War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  He never left without buying something. The eyes of the French-speaking woman, weary with refinement, drifted over his fedora, his cane, his midnight-blue suit and his bohemian tie with a blend of affection and pity. Running her graceful ringed hand over the cover of a novel by Suzanne Lilar on the stack by her cash register, she waited until he had unrolled his banknotes and proffered two of them. She wrapped his book in beautiful paper with the name of her elegant, aristocratic shop and handed it to him with a measured smile and a barely audible Au revoir, monsieur; a sign of her willingness to see him as fully human, even if he did speak old-fashioned, hypercorrect Dutch. He took the book of paintings by the School of Fontainebleau, made a slight bow, took me by the hand, and said, Come with me, lad, it’s time for a crème à la glace at Veneziana.

  I later went to Herckenrath on my own more times than I can count and bought a few expensive bible-paper editions in the Pléiade series, my first books on philosophy, a few sumptuous volumes of art reproductions, and a monograph about Tintoretto. Not many Dutch books were available, and although some were laid out in a side window, it looked more like a hiding place than a display. Once I found a copy of my own first book there, lost among travel guides and a book about outer space, and was caught up in nostalgic thoughts of the ragamuffin in clogs who came in to leaf through the books and was sent packing, and later returned so often in the guise of a little gentleman. My first book was published six months after his death. He never dreamed that I would publish anything. Across the street, in the Viennese patisserie run by the Jewish baker Benjamin Bloch, well-born ladies partook of buttered croissants and coffee from a silver pot while perusing books they had purchased at Herckenrath; the wrapping paper lay neatly folded next to their ringed hands. They were so posh that even their Dutch sounded French.

  —

  One warm, windless day, his father returns from Liverpool.

  They all go to Zuidstatie to meet him. Decades later, my grandfather could still describe it in detail, like a scene from an old film unspooling before his eyes. The wheels of the train hiss and thunder as it rolls in under the roof of the station and comes squealing to a halt in a cloud of smoke and vapor. They are standing on the platform in the middle of a swarming crowd, and before they can even start to look around his father and the mustached woodworker, Mr. Bracke, come striding toward them, waving. Céline rushes over to him; little Melanie clings to her skirts and stumbles along with her. She throws herself on her husband with such passion that the little girl falls to the ground. Franciscus looks down at his smallest child, who seems to recognize him only vaguely. He takes some candies out of his coat pocket. In the calèche on the way home, the husband and wife look at each other like strangers. The coachman cracks the whip. Conversation is impossible over the rattle of the iron-shod wheels and the clop of the horses’ hooves. When they enter their street, they see that a crowd of neighbors has gathered in front of their house. Some are clapping their hands. But when Franciscus gets out of the carriage, with a pale face and tired smile, supported by his wife, they fall silent. A couple of them reach out as he passes, to squeeze his fingers or lay a hand on his shoulder. Céline thanks them with a nod, the coachman lugs the large suitcase into the hallway, and she presses a few coins into his hand. They enter their humble home and shut the door behind them. Inside, an aunt and uncle have decorated the living room with homemade garlands, and in the kitchen, a large pot of soup is steaming on the stove. Franciscus takes a long look around, saying nothing, as if surprised to find everything just as he remembered it: the meager patch of grass in the large courtyard, the goat pen, the hopping canary and the finch in their simple cage. He barely hears the questions his wife and children are asking; he turns to them in surprise and picks up little Melanie. Still uncertain of him, she lays her hand against his stubbly cheek. His eldest child, Clarisse, is a little jealous and moody; Jules and Emile are giggling; Urbain swallows and is silent. Céline doesn’t know what to do with herself. Then she and her husband fall into each other’s arms again. The children look on in embarrassment as their mother runs her fingers through their father’s hair and covers his neck with kisses. He pulls away, goes into the corridor, undoes the belt around the large suitcase, and gives the boys a leather football, the girls a kind of board with hooks and numbers and a ring to throw over the hooks, and the smallest children a strange wooden horse with holes in it—the Trojan Horse, made by Mr. Bracke, he explains. He pulls the tail out of the horse and shows them what to do: you shut your eyes and try to stick the tail in the right hole. The children stand and stare in wonderment. Then he takes out a small box and presents it to Céline. With his limited means, he has bought her a cameo and a necklace. She holds the cameo to her chest and looks in the mirror.

