—
It must have been one St. Nicholas Day morning in the late 1950s when I found, among the mandarin oranges, spice biscuits, and chocolate figurines on the heaped table, an ingenious little airplane, which the generous saint had obviously brought for me that night. It was a kind of biplane made of thin strips of wood, with its body painted blue, its wings red, and its tail yellow and black. The wheels were cleverly made from two old coins, large iron twenty-five-cent pieces with holes in the middle. A thin rod ran through those holes, attaching the wheels to the body; the rod also ran through a somewhat larger hole in the body, so that the wheels could turn. Two small rivets held the rod in place. The airplane had been sawn with a jigsaw and then filed down, and it was only my unshakable faith in the white-bearded saint that, for many years, kept me from figuring out that my grandfather had made it by hand for me. So I never thanked him for it, despite all the loving care with which he had constructed it. I do not know what became of the airplane, but I assume it was lost somewhere in the dusty pots of soil in the greenhouse, with one wheel missing or one wing broken, tangled up in a ball of twine with a loose staple sticking out like a broken paw; I don’t know. Decades later, with the vividness common to some dreams of childhood, the image of the airplane flashed before my eyes, and I could read letters and numbers on it, which were still clear in my mind when I awoke: DK100710. I wrote them down, believing he must have wanted to make the airplane “realistic” by painting a code name on it. It seemed like a picturesque thought. Later that day, I recalled a few other old memories of lost childhood toys and then forgot about the whole thing.
But as I was reading his memoirs and checking a few facts, I stumbled across the date of Daniel Kinet’s death. Kinet, the first pilot whose airplane crashed on the grounds of Port Arthur, not far from where my grandfather had seen the nude girl rise from a pool. Kinet crashed on July 10, 1910, at approximately 10 a.m. I remembered my grandfather’s failed attempt to visit the clinic where Kinet would die a few days later and reflected on what a hero the man had been to him. D.K., 10-07-10…The code on the little airplane turned out to have a secret but genuine meaning; it was his memorial to the hero of Belgian aviation. How many other secrets had I missed? The more I read, the more I had to learn to tolerate the awareness of my ignorance.
In the same way, other clues appeared in my memory, because his memoirs blew away the dust, and I started to understand more and more signs. The first cigarette I ever smoked was a yellowish, foul-smelling oval tube, stolen from a flat, silver cigarette box I found in the narrow drawer of my grandfather’s notorious dressing table. I was fifteen and dying to finally smoke my first cigarette. I sat down with my trophy behind some bushes at the far end of the garden and smoked that strange, strong cigarette halfway down. I was immediately overcome with intense nausea, and a few minutes later I threw up. In his memoirs, I read about the silver box of cigarettes given to him by the mysterious Mrs. Lamb in Windermere, and I realized that he had held onto them all those years, like a fetish, without touching them—to the best of my knowledge, he never smoked. My little sister liked to wrap herself in a long scarf in those days—doubtless the scarf he had received as a gift from the same woman when he had to return to the front, a scarf that had stretched to mythical proportions in his stories, growing a little longer with each telling. Meanwhile, he let the actual scarf fall apart in an old drawer. That too says something about how he dealt with a past that would not let him go. Clues like these turn out to have been present throughout my childhood, invisible to me, and only by drawing links between my memories and what I read could I begin work on a modest form of restitution, inadequate reparations for my unforgivable innocence in those days.
—
And suddenly, this image, this scene, as if it were unfolding before my eyes right now: it is a day in spring, April I think, the light is white and low, it must be late morning. He stands on the iron lid of the cistern and explains to me what it really means to be a soldier, telling me I have a lot to learn. As I stand there picking my nose and eating it, I am filled with admiration, and because of the way I blurt out, “Can you still stand on your head?” he turns his steady gaze on me, sighs, sets down his fedora on the bench by the little wall, and ta-da, a miracle occurs: in one swift bound, a seventy-year-old man vaults into a handstand. His smock falls, partly covering his eyes, but he does not give up. Look, I hear his muffled voice say, and he raises a hand to wave at me, now supporting himself on just one hand and his nearly bald head. I see the legs of his trousers slowly sinking and his white shins poking into the air like beanpoles. His feet are turned slightly outward, away from each other. Before I can recover from my surprise, he is standing up straight in front of me again, wiping the dust from his hands, putting his hat back on his head, and saying, a little red-faced, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” I nod in silent agreement with the words of my childhood hero and then slink shyly away. He tells me he’s off to trim the bushes and makes his exit, whistling, into the garden.
