War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  The fumes of the small oil lamp fill the room. I can still hear clogs rattling down the pavement outside, and I try to guess from the cough of a passerby what kind of person it is—a man or woman, young or old. My mattress is torn at the foot of the bed, and the shredded straw filling sticks out between my toes like pipe stems. Down the street is the foundry, its heavy gate shut for the night. Next to it, across the street from the working-class houses around their little courtyards, is Café De Muyshond, where the fancy women are. I can hear the muffled music. Someone is singing along in the street: “Tick-tock goes the mill…it never fails to turn its sails.” After a while I hear my father gasping for breath as he clambers up the stairs. Soon after that, my mother goes into the children’s room again, puts a warm cover over the little ones, makes crosses on their foreheads, and puts out the oil lamp on the mantelpiece. Then I listen to the howling of the sheepdog in its kennel in the back of the foundry courtyard, to the whistle of a distant train, the screech of the iron wheels as the heavy locomotive tilts, rounding the sharp corner to the harbor. But most of all, I listen to the wheezing, panting sound of my father drawing breath. I can hear it distinctly, because my parents always leave their bedroom door ajar to let in the fresh air he badly needs. And I pray, for as much as an hour, pleading with God to protect my father, to save his soul and, if possible, cure him of his illness. I pass the rosary beads between my fingers as I murmur, and some nights my face is wet with tears. Dear Lord, please save my father, please, Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name….I sink into a kind of stupor, and when I awake, I hear my mother downstairs in the kitchen, shaking the ashes out of the stove grate and heating the fire with the bellows so that she can quickly prepare a cup of warm milk for her husband. She comes upstairs with the milk, and I hear her say to my father, “Here, drink a bit, it’ll do your throat good. And rest a little longer, everything will be all right.” When I get out of bed, I peek furtively into my parents’ room. My father is sleeping peacefully on his side. The old sheets have slid off him. I tiptoe into the room, cautiously rearrange the sheets, cover up my father, and creep downstairs. My mother gives me such a reassuring look that all the weight is lifted from my shoulders. I embrace her, wash my face at the pump, drink a cup of chicory coffee, put on my jacket for work, pick up my knapsack, in which my mother has already put the sandwiches she’s made for me, sling it over my shoulder, slide my feet into my clogs at the front door, and step out into the early-morning street. It is late January, Christmas and New Year’s Day are just a memory, and soon it will be Carnival—a whole week of people in masks whooping down the streets. Shreds of paper blow over the footpaths like a final flurry of snow, pale and smudged. Café De Muyshond is bursting with drunken merrymakers. At the end of the street two mounted gendarmes, their swords at their belts, keep an eye on the festive crowd.

  The city is strangely quiet in the days that follow, as though all the people are staying at home to lick their wounds.

  The first warm days are on their way. A hint of spring, a blue sky with white clouds sailing over the grim factories. Hope sails through the streets and alleys. The locals buy tubs of brown soap and clean out rooms grown sooty from months of heating. The windows are wide open all around. Jars of paint and buckets of whitewash are at the ready. They whitewash the walls of the small rear courtyards to keep the damp out and apply a shiny black stripe of tar at the bottom to keep pests away. The smells are familiar, the neighbors more cheerful, and chirping sparrows fly in and out of the hedges. The poor, black soil in the urban courtyards is fertilized with horse manure, which you can scoop right up off the streets. Amid this humble, hopeful world, my fears about my father’s condition swell to such paralyzing proportions that I feel like telling them to the trees and bushes. He has been at home with a nasty cough for three days. He sits shivering by the blazing stove during daylight hours and lies in bed wheezing at night with three pillows to support his aching back. The blue line along his gums is a symptom of lead poisoning from the white lead he uses so often at work, a condition that may worsen his shortness of breath. The doctor comes to see him every day, and friends and relatives stop by to ask my mother how he is. By our front door, the neighbor women whisper to each other. My courageous mother slams the door shut with a bang. A nauseating smell fills the house—the smell of illness. Over the past week my father’s coughing fits have left dozens of bloodstains on the whitewashed wall beside the bed. Next to the bed are untouched bowls of broth and tea, cookies grown damp and stale, and unnoticed fruit. The Prior and the Frère Econome come from the monastery to visit him: “You’ve been doing such fine work recently, Frans. We hope to see you back again soon. Your trial boards are all dry now.” My father breathes more and more heavily, trying with each exhalation to tell them he knows how far gone he is—“yeh…yeh…yeh…yeh…” morning, noon, and night until everyone in the family is climbing the walls. In the afternoon, my mother sits behind the wicker chair where he sits groaning, holding her hands up against the back of the chair. Her eyes wander out to the treetops in the courtyard, swaying against the dull gray sky. The budding branches whip back and forth in the April rain like bare arms raised to heaven. My mother’s eyes are ringed with red, but not a word of complaint passes her lips. The Prior and Econome are impressed. “We shall do our best, Madame Céline, and remember your husband in our daily prayers. He has grown very dear to us.” My mother shrugs.