  You fool, you. Come here.

  When he sits down in the wicker chair where he always used to sit, the girls squabble for a place on his lap. He runs his stubbly chin over their cheeks, making them squirm and giggle in his arms.

  Clarisse goes to untie the goat and bring it in. Their father pats the animal on the back and rubs the spot between its horns with his knuckles. She’s getting on in years, our Betty, he says. And he falls silent again, staring out of the window.

  Look at your eldest son, Céline says. He missed you most of all. He stood by me and made me proud the whole time; he neglected his friends so that he could help me to keep this family going. And he learned something that will amaze you.

  Go on, Urbain, she says, show him your drawings.

  At first, my grandfather turns white and shrinks back, shaking his head no. Then he sees the questioning look in his father’s eyes, and goes off with a sigh to fetch his drawings. Franciscus takes the stack of paper and examines the sheets one by one. The self-portraits, the studies of hands. The sketches in which he tried out different poses: a bent leg, a foreshortened torso, a rag in the wind, gnarled trees, an angel with a trumpet. Some are clumsy, but now and then they are skillful and expressive.

  My grandfather could not possibly have expected what happens next: his father bursts into sobs, puts the sheets of paper down on the table, and clasps his son so tight he can hardly breathe. Then he pushes the boy away, looks him up and down, starts to say something, bursts into tears again, and makes another attempt to speak, but gets no further than garbled fragments.

  All right, Frans, all right, dear, Céline says.

  He squeezes his son’s hand and looks at him in silence.

  I’m sorry, he says finally. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be back. Everything is so familiar, but different.

  He looks out of the window again and seems lost in thought. Then he coughs—a raw, scraping sound. Céline gives him a bowl of soup and feels how cold his hands are.

  Frans, you’re so cold.

  Don’t I know it, dear. Been cold for months. It’s like it’s in my bones.

  Somewhere out in the street, they hear the hurdy-gurdy man. So he’s still alive too? Franciscus says. The doves beat their wings on the low roof of the scullery, the male cooing and scratching. Céline hands him a drink.

  Here, get that into you, it’ll warm you up.

  He downs it in one swig. It makes him choke and cough. Céline slaps him on the back with the flat of her hand.

  You want another?

  He nods, and sips from the refilled glass. His breath scrapes and squeaks.

  Then, unexpectedly, he stands, as if struck by a thought. He wants to finish unpacking his suitcase. But Céline says he has to rest now, so that he can go to the Frère Econome the next day to ask for work. He protests at first, but then notices his wife shooing the children out of the house: Go play outside for an hour or so, your father’s tired. She unbuttons her black apron and says, Right, upstairs with you, and her eyes light up. She leads him by the hand, and he follows her, almost meekly, up the stairs.

  My grandfather writes, So it was that my dear father came back into our lives. I saw, as his hunched back climbed the stairs behind
my overjoyed mother, how thin his hair had grown. He was old for a thirty-seven-year-old man, with sharp features and dark shadows under his eyes. Amid all the joy of our reunion, fear had crept into my heart, a fear that would never leave me.

  —

  He ambles through the streets. It is the autumn of 1907. In a few months, he will turn seventeen. The streets of central Ghent are quiet; the people there are living their placid, anonymous lives filled with trivial concerns. There is news from America of the Knickerbocker Crisis, a great panic unleashed by a scheme to corner the market in United Copper shares. J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller pour money into the failing banks and just barely manage to stave off a stock market crash. In Egypt, Lord Carnarvon receives permission to begin the excavation of Thebes. In the Netherlands, the visiting German Kaiser Wilhelm II arrives by warship. He informs Queen Wilhelmina that, should war break out, Germany will respect the country’s neutrality. But why this talk of war? The Italian minstrel in the byway sings Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore: I lived for art, I lived for love, I never hurt a living soul. Urbain tosses two five-penny pieces into the tin box dangling from a leather strap under his cart.

