War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  Clarisse stuttered and trembled her way to the age of one hundred and six, as calm and clearheaded as ever; Melanie reached one hundred and three, wistful and elegant till her final day; my grandfather made it to ninety, plucky and sentimental; Jules and Emile died sometime in their mid-seventies. They were all survivors, tough people, hardened by the poverty of their youth and the brutal war years, Christian to the depths of their souls, but pragmatic and coolly ironic about the actual conditions of their lives. Their chronology was as simple as it was efficient, with just one point of reference: “that was before the Great War” or “that was years after the Great War.” They never said much about the Second World War. What was there to say? They had gone hungry, eaten bread made of rags and potato peels, seen eels as thick as a man’s arm in the Scheldt River; the Germans were polite to them, even when carrying out surprise inspections, no complaints there; and oh yes, they blasted the “salt mine” (as my family called the salt depot outside of town), but those were mere anecdotes.

  —

  They sit, they talk, they stop, they sigh, they laugh, they cough, they swallow, they take another sip, they say, Yes, life’s an awfully funny thing. I can see their hands in their laps in my mind’s eye, one pair gnarled with dirt in the cuticles, another delicate or pale. But I cannot draw them as my grandfather could. A strange kind of unearthly light surrounds their dark forms, the steadfast light of things that can never return. Gone, perished, a scattering of sunken headstones, their houses have been renovated or demolished, the addresses have grown vague, the streets where they lived have changed beyond recognition, the watch has stopped, the cogs are broken, and I fumble with the swept-up pieces, knowing I will never be able to make it run, tick, live again, as it did a century long.

  —

  It took half a year before Céline straightened her back and seemed to resume her life. It must have been in late summer, one day in early August. The summer months had slipped by unnoticed—a vague impression of time passing, light slipping by, warm nights of tangled dreams, waking up covered with sweat and feeling the venom of sorrow and grief fill her veins. She had grown thin, which somehow made her look even more dignified. A few white hairs stood out where her chignon reflected the light, making her aura still brighter, hinting at catharsis and inner resolve. She had formed the habit, whenever she passed the coat rack in the hallway, of running her knuckles over her dead husband’s winter coat, which had remained hanging there for months. In the sky over the fields behind the house, she had witnessed a fight, a crow assailing a magpie over and over again; the birds made a dreadful racket, swirling around each other, swooping away, sailing together in a death-defying dive, and stabbing at each other with their beaks while in full flight. She had stood and watched the circles in which they moved. The sight was beautiful and strong, she felt, and it brought a new sensation, a kind of clarity, as if a stream of pure, fresh water were running through her numbed, dormant body. She had looked around, heaved a deep sigh, and felt as if she were waking up after months of narcosis. The house was a filthy mess, the windows dull and dusty. The sight of it dismayed her. All that time, she had thought she was as conscientious as ever. Where were the children? Were they playing in the street again? What did they do all day? She had to admit she did not know. They often went to the neighbors’ house for supper, and they stayed out so late after school that she had to go from door to door to round them all up at bedtime. Suddenly, it seemed humiliating and unbearable. She had lived on her eldest son’s meager income, and their last reserves had been used up long ago. Urbain had his supper somewhere else too; she didn’t even know where.

  She looked around again in surprise. And then, again, into the languid August sky. The birds were gone. A few low clouds drifted over the roof, heavy with the promise of rain. She was overcome by a yearning to walk out into the summer shower. She went into the courtyard; the first drops fell. She raised her head and sobbed, silently. It helped, it drew the air in, opening a space inside. She seemed to become one with the air around her. She swallowed and let the rain on her face run down her neck, as soothing as balm on a wound. Her scorched soul, the fire that had to be extinguished. It suddenly began to pour; water fell in torrents. She opened her hands and lifted them, palms to the sky. A distant peal of thunder rolled through the firmament. Her thick, black clothes were soaked. She shivered with enjoyment—a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a long time. When the shower had passed, she returned inside. Her clothes stank. She went to her bedroom, took everything off, and put on fresh clothes.

