War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  He was my friend, the learned scholar, the elderly Urbain wrote in his fine, shaky handwriting. I still idolized him, as I always had. No matter whether he was ill or in the pink of health, he was my hope of a better life.

  —

  In the small chapel of the girls’ boarding school run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent, Franciscus stood for months on scaffolding he had built himself. He whitewashed the walls, carefully added a thin golden layer to the ornaments on the pillars, restored the old biblical scenes, and even painted a few new ones. He received permission to consult books in the school library with etchings and plates depicting biblical figures. He made sketches on paper, exercises in which he drew hands in all conceivable positions. He also drew countless heads—tilted heads, listening or watching, faces staring at a child, a dead snake, or a burning heretic, faces that had to be pensive and unrevealing. He learned to recognize that the great painters can be identified by the expressions in the eyes of their figures, and he did his best to approach that effect: How do you draw an intelligent look? What lines is it composed of? He often worked with a piece of charcoal that he held in a pair of metal pincers. Attached to the other end of the pincers was a tiny India rubber, which he used to draw lighter areas by rubbing out traced surfaces to varying degrees. Look, he said to his son, I can draw by erasing. This was the same technique my grandfather would later pass on to me when we went to parks and gardens to draw together.

  Franciscus bought everything he needed, sending an errand boy, who had been assigned to him, to fetch an order of expensive pigment. He measured, sifted, dosed, blended, diluted, experimented, and refined till he had the right mixture. He made trial brushstrokes on some boards he had sawn for that purpose and compared, deliberated, started over. It snowed, froze, thawed, rained, gusted, milder weather came, and all that time Franciscus was climbing up and down his scaffolding, day in and day out. Lying on his back, he painted the ceiling: a jumble of clouds and windblown robes, of streamers and vague faces, a divine epiphany that brought heavenly music to mind, the music of the spheres, imagined music, music in his cold, cramped knuckles, the music of lines, scratches, streaks, surfaces, folds, beams of light, and hair, of fabulous creatures standing or lying around the main action: a small dog with a light brown snout, looking up at a saint; a fleeing stag with thin, delicate antlers in front of a mulberry tree—it hardly even seems to touch the ground, as if it were transubstantiating into the sacred unicorn of his wondrous superstitions. Music of the age, music of color and nuance, music without sound, just a distant rumble, the rush of the city around the silent chapel, where he was all alone with his thoughts and dreams. Week after week, he came home with a stiff back from leaning over backward to paint. There were days when the paint trickled into his beard and formed painful clots; sometimes it dripped onto his mouth and he had to spit out the bitter liquid. That gave him the idea of diluting paint with saliva, which created a truly splendid effect here and there, especially in Our Lady’s sky-blue mantle, which, honestly, you’d like to pull off her shoulders and take home for your wife.

  He finally finished the job after months of labor, and showed off the result with modest pride to the dour abbess, who brought in an abbot from some nearby monastery for the occasion. They scrutinized his work, looking pleased, but trying not to show it—if you praise a simple fellow like that, it’ll only go to his head, and he’ll stop applying himself. The “good little sisters of St. Vincent” showed less reserve. Turning their eyes to heaven, with their heads tipped back like Bernini’s St. Teresa in ecstasy, they stood beside the diffident church painter and made him blush with their cooed compliments and rolling eyes. The city’s Christian institutions heard the success story of the humble painter who was capable of such miraculous things. He was promptly summoned by the Father Director of the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, who informed him of his next assignment.

  Franciscus, I have good news for you.

  Yes, Reverend Father.

  There’s an opportunity for you to work in Liverpool for a year. It’s a major assignment in an institution there.

  Where is that, if you please, Reverend Father?

  In England, Frans. You’ll see.

  But Reverend Father, how can I leave my wife and children?

  You’ll be well paid, Frans, and you can send your family more money every month than you’d earn here in six. You have eight days to decide. Talk it over with your wife. We’ll send an expert woodworker and an interpreter over there with you. Go on, then, it’s twelve o’clock now, you may go home to your family early today.

