When I visited the IJzertoren, I observed that the only slope on the site is right next to the location of the original tower; this suggests that my family was at the focal point of the event. That makes the photo a valuable historical document of the consecration of the tower. But it also seems to show something else: namely, that his mother was such an integral part of the small family that it was only natural for her to come along to that crowded ceremony. I was surprised to read my grandfather’s claim that a quarter of a million people gathered in the field in Diksmuide that day; most sources report 60,000 to 100,000. I imagine he was overwhelmed by the huge crowd and the ceremony, but be that as it may, what a fresh, mobilizing energy the Yser pilgrimage must have exuded in those days of the humanist Flemish Movement, with its old-fashioned belief in social uplift. And how stark the contrast with the same event in the 1980s, when it was infested with neo-Nazis, or in the years when the Flemish Block thugs showed up to spoil the atmosphere, complaining that the veterans’ pacifist message was “too left-wing” for their tastes.
The capital letter with which my grandfather wrote the personal pronoun “Her,” referring to his mother, seems somehow logical in his case. But where was his eight-year-old daughter, Maria, at the time? Did the child take the photograph with the old-time camera, which must have been much more complicated than the ones we use today? His stepfather, Henri de Pauw, was dead by then, and in September of that year, his mother too would die, still young by our standards. What I see in the photograph is a reassuringly everyday scene, ordinary people on a grassy slope, resting some twenty yards away from the crowd. There is a spot on the photo that makes it hard to see Gabrielle’s expression, but it seems to me she’s smiling. She looks nothing like the introverted older woman I knew as my grandmother. Her shapely legs are crossed, she is wearing heels, and she looks every inch an ordinary, well-dressed middle-class woman. She is forty-three years old. Céline turned sixty-two on August 9, two weeks before this photograph was taken.
In any case, there is not one word about her death in his memoirs. But then again, it was in the 1930s, a decade he hardly mentions in the notes I’ve found. Cilense…Maybe his silence says more than enough about his life as it was then. Maybe he was thankful for the routine of everyday life, as the whole world hurtled toward new catastrophes—and he toward his first shock treatments. But knowing what I know now, I suspect that the 1930s were also when he painted the secret portrait of his forbidden dream, a portrait I would not discover until many years after I first read his notebooks.
—
He spent the Second World War at home, where he and his wife and daughter subsisted on his meager pension. There are tales of the masses of fish that crowded the crystal-clear waters of the Scheldt after the first year and a half of war, there for the taking, a daily miracle of fishes, because the polluting factories had come to a standstill, and there are tales of the clean air and tranquility after the smokestacks stopped smoking. Sure, they had to walk miles for a pound of butter, a piece of pork belly, a few pounds of potatoes, or some milk for their blossoming young daughter, but that wasn’t going to kill them. In some ways, it was a reprise of the poverty of his youth. As far as I can tell from his stories, that didn’t bother him. On the contrary, the stilled world put him at ease. I don’t know what he thought, felt, said when he heard stories about the battlefronts; the period is cloaked in silence. There were a few confrontations with German soldiers because he missed the evening curfew and had to show them his purchases: a pitiful haul of foodstuffs he had bought from a farmer in distant Laarne at extortionate prices. Then he would salute and say, “First Sergeant-Major Martien, retired,” and the German soldier would respond with an equally polite salute and let him go. They had ration coupons, bad bread, and a neighbor woman who, in the middle of the war, said in a broad local accent to a German soldier asking for information, “I do recall right well, sir, that it was Friday when ’twas Saturday,” and slammed the front door in the baffled German’s face.
After the first year of war, there were no more supplies of paint. Paper grew scarce, and canvas even more so. For a while, he made his own paint from ingredients he’d stored in a cupboard in the back of the house, and he painted on wooden panels. When he’d used up that as well, he had to stop painting until after the war. So he started drawing in charcoal again, and refined his chiaroscuro.
