While the Gods Were Sleeping (10 page)

From the doorways and open windows on mild days smoky kitchen smells still drifted out, not of potatoes or milk, but spicier, more piquant aromas. Spicy and piquant as the conversations that drifted out into the street with the smells—women’s voices, hand-clapping, everything was as full of life as it used to be, nylon summer jackets, and shopping bags that swayed above the pavement slabs next to bare ankles. In the pubs the men still hung around the bar, although less beer was served, and I remember a chubby chap coming waddling out of one of those pubs, with the most beatific smile on his coarse face that I had seen for ages, and opening his arms wide, looking up at the sun, and saying with a laugh, “Türkiye. Türkiye, madam. In Türkiye always so warm.”

“But Mrs Helena. I’m Moroccan,” she laughs in alarm, Rachida, and I reassure her: “I know, child, I know…”

When we walked past under the fortress-like walls of those factories, we could hear the machines out in the street. The hissing of valves letting off steam, sirens that marked an end or a beginning. The roar of engines. The tapping, the clanking, the universal rattling. But the town was so fragmented that scarcely a couple of bends farther on a sober gatehouse hid a different microcosm. Perhaps frenetic bustle prevailed there, but a lot quieter and more minuscule: the buzzing of God’s worker bees. How unreal to suddenly walk there under the treetops without a breath of wind, dripping in the lifting fog, and to hear deep snorting and grass being pulled out of firm ground, and jaws that chewed it all up and to see the shoulders
of cows’ bodies resting under a deciduous tree; ruminating, ruminating, with a touch of nirvana in their pupils—and then to hear the clocks in the houses around the meadow striking the hour.

Elsewhere too there was the sound of carillons. Despite iconoclastic furies and other disasters there were enough monasteries and abbeys along the waterways of our town to shake out sackfuls of bell-ringing over the roofs at set times. It was reminiscent of the ethereal aerial combat of songbirds at dawn, the daily dividing-up of the firmament. And it was quite possible that the bells above the churches and convents were also doing battle, not with each other, but with the shrill whistle of the locomotives or the wailing factory siren, a music that threatened to disrupt the precious circular melodies of the divine.

I could try out all my speculations quite freely on Edgard. I believe he took pleasure in listening to me, amused by my increasing breathlessness—unlike my mother. Whenever during the gatherings of her sewing group I gave myself over aloud to my reflections, she usually said firstly that she couldn’t make head or tail of the nonsense I was coming out with, which of course pleased me, and secondly that I wasn’t allowed to philosophize until I was better at embroidery. According to her it was the same thing. In both cases there was a beautiful pattern and I simply made a mess.

For my mother everything revolved around substance. While substance, Rachida my girl, get this clear, is the least interesting thing about a person, an impure ore like any other; and nothing astonished me so much as the industry of the blast furnaces
and the production lines for the assembly of the new man in the decades after the war.

Everything to do with what was holy was cyclical in those days. A symbolic representation of the unchanging quite simply has to bite its own tail if it is to evoke eternity. Even my brother and I unconsciously adjusted our pace when we walked through the narrow streets of that
béguinage
, arm in arm past the houses with the names of saints on their doors. In that closed universe even simple walking took on the character of worship.

The female inhabitants of this mysterious enclave rarely showed themselves even within the shelter of their walls. Yet there were places where high windows let in an abundance of light, and there you could sometimes see them at work, at first sight as still as the statues of the saints with which they seemed to surround themselves everywhere. With their heads in white linen wimples, so fine that they almost resembled pieces of
milk-white
mist, they bent over the pincushions on their laps, faces smoothed by deep concentration, and appeared to regard with detached amazement the work of their own hands, which, as still as the rest of their figures remained, juggled with bobbins of yarn, moved pins brightly and went on juggling.

Slowly their work gave birth to something best compared to what a spider would produce as a web, if it were suddenly seized by artistic pretensions: a gossamer-thin tissue that expressed, not only in every thread but most of all where those threads were absent, the essence of mysticism, and as such represented one of the greatest realizations of the artistic genius of humankind.

