While the Gods Were Sleeping (14 page)

He was to follow on at the end of July to holiday with us, until from September onward the town gradually awakened from its summer sleep. In this we were following the habit of the well-to-do. Everyone, by which I mean those who populated my world, fled the town in summer and sought accommodation in the countryside. The country, which for the rest of the year I won’t say we saw as backward, but certainly as archaic, underwent a transformation in our heads as the summer months approached and became a place where life was still uncomplicated. The air was pure, the milk fresh, time twirled on its own axis.

I too was not wholly free of that enchantment. I was already longing for the imperial months of July and August. In my imagination a year took the form of a wheel or a clock face, and if you picture the twelve months of the year as the hours on that clock face, then there were two moments in the year
when time in my experience moved slower: the dark months in the depths of winter, and the majestically stationary days in high summer. Every hour had its own character for me in those days, its own intensity of light, constantly changing depths of shadow and colour patterns, and no summer was ever more generous with contrasts than the summer of 1914.

On the platform my mother and Tatante had embraced again at length. This time real kisses were exchanged, since my mother had already taken her hat off in order shortly to be able to enter, without too much manoeuvring, the compartment reserved for us.

If I could go back, if the gods were to allow me to
re-experience
something of that day, I would content myself, and not out of nostalgia but purely for my amusement, with just the sounds of that morning—the slamming of the doors of the carriages, the porters who shouted to each other in our broad local dialect as they unloaded the luggage from the handcart and passed it to the men in the luggage car, the hissing of the locomotive which was already under steam, and now and then blew clouds of white mist from its wheels over the platform, and in the background the ever-present heartbeat of the living town, the music of which at that time did not yet consist of the roar of engines, but of the flamenco-like rhythms of horses’ hooves on cobbles.

My mother had already boarded the train. Tatante put her hands on my shoulders and gave me three kisses. Edgard, who the whole time had been nonchalantly standing, reading the papers he had quickly bought, got on behind my back. He now
thought himself too old, almost eighteen, still to let himself be cuddled like a schoolboy.

“See you in September,” said Tatante. “Enjoy. What a summer.” It was a quarter past ten.

The stationmaster gave the signal for all passengers to board. The last doors were slammed shut. The driver sounded the steam whistle and with a slight judder the train started moving.

Tatante stayed on the platform, waving. I found my way to the aisle, because I knew that as soon as we were leaving the station my mother would let down the sunblind in our compartment, and I wanted to look out, feel the town sliding off me and experience the sudden transition from built-up areas to open country.

The haymaking season had begun. Between the fences the meadows lay sweltering in all gradations of green: dark and shiny where the grass had not yet been touched by the scythe, fading to yellow and white where the mown stalks lay drying in the sun. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, farm labourers and girls wearing caps or shawls against the heat were turning corn, putting it into stooks, or filling the hay wagons, which as their load piled up looked more and more like Chinese galleons. It had to be done quickly. Although it was Sunday morning, there was thunder in the air. The dew must evaporate from the stalks before the rain came.

I won’t deny that the sight delighted me, but the countryside has always been more to me than a charming set, although that day it was doing its level best to look like a set, complete with the wings of wooded banks and distant fields sliding slowly past the windows. When I was still a child my mother’s older brother had
shown me, during the evening walks he went on with me around our summer house, that everything that surrounded me there existed in the first place for its usefulness, and the beauty that I worshipped in them was rather a by-product of use, a nice extra, yes, but unintentional. No tree or bush, but it would be uprooted sooner or later to provide wood for beams or tools, or twigs for weaving the multiplicity of baskets in which eggs, vegetables, fruit and poultry were taken to market. Even the hedges that divided up the landscape into pleasant rooms served first and foremost to keep pests off the fields and to protect the crops from the heaviest buffeting of the sea breeze, not to please me or my father, who in the countryside sought mainly the proof of the accuracy of the paintings he liked—which naturally pandered to his tastes. The canvases of young painters, on the other hand, who in the years just before the war began increasingly to knead their peasants and fishwives in paint, who made the paint into a dark clay in which they modelled figures, he called crude and rough, as I gaped at them open-mouthed. For me they precisely showed the soul of the land, the impersonal clay of which we are all made. Breathlessly I observed the work of time on those canvases. Over the years I saw their areas of colour crumble away as slowly as a landscape, thunderclouds become even more thundery and the ploughing or contemplating figures weather under those skies into animate lumps of matter.