  —

  In the evening, he writes, he would go to his father’s bedside and make the sign of the cross on his forehead, saying the magic word Gobbleskipya. This was all that remained in their everyday language of what had once been “May God bless and keep you,” said while crossing the forehead with your thumb—a time-worn formula, foolish and incomprehensible to the outside world, a secret code to soothe the heart when thunder roared at night. Gobbleskipya also accompanied the countless evenings of my own childhood, as a stone on the shore is a water-smoothed vestige of what once was a great rock jutting wildly out of the sea, traversing the millennia to end up on a bedside table, left behind while the sick man was sleeping, sick with the memories into which he always, irresistibly, strays in the night.

  The soft, regular creaking of the springs in his parents’ bed through the thin wall is like the music of the spheres, rocking him to sleep, without thoughts, without dreams.

  —

  On the distant west side of town, in yet another institution run by the Brothers of Charity, Frans received an assignment that would take him two full years. The rough woodwork in the sheds and storehouses needed a fresh coat of paint, and the broken panes in scores of old windows had to be replaced. Frans, who had regular asthma attacks, accepted the job with reluctance. He often had to spend hours on tall, rickety ladders, picking the shards of glass out of an old window frame in the draft that blew through the opening, removing the old putty with blunt knives, cutting new panes of glass, and putting them in place. He occasionally lost his balance while reaching for some tool or other, and cut himself several times on the brittle glass while flinging out his arm to keep from falling. On top of that, his work was constantly being interrupted by the priests, who came to him for all sorts of other odd jobs. This prolonged the unpleasant work in the chilly sheds.

  He was counting the days, because he had been told that after he was done he could restore a fresco in the Brothers’ main refectory and add his own “paintwork and decorations.” The large fresco, damaged by damp, dated from the eighteenth century. The job seemed made for him. He decided to begin the restoration work even before finishing the first, more physically demanding job, and established an alternating rhythm, which allowed him to recover his strength at regular intervals. In the evenings he would sit by the stove in the kitchen and sketch: new figures, based on engravings he had found in the Brothers’ library. The large fresco depicts Christ as a young man, against the backdrop of a vaguely Oriental building in a garden of trees and bushes hung with festive wreaths of foliage. Young men and maidens approach, bearing baskets of fruit and vegetables. At a long table in the middle ground, shabbily dressed peasants are served food and drink. Christ himself is in the foreground, greeting the bedraggled old folks and the children with a gesture of welcome. Beneath this scene, Franciscus repainted a quote from Luke on a gently curving ribbon the color of oxblood, picked out with an edge of gold. It comes from the story of the rich man whose friends will not come to his supper. He says to his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the feeble, and the blind, and the lame. Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”

  —

  On the Internet, I go through all the addresses of Brothers of Charity monasteries and institutions, picking out the ones in Gentbrugge, Oostakker, and Ghent. I find one named after St. Francis, like my great-grandfather, but it’s in Mortsel, out near Antwerp. Nowhere do I find a monastery that lies or might have lain to the west of the city and where he might have worked. Was my grandfather mistaken? I call a number of monasteries and hospitals. Not one has ever seen a fresco of that kind in the refectory: the walls were repainted before the Second World War, or there’s been a renovation; it’s always possible there was something of that kind a century ago, what do I expect, they can hardly scrape off the paint for me, I do understand that, don’t I? And no, there’s nothing in their records or archives about anything of the kind, they’re terribly sorry, but they really must go now, thank you for your understanding, goodbye.