Nowhere, except perhaps in poetry and very occasionally in music, have I experienced a more intimate interweaving of something with nothing than in the lacework that there in the
béguinages
spilt from the ladies’ pincushions and descended in milk-white waterfalls to the woven baskets at their feet, flowed over the edge and fanned out across the floorboards, so that, in particular on days of very thick fog, those rooms, where only the gentle ticking of the bobbins could be heard, seemed to me nothing less than the secret maternity wards of our national mist.

Compared with this scholastic finesse of needle and thread, the sewing work of my mother and her friends represented little more than clumsy popular devotion, but more especially it seemed to me only logical that Belgium was not a country of embroidery or knitwear, but of lace. In a place where the art of lacking was practised so exuberantly and ubiquitously, something like Belgium was bound to be born sooner or later: a nation that was constantly playing on the fringes of its own emptiness, just as all of us, driven by our soul, our most intimate vacuum, have continually to knit ourselves together.

That was more or less the conclusion of our historians. They filled bulky volumes with explanations for the creation of our fatherland, wedged between north and south, east and west: a region whose specific feature was mainly the absence of specific features, where different spheres of influence operated as capriciously as the high- and low-pressure areas in their hopeless struggle in the sky above our heads. Those learned gentlemen usually came to the conclusion that if Belgium had not been invented, someone would have had to discover it.

“Helena, child, my little gazelle,” laughed my brother after a while. “Your mental gymnastics always make me thirsty. Shall we have a drink somewhere?”

We usually went to the cafés around one of the stations, never to the establishments which of course he only frequented when the night gave the streets a salutary anonymity. It did us good to feel our tiredness, the pain in our legs from the long walk, and we sank contentedly onto one of the terraces to be able to sit and absorb the life around the station square.

We liked the fragmentary nature of our home town, because we wanted to be fragmentary ourselves, free of the corsets into which the older generation wanted to force us, and I wonder why I should glue the pieces together here. In the museums, where Edgard and I sometimes sheltered from an unexpected cloudburst, the mouth or wing of a seraph on a shard of a stained-glass window from the Middle Ages evoked its figure more tangibly than if the angel had arisen full-length in front of us, high in the transept of the cathedral, where a stone or cannon shot had shattered it.

Why should it be different with people, or with the words that I see clinging together here with some disgust? It is as if I have never been able to shake off my mother’s admonition that I was hopeless at needlework. A firm tissue laces itself as if automatically to the pincushion of this page. I see my thoughts take the form of sentence constructions that accommodate an enervating abundance of furniture, curtaining and supporting cushions like the stuffed interiors in which I grew up. Even the voices of my father, my mother, my brother and myself start speaking again as we thought we should speak to
each other: with an eloquence that betrayed how closely we listened to ourselves.

Maintenir
was the key concept of our class. We didn’t have conversations in those days, cultured people maintained them. We didn’t give dinner parties, we maintained a table. We did not enjoy reading, we maintained our knowledge of literature. We didn’t have friendships, but formed affectionate attachments, maintained the best relations, strengthened connections; we maintained, we maintained and we told ourselves that this was in no way a duty, or a mission, or even a choice. It was quite simply a fact that with the deaf and dumb inexorability of gravity worked equally on all things at once.

And from all that
maintenir
the whole edifice of civilization rose up almost as a matter of course, as natural and unconsidered as the wax that honey bees secrete, and of which their honeycombs are made. Although without the diligence of our own class, we thought, this fine-meshed labyrinth of wrought iron and plate glass, all that architectural know-how, would naturally never have got off the ground. We regarded ourselves without any hesitation as the salutary middle way. Without us the world could only go under in the anarchistic tumult of the mass below us, or evaporate in the drawl of nobility and old money in the stratosphere above—we kept things in balance.

“So God, if I’ve got it straight,” laughed my brother, when I talked to him about my personal theodicy over a glass of mint water, “has actually created the ideal thermostat in the bourgeois.”

I laughed heartily with him.

