Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

It was a mild, sunny morning. My mother, after breakfast and a short chat with Edgard, had gone for a rest, and the nurses said that, if I liked, I could take my brother out. Most patients were taken to the promenade or the dunes in fine weather, to expose their healing wounds to the sun and the disinfectant iodine in the sea air under a thin, protective gauze. They sat on benches against the sides of the walls, looking out over the road to the promenade, some at first sight unscathed, others sometimes no more than a torso on which a head looked round alertly, with so many decorations on their pyjama tops that I wondered what the current exchange rate was: how many grams of metal for how many pounds of lost flesh?

“Poor devils,” said my brother, who felt himself rather hard done by with his Croix Léopold, however prestigious that decoration supposedly was; but nevertheless he had pinned the thing prominently on his breast pocket and now let himself be wheeled around by my husband and me like a reliquary in a procession. I pushed, my husband pulled with his free hand on the front of the wicker crate to guide the wheels more smoothly through the soft sand.

Everyone wanted to enjoy the September sunshine that morning. Ahead of us, far away over the broad, flat expanse of wet sand, under the supervision of a man on horseback, figures were marching to the music of a small brass band, and the sea wind carried snatches of the melody across the beach. Around us nurses were walking along, chatting arm in arm, and a child, a girl of about ten, under whose skirts only one leg stuck out and whose head, with flapping plaits, was like that of a doll with a paralysed neck, wobbled alarmingly to and fro as she limped enthusiastically on two crutches towards the beach, observed some distance away by a slim woman in an elegantly tailored coat, probably the mother.

It was quite simply a peaceful scene, and an equally peaceful, melancholy September morning, and for the umpteenth time during that war I was amazed at how quickly we, having just a few hours before hidden from fate’s wings, threw the everyday routine like a tough carpet over the craters and the dead — and I still don’t know whether I found that a form of grace, a sign of indomitability, or a kind of self-anaesthetizing, the calm of a sheep that, in the vicinity of a pack of wolves, too close to escape, summons up a glorious fatalism and looks its fate calmly in the eyes.

*

We found a quiet spot, out of the wind, backing onto one of the wards close to the promenade, looking out over the sand, and parked the basket chair against the wooden wall.

“Now, my little gazelle,” said Edgar, sitting up. “Your brother would like to test whether his legs can still carry him…” He spread his arms wide, signalling that he expected us to help him out of the basket.

“Is that a good idea, Edgard?” I asked, because I could see that he was weak. His face, half hidden under the gauze, had that white, fragile glow of frosted glass which long-term pain makes show beneath someone’s features and which seems to push the eyes deeper into their sockets; and when we had helped him out of the basket chair — it had been an effort, since he could scarcely move his right leg and he had raised it from the blankets with a single swing — it was now obvious that he was having a dizzy spell. He stood getting his breath back, hips leaning against that carriage, and looking around, at the beach, blinked vulnerably with his blond eyelids into the sunlight, and muttered: “Christ, vertical again at last…”

“I think we deserve a souvenir,” said my husband. He rummaged in the pocket of his pyjama tops, produced one of his small cameras and threw it to me. They stood next to each other, against the edge of the wicker basket, my husband so enthusiastically that he took my brother by the hip with his free arm and pulled him close, which produced a suppressed cry of pain from Edgard.

“Sorry, mate…”

And that’s how I saved them for posterity, one in salmon-red striped pyjamas, the other in grey and white, stuck together in front of the wooden wall, my brother more or less overwhelmed by the tall, thin figure next to him, the angular shoulders, the slender arms, the long, long fingers in the material of his pyjama top, pale and unsteady in contrast to the healthy complexion and that aura of boyish invulnerability which would never leave him, who was to become my other half, would make him immortal while he was alive — and when my husband said: “I could kill for a puff” and I handed him the packet of cigarettes I had bought the day before at the station, and he offered my brother one and then held the burning match between them like a restless moth fluttering in the lantern of his fingers; and when the match, his last one, went out and he held his own cigarette against the glowing tip of that of my brother, who was a good head shorter — he looked like a stork chick being fed from its mother’s beak — I took another snap of them, and I saw how my brother absorbed with his eyes that serene face, the closed eyes that concentrated on the cigarette, the hand resting lightly on his shoulder, the two medals that seemed to be trying to outdo each other, one red, the other blue — he etched it on the copper plates of memory, looked lovingly at that mouth, my husband’s mouth; the lips that pursed round the cigarette end as they sucked oxygen through the glow, and then suddenly released spurts of white smoke. And I turned round, and I still don’t know why my heart swelled in my breast, why the distant sea, the jade-green sea, the white lacework of breaking waves, the constant din of the surf, the empty beach, that vast nothingness, that breath of space, filled me with almost desperate euphoria — why, why? Are my eyes wet, Rachida? Are my glasses misting up? Why? Do you know that line of flotsam on the beach after a storm, have you ever seen that? The long, winding ribbon of pieces of wood sculpted by sea worms and cutting sand, that pure chance, that narrow congregation of bottles, the leg of a doll, the arm of a pair of glasses, the bladderwrack, shell grit, the sea anemones and lengths of rope at the furthest point reached by the waves the night before? As a child I tried to read them, I wanted to break their Morse code, to recognize in all that had been washed up a single sanctifying connection that would breathe life into all that had been drowned. Why can’t I free myself from that image, so long ago, that afternoon, also on the beach, the first of the many excursions that we were to make that summer, we thought, without knowing that it would be the last excursion for years? Why do I hear again the calm rushing sound, the seagulls, the ethereal rustling of the pages of the newspaper that my brother is sitting reading in his beach chair? I see only his legs sticking out of that upright wicker basket, his bare feet and his toes that are rooting nonchalantly about in the sand while, at the extremity of his rolled-up sleeves, the wind stirs the paper in his fingers. In the distance I see children in their navy-blue swimming costumes under straw hats with ribbons splashing through the tidal pools, and on the handle of the parasol that she has planted firmly in the sand my mother’s palms resting, while, leaning a little forward, she looks out with her slender neck, over the butter-yellow sand, the azure, the sea: content, not to say happy — and it is as if I hear my father’s breath, the rush of the air in his lungs, beneath my ear, under the material of his bathing suit rough with salt, my father who, so we still thought, for a little while yet, would be joining us in about ten days. And I can also hear the sigh my mother let out when, that evening, after we had dined on the promenade, eaten ice cream, taken a last walk, she and I arm in arm, my uncle came to collect us in the coach. My uncle, not the coachman, because he had been called up — and my mother had let out that sigh.