Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

by Georges Rodenbach

  His mother, already growing old, made her way beside him but, close to each other as they were, in reality they seemed very distant. The quais run parallel, but separated by all the cold water of the canals, and they too seemed each to be pursuing reflections without mixing them. Between them was a great, mournful mystery, cold and impenetrable as the water itself. What could it be? Public curiosity was aroused. As they passed, people often spied on them from the stillness of their homes, from behind the tulle of the curtains; and, thanks to those indiscreet little mirrors called busybodies that are fixed to the outside of the window frames, they continued, as the pair went on, to watch for a gesture, an exchange of glances, a sign, the slant of a profile which might throw some light on their secret.

  The enigma of this pensive pair seemed all the more inexplicable to the inhabitants of Bruges in that life had been kind to Mevr. Cadzand and her son. They belonged to an old family, they had inherited ample resources, but they lived a reclusive life, cloistered, humble, reduced to the bare necessities. They spent their income on good works, on charity.

  What had happened for them to cut themselves off from the world like that?

  Especially the son! His behaviour did not conform to what was expected, to what was usual for his age. True, his mother, for her part, had suffered a great misfortune in the past, being widowed after only a year and a half of marriage. But time heals all wounds, consigns such grief to oblivion, freezes the most ardent tears in the fine hail of funerary pearls with which tombs are decorated.

  And then, Mevr. Cadzand had had the compensation of this model son.

  Even now he never went out except with her. He had no friends, no business outside the house. The women looked with envy on this mother who was always escorted. It is the great sorrow of all women that their children go their own way, leaving their bosom as sad as a country from which one is departing. But this mother had realised the mother’s dream. She was entirely devoted to her son. Her son was entirely devoted to her.

  But it was precisely that which seemed strange. Why, being so united, did they appear to be so unhappy?

  Without suspecting that they were attracting attention, that all eyes, lacking occupation in this dead town, were fixed on them, they continued to walk back along the canals after mass each morning, at such a funereal pace and so shut off from everything outside their own selves that even the swans on the canals, sensitive as they were, did not take fright, did not feel the shadow of the couple in black stain their white silence with mourning.

  Part One

  I

  Great were the celebrations in the ancient dwelling in Blinde-Ezelstraat when Hans Cadzand was born. The old, blackened countenance of the façade was lit up by the white smile of the tulle curtains at the windows, which Mevr. Cadzand had wanted to look new as well, and bright, for this divine moment of nativity. The pretty swaddling clothes for the windows had been prepared along with those for the child. Oh, all those cool mornings, all those long evenings in the house during which this feast of white had been sewn and embroidered, hemmed and trimmed! Using only the finest linen, the flimsiest cambric, the mother-to-be delighted in designing, creating, enhancing with lace the garments that would enfold the limbs, the sleep of her baby! She had insisted on making the layette herself. She felt that she was the only person who knew the precise measurements, since she alone already knew the child that was to be born and could see its size within her. No other fingers were to touch the baby linen which would lie next to its skin. Made, handled by her alone, it would take on something of the gentleness of her hands, the motion of her heart, it would be like an extension of herself. Thus the baby, when it rested amid these coverlets and swaddling clothes, would think it was still inside her.

  It was born one year, to the day, after its parents’ wedding. A double anniversary! And a boy, an heir to perpetuate the fine name of Cadzand, which had for so long been held in such high regard throughout the land. The father of the newborn child was a worthy bearer of the name. He was a scholar who had obtained the post of archivist for the province so that he could spend his life surrounded by chronicles, charters, incunabula, rare manuscripts—flotsam and jetsam from the age of Bruges’ glory, authentic relics of a great past which it was his pleasure to republish now and then in annotated editions and scholarly monographs. At the moment when the child was born he was entirely taken up with collating new and important manuscripts on Hans Memling, the naive genius of Flanders, concerning the disputed question of whether his shrine depicting the martyrdom of Saint Ursula had been commissioned by the wealthy burgher, as some claim, or whether it had truly been painted while he was being cared for in the Hospital of St John in Bruges, where it still resides, to give expression to the freshness of his dreams when he started to recover his health.

