the same photos as mine: wedding parties, excursions, trips, babies and people celebrating anniversaries — nowhere a trace or sign of the life that must have been lived in the wings of our own, the life that was his, over which mine and that of my parents draped a cloak of silence… Not a glimpse of sweethearts, boyfriends, lovers, anything that referred to what for him must after all have been the essential thing, to the extent that there is an essence in a person, and to the extent that we could ever grasp it.

Perhaps someone else had beaten me to it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t carefully orchestrate his own disappearance without trace. He may, just before moving to that boarding house, have wiped the memory of his house clean, or given a confidant the task of doing the job for him. There were only two photos left, not much larger than visiting cards, which I fished out of his wallet where, judging by the folds and the frayed edges, they had been for years. In neither can he himself be recognized, unless one of the helmets in the background of that informal group portrait is his. Or did he take the photo himself? Is one of the men the one he was thinking of when he sometimes told me how pleasant it could be in spite of everything in the hole in the earth, while outside the inferno raged? “We even kissed, on the cheeks,” he said, “when the storm abated and we had survived it again, and there was nothing ambiguous about it. We created a god of brotherhood and a small liturgy of tenderness in order to have something that could raise us above the filth and the dead bodies, that was all. Don’t imagine any lewd scenes, my little gazelle, we did not want to degenerate entirely into animals.”

And yet I wonder why he himself is not in those photos. In both one face stands out above the indifference of the expressions, and I cannot shake off the feeling that he always kept those photos with him purely because of those two strangers. I don’t know if he often looked at them, perhaps it was enough to know they were in his wallet. Nor do I know if they survived or not. They may have been killed, and he may have chosen those two from all the men he had seen die, to hang his mourning and melancholy on. I remember him telling me how impossible it was to keep feeling sadness whenever someone you knew had been torn to shreds or had succumbed to his wounds.

Is one of them the A. Duval whose ring he must have always worn on his chest? That handsome young face in one photo perhaps, among the dozen men standing in front of the entrance to their underground shelter at sunset or early in the morning. Second from the left. Arms crossed. It was foggy at the moment when the photo was taken, so I don’t know if it really is a fine bracelet, that thread of light round the wrist of his right hand, which lies clenched in the hollow of the left arm. Above it that face: not surly, but not approachable either, rather intrigued, the most intelligent in the photo, the liveliest.

Three other figures dissolve unrecognizably in the thick fog that seems to seep in over the top of the trench — a milky-white mist that always fills me with a slight horror, because it reminds me of poison gas, which is of course nonsense. In that case they would have worn their masks and no one would have been stupid enough to pose languidly for a group portrait during a gas attack. That young chap also looks too determinedly at the unknown person who took the photo, my brother or someone else, he looks at me a lot less open-mindedly than the other face in the first photo, in the second photo — that has clearly been taken early in the morning. At bottom left a corner of a field kitchen, I suspect: a table or rack of branches tied with rope, on it tin bowls, a drinking bottle with a spout, a hunk of bread. Someone has hung a ladle on one of the vertical branches, and it hangs half in front of the chin of that face: the perky face of a young chap. Like the others, not someone who has often posed for a photo. A farmer’s son perhaps; there is an earthy soberness in his smile. The other men, five of them, look almost furtively into the lens. They have taken the butts of their cigars out of their mouths and hold them between thumb and forefinger.

Only that one chap, at the far left, looks with a kind of swank, half hidden behind that rack or table. He doesn’t seem the type that my brother would have brought with him to family gatherings or private parties at home. He seems rather to fall into the category of rascals: fellows who do not seem constantly surrounded by a cloud of language, in contrast to the well-spoken young men with whom he appeared in public, and with whom every experience first had to pass through the word, as it were — an accusation that my husband sometimes levelled at me, not to hurt me, but to make me be quiet, to seal me with his body.

We all mistrusted words. A combination of suspicion and bewilderment after years of ambiguous communiqués, lying newspapers, swollen propaganda and the inability of those who came back from the fronts to force what they had been through into an appropriate form, a vocabulary that would not distort, belittle, falsify their experiences.

I remember afternoons when I went to visit him with my daughter, his godchild, in his mansion just outside town. Afternoons spent sitting on the balcony on the bel étage , looking out over the large back garden, my daughter playing with her dolls at our feet, without exchanging a word, apart from the child language we used with her, the affectionate names and made-up words. Now, so many years later, I have the feeling that we wanted to submerge language in that child, as if in the source of eternal youth. I wonder: were all the disasters that we brought down on our heads ever anything more than a semantic question that got out of hand?

I could still let loose such speculations on him with the same enthusiasm, and he could listen with the same amusement as in our youth, during our walks through the town. Except that the ironic quips with which he pointed out my contradictions were often missing. There could be an undertone of bitterness in his words when he interrupted me and said: “You’re like an armchair soldier, my little gazelle. You’ve seen the battlefields once, in sunny weather, in ideal conditions, as a tourist. That’s all.” Usually he confined himself to amused chuckling while he poured us a cup of iced tea.

In the background, beyond the high box hedge at the bottom of the garden, on summer afternoons there was generally the measured plop-plop of a tennis game, soles crunching on gravel, exclamations of triumph or defeat from the mouths of young men who sooner or later would fall giggly and exhausted into the cane chair next to us on the balcony, legs across each other’s knees, dispensing playful blows — children.