Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

“We might as well go back,” he had decided. He had clicked his tongue and slapped the reins along the horse’s flanks. At home my mother had listened to us with perplexed astonishment. If she had been able she would have sacked history on the spot.

I walked on. At one end of the corridor, on the stairs that led to our attic room, a group of patients were sitting chatting. The sisters had left them there to keep the corridor as far as possible for civilians and the badly wounded. They reminded me of big chicks, in their white pyjamas, with bandages around their heads or hands. I thought: I must not go too close; doubtless my mother wasn’t letting me out of her sight for a second. And I was about to turn round when one figure struck me and my heart was in my mouth.

I walked towards the stairs. A few of the others looked up, but he didn’t see me, preoccupied as he was with an orange that lay on a napkin on his lap. His left hand was in a bandage and was resting in a sling knotted around his neck. With the elbow of his immobile arm he was trying to keep the fruit in place, while with the thumb of his other hand he was endeavouring to pick the skin open. He seemed to notice nothing of the noise outside, the people in the corridor, the languorous fear, the lethargy.

I came closer. The fruit shot out from under his elbow. I heard him swear under his breath. Under his pyjama bottoms his toes curled against the wood of the stair tread.

He pushed the orange back under one arm, and I was about to speak when the fruit completely escaped him and rolled over his knees down the stairs. It came to a halt against my foot, and I bent down to pick it up.

He saw my hand, raised his eyes at the same time as me and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Miss Demont… Helen… You keep surprising us…” His face brightened, with that childlike, all-embracing laugh of his.

I should have liked to throw my arms round his neck, but I restrained myself. My mother was watching, doubtless. So I said: “So do you, Mister Herbert. Peeling an orange with one hand… That would be an achievement…”

“Dunno Darling…” He conjured his grin onto his lips. “I’ve achieved lots of things with just one hand in my young life…”

He winked, stuffed the napkin into the palm of his left hand and threw it to me.

I found an empty spot, a few steps below his, and sat down. “Writing clearly isn’t one of them…” It sounded more piqued than I intended.

I spread the napkin on my lap, put the orange in it and began peeling it. I hadn’t eaten oranges for ages, let alone seen or smelt any; it must have been since the last Christmas before the war. The bitter smell of the oils that were released when I buried my thumbnail in the tough skin, and the sweetness when it gave way and the white membrane and the fruit were exposed, overwhelmed me. I felt tears rolling down my cheeks and tried to hide it by bending more deeply over the fruit, but the smell and the relief of seeing him after all those weeks were too much for me.

“Oh come on, love… It’s not an onion, it’s an orange!” he laughed. It sounded both flippant and helpless.

I tried to smile, but it was stronger than me and his quip upset me even more.

“Oh God, Helen…” He made as if to come and sit next to me.

I raised my hand. “Don’t… Mother’s here.” I nodded in her direction. “We were visiting my brother actually.”

“I see… La Mère audacieuse …” He pulled a face. I saw he was watching her. “Did she make that coat herself? She looks like bloody fucking St Paul’s she does…”

“My aunts made it…” I mumbled.

The sadness lifted. I took a deep breath, divided the orange into segments and handed him the napkin.

“At least you had the decency to write and tell me you were dying…”

“Minor wounds, I said, Helen. That’s all. Didn’t want you to worry…” He offered me a segment. I couldn’t get angry, I was too relieved at seeing him relatively unscathed.

“What happened?”

“I just slipped…”

I giggled.

“I did…” He had wanted to snap a troop of Canadians, by the side of the road. He had stepped onto the brick edge of a small bridge over a ditch leading to a field. “And I slipped. Ruined me arm, me wooden camera and some of me precious ribs… So here’s your war hero for you, Miss Demont. What d’ya say?”

“You deserve a statue in Trafalgar Square.”

He laughed, but I detected frustration in his pleasure. Greater honour could be gained with different wounds. “At least it got me a medal. It’s in here somewhere…” With his free hand he started feeling the pockets of his pyjamas. “They hand ’em out like biscuits these days.” The thing looked fairly paltry, a limp ribbon in blue material, on which a metal coin was visibly ashamed of itself.

It had become oppressively hot. Outside there was thunder. My mother was fanning herself with an old newspaper and doing her best not to glower too blatantly in our direction. The man next to her had fallen asleep. The first thunderclaps drowned out the increasingly faint noise of the guns.

“And next?” I asked.

“Back to London, probably, to recover. Daddy’s Mighty Arm pulling me back across the Channel. Visit Auntie Margaret. Have tea and ginger biscuits in the parlour. Sing hymns. Walk on the beach. Eternal boredom…”

“Sounds great. Will you come back?”

“Of course, love. Can’t stand Albion any more. Nothing there. It’s like living on a ship. Besides…” He flashed his grin again. “I’d like to try a few more Belgian delicacies…”

“I’ll keep you to your word, Mister Herbert.”

A sentry came into the corridor and shouted, “All clear!” The people got up, straightened their coats and adjusted their hats or caps. The patients around us scrambled to their feet.

“See you in the morning?”

I nodded. “We have to leave after lunch.”

I left him and went to my mother.

“Well, well,” she said sarcastically. “Isn’t that ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir ? What a coincidence!”

We went upstairs. The room was wet. The rain was leaking in through the smashed window. We slid the beds away from the window, towards each other. She lay down and pulled the bag under her head as a pillow. I cuddled up to her on the other side. She had kept her coat and her shoes on like me.

I waited for her breathing to become calmer, and waves of sleep to come over her, but after a while the mattress began to shake softly. She was sobbing.

I put an arm round her trunk. Through the thick material of her coat I was met by the whalebones of her corset, as if it were not my mother, a living being that I felt under my palm, but a creature of steel. I knew that she didn’t want me to say anything, so I just pressed my arm more firmly against her ribcage.

Outside there was the sound of men’s voices. Glass slivers being swept into a heap. The faint thunder.

She had stopped sobbing. Sniffed.

“Try to get some sleep, Maman,” I said.

She said nothing, but shifted position.

“You do know, child,” she said suddenly, “that I brought you along so that you could see him?”

I wondered how she knew. Had the aunts got wind of it?

“Your uncle won’t hide many more secrets from his dear sister,” she said, as if she had read my thoughts.

She took a deep breath and I could feel her lungs swell under the laces of her corset. She swallowed. “And I can’t see you eating yourself up with worry, Hélène. I’m not a monster.”

She turned onto her side, arranged the bag under her ear and the weight of her armoured body drew me along in her wake.

ONE OF THE TORPEDOES had left a deep crater in the sand between the wards, torn the head off one of the sentries, riddled another with shrapnel, and blown tiles off the surrounding roofs, smashed windows and left a bas-relief of scorings and impact holes in the walls; and when that morning we, my husband and I, rolled my brother on his wicker bed on wheels, like a grotesque pram, to the promenade, soldiers and orderlies were still pushing glass slivers ahead of their brooms across the floors of the wards. One of the projectiles hadn’t exploded and was lying asleep in the sand, surrounded by barbed wire, flanked by a sentry who occasionally looked at the thing as if he were taking his dog for a walk and waiting impatiently for him to do his business.