—
As far-fetched as it may sound, he did not notice until fairly late in life that he was wrong about certain colors. It must have been in the mid-1960s. Daltonism, or color blindness, is a strange affliction. Because it is a variable defect in the perception of color gradations, the number of varieties is almost as great as the number of people affected. He had a common type of partial color blindness: typically, he would confuse shades of red and green—not the entire spectrum, just certain shades. Bright green and bright red, for example, looked mysteriously similar to him; the potent red of the ripe rowan berries showed almost no contrast with the windblown leaves in the treetop, especially when sunlight fell straight onto them. Dark green and black were two others he could barely tell apart, especially on new cars and other gleaming surfaces. Strangely, it was sometimes enough just to point it out to him. Then he would look more closely and say, “Oh, yes, now I see it too.” This condition is apparently passed down the male line, but always by way of a woman who carries the recessive gene—in other words, it is handed down from grandfather to grandson through the daughter. So he must have inherited it from Mr. Andries, Céline’s father. His failure to observe certain nuances of color had far-reaching consequences, since some of his hues were made out of three or four different Rembrandt oils—colors that could not be confused, because the names were on the tubes. He would screw off the tops, add a drop of linseed oil to each dab of color, and start mixing. It was there that the trouble began; in the mixing process, he sometimes veered very far from the intermediate tones he had in mind, and because we, who lived with him, paid more attention to the sensitivity of his scenes than to the realism of his colors, some extra brown or red in certain elements of the landscape could easily be seen as a case of artistic license or an original light effect. He never became conscious of the extent of his deficiency until the day that he and a fellow painter, Adolf Baeyens, stood side by side painting the castle gardens in Bergenkruis, a pilgrimage site not far from where he lived. They went there on foot—two elderly gentlemen strolling down the country lane in the shade of the tall beeches. Despite the hot weather, they wore tidy suits, white shirts, and neckties, and had their hats on their heads. Each man had a small easel tucked under one arm and a wooden box of painting supplies slung over one shoulder. They found a comfortable spot somewhere in the great outdoors, like throwbacks to the nineteenth-century Barbizon School. Although they both painted the same rustic cottage at the edge of the woods, they returned home with two completely different paintings. Not only did Baeyens have a more angular, expressionistic style, but the house was blue in one painting and reddish-brown in the other. From that moment on, my grandfather became suspicious of his own visual faculty, and one morning while painting his umpteenth seascape with shrimpers, he noticed that—God damn it!—the sea in the painting was not authentically greenish, but an odd shade of reddish-brown. A brown sea—Jesus Christ! I happened to witness this dramatic moment. With tears trickling from his eyes, he swore, slammed the painting to pieces on his beloved dressing table, and made a wild attempt to rip the canvas to shreds, covering his hands with wet paint in the process. He wiped them off on his smock and looked at me in dismay, without a word, hissing in helpless rage. I remember the abstract painting formed by the smears of paint on his smock; I believe I could not appreciate the full extent of the tragedy I had witnessed. This was several years after the death of his wife; I was eleven years old at the time so, counting backward, I think it must have been around 1962. Gabrielle died in 1958. How had he gone so long without realizing?
From that moment on, there was so
mething different about the way he painted. His style seems to have become looser, vaguer, more careless, from one day to the next, but it’s also possible that his eyesight was deteriorating. He took refuge in his speciality, drawing in charcoal, which gave him the opportunity for brilliant sfumato effects. There are scores of half-naked girls by woodland springs, nymphlike apparitions that suggest the primeval purity of the shadowy forest, languid cloudscapes, and little-trodden paths where dappled light falls through teeming summer leaves. In these charcoal drawings, he mastered the art of evoking a melancholy, Arcadian mood. He gave away many of these drawings as gifts to family members, friends, and acquaintances. I never knew him to accept a single Belgian franc for a drawing or painting; I believe the very idea was unthinkable to him, an insult to the sense of the sublime that he had sought in painting his whole life long. It might also have constituted a betrayal of his father, Franciscus the fresco painter, who had always remained poor.
—
He took me along to Expo 58, the world’s fair in Brussels—my grandfather, who had seen the World’s Fair of 1913. What I recall is white: white buildings, white avenues, bright, new, squeaky-clean architecture, large modern windows, sunlight, white sunlight, a world that dazzled me—as I remember, everything was white. To a generation still dwelling in old houses with dimly lit rooms, it was overwhelming. The Atomium looked white, the trees looked white, the world was white. Even the bread was white, white Expo bread. Why was it all white? Are they glimpses of the American pavilion, these memories of mine, or of the futuristic French pavilion? Who knows. The only thing that was black was the clothing the visitors wore, I’m sure of that. All the men wore black, the women wore black skirts (and, admittedly, white blouses), and I walked hand in hand with my black-suited grandfather, who was also wearing his black hat and black bow tie. A white-and-black world. That’s all I remember. I was seven; he had lost his wife in the spring; he must have been in deep mourning at the time, missing her. I don’t remember anything else about that; in my recollection, I had seen her die in her chair one early morning, with a final loud rasp. That had been in May—a long time ago for a seven-year-old child in August. Only now, a half century later, does it all sometimes seem so strangely close, that world in black and white.
