War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  Tervaete is hardly even a hamlet. All my GPS can find is Tervaetestraat in the municipality of Diksmuide. If you drive there by way of the tiny village of Stuivekenskerke, you pass a stately country house with an archway, a broad drive, and a handsome courtyard, an oasis of calm and genteel seclusion. There is now a hotel there, called Kasteelhoeve (“Castle-Farm”) Viconia; in 1914, the property was known as Vicogne Farm. I walk down the paths lined with immaculate hedgerows and learn that the Germans briefly occupied the farm during the war and planned to set up headquarters there. The farm could have played a pivotal role in their plans to cross the blood-soaked loop in the Yser, just a few hundred yards away. It was blasted to rubble by the Belgian troops on October 24, 1914, shortly after the bridge over the Yser and the church of Stuivekenskerke received the same treatment. The obliteration of those three strategic points brought the German advance to a halt. Since my grandfather’s memories of the Battle of the Yser date from between October 17 and 24, 1914, he must have been involved in this phase of the battle, and the farmhouse he mentions may have been Vicogne Farmstead. In the battle for this farm, the enemy troops included a soldier named Adolf Schicklgruber, later known as Hitler.

  The road to the river is deserted. As soon as you reach the bank of the Yser, you can see the Tervaete bridge, which formed the boundary between two worlds: Occupied Europe and Allied Europe. There is now an information board, which informs me that “Tervaete” is related to vate, a word for “mud flat,” “a ford in the Yser Valley.”

  How exposed everything is here, how flat and open, with no place to hide…All you could do was burrow, like rats and moles, it was your only chance: a refuge from the endless open sky. The horizon lies at about three-eighths earth and five-eighths air, the golden ratio, the ideal of landscape painters and aesthetes. Deep below the vast sky are poplars, pastures, mud flats, salt marshes, creeks, and then, straight ahead of me, the deadly S-curve in the river. A tranquil, treacherous landscape.

  Just past the bridge, with the regular, delicate clucking of a few moorhens in the background, I find a small memorial. I take a picture of the inscription, so that I can type it up later:

  DEDICATED TO THE FALLEN SOLDIERS

  OF THE

  2ND BATTALION

  1ST GRENADIERS

  WHO PERISHED ON 22 OCTOBER 1914

  IN THE CHARGE ORDERED

  BY MAJOR S.A.

  COUNT HENDRIK D’OULTREMONT.

  Gilt letters and a cardboard cross with a plastic rose—each time I try to set it upright, it promptly blows over in the gentle breeze. Bulls bellow in a stall across the river. In the reeds by the water, I hear a sound I have not heard for decades: the crazed rejoicing of a reed warbler. And even a cuckoo, clearly audible on the other side of the river—another bird you don’t hear much anymore. An old superstition claims it will be a good year if you hear the cuckoo calling in the spring.

  This landscape, so fresh and unspoiled. Stillness. Peace.

  These are the soft, distant sounds that he must have heard too, that all the soldiers waiting in mortal fear must have heard: an idyll in hell.

  The mute landscape, indifferent nature, the charm, the oblivion of the earth, oblivion in the calm rush of the current that once divided life from death. All the birds of this misty spring morning are like the souls of strange beings, calling out something I can’t understand. Mystery of time and space. What a strange planet we’ve grown used to living on.

  A small ship called the Doesburg chugs past, and the high-spirited Dutch passengers wave merrily at the Belgian holding a notebook and staring into the river. Perhaps to them I am one of the charming locals. A few seagulls have come inland in search of food; something like a sleeve is bobbing in the brown water, just under the surface. A delivery van speeds down the narrow road; a dog starts up in the distance; young ash trees line the canal; the cows in the tall grass seem immersed in the green of a painting from Constable’s day. With the strange loop in the river, you can’t always tell the other side from this one; it must have been a treacherous business, trying to figure out what was happening where. You might see the point of a helmet and think it was sticking out of the grass on your side, when in fact the German hadn’t crossed the river. Or the opposite: death could creep up unawares and seize you by the throat, roaring something in Goethe’s language. Blossoming hawthorns, morning glories, buttercups, cattails, tansies, but no poppies anywhere, no splotches of red in the greenery. In Flanders Fields no poppies blow. Nature has shown a little restraint after all, with help from the farmers’ chemical sprays.