However butterfly-light and refined that vanished world considered itself, it had a weight. It weighed on me and on everyone. Everywhere, whether we want to or not, we always carry a whole globe on our shoulders. And, just as in my childhood I regularly visited our basement kitchen to find a less artificial dimension of life in Emilie, our maid, not least in her rough dialect, which, I felt, sounded “more real” than our language, so almost everyone longed, secretly or not, for a form of release from the sophisticated lacework that we at the same time “maintained”.

There was a hidden thirst for some form or other of ritual laxative: a collective cleansing that would greatly benefit the metabolism of our civilization. We obviously had to remind ourselves at regular intervals that, all things considered, we remained apes with clothes on, who in a circus of our own making jumped through hoops and threatened to forget that we were basically swinging on creepers and eating bananas. That would greatly improve our health, though admittedly we lost sight of the fact that a person, besides being too sick, can sometimes turn out healthier than is good for him.

Be that as it may, I liked the evening hours, especially in early summer, when the blue turning to purple moved in from east to west behind the increasingly elongated sunset, and in the cafés and restaurants around the station the lights were turned on, while it was not yet completely dark outside—the moment when the pigeons go to sleep and the bats wake up. The city became an area of transition, a twilight zone on the unstable boundary between day and night. The bow was a little less taut, the yoke lifted from the shoulders.

“And soon the minister will put his nightcap on,” I said to my brother as we both sipped our supposedly well-earned refreshment. “And the market-stall lady, and the bishop and the greengrocer. And then the curtain will fall, and the rest is silence.”

My brother was silent, but under his nose his milky moustache went to and fro in a lively way on his top lip, an expression of my father’s which he must have noticed and which he may have been deliberately imitating. He liked to make an impression of worldly wisdom on me. When I said something, I saw him thinking and running through a large number of possible answers in his head—for or against, usually against.

He brought his glass to his lips, drank a mouthful and looked out over the square in front of the station, where the last street trader was loading his wares onto a handcart, and sniggered without looking at me. “Dear girl, dear girl,” he chortled. “Either your eyes are full of shit, or you don’t get out enough. When it gets dark is when the show starts.”

He knew more parts of town, more layers and hemispheres than I and perhaps my mother. He was probably less familiar with the establishments that seldom advertised themselves as such on the outside, but behind their closed fronts hid a world of abundant plush, subdued red lighting, intimate boudoirs and painted girls, than with the meat market, which at once more and less visibly took place around the kiosk in the town park, in the vicinity of certain urinals or in certain cafés where an unwritten code of behaviour, facial expressions and phrases gave a double meaning to everything said or not said.

Later, after the war, he would point it out to me as we walked arm in arm through the park. What to look out for. What the
signals were. Ways of hanging about. All too furtive glances. Where you sat down, on what bench and how.

I don’t know if he told me everything. Perhaps he sometimes pulled my leg, so that in almost every gesture, every detail of clothing I suspected a fascinating iconography of male lust.

“The advantage of the war,” he said to me one day, “is that there’s always enough meat to be had nowadays.” We had sat down on the bench near one of the smaller ponds in the park. He still found it difficult to walk. For the time being long walks were out.

The “meat” in question had gathered on the other side of the pond, on the shadier benches under the trees. It was getting on for evening, a twilit evening in late spring, hesitating between winter and summer. Soon it would become too cool to sit still.

Much battered flesh. Armless or legless. On crutches or, like my brother, forced to use a walking stick, whether or not permanently. Some of them looked very young. With the only hand he had left, a chap who I think was my age, in his early twenties, a flare of straw-blond hair in the blue shadow, was rolling tobacco in a cigarette paper that he pressed tight with a lively interplay of his fingers, brought to his mouth, moistened, pressed again and—it was almost like juggling—rolled over his thigh for a moment with his palm, and put to his lips again. Then, again with fingers like a busy spider, he dug a match out of a box in his coat pocket. Only when he lifted his leg and scraped the match over the sole of his shoe to light it, did I see from the folds in his other trouser leg that he had a wooden leg. He brought the flame to his cigarette, sucked it into the tobacco, and leant back while he simultaneously exhaled a first cloud of smoke and extinguished the match by waving his fingers.