  I stay up with her the following night to care for my father. In his exhaustion, he has come down with pneumonia, a potentially fatal condition. In the early twentieth century there was no available method of easing his suffering—no antibiotics, no penicillin. In 1908 the medicines on a terminal lung patient’s bedside table were stramonium, camphor, ether, and tar pills. My mother makes him another cup of milk with sugar to build up his strength and orders him to drink at least a little—but he has great difficulty swallowing and immediately coughs half of it up again. The sugar irritates his throat, and the milk makes his body produce even more asphyxiating mucus, but we did not realize that in those days. Breathing has become an exhausting struggle for him. His entire upper body twists and strains for the slightest sip of air. The shortage of oxygen in his blood makes his heart beat more than 120 times a minute, twenty-four hours a day. His mouth is parched, his lips have split. His eyes seem to bulge every time he can’t get any air—sometimes for a full half minute. He grows thinner by the day. His face is sunken, his nose as sharp as a mummy’s. He sits up in bed: “Urbain…you must…fetch my cane—the smooth cane…to stick into my throat…” My mother shrieks: “Frans, please, you’re driving us mad!”

  I have never seen her like this. She tugs at her hair, wrings her apron like a rag, kicks the headboard of his bed, stomps across the wood floor in her black-stockinged feet, seething with helpless rage. In the twilight before dawn the priest comes to the door with the consecrated oil. Just then something inside my mother snaps. She leads the Reverend Father upstairs. By my father’s bedside she sinks to her knees as the clergyman murmurs his prayers. Our delirious father is hardly aware of what’s going on around him. The soot-black oil lamps go on fuming—a cloud of smoke hangs in the small, suffocating room. The neighbor women have gathered around our front door, “blabbing and yammering,” as my mother says with suppressed exasperation. An hour later, the doctor arrives in his little chaise and orders immediate admission to the hospital. The hospital staff, three nuns and two orderlies, do not arrive until late in the afternoon. They lift my father onto a wooden stretcher, and my mother wraps him up in two coats, his and hers. “There you are, my boy—we can’t have you catching another chill.” He lifts his upper lip in a wan grimace meant to signify a smile. He looks into our eyes and, panting, says to his wife, “Goodbye, sweetheart. Be back…soon…” The rest is lost in a coughing fit that has him heaving up phlegm.

  The stretcher is loaded, with difficulty, onto the back of the horse cart. My mother and I sit down on the bench in front. My fath
er reaches forward to clasp my hand and stammers a few words I can’t make out over the rattling wheels and clopping hooves. I nod my head yes. My father squeezes my fingers.

  After he is admitted, the file cards filled in, and his clothes handed over, my mother and I silently walk back home. She pulls me into the chapel of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, where she lights a few candles, falls to her knees, and sinks into mumbled prayer that seems to go on for ages. After a while, she falls forward and stays in that prostrate position. I sit next to her with my hand on her back. I can see the sky darkening above us through the stained-glass windows. I hear sounds of children playing on the little square in front of the chapel. The flames of the candles in front of the Virgin are so motionless they seem frozen. Under the statue is a clumsily painted inscription: “Vous qui tremblez, venez à Dieu car Il guérit.” Ye who tremble, take refuge in God, for He will heal you. By the time my mother stands up again, darkness has fallen. Come, she says. We make our way home, where my brothers and sisters have gone to bed without supper. I sit on the edge of my mother’s bed for a long time that night. We say nothing. The next morning, we are at the hospital gate before nine. The nuns walk up and down the long, high-ceilinged corridor, avoiding our eyes. They place the clothing we brought the day before on a table where a physician is seated. “Chère Dame,” he says, “please do not be alarmed. It was Our Lord’s will. Your husband had what we call galloping consumption. He passed away at three o’clock this morning. Be brave now and care for your family. That’s what Our Lord expects of you.” He pushes her husband’s rosary and wallet toward her. His underwear has been tied up in a package. My mother turns crimson, then ashen. She takes the package, stammers a mechanical “Merci, docteur,” and stumbles outside.

