War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  He did not write down the following anecdote, but I heard him tell it often enough: how his mother came to fetch him from the sewing workshop after two months. The bashful Urbain was alarmed to see her standing in the middle of the room; he took enough abuse already, it seemed to him, without also paying the price for his mother’s obstinacy. But no, she did not even stop to glance at the tailor, who was squinting at her over the rim of his pince-nez. She looked her son straight in the eyes, as he sat cross-legged at a large cutting table trying to sew buttons to an odd scrap of cloth, and said, “Come on, son, you’re done here, we’re going home.” The tailor looked down at the proud working-class woman as if he had discovered a cockroach on the floor and said haughtily, “Madame, voulez-vous avoir la politesse—” She broke in, “Monsieur Tombuy, you can stick your ten centimes a day where they’ll stay warm, avec politesse,” and dragging her astonished son by the hand, she strode out of the workshop and slammed the door behind her.

  All these stories expressed an admiration for his mother that ran deep. Again and again, he spoke of her attitude of pride, her self-control, the impressive knot in her black hair, the way people would step aside as she passed, how she looked straight through every fast-talker with her light gray eyes, without saying a word, till he slunk off in shame. That day, his heart pounded as he walked beside her, and he was filled with an overwhelming sense of freedom regained. He is more docile than she is; he will never outgrow his meekness in the face of higher social classes. All the events of his life reveal his sense of humiliation and self-doubt, which often clashed painfully with the sense of pride he had inherited from her. Even at an advanced age, when he knew the family doctor was coming by, he would set to work an hour in advance, polishing the large knob of the bell pull, the handle of the front door, and the old shell case on the newel post, so that all the brass in and around the house gleamed in the sunlight for the triumphal entry of the Doctor of Medicine, during whose examinations he always stood stiffly to attention as if a surly medic were deciding whether to approve him for military school.

  —

  He never fully recovered from the traumatic moment, one evening at the age of about ten, when he was awakened by knocking on their flimsy front door, the sound of his mother screaming, and men’s anxious voices in the house. He scrambled out of bed, tiptoed down the steps—and there, in the kitchen, in the dim lamplight, his father was seated in, or draped over, a chair, “his head covered with bleeding wounds,” as he never failed to say when he told the story, so that from childhood I associated this scene with Bach’s well-known chorale about the tortured Jesus. One of the men held a damp cloth and was dabbing at the blood that welled from his split eyebrow; another was muttering words of encouragement to Franciscus as he fished a broken tooth from between his bleeding lips. His father’s head dropped onto his chest, and his mother cradled it. Because Urbain had rushed into the kitchen shouting “Papa! Papa!,” one of the men grabbed the struggling boy and told him to go back to bed, but his mother, still holding her husband’s head as he slipped in and out of consciousness, said that he could stay, since he’d already seen it. His anxious questions went unanswered; they were too busy attending to his battered father, moving him over to his wicker chair, and bringing him a drink of water. His nose was swollen, and there was blood running over his split lips, blood flowing down his neck and dripping onto his brown velvet waistcoat, and even blood sticking to his hair.

  Blood everywhere, his father, his gentle friend, the hero of the frescoes in the church! My grandfather caught snippets of the story, as if in a daze, but it was only after his mother had said that she could handle the rest on her own and the men had left, assuring her they would return the next day to see how Franciscus was getting on, only after his father had begun to return to his senses and his head was bandaged, that Urbain calmed down a little and was given the whole explanation.

  His father and a few old friends had gone to the annual pottery fair in Schellebelle that day, and on their way back—they did all their traveling on foot, so they didn’t reach Ghent until nearly dusk—they had gone for a pint in their old neighborhood off Heirnislaan. He hardly ever did that sort of thing, but it was the kind of early summer’s day that called for a celebration, and one little glass of beer was not about to kill him. In the pub, they were overcome by the urge to sing, and all of a sudden there was a waiter at their table, telling them to shut their ugly mugs. Then the waiter knocked one pint off the table. He shouldn’t have done that; it belonged to the giant Louis Van den Broecke. He drew himself up to his full height, grabbed the waiter by the throat, and asked what the problem was. The waiter shouted, “I don’t have to take orders from you, you filthy Papist,” and tried to throw a punch, but before he could swing his arm, he received a blow that slammed him into the bar. He staggered outside, swearing, Louis ordered a fresh pint, and that was that. When they left half an hour later, it was dark. Near the Rietgracht canal, they were assaulted by five men, led by the waiter, who attacked Louis from behind. Louis seized hold of the man and flung him into the canal like a doll. When he crawled back out and came at him with a knife, Louis punched him again. By this time, the other men had gotten hold of Franciscus. Two of them were sitting on his chest and the others were kicking whatever parts they could reach. The giant raced over, slammed them aside, picked up the waiter’s hat, placed it on his own head like a trophy, and together with two friends, who had made a run for it and then cautiously returned, dragged the half-conscious Franciscus home. In the kitchen, Louis saw that there was a name in the hat, which turned out to belong to a leading socialist. The man was given a year’s probation by the justice of the peace, which did nothing to ease the tensions between socialists and Catholics.