—
All those years, something kept me from paying the mandatory visit to the endless cemeteries of white gravestones around Ypres and Diksmuide and the painstakingly re-created trenches that offer historically minded visitors the most “realistic” experience possible. What’s the point in standing next to the bridge at Tervaete, I thought, or in Stuivekenskerke, or somewhere in the fields where so many unexploded shells lie rusting in the earth, when I know that nothing can bring me closer to his experiences than the old notebooks on my desk? In the 1980s, when I was living with a girl from that part of Flanders, I would sometimes go for walks there on Sundays, visiting the Käthe Kollwitz Monument, the welcoming interior of Talbot House, Tyne Cot Cemetery, the endless burial grounds, all the things you have to have seen to join the conversation about the First World War and Flanders Fields. I read horrifying books on the Battle of the Somme and the massacre of endless ranks of charging British boys, and I wondered what anyone could add to that kind of horror today.
But it was not until a few years ago, when I visited the Citadel of Dinant with my son, that for half an hour my grandfather’s world seemed frighteningly close by. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the reconstructed trenches in the war museum, the dim lighting, the naive but effective simulation of soldiers’ lives in the war years—because of that bleak setting, where I had to grope my uncertain way down the slanting paths, I felt a sudden connection to my grandfather’s fumbling steps in the dark. I touched the hardened sandbags, saw the scale of the battlefield, the rifles, the clumsy dummies caught like rats in a trap. It had that musty smell peculiar to historical museums. The light from the bare bulbs shone pitilessly over the motionless figures, casting shadows like gloomy stains over the artificial trenches. It was as if I were making my way back to the world of the dead, against the current, and the Eurydice of memory stood up and took me by the hand. As the finely strung philosopher with the hammer once memorably wrote in The Antichrist, I can no longer look at paintings without seeing gestures, because I understand that what has touched my own life is not a book of innocence, but a reading saturated with historical guilt.
—
Now that the end of this story is creeping up on me, I must proceed to the final paintings: to the captivating portrait of Gabrielle, and to the secret nude of her sister, which I did not discover until the last moment. I am approaching them quietly and carefully, like a man in an imaginary museum, cautiously drawing closer with his hands behind his back, removing his glasses from his nearsighted nose, leaning in toward the painting, and smiling at a detail only he can see. There is silence in the gallery of memories; a woman passes behind him, fanning herself with the folder in her hand, indifferent to the stranger with the sheepish smile on his face, staring distractedly, his nose almost touching that old canvas in the crumbling gilt frame.
The portrait of Gabrielle, based on the small black-and-white photograph on her memorial print, has an almost classical quality an
d rivals some of the finest women’s portraits in the realist tradition. She has draped her black mantilla over her gray hair and is wearing her gray cardigan and a white lace blouse fastened with her ivory cameo. She gazes tranquilly at the viewer, utterly at peace with herself. Her eyes tell of halcyon days, days when she sat on the bench in the garden and watched the everyday things around her, which made her happy. The predominant tone of the painting is a lustrous gold, as if a kind of evening light were pouring over her face.
