War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  —

  Suddenly, the aircraft began to swerve, abruptly tipped to one side, and crashed into a tree a few seconds later. With an enormous bang, it bored into the crown. The tree split; branches flew through the air; a cloud of sparrows spread in all directions. In the unearthly silence of that instant, a few people rushed to the scene. The crash had destroyed almost every part of the aircraft. Kinet was pulled out of the wreck, severely wounded. After receiving first aid, he was taken to a clinic on Kasteellaan. He recovered consciousness and could even talk, and surgeons operated successfully on his torn abdomen and damaged kidney the following day, but he died of heart failure later in the month, probably as a result of postoperative stress. My grandfather stood at the entrance to the hospital with a bunch of grapes in a basket, but was not allowed to visit the famous patient. He wrote a clumsy note to wish him a speedy recovery and read the obituary in the paper a few days later. For some reason, he was shaken by Kinet’s death. To my grandfather, the aviator had become a model of courage and of what he called “manly virtue.”

  Now, four years later, again in the summer month of July, he stops for a moment in front of the huge lump of stone with a memorial inscription, plunked down in the middle of the sandy expanse. He salutes. A cloud of butterflies flutters around the memorial, and in one of the slender poplars to the right a thrush is singing. A little farther on, the landscape has been churned up for the construction of a second large dock. Some distance away from the lonely footpath that leads him through the scattered shrubs and copses, there are construction sheds holding large, newfangled machines. On the side of one shed he reads Entreprises de Béton armé. Reinforced concrete. It was a new product, he writes in his memoirs, and back then we had never heard of it before. (Soon enough he would learn more about it: it was precisely because the concrete forts of Liège were not reinforced with iron that they could not withstand heavy shelling and German mortar fire.) The dirt road is deserted; somewhere amid the trees, he hears the monotonous chirrup of the chiffchaff. He is still about half a mile away from the pilgrimage site in Oostakker. That’s just outside the range of a long-distance rifle, he thinks—about 2,300 feet in those days. The sun is sinking; the sweltering heat of the day lingers on the country road and the deserted landscape around it. To the left of the road is a mound, a kind of embankment. He notices young grass poking through the loose sand, a sign of moisture.

  Suddenly he sees a small heap of clothing, white and blue. The Blessed Virgin’s colors, he thinks to himself. Curious, he takes a few steps toward it, climbs the mound, and finds a sandy pool on the other side. Then he receives what he calls in his memoirs “the greatest shock of my young life.” A startled girl, about eighteen years old, stands up in the pool. The water barely reaches her knees. He is stunned; it is the first time he has ever seen a young woman naked. As for her, she looks at him as if awaiting his next move, almost apologetic. There before him is something he cannot believe is real, a figure that opens the door to a whole new world inside him, a door he had taken great pains to keep shut, out of Christian piety and the repression it entails. The girl stands in the late sun as if waiting, but does not look scared. He has no idea what to do with himself. I must admit, he writes, I was thrown into confusion; all sorts of thoughts assailed me. Did she see him coming? Why didn’t she stay underwater? Why are her clothes dozens of yards from the edge of the pool, on top of the embankment for all to see? Does she have what he would call “unchaste” intentions? Isn’t she running the risk that some worker on his way home will have his way with her? There is not a stump or trunk for miles around; only the low basin protects her in this godforsaken place on this warm late afternoon. He breaks into a sweat; the girl is almost smiling now. He stammers an apology, feels his collar tight around his neck, gestures as if to say that everything is fine, turns around, and then looks back at the girl. All this time, she has not moved, except to slowly raise her left arm over her chest. He sees the dark blonde tuft on her underbelly, the shadowed slope of her small navel, the curving underside of her young breasts, still visible under her arm, her straight shoulders and the hair tumbling lightly over them—all things he has seen only in centuries-old paintings—or actually, only in reproductions in indistinct books. To think that such a creature now stands before him in sharp focus, naked and breathing! In the wink of an eye, he becomes fractionally aware of his own improbable naïveté. He wants to ask if she isn’t afraid that something will happen to her. But he can’t get the words out, and after an endless minute, he waves goodbye, flees back over the embankment, and rapidly strides away, feeling his head reel. After fifty yards, he looks back. She has evidently left the water; he sees her head sticking up over the embankment, as she watches him recede into the distance “like a curious squirrel behind a tree.” He hurries on, his heart pounding in his throat. The drowsy afternoon, the bushes, and the lonely expanse suddenly seem unreal.