  To people like my great-grandparents, socialism meant nothing but danger, violence, fear, and mayhem. For a few years, the city had been in the grip of social unrest—my grandfather describes with horror and disgust how the “Reds” sometimes marched through the working-class neighborhoods in the evenings. There were people singing, resounding cries, gendarmes on horseback charging into the crowd. Then the fighting began: a gendarme was pulled off his horse and mauled. My grandfather was out in front of the marchers, fleeing from them in his clogs. He arrived home panting and slammed the door behind him. We lived through the uprising of the rabble, he wrote bitterly in his notebook.

  Discharged soldiers were called to arms again to break the massive strike in La Louvière and Charleroi and to put down the popular uprisings that accompanied it “with drawn swords.” There was talk of the great mine disaster in Hornu, a town in Wallonia, and the inhumane conditions in the mines there, of the drowned fishermen in Ostend, of the children worked to exhaustion in the textile factories, whose fingers were torn off by the huge carding machines as they gathered up the ends of the flax fibers, of the maimed metalworkers and cripples who could no longer work and were wasting away at home, and of the countless other disasters that befell working people in those days. But working-class Catholics did not protest in the streets; they abhorred the idea, and withdrew into their quiet little lives.

  Even right there in Ghent, there were bloody clashes between socialists and gendarmes. Tempers ran high; there were deaths on both sides of the conflict. On long summer evenings, they would hear the “goading voices of the Red orators in the dead-end alleys where the low people swarmed together to voice their hatred of anyone a hair’s breadth higher in rank or station.”

  Sometimes there were hotheads who bellowed that it was time to seize the money from the people who had it, that they would march to the homes of the rich to demand it, why not now. That made my grandfather’s ten-year-old heart contract with fear; soon all the fine ladies and gentlemen would be angry, and then his father and mother would never find work again. So the Catholic dogma of the day took root in their household: the Reds were envious, common people who had forgotten their place in the world, who blustered, made trouble, and drank themselves into a stupor
instead of humbly doing their jobs. The earliest demonstrations seemed calculated to strike even greater terror into the hearts of the timid working people; each procession “was preceded by two rows of twelve muscle-bound brutes, who emptied the streets, from the thoroughfares to the footpaths. Any family that wanted peace and quiet slammed its door shut.” The Church, too, did its best to undermine any possibility of better relations with the socialists; conflicts of this kind formed valuable fuel for both propaganda machines, and the priests in their pulpits spewed as much gall as the protesters in the streets. On Sundays, Father Vandermaelen’s theme was the godless heretics who once again, my dear congregation, as in Roman times, seek to murder Christians and throw them to the lions. Although my grandfather came from the common people and, in a way, remained proud of that fact his whole life, he expressed nothing but loathing for the “Red clique,” a dangerous enemy that he accused of possessing no culture, no respect for God or his commandments, and no sense of justice. He was sickened by their coarse language, their disrespect for God’s name, their failure to use more than three hundred words in their whole lifetime, the way they polluted the canal sides with quarreling and cursing, how they drank up their wages at the alehouse as soon as they got them instead of dutifully coming home, as his father did, and sharing the money with their families: “They shouted, ‘Down with the tyrants,’ but they themselves behaved like beasts, taking unflagging pleasure in other men’s misery.”

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  In his memoirs, he noted bitterly that socialists were later appointed as city councillors, members of Parliament, and even ministers, but that this new class of representatives was barely literate and required assistance from the very kind of people they once had cursed. While events like these certainly widened and deepened the rift in the working population, all my grandfather saw as a child was his father in bed with a bandage around his swollen head. And his young heart hardened against the people he would later describe as the enemies of law and order.

  For a while, in the 1950s, this trauma manifested as paranoia. There were microphones all over his house, he said, planted there so that the socialists could monitor his conversations, and when he started telling anyone who would listen that the Christian Democrats had offered him a post as minister, but the Reds were spying on him in his own house, it was time for the family doctor to intervene. He was admitted to Sleidinge psychiatric center, where he received shock treatment five times. He returned home a broken man, said nothing to anyone for weeks, and sat and cried in the greenhouse under the small green grapes. Now and then it would resurface, and he would pound his fists on the table, fulminate against the “riffraff” from the back alleys—even though he came from the same place—and call his proletarian neighbors tosspots and drunkards. Then the only way to preserve the peace was by keeping all newspapers out of his sight and avoiding the radio news as much as possible.

  His old wounds were reopened again and again—by the controversy over King Leopold III in 1951, and later, in the 1960s, by the nightly television news. The old animosities between socialists and Catholics seemed to merge with the tensions between the regions of Wallonia and Flanders, and between French and Dutch speakers, reminding him of long-ago humiliations at military school. He heard that Russian Communists had destroyed the old church icons, scratched out the eyes of saints, murdered priests. And every time, it seemed to him like a plot to kill his dead father again; yes, even to destroy his murals if they got the chance—sacrilege, no more and no less. Madness struck a second time; he began to talk nonsense and was readmitted for more electroshocks.