This nearly idealized picture expresses his love and devotion to her, and thus embodies catharsis and the final attainment of harmony. That was no mean feat, considering the manner of her death. A year before she died, she had a stroke. Her recovery was difficult: she woke up with mild dementia and had to learn how to walk and talk and eat all over again. He was caring and devoted, washing, dressing, and nursing her every day—she was forced to put aside her prudery, now that it was too late for any carnal intimacy between them. Guiding her through tumble after tumble, he helped her learn to stand on her feet again, to take her first steps once more, as if she were his belated second child. Bit by bit, although her capacity to think and speak was obviously impaired, she became a fairly happy, calm, and quiet old lady, drowsing away and somehow making it clear that everything was fine, that she was fine, the way things were. Then one morning, sitting in the chair by the window where she often sat, she had her second stroke. Her eyes flew wide open, the veins in her throat bulged menacingly, her neck and face turned purple, she grasped at her throat, gurgling, and fell sideways out of her chair. What frightened me most was the panic that struck my mother and grandfather. Rigid with horror, I looked on until my mother pushed me out the door, saying it was time to go to school.
That image has stayed with me all my life, and was the last I saw of her; when I returned home that night she had been readmitted to the hospital, where she died a few days later. Her transcendent portrait still gazes at me, untroubled, every time I visit the house. It gives the lie to my tragic memory and yet is so perfectly rendered, so true to life, that it seems even now as if she were on the verge of speaking.
This is, without a doubt, the only great original painting my grandfather ever produced, as if his entire life had been a preparation for that cathartic portrait. At the same time, I could not help wondering whether, as he painted Gabrielle, he had ever thought about how her younger sister Maria Emelia would have looked at that age, if she had lived. The secret image of Maria Emelia that he carried inside himself could never age, while Gabrielle grew older, as if in her sister’s place, almost like the portrait of that old dandy Dorian Gray. So I have come to see my grandmother’s portrait as being like one of those old-fashioned pictures from my childhood that change as you move them, which you could keep turning back and forth as long as your heart desired: two sisters, the elder still shining, apocryphally, like a light in the eyes of the younger, painted after both of them had died.
—
I cannot imagine that, after all this time, I will find the portrait of the other sister, carefully hidden. But a week later, I drive back to the house on the riverbank to ask my aged father about all sorts of circumstances and particulars. He has dug out a cardboard box from a half-concealed crawlspace behind a partition in the attic, where my nursery once had been. The key is missing; we carefully open the box with a thin screwdriver. It contains dozens of photographs: pictures of my grandfather’s parents, for example, which give me my first glimpse of Franciscus and Céline as a young couple, posing stiffly next to a small wooden pillar and a backdrop of a mountainous landscape sometime around the turn of the century; passport photographs of my grandfather at the age of thirty; and his “fire card” for veterans who came under enemy fire in the Great War. I learn that starting in 1938, two years after his early retirement from the Belgian Railways, this card entitled him to a modest supplemental disability pension of a few hundred old Belgian francs (and I later discover his name in the endless compendia of fire card holders, in vol. 37–38, p. 14; two lines farther down was a Charles Martien of Gentbrugge, but I haven’t found out whether he was any relation). Digging deeper into the cardboard box, my father and I also find a folder of postcards that my grandfather sent to his mother from Windermere in the Lake District; innumerable photos of relatives; a few memorial cards for soldiers; a beautiful wooden case containing a pair of brass compasses and a silk ribbon bookmark finely embroidered with a cross, a crown, and the epigram Bear the cross, and wear the crown; a photograph of a pretty English nurse from Liverpool, signed, Yours sincerely, Maud Forrester; photographs from military school (a flat cap and blue coat with gleaming buttons); and a card providing admission to all Belgian museums, issued by the “General Department of Fine Arts and Letters.” I also find the fragments of his father’s shattered watch; next to them is a bullet with the date 1916 carved into it clumsily with a pocketknife.
But above all, again and again, I find photographs of a young woman who could not be anyone but Maria Emelia. My suspicions are confirmed when I find a photograph of her and Gabrielle together, almost like twins and yet so different in attitude and personality, each with one hand on the shoulders of their mother, who sits regally in the center. Then I find about a dozen blurry copies of the half with Maria Emelia, most of them enlarged to a size slightly smaller than a postcard (about 5 × 3 inches). And finally, in a closed envelope at the very bottom of the box, there is a crisp, beautiful frontal portrait photograph that leaves no room for doubt: this is Maria Emelia’s face. For the first time, I take in her serene features, the countenance that holds the key to my grandfather’s secret passion, the young woman who could have been my grandmother, who could have passed down some part of herself to me. I take in her straight nose, her pale yet sensitive eyes, the dark hair in a severe bun, the finely pointed chin, the long neck over the opening in her simple white blouse. After a moment, I realize that this woman could never have been my grandmother; if my grandfather had married the woman of his dreams, I simply would not exist. She represents the impossibility of a different me.