  Out in the street I try to hold her up, but she slips out of my arms like a rag doll. I help her over to a bench by a flower bed, where crocuses and daffodils are flowering in bright rows of yellow and blue. She starts sobbing as if just now bursting open inside, sobbing so hard I fear that she will choke. She kicks at the flowers with one clog. “I won’t have it, I won’t, I won’t,” she cries. I try to quiet her down but that only makes things worse. Her body shakes and heaves as if a devil were loose inside it. I grip her by the shoulders. After more than a quarter of an hour of this, she seems so worn out that she lapses into silence. She looks at me—her light gray eyes seem to wander in her head. “A widow at thirty-eight,” she says. “I can’t, I won’t.” Again she falls into a sobbing, howling fit. Her chignon, done up so carefully that morning, has come loose, and she looks a little wild. I can hardly understand my own emotions. I’m unable to weep—it’s as though there’s a stopper in my chest, a hard, foreign object that was not there before but is now stuck so firmly in place that it causes me indescribable pain. There comes Aunt Rosa, who was at our house watching the children. She immediately sees what must have happened, helps my sobbing mother to her feet, and drags her along. My mother bobbles like a jointed doll beside her under the trees that line the Coupure. She frequently stops in her tracks and starts sobbing again, and a couple of times her legs fail her. A man rushes over and tries to help her up. She gashes his hand with her nails and screeches at him to go away. I stammer nonsense: that the doctors made a mistake, that our father may just be in a coma, that I’ll go back and see for myself, that I—My mother gives me a rough shove. “Be quiet, Urbain, please, shut your mouth just this once, for God’s sake.”

  Our mouths will stay shut for weeks on end. Not a word is spoken in our house, because we all live in fear of my mother’s madness. She has closed herself off completely to everyone and everything. At the start of the day, she bathes her children without a word. She silently gives them their milk in the morning and their buttermilk oat porridge in the evening. She lets Rosa take care of the dishes and crawls into bed even earlier than her children, remaining there until the following morning. She no longer traces the cross on our foreheads at bedtime. She seems like an automaton, a spirit, an apparition vaguely resembling our mother, but unapproachable. She sits down at the table one evening and suddenly yowls like a dog—“My Frans, my poor boy”—and crumples into a quaking mass, throwing up her dinner next to her chair. We children look on anxiously. Melanie starts to cry. I help my mother upstairs to her room. The spring wind beats on the windows with dull thuds. I listen to the strange creaking, as if the frame of the old house is gently moving in the unbearably long night. At the first hint of dawn, a blackbird sings on the roof. It’s as if he is absorbing all the air, all the air in the world, the air our father could no longer draw into his lungs.

  After three days, after the pauper’s funeral, I return to the foundry. Although no one asks me anything, the men go easy on me, taking the most demanding jobs off my hands. I come home in the evening to find my mother sleeping in her husband’s wicker chair. Her long, black hair has come undone and fans wildly around her pale head, as if she were one of the Fates. The goat has got into the kitchen again, and the floor is covered with the gnawed remains of bread and vegetables. My brothers and sisters are not there. I tie a rope loosely around the goat’s neck and lead it outside. Going into Café De Muyshond, I ask if the bartender wants to buy our goat. Without any fuss he agrees, thrusting his hand into his cash box. He gives me thirty francs for old Betty—too much, in fact, but it will prove to be a lifeline, just enough to see us through the first few weeks. When I return home and give the money to my mother, at first she stares as if she has no idea what it is.

  Merci, Urbain.

  She goes upstairs to her room and closes the door. Half an hour later, she comes back down again. I am sitting with my hands between my knees and staring outside. “Here,” she says. She gives me my father’s gold watch, the pocket watch I reclaimed from the Mount of Piety. “Take good care of it, Urbain—it’s the only family heirloom we have left now.” She disappears up the stairs again and does not come out until the next day.