  Nothing rustles as peacefully as poplars by the water on a cool still day in May. Cormorants, coots, and grebes drift over the water with their quirky crests. A heron on a post does not fly away as I approach, but stands and waits and seems to be pondering its own inability to ponder.

  The Tervaete bridge has a bell, which jingles when the bridge opens to let boats through. You can hear the bell from hundreds of yards away; you can hear the rooster on the farm down the road. Everything is audible, clear, and quiet. What a strange, paradisiacal trap this must have been, just before it was bombed to rubble and mud—the union of life and death in the sounds of the earth. I imagine alien beings landing on our planet at this exact moment and hearing these sounds for the first time. To brains never previously exposed to the song of the reed warbler, it must seem hallucinatory, magical, a source of ecstasy. What a miracle; how could you invent a thing like that?

  I follow the deserted road along the river for a few hundred yards. There is only one place in this landscape to take cover: behind the dike on the other side. From the Stuivekenskerke side, where the dike is flat, this formed a major threat, because the goddamned Germans could hide behind it. You had to fire shells over it in a high arc, and then shoot blindly and hope for a good Flemish harvest. The Belgians returned fire from unpredictable places, moving quickly behind the earth wall and through the dense maze of trenches. It must have caused the Germans no end of frustration, which they took out on sentries whose attention had strayed.

  The road along the dike now seems to be little more than a favorite route for amateur cyclists. With clockwork regularity, I see them shoot by, huffing and puffing, with their plastic goggles on and their eyes on the asphalt, always wearing the uniform of the modern age: a stylish racing outfit, pricey athletic shoes, a flashy helmet, and an expensive bicycle like a whistling bird, clenched between thighs of steel. The athlete as the great-grandson of the soldier in his cumbersome fatigues. Same age, different planet.

  As I walk on, I can see approximately where my grandfather must have risked his life storming the dike. Once I have passed the loop, I start to understand how they could keep a floating platform hidden from the Germans for days, and how they could be provisioned from the other side without alerting the enemy to their presence. Literally everything comes down to that S-bend in the river. Battlefield logic, a game of chess with chance and death.

  Past the bend, there is a sign: “Anglers, show you care about our environment! Please use only the marked angling locations and do not trample the riverside plants.” Here, where not one leaf of one plant has been disturbed, the roots grow deep into the earth, which is rich and bountiful, thanks to the strange fertilizer called man, an environmentally friendly miracle substance that biodegrades easily into humus. To think that this remote, eerily silent place could become the setting for such horrors—it shows once again how any logic of war is utterly opposed to every natural fact, to ordinary time, to the usual course of things, which has no ultimate aim and retains very little of what human beings do.

  Another boat approaches, this one full of schoolchildren and their teachers; to my astonishment, it’s called the Star of the Yser. The children prattle cheerfully and wave at the figure on the bank—who even waves back. What a peaceful flatland. Just climb a tree and you could see the enemy trenches. One sole problem: there were no trees left, only pits and mounds.

  A flattened kestrel is
stuck to the asphalt, a cyclist whizzes over it, a few feathers drift into the air. Was it Armando who came up with the term “guilty landscape”? Or was it Claude Lanzmann, with those insidious forests in his film Shoah? In any case, this landscape could be a painting by Anselm Kiefer, a landscape with the invisible scars of a submerged catastrophe. On second thought, that’s not it, this is not Kiefer’s style at all. The brushwork is too delicate, too tender; I can see every flower, each blade of grass. It’s one of my grandfather’s romantic paintings, of course, strange that I didn’t think of it before, just the kind of thing you might expect from an old-fashioned, precise, partly color-blind painter—gaga for green, obviously, with those marvelous verdant hues everywhere you look and no red poppy splotches to throw him off.