Of course I was jealous, and I still am. Jealous of the painters, of their vocabulary of colour. Jealous that I can’t grind language fine in a mortar and make it fluid or thick as I see fit by mixing it with oil, or create a new colour by adding some powder from one word to some powder from another word. Jealous, too, because there is no language with which you can
first apply a base, which continues to glow though the tissue of colour that you apply on top. Jealous because I would like a language that carries no meaning, but above all intensity, a meaning that transcends meaning, and which you must not so much read as survey, with the literacy of the eye, the erudition of the retina. I would not house those words and stories in a notebook, but in a kind of album: a sketchbook in which as you turn the pages you come across a miniature, then a genre piece, pages full of studies; fantasies in grisaille, marine skies in watercolour, so ethereal that the texture of the paper contributes—and then again sheets full of shadow, rooms at night, darkened rooms on the edge of abstraction, where a doorknob pierces the darkness with a pinhead of light, as realistic as the glitter of the watch chain that struck me in the darkness of one of the compartments, when I turned round in the aisle after my mother had sighed, “Helena, come and sit with us. You’ll look so much you’ll go cross-eyed.”

If she had been able to read the preceding lines, she would undoubtedly have taken off in annoyance the small pair of reading glasses she needed in her later years and grasped them impatiently in her fist as she said to me in pique: “Do cut a few Gordian knots, and put some full stops here and there. A sentence isn’t a sausage.”

The rocking of the carriage and the music of the wheels on the tracks had put everyone in a sleepy trance, that mixture of waiting and expectation, impermanence and tempered impatience that goes with travel.

I sat down. My mother was reading the book she took with her every year, some
Guide pittoresque des chemins de fer
, containing
all the sights we passed en route. Obviously she didn’t mind not being able to see any of it, behind the lowered sunscreen.

My brother had dozed off. I took the papers off his lap without waking him.

“Is there anything in them?” asked my mother.

I shook my head. “Not much. Just love scandals.”

“Oh, well…” She giggled and shrugged her shoulders. “If there’s anything worthwhile, read it out to me.”

There wasn’t much. The boredom of the summer seeped through the columns. Adverts for boarding houses on the coast. The calendar of brass-band concerts in the park and the names of artistes of the umpteenth class who would be performing at the casino, with medleys and popular operettas. A short announcement that His Majesty had left for Switzerland for a few days. A letter in which a boastful gentleman, who was organizing a sports festival at the seaside, praised the
soul-strengthening
effect of “gymnastic clubs” on what he called “our young generations”, which immediately prepared them for the burden of working life and the discipline of the barracks. “In particular,” I pronounced the words with some sarcasm, because they sounded so official, “in particular the moral aspect of gymnastics must be stressed, since anyone who puts steel in his muscles will almost automatically be proof against the temptation of late-night bars and drinking dens, where so many young men can have only unhealthy ideas, caused”—I cleared my throat—“by a siren call of immoral and anti-government principles…”

“Bravo!” concurred my mother.

“Where is that festival?” asked my brother, sitting up languidly and rubbing his eyes.

“Ostend…”

“God, then we’re going entirely the wrong way again…”

It became hot. Behind the sunscreen the noon light blazed and the dry air in our compartment smelt more and more strongly of the woodwork and the velvet of the seats. My mother had sunk back a little and had closed her eyes. I rested my head against the side of the carriage, so that I could see the landscape gliding past between the sunblind and the window. Sometimes the train slowed and came to a halt at a main station, to take on fuel and water. Then there was a swarm of children’s heads thronging beneath the window, blond quiffs, pigtails, fingers tapping the bottom of the window glass—until the stationmaster chased away the young devils simply with the severity of his uniform.