  —

  After typing up the pages above, I lay sleepless in bed and saw, in the night, their epoch, their vanished world, their figures rising before me, on a snowy New Year’s morning when the five children of Céline and Franciscus, elderly people even when I was a boy, came into the house: Aunt Clarisse, her wavy white hair in a bun, trembling, with her shiny black cane in her hand, and her husband Fons at her side, a boisterous man, always puffing on his pipe and telling jokes and showing up in our kitchen unexpectedly, with old-fashioned bicycle clips around the bottoms of his trousers and the sweet smell of pipe tobacco hanging over him, his graying copper hair stiff and straight on his craggy head; wheezy Uncle Jules, my grandfather’s youngest brother, married to Aunt Leontine, an uncomplicated woman who drank gin out of tiny crystal glasses all day long and, no matter what she saw, would lay her chubby hand on her formidable, lace-covered bosom and say, O Lord have mercy (“Oloramercy”); Uncle Emile, the middle brother, whom I remember only as a man in a dusty chair, suffering from Parkinson’s disease—I see him striking a match again and again, in hopes of relighting the stump of his cigar, but because his hand trembles in slow waves, he keeps putting out the lit matches, until my grandfather, older but in vastly better form, rises from his chair to light a match for him, so that Emile, already short of breath, can puff rhythmic clouds of smoke and inhale fire into his cigar end, appearing each time to draw in the flame for an instant before blowing it back to life in small puffs of smoke—and finally, the baby of the family, my aunt Anie, with one “n,” as the elegant Melanie called herself in her later years, next to her husband, my overperfumed Uncle Odilon, who was a hairdresser with wandering hands, as rumor had it, and a full head of wavy black hair well into his seventies. Finally, the man around whom everything revolved, the eldest son, my grandfather, next to his quietly smiling wife, Gabrielle, in whose home the whole family gathered every New Year’s morning. One after another, they marched through the front door, stamped and wiped their heavy boots on the mat with thumping and scraping sounds, and shouted o
ut to my mother that they were really going to make a pigsty of her nice neat home this year. They brought the smell of snow and cold air with them, the mothball smell of their dark winter coats—loden, mink, and astrakhan—and the smell of lavender and Marseilles soap. Their dark forms are larger than life, because memories like that grow along with your body, so that adults from our childhood always resemble an extinct race of old gods, still towering over us. They were constantly cracking jokes; after moaning and groaning into their chairs—“We’re not getting any younger, are we, Urbain?”—they would reminisce, dredging up old stories, often accompanied by peals of laughter that petered out into a pensive “Yes, it sneaks up on you, doesn’t it, my dear….” An occasional sigh, and then Fons would call out to my mother that she was not as generous with her liqueur as she used to be, and out would come the glasses, along with another round of madeleines and ladyfingers. Fons would bring smiles to everyone’s faces again with a wisecrack in questionable taste, and my aunt Clarisse, shaking her head, would say, “Oh, Fons, you dirty man,” while the others chuckled discreetly, my grandfather looked disapprovingly out of the window, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Now I wish I could hear their stories again, every colorful detail, because although I lurked unnoticed in the room, seeing and hearing everything, I understood nothing; I, the miscreant who would shatter their late father’s watch a few years later. Very soon the room beneath the lanterneau, as they called the colorful stained-glass skylight in the roof, would be filled with cigar and pipe smoke. Just as quickly, the bottle of Elixir d’Anvers was emptied, and gin was brought to the table at Leontine’s request. “It’s good for what ails you, even better than elixir,” Jules said, chuckling. My mother rushed in and out with “sweets and savories,” as she called them, they talked about the children and grandchildren, and about who had died in the past year, and how unbelievable it was, and who had one of those newfangled gadgets in the house—a “tellyvee,” Jules said with a sneer—how pointless or wonderful and how expensive they were, and the problems with the city’s old-fashioned radio relay system, until Melanie would coyly say that she always made the most expensive choice, because the cheap stuff costs you more in the end, and Jules would cry out, Our little Melanie is every bit as précieuse as our dear departed mother, and my grandfather would protest: Our mother wasn’t one bit précieuse, what are you talking about?