  Yes, Reverend Father. Thank you. Merci, Reverend Father.

  When he shows up in the kitchen at twelve thirty, Céline nearly dies of shock. What’s wrong? Why are you home at this hour? Has something happened to the children?

  He takes her in his arms, comforts her, and tells her what he has been told.

  You’re out of your wits, Frans, there’s nothing but fog and vile factory smoke there. You can’t handle that, not with your asthma.

  No, no, don’t fret, the director says it’s a large estate, with a park where I can go for walks. I’ll have short working days, no more than eight hours. I’ll recover my health there, you’ll see.

  Céline’s face is pale; her lower lip trembles. She does not know how to react; she turns away, straightens her back, walks to the far end of the kitchen, bends over, fills the coal scuttle, picks up the hook for lifting the lid of the stove, and heaves the coal into its smoldering mouth. A cloud of fine sparks drifts toward her face, her squinting eyes. It suddenly occurs to Frans that she looks something like a she-devil, a beautiful, captivating she-devil, with that fiery light reflected in her pale eyes. And he feels a little afraid of what will happen.

  All right, Frans, all right.

  They say no more that night.

  For the next few weeks, Céline is at the sewing machine day after day. She makes three pairs of work trousers, three dark gray jackets of coarse linen, a suit for weekdays, and a suit for Sundays. One Saturday, she goes with him to a shop near Sint-Jacobsplein to buy a suitcase for the voyage.

  Will you be faithful to me, Frans?

  You silly fool. Come here.

  He takes her in his arms and strokes her back, right there in the middle of the street, where people can see and are bound to speak ill of it.

  The following week, they spend several days visiting his relatives and hers. There is no end to the asinine questions and droll remarks. He exchanges a resigned look with Céline. It’s as if they’ve developed an entirely new relationship over the past few weeks, something larger yet more fragile, which makes their hearts beat faster when their eyes meet. At night, they cuddle close together, saying nothing. He caresses her in the dark and feels that one of her cheeks is wet. Even in bed, she keeps her back straight, he thinks. One day soon she’ll snap like dry wood. He goes on caressing her. All right, now, Frans, I’ve no need of another baby while you’re in England. So they lie still in the dark, side by side on their backs, both filled with longing, listening to each other’s regular breathing, keeping themselves in check until morning comes. During the day, she sits on the sofa with her hands in her lap and does not hear the conversations around her. She sees herself in that large bed alone and is already shivering; she imagines the mean, cold, dirty dusk; she turns onto her side and squeezes her eyes shut.

  On the day before his departure, she offers him a present: a razor, a piece of shaving soap, a leather strop, a block of alum, and a cloth bag for his few toiletries.

  Oh, Céline, my dear, you shouldn’t have.

  Don’t lose it, Frans, you know I’m superstitious.

  —

  It’s hard for my grandfather to part with his father. In his notebook he describes it as if it were yesterday: that “delicate man, with his tender disposition” sitting across from his mother in a dark, rattling carriage with just one crack of light seeping in, bringing a faint, intimate glow to the faces of the
silent husband and wife, like faces in a painting by Georges de la Tour. It is raining in Zeebrugge, he does not cry, nor does his mother, but he feels as if he is losing something forever. High on a bank by the railway, under a lean-to where rain wets their stained faces, amid clouds of smoke and soot from the engine, they say their goodbyes and watch the stooped figure drag the suitcase onto the train. On the long trip back, as they jolt down the endless cobbled streets, she places her hand on his arm and says, Now you are the man of the house, my big strong lad.