  He arrives at the shrine in a fluster, passes the tinkling porcelain tablets hung there by grateful pilgrims, sees the figure of the Virgin Mother, feels a stabbing pain in his chest, gropes in his trouser pocket for his rosary, and launches into a murmured prayer for peace of mind. I am a soldier, he thinks, I saw a virgin, a girl, O Mother of God, not your effigy, but a woman like the ones Giorgione and Titian painted, I saw a nude girl in the flesh, she appeared right before my eyes, her clothes were white and blue, O Virgin Mother, what have You done to me? His head is pounding so hard that several hours later, at home in his room, he is already wondering whether he really saw her: could it have been a delusion, brought on by the heat, the solitude, the funeral earlier in the day, a sidelong look from a distant, dark blond cousin in a black dress, piously praying in a wicker chair on the other side of the nave? Has he not, in fact, been visited by the wily devil? He tries to draw her from memory—which only adds to his confusion—tears up the paper, and has to say five rosaries before his rebellious nether parts will start to settle down. I must be pure, I must be pure; he doesn’t know why he must, but he must, he must.

  A month earlier, the young Serbian Gavrilo Princip had shot and killed the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, thereby sending my grandfather’s whole familiar world hurtling toward destruction, but he was in no state of mind to read the papers. He preferred to look at Raphael and Botticelli’s blushing, motherly virgins, while pinching painful dents into the palms of his hands.

  —

  It is January 2012. I have just spent a couple of hours in the Alsemberg Vorst cemetery, south of Brussels, because my investigations revealed that it held the neglected grave of Daniel Kinet, the hero who had crashed in the place where my grandfather saw a young girl naked for the first—and maybe the last—time in his life, just a few months before the start of the Great War. Icarus and Aphrodite, I thought, it’s too good to be true. So I drove to the cemetery, which happened to be close to the place where I had been sitting and writing all that time. How did Kinet, a Walloon boy from Jumet and an honored guest in Ghent, end up here in a neglected cemetery south of Brussels? There was nobody I could ask.

  It’s a clear winter’s day. The icy, glinting beeches on the other side of the cemetery wall are moaning in the wind; snapped branches and mud puddles fill the paths after yesterday’s storm. Somewhere, a tree has fallen on a few old gravestones; some markers have been smashed, and puddles glitter in the open graves. The light itself seems rinsed clean, purified. The gravestones lean against each other, collapsed and sunken, their inscriptions no longer legible, with white-encrusted patches of moss over the faded letters. Plastic flower buckets have been blown together in the mud on one side of a tomb; three wooden crosses lie in a splintered heap, distinguishable from refuse only by the names that have cracked through the middle. There are deep grooves in the descending paths, eaten into them by the raging storm. Here and there, gravel walkways have been closed off with red-and-white plastic ribbons. The design of the cemetery is very peculiar. The oldest section, with monumental tombs, has
a wall around it, and the soldiers’ graves are a little way off, in semicircles. There are open, grassy areas that serve no clear purpose. Some of them have a single gravestone at the edge, without an inscription. In another section, a line of cypresses borders a grassy plot with a pile of broken-down machines and wilted chrysanthemums. Nothing here really seems to be grieving; everything exudes calm, detached impermanence. Trudging past graves with names like Corleone, Schiavoni, and Devlamynck, names from Mrazek Marasco and Doudou to Jeunehomme, Tobiansky-d’Altoff, Perceval, and Culot, I make three loops around the muddy field of the fallen but cannot find Kinet’s simple gray headstone. It may be one of the dozens of smaller stones now buried under thick layers of ivy, the only hint of their presence a slight swell in the green overgrowth. There is no one I can ask, since the office is closed. An old woman I approach is so deaf that she doesn’t understand me, even when I shout into her fuzz-filled ears. Not until months later, after who knows how many visits, do I find the gravestone, decorated with angels’ wings and no body.

  That same day, I drive to the harbor in Ghent to find the monument to Daniel Kinet and possibly the pool where my grandfather had his prewar epiphany, poised at the outermost edge of the old world; there must be some remnant of that idyll that I can still touch. I get caught in the snarl of traffic on the beltway and creep toward the large grain silos by the industrial road, surrounded by trucks expelling clouds of black smoke. The weather has turned cloudy and cold. My GPS recognizes Daniel Kinetweg. It takes me to a no-man’s-land in the midst of a desolate harbor zone, with vague industrial sites, warehouses, fences, and a tremendous mountain of scrap iron by the side of Farmanweg, a road named after the French aircraft builder Henri Farman, who designed Kinet’s biplane. After searching for a while, I find the monument marking the place where Kinet crashed. The forgotten memorial stands by the roadside, next to dozens of yellow-and-red trucks parked in a row. The transmission tower behind the monument looms over it, reducing the rough bluestone monolith to insignificant proportions. A young woman with dark red curly hair, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, stands in the icy wind taking photographs; besides the two of us, there is not a living soul in sight. The woman gets in her car and drives away. Although we glanced at each other with vague curiosity, neither of us said a word. Who on earth would visit this desolate site on a lost weekday? Who would walk a hundred yards on foot in these parts, in a world that no longer offers a human scale? I look around: nothing but nameless, neglected space of the type left behind by major industries around the globe. Spatial collateral damage. The Arcadian pool where my grandfather must have seen his idyllic apparition lies buried deep under the reinforced concrete of the grain silos. Perhaps it was no more than a slight swell in the old landscape, mindlessly flattened by bulldozers when the harbor was expanded, decades ago.