  Thus it was because he was entirely taken up with his research on the great painter who filled him with such enthusiasm that he had the idea of giving his name to the child that had just been born. Hans! That pretty name which spurts up, not very high, then is turned down. Hans, a name hallowed in the world of art, a name to bring good fortune. The infant was christened with the name which, now ceaselessly repeated around the house by his father, his mother, his nurse, the servants—‘Hans!’ morning, noon and night, even in their dreams: ‘Hans! Hans!’—had a freshness that made the continuous faint, moist sound of a fountain hidden in one of the rooms.

  Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face. The intoxication of starting a family! But any great happiness is a bright light, a challenge to fate to do its worst. There must not be people who are too happy. They would discourage all the rest, to whom life grants nothing more than unexceptional moments, intermittent joys, roses that have to be watered with tears.

  The Cadzand household was too happy. The white smile of the tulle curtains on the old blackened countenance of the façade was too white. Hans’ layette was too white.

  A great misfortune befell his father and all the linen had to be edged with black crepe; crepe was tied to the cradle, like a flag at half-mast on the fragile barque setting out into the world.

  Hans, completely unaware of the sudden mourning, made his first smiles.

  It was one night that the tragedy occurred. Hans’s cradle always stood beside the bed where his father and mother slept, the little barque alongside the great ship watching over its one frail passenger. It was his mother who had insisted on this vigilant watch. She was unwilling to entrust the child to its nurse during the night. These country girls are heavy sleepers, slipping so abruptly and so far away into sleep that she could well have not heard Hans waking up, have let him cry, get cold because of his habit of pushing the covers off, a gesture of the newly born and the dying as if, so close to non-existence, they were afraid of anything weighing down on them, immobilising them.

  Mevr. Cadzand, on the other hand, watched over Hans punctiliously. She frequently got up and wrapped him in the eiderdown; even after she had gone to sleep there was still some part of her remaining, that tiny fragment of consciousness which is left and wakes us on days when we have to rise early to set off for some railway station or other.

  When the child merely moaned softly, scarcely grazing the firm weave of his sleep, it was sometimes his father who, to save his mother having to get up, would stretch out his arm and rock the cradle for a second, imparting a slight swaying motion to the fragile barque, which quickly came to rest again as silence returned, having sent its little passenger back to sleep.

  On that night the infant whimpered and Mevr. Cadzand, still embroiled in sleep, called to her husband, ‘Hans is crying. Rock him a little.’

  His father did not reply. Mevr. Cadzand, only half awake, said again, ‘Hans is crying.’

  Since her husband did not move, she felt for him to wake him up, to insist.

  But what’s that her hand has touched? It’s li
ke touching a block of ice! Finding her husband silent, cold, motionless, she gets up hastily. She takes the nightlight, which was fixing shadows on the ceiling like spots on the surface of the moon, and brings it closer. She calls his name, she checks his face, his hands, his body. Everything is frozen, everything is stiff, everything is over. Now there was a waxen statue stretched out alongside Hans’s cradle.

  II

  The years passed. The child grew.

  Every moment of the day poor Mevr. Cadzand was crying, ‘Hans, Hans,’ as she clutched her son’s head. Oh, how she clutched it in her hands, such long hands, as if to enable her to enclose it entirely, such pale hands, which seemed to have turned into wax since the night when they had touched the corpse.

  She clutched it passionately and full of fear, as if holding a precious treasure she was afraid of losing. Are a mother’s hands not a key, a clasp to secure this treasure? They are also wings, they can extend, warmly surround, like a mother hen …

  This duty of nurturing her little son had been essential to rescue the poor widow from the overwhelming grief which threatened to unhinge her mind. For months she had been subject to fits of harsh laughter, nervous tics, had been drawn towards a dear ghost drowning in the mirrors. The child alone had pulled her back from the edge of the abyss. Hans was her dead husband still present, the beloved she had lost after a year and a half of marriage. He had been so handsome, so good, so noble! Hans resembled him. As he grew up, the resemblance became clearer: there was his delicate mouth with the short, disdainful crease, his fair skin, above all his hair with its swirling lights, whorls of fairer hair in a mass of darkening gold.