  A great gap had opened in our family, he writes. The slow, interminable ticking of the cuckoo clock—a gift from a distant cousin to his father, who would carefully pull up the brass weights every night—fills their days, wearing away the time they must endure, ticking away the difficult mornings when his mother sits waiting for a letter and the postman does not slow his step as he passes their door. But when he does, she leaps up, grabs the letter from the floor, and goes to the shadowy front room to read it alone by a single small oil lamp while the children leave for school. Her heart pounds in her throat. A loose lock of hair falls in front of her face as she reads her husband’s clumsy scrawl: I have a long night ahead and am wholly alone here. It is very hard for me to find the right words, pray forgive me. I shall compose my letter to you in pencil first and then copy it over. The second time I shall find better turns of phrase to tell you how I am faring here. I start the day by cleaning myself thoroughly, dress up as if to visit some distinguished personage, and put on that handsome waistcoat that you sewed for me. I am not lodged far from the chapel that I am to paint. It is a cold, bare place, but I mean to turn it into something sublime. When the weather is bad I say a Pater Noster for you. Each evening at nine thirty when I go to bed my thoughts are of you. To the west I see the changeless gray sea in the distance. May God bless and keep you, Céline, and our children too.

  —

  He grows ever closer to his mother. The memory of a summer thunderstorm lingers, an image of their lives together. One night after the younger children go to bed, he’s sitting in the small courtyard with his mother, telling her about the seedy cabarets where his pals from the foundry go after work, and she’s teasing him, asking if he looks at girls too, when suddenly, without warning, a bolt of lightning shoots through the warm dusk, followed a few seconds later by a deafening thunderclap, just as he is telling her that he would never, ever do such a thing, because he only has eyes for her, and his sentimental confession is drowned out by the sudden tumult. Along the lane behind the house, wood pigeons flap from the swaying tops of the white poplars. As they run inside, the rain pours down on the roof, the courtyard, the street, and their intimate world, which glows with an ethereal light. On the landing, just as Céline is soothing the frightened children roused by the storm, a window slams open, the frame hitting her full in the face as the rain spouts in. She stumbles, but regains her balance; the water floods onto the steps. In the flashes of lightning, he sees blood on her forehead, they push at the window together, the latch is broken. He tells her to hold the window shut to keep out the howling wind and the torrents of rain, runs down the stairs, and searches the firewood for a piece to wedge between the hinges. He leaps back up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and jams the wedge into the crevice, while above him the wind roars across the roof, the loose tiles rattling in the night. They stand together in their vulnerable house, soaked to their bare skin. Céline takes her son in her arms.

  Aged seventy, he writes: When she, my beautiful mother, clasped me to her breast, a great emotion washed over me and my heart raced. I missed my father so much, I saw the blood on my mother’s forehead, I wiped it away and couldn’t help weeping. Nothing makes a deeper impression on a boy than seeing his strong mother suddenly girlish and hurt. My mother laughed softly and said, “You’re as tender-hearted as your father, you are—it’s just a scratch, silly boy,” and she ran her hand through my rain-drenched hair. And now as I write this down I can’t help weeping again when I think of my mother that night in the blue lightning, standing before me for a frozen instant like a lovely old portrait.

  Reading these lines, I recall something he once said to me: I have tried several times to paint my mother from memory but never succeeded, I couldn’t capture the exact expression on her face, I smashed the last attempt to splinters and threw the canvas into the stove. On the other hand, he copied Raphael’s Madonna with the Chair at least five times, and the look in the eyes of the child taking shelter in his mother’s arms grew a little mistier each time.

  —

  A while earlier, he and a friend from the iron foundry had visited his friend’s eldest cousin, who worked in the old gelatin factory.

  You have to come and see it sometime, the cousin had said, it’s unforgettable.

  So one free afternoon they set off for the factory. It was in the blue and gold month of October, and the old chestnut trees along the avenue stood so leaf-still in the mild air that it seemed the world itself was holding its breath, so that not one detail of the day’s fleeting beauty would escape the notice of the living, who had eyes, and noses, and senses for experiencing it all. My grandfather, who was always elated when he could pass an idle afternoon with a friend, twirled about madly, singing a song about pearls and joy—or something else that rhymed with “girls” and “boy”—and dancing by the banks of wild flowers gone to seed by the roadside: snow-on-the-mountain and Queen Anne’s lace. With a final sprint to see who would reach the large, rusty factory gate first, they arrived at the supervisor’s booth. He stared out at them through a small, dusty window and asked what their business was.

