Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I could easily walk back into the scene, as it has distilled itself from all the memories over the years. The fug of the cigars that hangs over their heads in dull-blue veils and when I open the door seems to recede in reluctant whirls before the cooler air I bring with me. The silence of those men in the room. The glass of port or cognac in one hand. The arm resting on the mantelpiece. The round table and the oil lamp on a cashmere tablecloth, an old shawl in which someone has made very symmetrical folds. The crockery in the convex glass-fronted cupboard. The cups and jugs with their female-looking handles that are almost like limp wrists, give to the silent togetherness of the men in the room something coquettish, not to say an almost sexual charge — but I am wary of dragging up such images from the quicksand of the mind and clothing them with language, with flesh. I see their figures: my husband, my brother, the friends who sometimes accompany them, sometimes not, congealed into figures of milky-white, hand-blown glass, not gaseous and not solid. I feel like a treasure-hunter who for the first time in millennia looks into a tomb and encounters the alabaster smile of a concubine. And when I ask my husband what they actually talk about, he replies: “Nothing really. Someone sometimes mentions a name and the others nod. Mostly we say nothing.”

My brother often said that in his dreams, too, scarcely anything was said. I think, he said, that the mind is lost for words — we always dream what we can package in words. What is wordless wakes us with fear. The body plucks us in time back to the surface of consciousness and then we say we had a nightmare.

I never dream about the dead either, he said. Or about the horror. I dream silence. The silence of the trench. The scraping of my men’s equipment against the walls left and right as they follow me, God knows where, through complete darkness. Only the sound of their equipment against the walls, their breath, their footsteps gives texture to the darkness — then there is the bright glare of a flare exposing an endless trench, a winding passage with walls of sandbags and planks — and then the solid night again that swallows us up. It always lasts hours and hours, that journey in my dreams. Finally day breaks and I smell the forest floor, the scent of pine needles. The branches dampen the morning light and the silence acquires a pleasant feel, a sigh that hangs above us whenever the wind plays in the needles.

The trench forks. The sandbags give way to walls of woven branches, tightly woven structures that reach higher and higher. More and more frequently we pass openings in the wall. To right and left there extend still more passages. Meanwhile the walls have become so high that it is as if we are roaming through a subterranean Knossos, a sunken Venice with canals full of mud — but however the dreams begin and however varied their course, sooner or later they all reach the same destination. The trench winds sharply up a hillside. Where the wall becomes lower again a valley extends down below, in which, largely obscured from view by treetops and trunks, a small town stretches out. I see chimneys from which plumes of smoke escape. The sounds of church bells and horses’ hooves resound crystal-clear in the freezing cold of a limpid winter morning that seems to me strangely familiar. I know that the destination is approaching in my dream, because I have the dream so often.

I know that over the mesh of branches and twigs in the wall of the trench a second mesh will be laid, of frozen stalactites which close more and more tightly together into walls of ice. The paths between the walls wind farther uphill and turn into ice steps. I can hear the laborious trudging of the men following me. The echo of their soles on the treads draws a long ribbon of sound behind me — and then I am always overcome by sadness, an unnameable feeling of regret, an unnameable grief, an unnameable resignation evoked by the sounds of the town down in the valley, by the smell of burning wood and coal winding up from the chimneys, and the peacefulness that the sounds and smells bring with them — that wave of regret and longing that goes through my trunk, where on earth does it come from, my little gazelle?

The steps become wider, the ice now looks almost polished, like marble. I feel the embarrassment of my men, as it were pushing me in the back, the shame, and we are carrying the stench of the mud with us. The steps lead to a wide, covered terrace which on one side looks out over the landscape and on the other merges with the ridge. Between white columns is a balustrade, behind which elegantly dressed women on deckchairs relax, smoke and drink and talk and laugh. They are making eyes at gentlemen who are standing chatting by the balustrade in groups of four or five and stretch their necks to emphasize their attractiveness. Between them waiters with trays come and go. Maids clear empty glasses or distribute newspapers. There is music, the hum of a string quartet, laughter — I see the hand of a man resting on one of those bare shoulders, his figure bending to plant a kiss on a neck. No one sees us. No one notices us. No one pays any attention to us.

Waves of rumbling rise from the valley, muted and distant — the echo provokes excitement among the company, as among people following some contest or other. Gentlemen look up simultaneously, interrupt their conversations and peer into the distance while casually putting a glass to their lips. Ladies sit up languidly in their chairs, lean bare-armed on the balustrade and also look into the distance — but what they see is only mildly interesting. A languor hangs over the terrace, a blanket of lethargy. At the same time I feel the jealousy of my men behind me, and rage wells up in me. Who is drinking our blood? Who is eating our flesh? Who throws us over the fence like chicken bones gnawed clean? And then there is that sadness again, that gnawing, amber-coloured regret — why do the years bring so much regret, my little gazelle? What loans must we repay, whose losses must we redeem? Who has lived above his station and mortgaged our existence? Usually I wake up in tears.

He stops talking and brings the cigar to his mouth, shrugs his shoulders sheepishly and smiles faintly. All his life he remained an adolescent, a lad who as years went by could stare out at me more and more perplexed from that old body, in which he seemed locked like a passenger on a train which to his horror goes past the expected destination. His cigars, his walking stick, his unwrinkled clothes — the icing on his refined, fickle despair. He brings the cigar to his mouth and, as he takes a last puff, on his top lip his fine blond moustache squeezes round the smoked-up stub — the mouth of my mother, her catamite’s mouth grinning at me on the train to De Panne, where we go to visit him in hospital. Between her eyebrows the permanent crease of contempt at my escapade of the summer before has softened a little. When I look up I see her avert her gaze, and on her lips the grin with which she must have been peering at me while I was reading fades. She looks outside, rocking along with the jolting of the wheels on the tracks. Resignation is what I see as her eyes wander over the farmland, the villages with their worm-eaten roofs and walls and cemeteries in which the crosses proliferate like weeds. There is no longer a cemetery to be found that is not bursting at the seams.

It is already getting on for the end of the afternoon. There were so many hold-ups that day. The eternal whining of military transports to which we had to give precedence. The umpteenth check of the transport permits, certificates, permissions which she extracts from her big bag of rough material, each time with a hint of fear that she will be told: the papers are not in order, this or that stamp is missing, this or that official should have put his signature. I see us sitting in the light, growing stale, of that September day, waiting for the carriage to start moving again, for the invisible elastic walls with which the war is dividing the country into compartments to recede so that we can proceed. I see us sitting there in our sturdy clothes of stiff textiles, cut from the materials that we quickly purchased when it had become clear, three years earlier, that we wouldn’t be able to return home immediately, and I feel the same regret, the same pity.