  He left no autobiographical account of the years after the Second World War, because he refused to talk about the things that really mattered. What remains are apocryphal puzzle pieces, an assortment of anecdotes and memories recounted by my aunts, cousins, and parents. The pain all this had caused him went on smoldering when he saw me fall under the sway of left-wing ideas at university, and he snapped that I was throwing away everything my parents had done for me. In his eyes, it was the second time I was letting my family heritage go to pieces.

  I later realized how fitting it was that his birth year also saw the publication of the notorious papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, a pamphlet by Pope Leo XIII about Catholic social teaching, which was a new and unexpected development after centuries of support for nobles and aristocrats. This was an attempt by the Church to head off the rise of socialist unions, partly by parroting the demands of the socialists, interspersed with precepts calling for just the kind of rigid morality and obedience that had created such a barrier between my grandfather and his nonreligious fellow working men.

  —

  In the small scullery, he stands in front of his father’s white-painted bathroom cabinet. He is trying to shave the downy stubble on his cheeks for the first time. He looks into the small, speckled mirror and sees a stocky, robust young lad with a thick head of wiry hair, bright blue eyes, and a couple of sizable pimples poking through the blond fuzz along his jawline. He stands with a straight razor in his hand, which he first sharpens the way his father showed him, on a leather strop hooked over the doorknob to pull it taut. He is almost fifteen but will never grow tall. Even in his old age, he will claim that he never reached his full height because of all the heavy lifting he did in the foundry as a fourteen-year-old boy. He picks up the shaving brush, dunks it in the large bowl of soapy, lukewarm water, and lathers his right cheek. He scrapes the razor awkwardly over his skin, clenching it in his large fist with black-rimmed fingernails. It is as if an unknown animal awakens something in him, something still slumbering that half opens its eyes, rudely aroused from childish lethargy; a slow, warm dream still sweeping through his shivering body like the first gust of summer wind in May, there in the cold scullery, a warmth that spreads from his mouth to his ear and wounds him, cuts him, makes him aware of his own vulnerable body. He feels how warm and hard it is growing in his trousers. He wipes the soap from his cheek, dabs at his burning skin with the alum set out on the crude wooden rack, lathers the other cheek, and pulls the skin taut as he has seen his father do. Just then, with one cheek covered in white, frothy soap, he sees a face behind him in the mirror: his mother, staring at her son with bated breath and a light in her pale eyes. She notices that he has seen her in the mirror; their eyes meet. He stands with the blade in front of his face and gazes at her steadily. He sees her expression soften, as if she smiles without moving a muscle, changing only the look in her eyes, like a brief burst of sunlight through a veil of clouds, drifting away and gone before you’ve truly seen it. Then she steps back and softly shuts the door.

  —

  In the adjoining house, a young woman is dying. She has been sick for months, complaining of pain in her back, pain in her belly. Her four children have a neglected look. Her husband, the surly Henri, a cabinetmaker by trade, gets drunk and stays out late. The young woman, Emilie, is thirty-five years old. She stands in her kitchen, wasted and pale; she pounds on the thin walls for help; she shrieks in agony and asks for death. Céline holds the newborn on her lap, a premature baby girl named Helena. She nurses the child at her own breast, since she is still breast-feeding her own youngest daughter, Melanie. Years of breast-feeding were no exception in those days; it saved a mouth to feed. In the weeks that follow, Emilie wastes away rapidly. When Céline brings her something to eat, she throws it up almost at once. She screams with pain when anyone tries to tend to her swollen midriff. As far as I can tell from my grandmother’s story, the cause of her death may have been an undetected tumor somewhere in her bowels; at the time of her death, she had a black boil on her belly.

  Henri places the other children under Céline’s care, not knowing what else to do with them. It must be a heavy burden for her to bear: her own five children, plus the youngsters from next door. After a few weeks, she is worn out. Franciscus, unable to bear the sight of his wife falling apart, walks in on his drunken neighbor Henri as he dozes in his armchair—the houses had no
doorsteps to separate them from the street, and the doors were never locked in the alleyways—and insists that he send his children to one of the city’s many charitable institutions. Henri grudgingly agrees and later moves away himself. He takes his eldest son with him, and his eldest daughter Leonie comes to mend clothes with Céline twice a week, another small source of income. For my grandfather, this means four new foster brothers and sisters, and for his poverty-stricken parents it means even more mouths to feed when the charity schools are closed. He never told me much about them, except that the eldest, named Joris, attended secondary school a few years later with financial aid from some Christian organization, a stroke of good fortune of which my grandfather was secretly a little envious. Joris grew to become a somewhat fretful boy, perpetually smitten with girls he was too shy to talk to, stiff and fussy, always finding fault with one thing or another, but once in a great while they would walk by Zuidstatie together and recall the idyllic days gone by, when they spent their Sunday afternoons strolling around the serene city. They would see each other for the last time amid the feverish turmoil of London in March 1915. One of them, my grandfather, was a war hero by then, returning to Belgium after his first convalescence; the other, the educated stepbrother he admired, had fled the war after the death of his anemic wife and would die in obscurity somewhere near London.