  We’re here to see Alfons, my grandfather’s friend said. He’s my kozze.

  Have you got sturdy shoes?

  My unsuspecting grandfather pulled off one of his clogs and held it up to the window. The man growled something inaudible and nodded his head toward the gloomy building. That very moment, the rusty gate swung open, and an enormous cart rolled out, its iron-shod wooden wheels rattling deafeningly over the cobblestones. The Brabant carthorse that pulled it was heading straight for them. They leaped aside. Foaming at the bit, the animal swung its large, gloomy head, its eyes gleaming with yellow obsession between the leather blinkers. The boys slipped inside, and the gate groaned on its heavy hinges as a man in a sleeveless leather jacket pushed it shut. He looked at them without expression, waving them away.

  It wasn’t until they turned around that they saw the large pile in the courtyard, and froze. Animal heads of all shapes and sizes lay in the center of the filthy yard, heaped into a pyramid. The heads of horses, cows, sheep, and pigs shone there in a viscous, spreading mass, freshly dumped from the cart. A swarm of fat flies, so dense and infernal they looked like a gleaming blue mist, droned around the heads with their huge extinguished eyes like staring boils, their bleeding eyes, their sunken eyes with dead gazes and blind pupils where maggots squirmed. But not only those eyes—there was also the mass of muzzles, jaws, and snouts that dripped brown slime, the protruding tongues, bloody nostrils, broken horns, and formless lumps. A swirling stench took away their breath. A man came closer. He was wearing a spattered grayish-brown coat and thick gloves with sleeves that reached up to his elbows. He grabbed a few heads carelessly by the horns, the ears, or the snout, buried his fingers in a severed throat for a better grip, hooked his thumb around an empty socket, and pitched ten heads or so onto a long wooden wheelbarrow. The bloody slop oozed off the barrow as he rolled it through an open gate into the brick building. The boys remained transfixed by the towering heap of slowly spilling heads. It was as if the oxygen—that invisible substance they had never even been conscious of before—was being driven out of their blood vessels, their lungs, their eyes, and their hearts, and replaced with a thick, asphyxiating ooze that would cling to them forever.

  Without a word, they stumbled over the slick cobblestones toward the factory building, from which they heard a confused hubbub of voices, metal blades sliding back and forth,
continual thundering crashes like bodies falling into large tubs, and somewhere in the darkness beyond the noise, a sonorous clanging and juddering. When their eyes had adjusted to the dim light, they saw dozens of men in a row, standing before long tables on which the heads were sorted by animal. Horse heads next to horse heads, sheep with sheep, pigs with pigs, the muted tumble and thump of bony masses that seemed to disgorge more and more fluid as they were tossed and rolled, until, at the end of the long row, they were hacked into three pieces by burly men with cleavers.

  The meat-cutters’ jackets were so thickly spattered with muck that they seemed to have been hewn from some kind of liquid stone. They threw the pieces of head into large cauldrons on fires fueled half a story below, where men with shovels were piling on coal, their faces shining in the yellowish glow of the fire pits.

  Only then did the boys realize that something around their feet was moving, shifting, sliding to and fro. Legions of white maggots that had fallen out of the heads were crawling over the floor in a thick layer. They looked at their open clogs, and then at the men’s tall boots. They stamped in disgust, realized this only made the slime thicker, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and dared not proceed any farther. A man sorting heads one-handed, while casually eating a sandwich with his other grimy hand, saw them there and motioned to them to make way. The man with the barrow streaked past them, nearly running into them again, and dropped his load at their feet. A black bull head rolled into one leg of the table, and the white maggots immediately went for it, like an invincible army sent from another world to cover everything and gorge themselves till nothing was left. This was a total eclipse in broad daylight, a dark substance out of which something unnameable was pressed, refuse transformed into refuse, death into sludge.