—
Schiplaken, January 2012.
On Google Maps it looks almost as if history is still alive there, and I can imagine the woods where the fighting took place; swinging the cursor between streets named after composers and streets named after canaries, between a lingerie shop and a suburban lane, through the stone encampments of the urbanized Flemish landscape, I can explore the terrain, feel it out, as if I had a 3D military map, or as if I were flying over the places to be mapped in an army helicopter. My satellite view is dime-store quality, but it seems to bring things closer, for the length of a distracted afternoon. The cemetery in question is on Bieststraat, fine, but when I actually arrive there in my car, it’s one of those chilly, lightless days that give you the feeling this part of the world is buried under a centuries-old damp rag, while elsewhere on the planet, in more fortunate climes, the sky is filled with bright and endless blue. Everything here seems flat and bare. The new developments lack imagination, as do the ceaseless, infernal cypresses, cherry laurels, and close-cropped lawns. There is no traffic on the concrete road, aside from a single delivery van, hurtling over the joints in the road with a monotonous tock-tock, tock-tock. As I take in this scene, children come pouring out of the little school next to the cemetery. A crossing guard waves a stop sign at the deserted street. Then they converge from all sides: SUVs, luxury sedans, vans, and parents on foot. The children are picked up and packed into seats, doors slam, and the cars pull out of the parking lot one by one, disappearing from view as they head for affluent suburbs in all directions. Silence returns; you can hear the wind in the bare trees. It is bitterly cold. At the entrance to the cemetery, the flag dangles like a dead bird. I take photos of the monument—a long wall with black iron letters reading TO THE HEROES OF THE BATTLES OF SCHIPLAKEN.
The sombre sculpture in the middle, on a pedestal bearing the words PRO PATRIA and the dates of the battles (August 26–September 12, 1914), is the sole testament to what must have happened in this place. The stone cross has fallen off the pedestal; what remains is a dark gray cross-shaped blotch. The bronze sculpture by Bernard Callie represents a mother bent over a dying soldier. He is wearing his capote and resting his helmeted head in her lap; she appears to be laying a palm branch on his shoulder. His knapsack still hangs from his bronze neck. One leg seems to have slid off the pedestal, a dramatic touch. The bronze is stained with moss and damp. Along the wall, behind which the roof of the little school rises up beside two formless, overgrown cypresses, are two rows of small gravestones like upward-tilted nameplates, commemorating almost a hundred fallen soldiers. I copy a few names, reflecting that my grandfather may well have known these lads: A. Van Dezande; B. De Munter; A. Vandecandelaere; J. Buffel, carabinier; D. DeBacker, artilleryman; E. De Jonghe; J. Verhaeghe; A. De Groote; L. L. Coene; J. Cravez, all soldiers of the 2nd Regiment of the Line.
—
There’s no reason for me to be writing down these names. I do it just to keep busy, but the cold soon seeps into my fingers, and I walk on with my hands in my pockets, leaning into the wind. In a grassy field to the rear of the cemetery is a large cross on a pedestal. Over the walls, bare treetops sway in the icy wind. It happened in these woods, I think to myself. I return to the car and drive down narrow, sandy roads through desolate stretches of forest that lie strewn between clusters of houses. There is truly nothing to see, except for one smashed-up car without wheels somewhere in the middle of the woods, a kind of focal point for the surrounding desolation, the lack of anything that might indicate memory. I step out of the car for another look around; even the trees were different back then. Not one of these trees is a century old; all of them may have been planted after the Second World War. There is not a single witness here: not in the sand, not in the trees, not in the houses, not in the roads. And as I reflect on this absence in these strangely young trees, I am seized by the near-physical sense of how far removed it all is from my own time, everything that’s preoccupied me for the past few years. It’s almost as if the mute trees, so absurdly young, are dissemblers, conspiring with time.