  Mevr. Cadzand adored her son, he was so elegant, and so intelligent as well. From the very first months he had delighted her with graceful charms, postures that could have come from some engraving: amongst others she remembered how, when he was very young, he had danced to the doleful melody of a barrel organ that was passing. Clasping his gown in a dainty hand pretty as a jewel, he had started to revolve, swaying in time, like a hollyhock in a strong wind. The intoxication of rhythm! Not long afterwards he had been undressed for his bath. Hans was naked. And the barrel organ came back down the street, grinding out some sad old tune. Immediately the child had started to dance again and, not aware that he had been undressed, had this time clasped his own flesh with his dainty hand pretty as a jewel, creasing the innocent nakedness of his skin as if it were the material of a gown. A heavenly moment, a perfect little picture she had deposited within herself for ever, a few touches of pastel to relieve the room decked in mourning that was her soul.

  Now Hans had grown. Already he was a little young man, pale and serious. The time came to think about his education. The widow sent him to a college run by priests where, from the very start, he gained the top grades in his class, the first prizes, the medals, the teachers quickly setting him up as a model of diligence and good behaviour to his fellow pupils. And they respected him with a hint of veneration, not simply because of his success, his obvious intellectual superiority, but above all because of the air of nobility surrounding him, the fervent piety which transformed his face, encircling his head with a halo such as could be seen in the college chapel round the head of the Blessed Jan Berchmans. They were not far from thinking that little Hans would also be beatified, perhaps even canonised. What an honour that would be for the college where he had grown up and for the city of Bruges, which has always been a sacred fortress of the church.

  The Catholic rites sent him into exquisite raptures. At high masses and benedictions, at Easter and Christmas, he would pray as a bird would sing. The prayers filled his mouth with flavours as delicious as a ripe fruit melting on his tongue; he counted the beads of his rosary as if they were the sugared almonds for the baptism of his soul and the Virgin Mary its godmother.

  And the canticles from the rood screen, the thrill of the organ, which moved him to tears, pitching and tossing on its immense waves!

  He closed his eyes, rose up with the octave then tumbled back down into a dazzling abyss. He was part of the music and the music was part of him. An ebb and flow of sounds sending harmonies, rainbows of colour, hosts, incense and all the blue of the sky rolling across the beach of his soul…

  Oh, those Sundays in the church; and the Saturday meetings of the Sodality too, with, after the great swell of the organ, the gently flowing canal of the harmonium on which one glides, drifts along. Calmly meandering chords, a mist of notes rising from the keyboard to the statue of the Virgin, smiling in her velvet mantle, her long lace veil.

  Because of his exemplary piety, his fellow members had elected him to the position of prefect, the highest dignity of the Sodality. He was enthroned in a prie-dieu, flanked by two acolytes, while the ordinary members knelt on straw-bottomed chairs. They wore a blue ribbon with the consecrated medal round their necks; he had a red ribbon, designating his rank.

  In his religious fervour Hans had a dream that was close to his heart: to become an altar boy. Was that not a way of getting closer to God? He would see the face of Jesus in the host more clearly if he were kneeling on the altar steps, just as one sees the face of the man in the moon more clearly from the top of a tower at night. It was also a way of better serving God. He would play an active part in the holy sacrifice of mass, would present the cruets, carry the Gospels, would, at solemn moments during the service, ring the special instrument with twenty tiny bells which abruptly moistens the silence with a sprinkling of tintinnabulation, spraying the souls with its noise, like an aspergillum of sound. Hans was carried away by the very thought: he would be the one to sound the arrival of God, he would be the one to swing the thurible, creating all those little paths of blue in the air by which the eyes would make their way to the host.