  Past the spawning grounds for the perch, the common roach, the white bream, and the gudgeon (another convenient information sign, in green), I find—at the side of the road, as if placed here for my grandfather’s sake—a small shrine to the Virgin:

  O MORTAL FEET

  DO NOT PASS BY

  WITHOUT HAILING MARY

  THE MOTHER MOST HIGH

  As I am wondering how a foot could hail Mary, a tractor rumbles by, with those strange, insect-like protuberances used to poison the fields. No poppies anymore. It was all so long ago, a century ago; I am walking here with his DNA in my body, lonelier than alone and too late for it all. And again, the cuckoo, close now, as loud as in dreams, making me flinch. It flies over the bushes in the cool spring air, calling as it sometimes did in my childhood. It copies the cuckoo clock in the dim middle room, and my grandfather pulls up the brass weights and says to my mother something I can’t make out, something about time.

  —

  In his final years, there was one piece of music that moved him more than any other, transporting him to a far-off, imaginary place where we could not reach him until the final note had died away: the ballet music from Schubert’s Rosamunde. I don’t know exactly what he found so moving about this slightly saccharine babbling brook of a melody; I have no idea if he had particular memories of the music—if he had heard it at a concert he went to with someone, or if something had happened back in the 1950s just as it was pouring out of the brown radio relay box screwed to the wall. There were no detailed program guides in those days, so when Rosamunde came on the radio, it was usually a surprise. Something like a sob would run through him, he would clap his hands to his face, we would hear his labored panting, and then he would pull himself together, breathing slowly and deliberately, until—as wheezy as his father by this stage—he found a rhythm that reconciled his body to the shock of recognition he’d just experienced.

  It begins with sprightly ballet music like a fairy dance, followed by the darker inflections of the men’s response, culminating in a scrap of melody and then merging into the dancing rhythm again. But it was the Entr’acte No. 3, above all, that provoked his strange passion, an emotion that made the world around him fade away. In this andantino, melancholy mingles so naturally with a sheltered, secure feeling, casting such a veil of nostalgia and distant beauty over my childhood years, that whenever I see one of his many charcoal drawings of a female figure, cloaked in sfumato, fading from the yellowed paper under the dusty glass, I see him, seated in the middle of a landscape he drew himself, somewhere near an elusive German spring in an imaginary German forest. He has his fedora on, and I see that he is breathing heavily. But no, I hear nothing, nothing at all, until somewhere in the distance the first notes of that andantino sound, and images appear, images of a gray, silent time when secrets were a normal way of life, giving it shape, hitting it hard with the hidden softness of their unvoiced desire. The Ballet No. 2 seemed to calm him down again; this is the andantino in G major with which Rosamunde ends, a return to pastoral lightness after melancholy—his most fundamental mood. Maybe Schubert’s personality made him the perfect kindred spirit. His gloominess, his sublimated erotic yearnings, and his penchant for turning inward, a product of his tragic life, formed a constellation of traits that spoke to my grandfather—Schubert had remained poor and underappreciated all his life, and his creative development had suffered from the threat of conscription. He bore the first name of my grandfather’s father, who had also died young, and there was a blend of devil-may-care and deep feeling in his music, the grim courage to face life’s reversals combined with hypersensitivity, character traits that found expression in this innocent-sounding andantino. Too many Sundays to count, he heard these strains and everything around us fell silent. Or was it just a couple of times, which my memory has clumped together into a life?