The various sizes and dimensions of the many prints clearly show that they were not all made at the same time, so these decisions must not have been made casually. To obtain copies of a photo for which he had no negative, he would have had to go to the “photographic portraitist” in the square by the Sacred Heart parish church, half an hour’s walk away. Then he would have needed to wait a week for the new negative and the prints and to spend another hour going there and back. Why so many prints of the same photograph? And where is the negative? Did he always dream of painting her portrait but lack the courage? How many hundreds of times did these grayish photos pass through his hands? Why was the largest, best-quality portrait in a sealed envelope? I do not know.
Recalling the vague suspicion that came to me as I was standing in front of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London, I ask my father if he has any idea where the copy of that painting is now. I seem to recollect seeing it somewhere in the attic as a child. We ascend the attic staircase, now rickety with age, and somewhere in a dust-covered corner we find twenty unframed paintings, which must have been stacked there for decades. The next-to-last one is the copy of the Rokeby Venus. We remove it from the stack, blow off the dust, and there she lies, nude and in quiet pride, in all her down-to-earth elegance: Velázquez’s Venus.
And I’ll be damned—the blood rushes to my head….The face that regards us in the mirror is not that of Velázquez’s model but, unmistakably, the face I have just recently learned to recognize from the grayish photo in the envelope, the face with the pale, luminous eyes, the face of Maria Emelia. That explains the difference in hair color that struck me in London….With a dizzying rush, I realize that this copy, however close the resemblance may be, was never a copy, but a concealed act of love; mustering all his skill as a copyist, my grandfather very discreetly altered the details so that he could briefly imagine his dead love in the nude—his greatest
sin, the object of his deepest desire, which gnawed at his damaged soul his whole life long. He did not accomplish this by painting her body, which he had never seen, but by transforming the face in the reflection into hers—a face that the mirror isolates from the body. And it was this double figure that lay before us, nude and vibrant on a dusty old canvas: Velázquez’s Venus with the face of the idealized Maria Emelia. In other words, what appeared to be a mere imitation concealed the original of his passion, and the charade of painting thus became the allegory of the hidden love he could never forget. For some people, no life is long enough to recover from the shock of love, not even if they live to be nearly a hundred.
Then I realize why this painting was stored in the attic for decades; the sight of it must have been unbearable to the pious Gabrielle. Who knows—perhaps this portrait of her sister as a nude Venus, this blasphemous betrayal of conjugal love, was the actual reason for her sexual denial. I will never know. After I return home, I see that the photograph in the envelope shows vague traces of a grid, drawn in faint pencil and later rubbed out.
—
One morning in the unseasonably cool May of 2012, I decided to go ahead and visit the Tervaete Loop, more to ease my conscience than in any real expectation of discovering what I had already learned long before from my grandfather’s memoirs.
I have always been fond of the silty smell, like the memory of the vanished sea, that fills the polder landscape on some misty days—earth as flat as water, as silent and unfathomable as a sunken sea. Brackish water in the streams, silt in the air, the heavy odor of land and livestock, the deeply comforting simplicity of soil, the consolation of that self-sufficient rural life. In the midst of a landscape like this one, tens of thousands of Flemish and German, French and British lads lay in the mud, which sucked and swallowed, dried and crumbled, pulverized and cracked, and slaked its thirst in the sudden showers until it was wet and chilly and sour-smelling again—the polders, on certain days in May or in September, with lapwings darting through the air above the fields, the tart smell of poplars, the pigsties, the horizon all around. It cast a spell over the senses.
War and Turpentine Page 28
