Abyss after abyss opens in this descending spiral of questions. As I am walking in Gentbrugge Cemetery one lovely October day, on the lookout for names of lost relatives, wondering where my great-grandmother’s grave might once have been, I stumble, after long hours of searching, upon the grave of none other than Napoleon de Pauw, a once-renowned Ghent lawyer and bridge-builder, and a sudden smile bursts all my nostalgic memories. On the other side of the river, among the swaying treetops, I see the house where the only surviving eyewitness, my father, still lives peacefully today. The house is surrounded by muddy excavation pits under tall, swaying cranes; a new neighborhood is rising from the ground. If his house, the romantic house of my childhood, were not standing there between the huge construction sites, as conspicuously out of place as Åse’s cottage, I would scarcely recognize the area. Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire. Damaged nature, memory. Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom. Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery. But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s “Åse’s Death,” that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.
—
Not until years later did I recall that my grandfather once pulled me outside to see the Great Bear. Look, he said, with the happy excitement that sometimes came over him at times like that, look, do you see that big wheelbarrow? That’s the Great Bear. At first I stared blankly at his fingertip, smudged with midnight-blue oil paint, but then I saw the large parallelogram gliding through the silent vault of heaven in the mild air of the early September night. This constellation, he argued, does not represent a saucepan, as many people say, but looks more like a wheelbarrow of the old, forgotten kind, with two slanted sides like a primitive cradle (a wheelbarrow transformed into a cradle), and the long wooden handles are also visible in the stars projecting out of the constellation. This is the wheelbarrow in which Peer Gynt carried his mother to heaven.
Later I realized that old-fashioned wheelbarrows did not have handles rising from the body, like the ones in the constellation. Instead, they were under the body, supporting the weight, a rational design that uses the power of leverage. Putting away childish illusions, we can see that the constellation most strongly resembles a shopping cart in a supermarket. But leverage or no leverage, such quibbles could no longer dim the luster of memory. The image of a large bear seemed even less plausible than the saucepan. I’ll take the wheelbarrow. That’s how a person becomes a bad poet, I thought later: for the sake of some memory he cannot fathom, he’s compelled to pile up saucepans, bears, shopping carts, dead mothers, sleds, Peer Gynt, and wheelbarrows in his head. And in memory, I keep staring at my grandfather’s outstretched finger, each night anew, under the bright, silent stars.
—
In the left corner of the courtyard, next to the old window, is the zinc drainpipe for the rainwater that runs off the low roof. It ends just above the ground floor. Beneath it is a large barrel that catches the rainwater. The barrel is usually half full, because Mother fetches water from it on Fridays for the laundry, an activity that takes all day. When gloomy drizzle falls, the water splashes into the barrel in halting plops, like a chain of swollen raindrops, some heavier than others. Ploink…ploink…pling-pling…ploink…cloikkk…
My imagination runs away with me. I hear a piano tinkling in the magical half-full barrel, where the water shines black when the waxing half-moon floats through the clouds, as if it were deeper than the deepest well. I see marbles rolling down a marble staircase in a high, sun-drenched cloister—it’s summer, and my father is smiling at me….Crystal cones, long, swinging strings of pearls jingling in a chandelier blown by a summer breeze, jingle-lingle-linging like frozen tears at a masked ball…But no, it’s only water in the barrel, music to my ears, like dancing notes on a musical staff…ploink…ploof…plik-plik-plik…splonk…plop…ploink…
I do my very best to shut out the sound of screaming and quarrelling from the kitchen.
—
I take out a well-thumbed card from beneath the old blotter on his desk and stare at it.
Urbain Joseph Emile Martien.
Soldier of the Second Regiment of the Line, age: seventeen years and nine months.
First Company—First Battalion.
Matriculation / number: 55238.
Student in the Regimental School of and in Courtrai-Kortrijk.
Done in Ghent, Wednesday the eleventh of November 1908.