  All my questions must go unanswered. But when I heard—on the very day I had taken the box with the photograph of Maria Emelia from my father’s silent house and looked that young woman in the eyes for the first time—when I heard, on that day of all days, during the drive home, the andantino from Rosamunde playing on the car radio, it gave me such a peculiar shock that I almost drove off the road. My heart started pounding so hard that the blood thumped in my temples, and when I parked by the roadside and opened the tin box again with trembling hands and held the photograph between my fingers, something rose up inside me, as if following the lead of my dead grandfather, who seemed to possess my body like a tender demon and draw me completely into his emotions, into the world that had always been closed to me, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t sit there with a lump in my throat, biting my lower lip, as the voice on the radio repeated the title of the barely seven-minute andantino and moved on to Paganini, a composer whose virtuoso antics I have always abhorred. In the portrait of Schubert painted by Wilhelm August Rieder in 1875 (almost fifty years after Schubert’s death, I might add, after a pastel made a half century earlier), the composer is shown with a quill in his right hand, his elbow resting on a musical score. Twenty-eight years old, he has a confident gleam in his eye, looks healthy and warmhearted, and wears a large black bow tie over a spotless white shirt. This was around the time that he was offered the position of court composer, but rejected it to preserve his freedom, and his pose shows the same assurance my grandfather tried to project in the somewhat unsuccessful self-portrait where he clutches his easel in his left hand.

  —

  Painting grew more and more difficult for him in his final years. He was afflicted with gout, stiff joints, and cramping hands, which allowed the brush to slip between his fingers, as well as glaucoma, which clouded his vision and forced him to resort to his sense of touch, sometimes spreading the paint into an impressionistic blob with his fingers, despite all his diatribes against the modern “daubers” and their finger-paintings—my grandfather, the minor master of devotion to painted detail, the man who had once reproduced every minuscule vein of the delicate white flower Saxifraga urbium, sometimes known as Painters’ Sorrow. His small, frugal paintings showed odd smudges where faces should have been; he painted naive little cars with bulging tyres on the road along the Scheldt outside his window, with the clumsiness of a child who has just begun to experiment with oil paint, a strange document of fingertips gone blind, fumbling and trembling as they slid across the canvas. Another time, he tried to paint a half-nude courtier, a blotchy copy after a reproduction of Titian that turned into a kind of degenerate Degas of a blurry ghost. But he could not see the painful irony in all these little tragedies. Rigid with back pain, he would shuffle step by tiny step over the staggered, colorful tiles of the kitchen floor. Seated in his rocking chair, he would hold the newspaper up against his face, as if he wanted to sniff the news right off it. He had less appetite than a small bird and often sang softly to himself. At his advanced age, he could no longer put on or remove his socks on his own, or cut his brittle toenails. Toward the end, he could no longer wash himself. His daughter received his permission, after lengthy prodding, to put him in a bathtub once a week and take care of his grooming. Sometimes he wanted to keep his old fedora on, because he felt a draft, always and everywhere, even on warm, windless days, as if cracks had op
ened up in life itself; a fragile, naked old codger in a black hat, in the bath, his daughter the only one who could see or feel the scars and indentations on his back.

  credit 9

  The doctor often had to be called out during the night, when shortness of breath threatened to asphyxiate my grandfather. Dr. Rombouts, an elderly physician with impressive eyebrows and a gray Beethoven coiffure, dabbled in sculpture in his spare time, and the two old gents would sit together in the gentle glow of an old-fashioned nightlight, talking softly about the anatomy of the ideal human form, the Vitruvian man, and the mathematical proportions of the Palladian arch. Just before the first light of dawn, the doctor would return home as he had arrived: in his spotless suit, his large tie knotted loosely and with verve. As he passed through the doorway, he would turn to the aged man, who was breathing gratefully now that the cortisone injection had kicked in, and say, “Now you be a good fellow, Sergeant-Major Martien.” And my grandfather would let out a kind of wheezy giggle and nod his head like a horse at a fence. By 7:30 a.m., he would be in his chair, waiting for his daughter to finish dressing him so that after his coffee and simple slice of bread and butter he could sit at his table, his pen clasped between his aging fingers, and write the things I would not read until decades later, or he would try, with shaking hands and profound dedication, to sketch the contours of a medieval face, and then say, looking up from his blotted page, “That Dürer really was a genius, don’t you think?”