  Driving into yet another traffic jam—rush hour has begun—I go on to the Lourdes grotto in Oostakker, where I stumble into memories of my own childhood: the old-fashioned, exotic style of the Hotel de Lourdes, the dark basilica with slender Eastern columns along the central nave, and at every turn, inscriptions praising the Virgin—nameplates, votive tablets for that Palestinian girl who was impregnated centuries ago without any stain of human sperm and thereby gave birth to a man-god. I buy a folder of prayers to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, my grandfather’s favorite. There is nobody here. Outside, wintry dusk is falling, the wind is frigid. I walk to the grotto, which is much closer to the basilica than I remembered. But I recognize the exact sound that’s been stuck in my memory for years, the shivery tinkling of the countless porcelain tablets that hang on the fence, swaying and clinking, in never-ending rows beside the gravel path around the shrine, ethereal music from long ago that descends on me with all the force of the forgotten. In front of the grotto with the sculpture of the Virgin Mother is a statuette of Bernadette Soubirous. She too is dressed in white and blue. The girl mystic sits in an attitude of worship, tilting back slightly with her hands folded together and raised to the apparition in the artificial grotto, the Blessed Virgin herself, surrounded by scores of small lightbulbs: bulbs that were undoubtedly not there yet in 1914. This is where he must have stood and prayed, sweating in the late afternoon heat. I try to visualize his route from the pool, from the nude girl and her blue-white clothes, to this place, but it can’t be done: the beltway, the buildings, the industrial sites, the fences, the streets, the railway, everything runs straight through it, as if an old songline had been ruptured by the brute force and mindlessness with which modern technology has flattened memories everywhere.

  Along the path around the shrine are seven smaller grottoes decorated with religious scenes. The cold seeps into my fingers; I have to pull my collar tight around my neck so as not to catch cold. In the yellowish light of the deserted shop, filled with religious knick-knacks, I buy a memorial tablet for fifteen euros, selecting the neutral inscription “In gratitude.” They are no longer made of tinkling porcelain, but of inexpensive earthenware, possibly made under harsh conditions by devout Catholic children in some third-world country. The dark blond saleswoman, about fifty years old, asks if I want a hook to hang the tablet on the fence. I say no thank you. She gives me one anyway. I slide the wrapped-up tablet into my coat pocket and walk out of the deserted pilgrimage site. A bantam cockerel struts impatiently beside me, as if warning me not even to glance at the three little hens hopping along behind him. I linger there a moment and look around. Never before have I been so deeply struck by the transience of human life. I know nothing about the girl whose gift to my grandfather was the quasi-mystical memory of a miraculous apparition—not her name, nor her background, nor even what she looked like, apart from his agitated description of her form rising out of the water. She has become the pure apparition of a human figure, so anonymous that she could be the image launched into space to give other inhabitants of the universe an impression of how human beings are supposed to look and what they can expect when they land on this planet. It is the final image of an old, idyllic world, which a few days later was destroyed forever.

  Even though the car radio is droning the news of the day, silence swallows the world as I wind through traffic. I have never been a calmer driver, detached from everyone and everything, as if returning from something utterly fresh and unimaginable, reconciled to the fact that everything is gone. Back in the basilica, I opened a prayer book, read a few lines, and surreptitiously stuck it in my pocket:

  I drew the water

  from the rock for You.

  You gave me gall

  and vinegar to drink.

  Holy, immortal God,

  Have mercy on us.

  II

  1914–1918

  1

  Why has that organ been playing in my head all through the night?

  Wild geese are flying over, hour after hour. The first birds came just before dawn, in the frigid interval before daybreak. As they soared over the countryside, cackling, their wings shone in the first rays of the rising sun. I’m shivering so hard I can feel my bones creak. In the distance, the sky unfolds a delicate fan of grays, pink, a slight hint of orange. Above it, the thin white of rising mist drifts over the fields.

  —

  The date is August 5, 1914. Four days ago, around four in the morning, we heard a pounding on our front door—a city councillor and a policeman; alarm in my mother’s soft voice; me, coming down the stairs to find her at the open door, her hair tangled, her dressing gown thrown on in haste. I have ten minutes to present myself at the door “in full uniform,” as the policeman puts it. He says that someone will escort all the lads in the neighborhood to the nearby square where we are supposed to assemble. I say nothing; my mother says nothing. She clasps me in her arms, holds me close for a long moment; I smell the sleep on her breath, the scent of her skin. She lets me go, her eyes pale, unfathomable.

  I jump into my clothes without washing and run a comb through my hair. My name is Urbain Joseph Emile Martien. Corpora
l, twenty-three years old. I have four years of training at military school. I know what I must do; I know how to obey without flinching; I can stand stock-still for hours in the rain and cold.