—
He does not say whether he enrolled in military school in Kortrijk to escape the strained atmosphere at home, but he does write that the work in the iron foundry was taking too heavy a toll on him. He also mentions a new apprentice who charmed the iron founder’s daughter, seemingly depriving Urbain of a fair shot at a bright career in the workshop. It was in this uncertain period that he suffered his first episodes of shortness of breath, “a legacy from my father that lives on in me.” A few weeks earlier, a parish priest had sounded him out: Did he have the feeling the Lord was calling him? You see, the priest added dryly, for a boy like you, without money or a degree, there are only two paths out of slavery: soldier or priest. My grandfather couldn’t see what that had to do with a holy calling; it seemed more like a calculation, which had never before been presented to him so clearly.
—
All right, then, soldier or priest. At the instigation of Father Van Acker, SJ, a fisher of men, he takes part in a kind of weeklong retreat, run by the Jesuits, and has a vision of his father standing under a tiny green blossoming mulberry tree in the monastery garden. He sleeps poorly in his monastic cell—“soldier or priest” pounds in his head for hours—and when he returns home after days of prayer, sermons, and song, he has made his choice: military school, where he will remain for a total of four years. For four years he is well dressed, well fed, well booted; no longer does he have to slog and slave away, but instead he is drilled by bad-tempered sergeants, stands out for his punctuality, reliability, and discipline, and for the first time in his life meets boys from the upper classes—lads whose verve and flair, French accent, financial independence, and friendly arrogance bring back the sense of profound insecurity he felt in Adolphe Hoste’s bookstore. His superiors soon recognize that he has the makings of a true soldier, a man who conducts himself better than the others, with greater discipline and conviction, combining modesty with self-assurance. So they increase the pressure. Sometimes he is punished for a fleck of mud on his boots or trousers, while others go scot-free. He feels no resentment. In the isolation cell, a ramshackle structure under an old linden in the central yard, he sits and sings songs he remembers from childhood. The next day he stands rigidly to attention, unbroken, under the gaze of the hard-drinking, bloodshot-eyed commander.
Très bien, Marshen, now run along back to your post.
Merci, mon commandant. My name is pronounced Mar-teen, not Mar-shen, à vos ordres, mon commandant.
Ta gueule, Marshen, God damn it!
—
And that—writes the elderly Urbain Martien, sitting comfortably in his small room under the vine-wreathed window that looks out to the east at the barges puffing by on the Lower Scheldt—brought the first part of my life to a close. It is spring when he writes these words. He has just had coffee with his daughter. His grandchildren have gone to school, with the usual noise and fuss. The house is quiet. He nibbles at a cookie. The radio tells of riots in Paris. He barely hears it. Somewhere in the neighbors’ overgrown garden, a great tit is chirping its monotonous melody. It is a windless day with white clouds. These days, he is sometimes troubled by melancholy moods. He thinks of his dead wife, Gabrielle, and wishes he could tell her all his stories again.
About the war, Gabrielle.
I know all about it, you old fool, you’ve told me twenty times already.
The
n he falls silent. He picks up his brushes and stirs the dots of ultramarine, burnt sienna, madder, and Naples yellow to get rid of the skins that have formed during the night. He stands at his easel and adds color to a few leaves of an elm, around a small, crumbling castle that is half finished.
I know, Gabrielle, my dear, it was a long time ago.
But that day, he remains in his chair. Again, he sees himself walking up the hill in Ghent for his physical exam with another boy who was there for the same reason. The boy’s name has slipped his mind. What was it again? Albert, Adalbert, or Robert? Bert, pronounced the French way—that’s right, they called him “Little Bert”—but he’s forgotten the rest of the name.
—
He masters the arts of fencing and hitting a target from a thousand feet away (an officer he has humiliated orders an inspection of his rifle, suspicious that this raw recruit seems far too experienced). He learns French in the school of hard knocks—from the officers, who humiliate him, and from arrogant bourgeois boys—but at the same time he is appalled by the coarse rudeness of the many bumpkins from rural Flanders, who hang around in bars at night, pinch girls’ bottoms, and vomit in their beds. He makes friends with an unassuming Walloon boy, whose gruesome death in the mud at the front he will witness six years later. And he obeys—even when their drunk commander bellows Silence! while no one is moving a muscle. But in his memoirs, the French word Silence comes out very differently on paper; he makes a slip of the pen; I read, Cilense. The word leaps off the page at me. How could he have made such an uncharacteristic error? Then I realize something absurd: he mixed up Silence with the name that still haunted him, Céline, his mother’s name. Silence, Céline—Cilense.