  He talked about it to Mevr. Cadzand: ‘Mother, I’d like to be an altar boy.’

  ‘Of course you can, Hans, if that’s what you want.’

  She was overjoyed. She could already see him in the chancel wearing the long red surplice and the pleated rochet decorated with lace. He would need two outfits, one for ordinary days and one for feast days with a silk cappa magna, a purple cape over the white linen. It was the college that would see that he was provided with all the sacred accoutrements and to see her son wearing them would fill the widow with pride.

  One day he said to her, ‘Mother, I’ll soon be able to serve at mass. I’ll have to shave my head.’

  ‘Your hair? You want to cut off all your hair? Surely you’re not thinking of doing that?’ his mother said, disturbed by his sudden revelation.

  ‘It’s a rule, Mother. All the altar boys have shaven heads.’

  Mevr. Cadzand’s heart rebelled at the thought that she would soon see Hans’s pretty locks fall under the scissors, that turbulent mass with its swirling lights, just like his father’s.

  No! No! The cold steel of scissors cutting into hair—it was all right for a dead body. She had already seen a whole head of hair cut off, but that was her husband’s after he had died. But to see Hans’s hair fall would have been as if she were seeing something of him die, for our hair is part of us, our hair is alive. It would have been a kind of half-death.

  Hans, not wanting to annoy his mother, didn’t mention it for a while. But then, when his outfit was ready and a locker in the sacristy already had his name on it, he returned to the painful subject with great tenderness in his voice, cajoling her in such guileless, mournful tones as if, by insisting, his mother were dashing his hopes of happiness, were casting a shadow over his life, were preventing him from entering on the path along which he was being called.

  Mevr. Cadzand continued to say no, giving herself over to sad thoughts and balking at the idea of seeing Hans somewhat disfigured by his shaven head. His fine head of hair harvested! The sun-ripe ears of corn scythed down! She could already see his little head bare as a stubble field, his hair short and dense, like grass that refuses to grow… However, she eventually gave way, but at least she was not going to let
this treasure go to waste and insisted on accompanying Hans. How distressing to see his abundant locks gradually diminishing, his head gradually stripped bare like a sheep during shearing. But does one let a fleece go to waste? With an aching heart Mevr. Cadzand, in the gloom of the hairdresser’s salon, bent down to collect the silky tresses. Hans, sitting at the mirror, was smiling as his face was reduced to an ascetic thinness, the slenderness of a pale ivory sculpture. He was not less handsome, he was different.

  Full of apprehension, Mevr. Cadzand followed the metamorphosis: his head simplified, as if he’d been ill, as if he were in the moonlight…

  Once the operation was over, she gathered up and bore away all the hair cut off from Hans’s head, a pretty bundle of silk cocoons with which she was going to spin out the gloomy days of her future. Instead of shutting them away in a drawer or a casket—which is only done with the hair of the dead—she even had the idea of letting them circulate, so to speak, letting them continue to exist outside, to be part of her life. She wrapped them up in an old piece of cloth; yes, she would make a cushion out of them, adding a little wool, a little swansdown. Weren’t they the same thing? A swan, a lamb, a child, weren’t they brothers?

  The triple sweetness of three innocences mingling: hair, wool, down. A soft cushion that was never to leave her side, a little pillow for her days, a support to soothe her frail head and her frequent migraines. Now, when she rested on the gentle cushion of hair, it was as if she were leaning against Hans’s face.

  III

  Hans’s piety became even more fervent when he was made one of the group of altar boys. He felt that he was contributing to the ritual of the service, that he was playing a role in the great drama of the mass. How he trembled as he stood behind the priest, raising the chasuble at the moment of consecration, admitted to the privilege of being so close to God that he now felt that in the past he had only loved Him in absence. Face to face with the great sun of the holy sacrament, he lowered his eyes, dazzled by all the gold, the rays, the diamantine dove trembling at the top, dazzled above all by the host, the transparent unleavened bread on which, now and then, the glow of the nearby candles seemed to make the wounds of Jesus bleed.