Sunday in the country. Peasants in their Easter best, waiting on the platform under the lean-to. White starched shirts, black suits, caps. Behind the station usually a square, dazzling in the noonday sun, a small garden, crowded cafés, gleaming roofs and, invariably rising above them, a spire. During the week you could have heard the shuffle and hollow ring of clogs on the paving stones, certainly early in the morning, when the farmers’ wives went off to sell their wares at the markets, and you would also have seen the young men going to work in town. If they had wanted to, they could easily have travelled almost right through the country in a day, and nevertheless be back in their own beds the same evening. The railways in my fatherland, which had branch lines going even to the most remote hamlets, guaranteed everyone optimum mobility, with the paradoxical aim of keeping everyone as far as possible in
their place. That’s how it seemed that Sunday. Everything had its place, everything its time.

I looked at my mother, dozing on the seat, the index finger of her right hand between the pages of the book in her lap. In her later years she would become the kind of expanding matron who to her last breath squeezed her shape into the old harness. At the last, when she was ill, hollow-eyed and grey because of the cancer eating away her insides, it was as if she had no bones any more, but was only kept upright by the fencing of her underwear, from which her body, whenever I undid those hooks and buttons, seeped out almost like mush.

“Is she asleep?” asked my brother.

“I think so…”

He got up and carefully pulled open the door of our compartment.

“Full bladder,” he whispered. “Got to take young Jim for a walk.”

“I heard you,” growled my mother, without opening her eyes, but her eyebrows expressed enough disapproval.

Only late in the afternoon, when we were eating something in the station buffet of the place where we were waiting for a connection, did we notice that the commotion in the square might be about more than Sunday exuberance. On and around the terraces of the cafés people were conversing animatedly.

“I’ll go and see what’s going on,” said my brother, getting up from our table.

“Probably much ado about nothing,” said my mother soothingly.

He was gone quite a while.

“It seems the Crown Prince has been murdered,” he said when he came back.

“Ours?” my mother responded in disbelief.

“The Austrian one. In Serbia. He and his wife. Some lunatic shot them down.”

He sat down again, folded his napkin in his lap and took a bite of his roll. “There’ll be another storm in the east.”

“There are always storms,” said my mother light-heartedly. “
Quand même
, it remains tragic. Poor souls. No one deserves that.”

I did my best to find it tragic, but I couldn’t manage to retrieve the human being from the few photographs and prints from the paper. They showed a tall fellow with fairly puffy cheeks, a full moustache and a clearly delineated paunch around the navel. I thought he was a dopey-looking sort, certainly in dress uniform, with a helmet on his head crowned by a dead chicken. He had according to the press no mistresses, or other habits that required discretion, or the accompanying loose-tongued behaviour.

“
Enfin
, we’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow,” concluded my mother, and I sensed in her words an undertone of eagerness that she usually showed when she read out the society section from the dailies, as if she were regularly invited to tea at every royal court. She called herself a full-blooded republican. “But if you’ve got kings anyway,” she was fond of saying, with her predilection for circular arguments, “you’ve got them.”

In her eyes our own queen, whom she sometimes sneeringly called that Wittelsbach field mouse, did not behave regally enough at all, but my father would then usually add: “They’re
all odd birds in that aviary. People don’t grow up normally in a palace.” Only the Austrian Crown Prince, whom he had once seen on the promenade at Blankenberge, did he find a perfectly ordinary chap. “Absolutely no airs and graces. He greeted me as naturally as anyone of my own class.”

I tried to imagine them, the archduke and his wife, just arrived in death’s realm, side by side, each in an open coffin, hands folded, eyes shut, the horror of the fatal moment perhaps congealed in their flesh that had grown cold, but my brother disturbed my daydreaming.