I sit and stare at that strange word, as if it shone a light into the dark well of my grandfather’s soul. A glimpse of his loneliness, his repressed longing for home, a cry for his mother, smothered in the sublime nonword Cilense. I see him sitting at his desk, nibbling at his spiced cookie. He writes and is silent. I’ll be strong and silent, Mother; I who braved the summer storm with you that night and was your man in the house, when the rain pearled on our hair and for a moment I was your only darling, the hero of Nowheresville, as you liked to call me. I, who will now be a man in this life I never wanted, far from anything I know and love. Silence, Cilense. In the hush that fell, the humble chronicler writes, I would not have dared cough or blow my nose; on our commander’s chest, the medals rattled with a tinny sound.
—
After four years of training in subservience, unfailing obedience to a roaring drunkard named Bellière, endless drills in mud and sand, and countless nights of aching muscles, sleep and sleeplessness in the frigid dormitory, he completes his military training. He has become a sturdy, proud, and taciturn young man. He is discharged, turns in his rifle and uniform at the depot in Dendermonde, and returns home. A couple of months later, he is called up to serve as a customs officer in the border zone north of Zelzate. His mother throws the letter into the stove; if he thinks he’s going to risk his life chasing armed cattle thieves after dark and put his health at risk by spending night after night in a sleeping bag out in the swampy fields, between the drainage ditches, then he shouldn’t count on her support. He didn’t request a discharge just to turn around and throw away his freedom again. My grandfather nods and says nothing.
A few weeks later, he goes to the railway to look for work and is hired as a metalworker in the Gentbrugge workshops. It is a slow year, a year of calm regularity. He learns to get along better with his stepfather. Sometimes they walk along the bank of the Scheldt together and say little, but understand each other well. He is almost twenty-two years old now, and his mother says it’s time for him to look around for a pretty, well-brought-up girl to marry. He often roams the city, which is being turned upside down for the forthcoming world’s fair. La Grande Expo Internationale is expected to put Ghent on the world map. There is some controversy about the organization of the event and the costs. Early on, the French-speaking bourgeoisie takes the lead, mainly because the Germans are thinking about investing in the event. That incites the rising Flemish bourgeoisie to play the German card, in the knowledge that their German brothers support their struggle against Francophone supremacy in their own city. In short, as the Ghent World’s Fair approaches, German and French interests are already directly opposed. Amid the cacophony of world’s fairs in the early decades of the twentieth century, this is just one more disturbing sign of things to come. No one seems to recognize the squabbling in Ghent as a symbol of anything larger, except perhaps of the Franco-Prussian War forty years earlier and other conflicts of the past. Thanks to pressure from Ghent’s Francophone bourgeoisie, the French ultimately gain the upper hand. The Germans withdraw from the organizing committee and it becomes a completely French-language project, chaotic and poorly managed. No one really has any need for yet another international exhibition, except for the ambitious city of Ghent. The Flemish middle class grumbles, complaining that the enemy is now among Ghent’s own people—with their Francophone arrogance, the haute bourgeoisie are a “foreign element” in the heart of their community. The first tears in the city’s social fabric are already visible, in a project that was meant as a show of unity. Countless plaster edifices are erected to display the glories of the Old World and the New, in all their diversity, to the public. It is the twilight of colonial rhetoric and the kitschy exoticism that accompanies it. There is a re-creation of a Senegalese village, complete with villagers, but the entrance to the African village more closely resembles the gate of a German fortress. The Senegalese visitors give rise to rumors about “certain girls in Ghent” who are said to be hanging around Citadelpark making eyes at the “well-built Negroes.” When some of them declare their wish to stay on in Ghent after the world’s fair, they are quickly escorted onto a ship bound for Africa. There is also a delegation of Igorot tribespeople from the Philippines, described by the great Ghent author Cyriel Buysse as a cross between apes and Mongols. The penniless tribespeople also have a building of their own, which exudes the spirit of the Flemish Middle Ages. After the exhibition, which runs from April to November, some of them are spotted begging in the streets; one young Igorot man dies, overcome by the harsh climate and, the newspapers eagerly add, homesick for the wilderness. His name is Timicheg. In 2011, almost a century after his death, and after all sorts of tussling in councils, commissions, and internet forums, the city of Ghent decides to name a tunnel under the railway line near Sint-Pietersstation after this unfortunate victim of the world’s fair and its colonial kitsch. The opening ceremony is even attended by delegates all the way from the Philippines, who express their country’s humble gratitude to His Worship the Mayor and the big cheese from the Belgian Railways.