  —

  A fresco is a painting executed on freshly plastered walls. The colors are applied to the wet plaster and combine with it as it dries. The art lies in anticipating how the colors will look after they dry, because all hues are darker when wet; the moisture makes blues and reds brighter and more intense, while yellows and greens look matte. Suppose one of the maidens in the background of the large scene that Franciscus is restoring has had one of her legs eaten away by damp. Then you first have to coat the wall with highly diluted plaster until the dark patch of moisture disappears or at least is well hidden, all the while making sure to keep the surface perfectly even. No strokes of paint should show through the fresh layer of plaster, and this can be very tricky, since they are sometimes visible only in light from a certain angle, and then you have to retouch them with fine sandpaper. The next step is to repaint the leg, but not in the same shade you see in front of you. You have to try out various mixtures on carefully numbered boards brushed with plaster. Once these test boards have dried—it can take more than a week in damp weather—you can see whether the result is approximately the right color. If not, you have to try again on a new test board.

  Soon, the refectory was filled with dozens of test boards, all in different colors. Using this method, my great-grandfather carefully restored a missing leg, the grayish-blue folds in a white garment, a pale yellow apple on a serving dish, a patch of grass in the shade. Each time, he had to study his test boards carefully and hold them up next to the spot to be filled in. When the evening sun bathed the east wall in a treacherous red light, he could not work unless he first covered the high windows with old newspapers. But even that had its dangers: in the morning, when the light contained more blue, some additions seemed not entirely successful, subtly different from the original. Then the only solution was to apply a little more diluted paint, as inconspicuously as possible, or, if the shade was too dark, to cover it with a very thin, watery layer of white, most of which he then had to wipe away again with a fine sponge, a few days before the plaster was completely dry. One stroke too many and he would have to do the whole thing over again.

  So weeks passed as he restored a few figures on a single wall, without any model or engraving to use as a reference. But the priests were enthusiastic; they brought Frans a cup of hot soup now and then and showered him with praise. Then he would become flustered and hardly knew how to respond.

  —

  In his memoirs, six decades later, my grandfather wrote, Now that I’m old, and having painted all my life, I believe I have something of an expert eye. Well, then, I have a document in front of me—a colored drawing of the restored frescoes showing what he added. And I am filled with even deeper reverence for my
father, who died far too young, and I feel a pang in my heart when I see the love and devotion with which he retouched an old farmer’s hand. For he saw each individual, however humble, as equally worthy of his attention. And I miss him more than ever now that I myself am nearing the end.

  And I wonder, as I have wondered for years, whether he deliberately failed to mention that his father had once asked him to pose as the young Christ, whose shoulder and neck he had to restore. I eventually put this question to my fierce old aunt Melanie—my great-aunt, really—who lived to the age of one hundred and three and remembered no more than vague details from back then, in her spacious apartment on Frère Orbanlaan along Zuidpark, where she held court, lucid and dignified, the last witness of a bygone age. No, she wasn’t sure where that monastery was either, she had been far too young when her father died, and she’d never heard him talk about a colored sketch of the fresco, but her brother had told her about it. As my Aunt Melanie spoke to me, daintily holding her teacup in her wizened hand, adorned with a single diamond ring, I pictured my grandfather, the little foundryman, with a ratty old blanket draped over his stocky shoulders, posing as Christ in that cold refectory in the quiet years before the Great War, with his father in front of him, sketching away without a word, and it’s as if the scene in my imagination becomes a memory, the painter painting a painter, something I seem to have truly experienced and can call to mind right now, right here, now that I too feel the stealthy approach of old age, and the dead grow more and more alive in an ineffaceable fresco, an allegory no living soul can ever revisit or recover, but which has been burned into my being.

  Dans le ciel il y a une danse, says plucky old Aunt Melanie, the youngest of them all, the baby of the family, and she laughs her girlish, centenarian laugh.

  —

  My beloved father is going downhill fast. I lie awake at night. In bed next to me, I hear and feel the regular breathing of my eldest brother, Emile. My two sisters, Clarisse and Melanie, are sleeping in the alcove in the farthest corner from my bed behind a folding screen. Next to the door, little Jules lies in his little bed. My nervous fatigue keeps me from falling asleep—images of the foundry flicker through my head. The streetlamp sends its pale beam slanting down beside my headboard. In the half-light of night, the window draws a black cross on the whitewashed wall.