  That was the moment when she straightened her back.

  She tidied the house. The birdcage was empty—where had the finch and the canary gone? The day her eldest daughter Clarisse had found them dead and thrown them away without a word, she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t even noticed that her husband’s winter coat had been moved a month earlier, from the hallway to her bedroom closet. It struck her only now. It seemed to her as if she’d just run her hand over it that morning. How could she make sense of that? She remembered nothing, she was empty, but also—for the first time—lighter, brighter.

  The next morning at nine, she stood at the gate of the Brothers of Charity in Oostakker. They let her in. She asked the prior if they had work for her. They did. She could make clothes for the insane asylum that the Brothers ran. That very same day, she walked all the way to the Dr. Joseph Guislain Hospital near the Nieuwe Vaart canal, where she would receive sewing jobs from that time on. Now and then, she had peculiar instructions; the sleeves were sometimes extremely long and had to be sewn together. In the large scullery she set up two sewing machines, one of which was on loan from the hospital. She bought the other one on the installment plan. As soon as the youngest children left for school—Emile was already working as an assistant in the foundry with Urbain—she was joined by Leonie, the eldest daughter of the neighbor woman who had died young, who had agreed to help her out for a pittance. Then the rattle and purr of the sewing machines began. Leonie filled the day with ridiculous stories and gossip; Céline barely said a word in reply, but it obviously put her at ease, diverted her mind, and the work went more and more smoothly as the days passed. Payment was prompt, and the rates were reasonable. The family’s finances were looking a little less dire.

  —

  One day, after delivering another fifty garments, she and the talkative Leonie went to the shoe store in Langemunt. Céline’s first pretty shoes since childhood—it took her an hour to decide, even though there were only four pairs for sale in her size. When she thought about it, the expense seemed absurd, but it brought a feeling of foolish happiness deep inside like an itch she had to scratch. She chose a pair of laced boots in matte black.

  I feel just like some stuck-up lady, she said, laughing, and her pale eyes flashed with irony for the first time in many months.

  —

  Men keep turning up at her door, who just have to sit down with her and have a good talk about life sometime, isn’t that right, Madame Céline? They are distinguished gentlemen, they are modest clerks, they are ordinary workers, the city evidently has no shortage of widowers apprised of her husband’s death. You’re still so lovely, and so all alone, that’s no kind of life for a spirited woman like you, so I says to myself, I’ll stop by sometime and see—

  That’s quite all right, don’t trouble yourself, she replies, and she passes the man the coat he has just hung over a chair. Sometimes one of them comes to the door, cap in hand, faltering and quaking and going bright red, and offers his hand in marriage on the spot. Sometimes she’s amused, sometimes touched, and sometimes she laughs herself silly. More often, she’s annoyed and slams the door in their faces. Some slink away, their shoulders drooping, others ask her to think it over, and one or two of them say something truly vicious. Even the family doctor makes an unexpected house call one day, and she can tell why he’s there from his furtive chuckling and his comments about how unhealthy it is when a woman has no man to put her through her
paces. Monsieur le Docteur, she says, have you forgotten your Hippocratic Oath, or should I have a heart-to-heart talk with your wife one of these days? He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough.

  —

  She goes to the cemetery alone. That’s what she prefers. Sometimes she stays there for hours.

  Mama, what do you spend all that time doing there? It was dark by the time you came home yesterday.

  I talk to your father, Urbain, it eases my mind.

  Do you tell him about all the suitors who come to the door?

  Yes, she says, laughing, I tell him everything.