—
In the summer months of 1913, Urbain wanders through the crowds, his hands in the pockets of his Sunday trousers, eyeing the elegant girls from Ghent’s best families but too nervous to strike up a conversation. He is a deeply religious, introverted young man. Now and then he sits on a bench with a small sketchbook in his hand and draws what he sees. After his death, I found studies for a small painting that I remember vividly, the portrait of a black man, with a furrowed, abstemious face like a secular Christ and a dark look in his downcast eyes. Did he paint one of the exotic victims of the world’s fair, someone he had met in the city? As far as I know, that painting was always in his small room, just over the door, in the spot where you might normally expect a crucifix—when I last visited my father, I saw that it was gone and had, in fact, been replaced by a small wooden cross. Where had the painting disappeared to? My father was as stumped as I was, but that wistful portrait will always remain in my memories. I have never fully grasped the symbolism of that exotic figure, and I never asked my grandfather about it, because only now, as I write, do I realize that there must have been something more, perhaps a meeting or a conversation with one of those people who were shamefully put on display—there were so many things he neve
r spoke of, but which must have run through his mind on quiet Sunday afternoons as the opera program on the radio lulled the rest of the family into a forgetful slumber.
—
On New Year’s Eve 1913, he celebrates with his family, telling tall tales about military school as his brothers and sisters listen admiringly. In the spring his stepbrother Joris, now resigned to his fate as an anemic office clerk, marries a girl he describes as “devout and good-natured,” but who simply will not become pregnant. Urbain reenrolls for the evening drawing classes and is more successful this time. After three months he is given the chance to draw from living models—boys wrapped in loose-fitting loincloths, posing like Greek sculptures against the dusty plaster of gnarled tree trunks. Le Frère Professeur teaches him that one must keep in mind the muscles under the skin when drawing limbs, that Leonardo da Vinci developed a system of ideal human proportions, and that one must try to make drawings of angels at least a little bit plausible; in other words, one must think about how the wings are attached to the shoulder blades, because there must surely be muscles involved. Flying is no mean feat; anatomy is more than the body, he adds cryptically.
—
A young nephew of Céline’s dies unexpectedly. It is July 1914. The man, an electrician, was hit by a high-voltage cable in his cabin at work and died instantly. There is no public transportation from where they live to the village of Evergem, where he will be buried. Céline asks her eldest son to represent their family. So he walks there on his own, more than six miles, taking the ferry across the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal. There are not many mourners at the modest ceremony, and after attending the church service and offering his condolences, he heads back home without delay. The weather is magnificent. After crossing the canal again, he walks through Port Arthur, an open expanse of sand by the harbor, passing the tomb of the aviator Daniel Kinet, who crashed there in his biplane. He remembers the incident well, even though it was about four years earlier. He had gone to see the aerial show at the harbor, which was announced well in advance, and to which Kinet had invited him after the hot-air balloon ride in Sint-Pietersplein. The event symbolized the new age, the city’s boldness and audacity, and the hope of a spectacular future in the new century. On the way to Port Arthur, he had paid a brief visit to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes in Oostakker, and just as he was standing in front of the grotto there, his hands folded, the biplane came skimming over his head, less than three hundred feet above him. Kinet was already conducting test flights for the show at the Ghent fair later that day. The actual flight, scheduled for nine thirty, was to follow the Ghent–Bruges–Ostend canal to Ostend. The plan had been for Kinet to come in for a celebratory landing on the beach, just in front of the waiting royal family. At nine thirty that day, July 10, 1910, Urbain was among the crowd peering into the sky when the Farman biplane took off to loud applause and shouts of encouragement.
War and Turpentine Page 13