I drive to Sint-Margriete-Houtem, where another horrific battle took place, pass a street named after the 22nd Line Regiment, drive by Weerde, and then past Elewijt—which he saw burning after it was shelled—from Boortmeerbeek to Kampenhout, and on to Winksele, the places where he marched, bivouacked, fought, dug, slept, and ran for his life: all sunk in the same oblivion. O peace, banal, beloved, we salute thee. A grocery store, a bakery, an empty parking space, a small supermarket, an obnoxiously trendy boutique pharmacy, a rusty traffic sign, an eccentric plastic newspaper kiosk, a concrete road like a ribbon of emptiness on a wintry afternoon. Nobody outside; now and then, a speeding car. On my car radio, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments: dramatic, drifting music that perfectly complements the nameless suburbia drifting past. It’s two p.m., two thirty, I can’t help lingering to soak up this absolute nothingness, the nothingness called the contemporary that surrounds me like a sheltering cocoon. I return from my trip empty-handed; even a handful of the cold, polluted sand from a forest path did not seem like a form of contact with what once happened there. Speed bumps, traffic signs, an impatient idiot who flashes his headlights at me because I’m driving the speed limit and zooms past me the first chance he gets, in such a rush that he almost flies off the road at the roundabout. Flanders, 2012. Nothingness. Absolute nothingness. Safe and meaningless, thank God for that, I suppose. I take a few more photos and have another look on Google when I get home—it all seems so much more interesting there than in reality.
—
Every Friday in the summer months, he and his wife went to Bruges, and we, his daughter’s family, often went with him to the Basilica of
the Holy Blood, which he called the Blood Chapel, to see him carry the flambeau. Countless summer Friday afternoons, I watched him step out of the pew during the service, take up the huge candle on its golden stand, and stride solemnly toward the altar, following the officiating priest through the praying or singing crowd. The relic, which the congregation was expected to kiss during the service, filled me with a mix of revulsion and fascination. A priest sat on a small platform, holding out ahead of him the glass tube that contained the centuries-old, discolored brown piece of cloth, stiff-armed, as if he were a little disgusted himself. As I recall, the ornamental case was edged with delicate gold trim. Every time one person kneeled and kissed it devoutly, the priest would laconically whisk a white handkerchief over the prints left by the sinful lips, so that the next worshipper could make an equally humble and sensual contribution to this age-old tradition without danger of bacterial infection from somebody else’s act of faith. Outside, Bruges was buzzing with ordinary, profane life. The flags rustled, the rowboats cleaved the muddy water of the canals, the English translation of Georges Rodenbach’s famous novella Bruges-la-Morte was being read aloud on Rozenhoedkaai, and Rilke’s poem “Quai du Rosaire” was being recited in French. Inside, we were part of the secret ritual that had begun in the twelfth century, when Thierry of Alsace brought this bloodied scrap of cloth from the Holy Land, now part of the most explosive region of the planet (these days he would probably face a lawsuit for illegal export of national heritage, although such matters are complex in present-day Jerusalem). On Ascension Day we witnessed the Procession of the Blood, and I couldn’t help thinking of that discolored brown blood-soaked rag I kissed once a week. The older I got, the more I was troubled by thoughts of the perishability of fabric, of bloodied rags, of relics. The less likely it seemed to me that this cloth had ever been soaked in the Blood of the Savior, the more astonished I was by the singular magic of those expressive rituals, the songs, the gestures, the centuries of dedication without any hard evidence—in short, the pure transcendent power of other people’s faith. Outside was the world, and that made religion—inside, in that incense-scented gloom—alluring and profound. Abstinence always makes the world seem attractive and deep—the swans drifted over the Minnewater, the last of the Beguines were dying out as the autumn crocuses bloomed in the damp canalside courtyards that August. Japanese tourists scurried through the city without understanding the first thing about it. The Holy Blood became forever intertwined with stopping for a lavish sundae, strolling across the main square, drinking old-fashioned fizzy drinks at some sidewalk café, where I once stared at a pair of lovers—an older man with a piercing gaze, talking to a young blond woman with windblown curls and goose bumps on her arms, two people in love, lost in each other’s eyes, who, because they were such an odd couple and yet were so clearly sharing something intimate, filled me with a sense of the inexplicable. Religion, tourism, my first hint of the erotic, summer and high wisps of cloud, flapping banners and the smell of old churches, the slack, slow lapping of water against the prows of white boats.
War and Turpentine Page 26