  The following week she brings along a can of black paint to touch up the iron cross on the shabby grave. She spends a long while there, thinking the whole time about the body of her beloved Frans, just a few feet away. How must he look now…The thought makes her head reel. She wants to scratch away the soil with her nails. Eternal slumber, she thinks, eternal slumber, damn it, damn it, he’s so close to me. She grinds her teeth so hard they nearly break. Then she takes a deep breath; the dark urge to dig up the coffin has worn her out. She closes her eyes, waits for her dizziness to pass, and returns to painting. My poor painter, she mumbles, look at me here now, painting your cross.

  When she’s done, she looks up and notices all the eyes of the faded portraits on the graves. It’s as if the countless eyes of the countless dead are all on her. “What countless numbers death already has undone”—she remembers the line of poetry, but cannot recall where she read it. She shudders. There is no one else left in the graveyard. Has she been here so long? It’s already dusk. She’ll have to hurry to make it to the exit before the caretaker shuts the gate. She is still squatting, about to stand up, the wind rises, she hears a sudden loud rustling behind her, from far away, approaching between the graves at ferocious speed. O my God, it’s the devil, she thinks; help me, Frans, the devil’s coming for me; what did I do to deserve this? She shivers, she stands up straight, her whole body is trembling. A large piece of dirty paper flies onto her back, she lets out a shriek, the paper slides away like a great hand, a foul, groping hand that scrapes over her left arm. The next moment, it flies on between the graves until it gets caught in a bush, where it remains, convulsing like a formless animal. She feels her heart pounding in her temples. In utter distress, she runs to the exit as fast as she can. The man lets her out with a mumbled “G’night to you, madam” and shuts the creaking gate with a bang behind her.

  From that day on, she brings along her eldest son whenever she visits the cemetery.

  You have to protect me from the evil spirit, she says with a smile. Suppose he comes for me, what will you do then? She laughs again, but he sees the fear shining in her pale, unfathomable eyes.

  My mother, my elderly grandfather wrote in his memoirs, was pursued like a rare and coveted butterfly.

  She kept the front door locked for months, even during the day.

  —

  It must have been not long afterward that Leonie’s father began stopping by the house to pick up his daughter. One day he sends her home on her own, comes into the kitchen, heavyset and clumsy, wringing his hands, and asks Céline to marry him. She bursts out laughing and says the very idea is absurd. He presses on, saying he earns a good living and she could use a little help, and what with him being a lonely widower and her a widow—She interrupts to say it is out of the question. But Henri keeps coming back; eventually, she forbids him to pick up his daughter after work. Things quiet down for a while, and then the letters start coming, delivered by an embarrassed and somewhat giggly Leonie. Clumsily written letters, brief notes intended to flatter, in a ludicrous, formal style full of grammatical blunders—what is he thinking? She tosses the letters into the coal scuttle and notices Leonie biting her lower lip. After another six months of increasingly curt and accusatory notes, he shows up again, red faced, his hat in his hand. He makes a proposal with an ultimatum: she can take a month to think it over, and otherwise his daughter will not come to work there anymore. Leonie, asked for her opinion, refuses to get involved at first, but finally mumbles that it might be nice if Céline were her mama, and her eyes fill with tears.

  The proud widow straightens her back in her customary fashion, keeps her own counsel for three weeks, and then says, “Fine, if I must.”

  My grandfather is shocked, outraged, bewildered, aghast. In his memoirs, he rants about the clumsy oaf who came into their home, broke their glasses and dropped his fork, who had no appreciation for music, let alone for painting or beauty of any kind, who never said grace at the table, who bolted down his food and then, seated in his dear departed father’s wicker chair, “gave free rein to his flatulence”—a desecration of dizzying proportions. His mother had suddenly become a riddle, a sphinx, a closed book to him. He could not imagine any intimacy between them.

  This goes on for more than a year, until one Sunday morning he happens to overhear them in conversation. They have just returned from church. His mother has on her Sunday best and has placed a white flower in her glossy black hair. She is still in her early forties, in the radiant prime of her life. He hears Henri muttering, Come on over here, you, let yourself go, just for once, Céline, I can’t take it anymore.

  She says, You’ve got your marriage for the children, just as you proposed, Henri, and I made my condition clear to you. You keep your hands off me. If you’re not satisfied, you can crawl back into that hovel of yours and send your children back to charity school.

  One of these days I’ll break you, my grandfather hears him reply. The blood rushes to his head; he storms into the living room and sees his mother with a mocking smile in her eyes. She winks at him. Henri turns away like a beaten dog, skulks out of the house, and spends the rest of the day in the pub.

  —

  So the ham-handed Henri de Pauw, in spite of his plans, became my proud great-grandmother’s estranged second husband, and that was how his name came to appear on the gravestone that my grandfather must have removed from the cemetery sometime in the 1950s. Céline died in 1931, the lease must have run for twenty-five years, and instead of renewing it, he took the stone home and hid it in the cavernous recesses under his house. If my calculation is right, that must have been in 1956, when I was five years old. According to my father, he picked up the stone from the graveyard in Gentbrugge with a wheelbarrow, an old-fashioned sloping wooden cart with long wooden handles, an unwieldy monstrosity in which I later carted around my younger sister. The cemetery was almost directly opposite his home, but on the far side of the river. So he had to go all the way to the bridge over the Scheldt, cross the steep bridge with that bulky thing, go back more than half a mile to the graveyard by the church in Gentbrugge, lift up the heavy stone, load it into the barrow, and carry it all the way back over the bridge and home again, about two and a half miles in all, pushing a cumbersome wheelbarrow with a wooden wheel that tended to stick, as well as a heavy load on the way back. On top of that, a single pothole could easily have broken the gravestone; marble slabs are as crumbly as cake when they’re not standing upright. In the end, he must have spent half a day lugging the thing.

  When I picture him plodding along the banks of the Scheldt with a barrow containing the gravestone of his departed mother, which he felt had been wrongfully desecrated by the name of a stepfather he had never acknowledged, I think of a story he told me many times, whenever Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite was on the radio, which it regularly was. It was one of his favorite pieces; he always sang along. Listen, he would say then, Peer Gynt is carrying his dead mother to heaven in a wheelbarrow: pom-pom-pom pom-pom pom-pom…pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom…Rhythmically marching, carting his dear, dead mother over the mountains and the clouds to heaven, Peer Gynt is taking his dear mother to heaven! And he accompanied the music with the broad sweeps of an amateur conductor. Years later I bought the suite myself, mainly for nostalgic reasons, a vinyl record with a naive painting of mountains and clouds on the front. When I read the record jacket, I saw to my
surprise that the fourth movement, so often pom-pommed by my grandfather, was actually called “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” I searched for the scene where Peer Gynt carries his little old mother Åse to heaven, and discovered only then that he does no such thing. In the play of the same name by Henrik Ibsen, he simply tells his dying mother the story of the Mountain King’s feast, allowing the delirious woman to believe that he is taking her there in a sleigh, past fjords and pine trees, to Soria-Moria Castle, and not to the Christian heaven—although St. Peter is at the gate, and in her final moments Åse has a vague image of God approaching. I stood, bemused, with the record in my hands. Why and how did my grandfather come to invent his version of the story? Only after my father had told me the story of Urbain bringing home his mother’s gravestone did I begin to understand this perhaps unintentional mishmash of the Peer Gynt story and my grandfather’s own guilty journey to pick up a gravestone he then buried in secret. This childish tale concealed a drama whose depths I could hardly imagine: his jealous love of his indomitable mother. In my grandfather’s imagination, the evil spirit his mother had believed was coming for her, the great sheet of dark paper that had clung to her back like a diabolical hand, had transformed into Henri’s grubby paws, which had tried and failed to gain a grip on his mother. But had Céline herself meant something different that day, something he could not fathom? Why was she so upset, and why did she call it the devil’s hand? Did she already feel guilty? Was Henri already in her life, so soon after his father’s death? That was impossible and unthinkable.