It is not unthinkable that old Joshuah Obadiah wrote about the catastrophe. But written documents could not survive in this unpredictable climate as they did in Fustat. Nor can it be ruled out that he later recovered the synagogue’s ritual objects from their hiding place and they were all lost some other time, centuries later. It’s equally possible he no longer knew quite where he’d buried the objects that hellish night; he’d had to run for his life when the bear came out of the cave. Yet it is as good as unthinkable that any trace of them will ever be found.
I decide to walk down to the overgrown slope outside the village, which some call the old Jewish cemetery. Under the ground ivy, arum lilies and cleavers lie some old stones. I strain to turn a couple of them over. Can I see any ancient scratches or faded marks? As much as I wish I could, no clues remain here. If there are any old Jewish graves on this site, then after ten centuries they must be at least a metre and a half below the ever-shifting humus of this slope. The cemetery itself lies buried. The only vague hint is the straight line of a little wall and three stone steps, sunk in the withered leaves.
Selah. The end of the psalm.
But that was not the end.
There’s a small place in the ruins above the village where, summer after summer, I have known exceptional happiness. It’s a field of dry grass; flakes of bark from dead cherry branches swirl down in the hot summer wind like black snow, some landing in my hair and on the pages of my book. I’ve spent whole afternoons there, unsuspecting, watching the shifting light on the plateau, hearing the caw of the crows echo from the rocky slope above me, and listening to the sublime music of Sébastien de Brossard: ‘Ego sum pastor bonus’ – God comforting the dying man and assuring him that He is the good shepherd.
The field is high on the south side of the medieval village, where the Jewish quarter must once have been, just below and to one side of the Petit Portalet. To reach it you climb a few age-old steps, stones shifted by centuries of persistent weeds. Next to those steps, you can see a partly buried Romanesque cellar arch. The house that stood here must have been large and stately; the foundations are thick and strong. A deep well was dug from the upper level, accessible only from above the cellar; it was this that made me realise what an unusual structure it must have been. Looking at the outline of the foundations, it’s obvious the building was larger than a private home.
A sheet of corrugated metal covers the dark well. Through a narrow opening, I can see a pool of darkness in the depths, cool water gleaming. I pull away the metal sheet. To my surprise, I find beneath it not only the well, but also a primitive seat in the old stone. The well has the vague shape of a figure of eight; down below I see a space that must have been enlarged at some stage, but even before then could certainly contain about five hundred litres of water. That’s when I realise this is a Jewish bath, a mikveh for the cleansing ritual. I sit down to collect my racing thoughts. Could this really be … ? A mikveh of this kind, on an upper floor, could only have been part of a synagogue, or perhaps the rabbi’s house. There are even a few steps leading up to a still higher aisle, perhaps the women’s gallery. In other words, the spot where I’ve whiled away so many happy days reading over the years is the very place where Joshuah Obadiah and David Todros bent over their Torah scrolls. It is where Hamoutal descended into the ritual bath. It is where the gruesome massacre took place. In an instant, this calm, grassy field has become a space full of voices screaming, wailing, cursing, with murder and manslaughter, desperation and blood. Here I stand, literally in the place of their past. Shema Yisrael. Here, the day after the pogrom, Hamoutal fell to her knees in despair beside her husband’s mutilated body. In her last days of madness and misery, it is the place where she spent whole nights hiding and crying like an animal.
I cannot stop staring at my discovery, in disbelief and wonderment.
I touch the edge of the old well. I touch Hamoutal.
It’s drizzling over the dusky valley. The snails creep across the old stones of the upper streets, immersed in their dreamlike lovemaking. Watching out where I put my sprain-prone feet, I head downhill to Andy Cosyn’s house, where I find him happily sipping his aperitif. I tell him what I’ve found; physical evidence of the Jewish community in the days of the southern crusades, the final piece of evidence that Norman Golb needed to demonstrate his Monieux thesis. Andy goes straight to his archives and finds the old maps from before the Napoleonic period. We search for the plot of land and see that the building with the mikveh was the only one in the village with a rear exit. The synagogue’s back gate. It opened onto a narrow street, now long gone, which made a half-circle around that side of the village and ended at the southern Portail Meunier. Our eyes meet; this was the route the men must have used when they fled with the synagogue’s ritual objects.
3
The villages in the south are emptying out as the social fabric of the old communities wears thin. A whole generation is disappearing, and hardly any young people have replaced them. Sometimes a couple of newly-weds move to Monieux, but after the first year, the solitude of the harsh landscape begins to weigh on them, and they go in search of less desolate climes. Even the buxom old woman at the bakery counter has retired and moved a few villages away, along with her husband Jean Jacques, the baker whose laugh rang through the village from morning till night for decades, like the sound of a gigantic, quacking duck. Each Sunday we hear Alex, the white-haired plumber, grumbling about his ruined knees as he passes by on his way to the home of the good-natured Hélène, where the two of them will drink themselves into a pleasant fog. He dreams of his fatherland, Croatia, but won’t leave the village now. Renée and Henri Chanu, a childless couple, were the noblest souls I’ve ever met; he spent his days listening to opera, and when he felt like making himself useful, he repaired the broken finger of St Rochus in the village church with a delicate twig or fixed up some other old statue of a saint with infinite patience. Their romantic house with the large rose bushes has been vacant for years now; the cracks in the front grow wider every year. Inside, a centuries-old baker’s oven is slowly crumbling away; I’m told the baker drew his water from the cellars under my house. The ageing Irish rocker down by the village square lives with his wife in a shop like a doll’s house, set up for selling her colourful paintings. His hair, once a long, ferocious mane, has now turned a pale grey. This spring he discovered the field of grass by the synagogue and innocently turned over the soil and planted potatoes. He draws water from the old mikveh, which must have been deepened in later times. I tell him what I’ve discovered; he looks a bit sceptical.
The village’s cheeky charmer, the former postmaster, is now well into his eighties and brags of his latest conquest – a girl barely sixty, what do you think of that? He smiles his wide, irresistible smile and eats his modest supper alone with half a bottle of rosé. Next to his house, the junk piles up, a museum of discarded bric-a-brac. The mayor and restaurateur, bestowing an affable smile on the guests who converse under the plane trees of his welcoming outdoor restaurant, has gone grey as well and walks with a slight stoop.
In the village square stands the girlish figure of La Nesque, as serene as ever, holding a jug in her graceful hand from which she symbolically pours the river’s water into a basin where small bream swim. She is made of bronze, yet sensual, with a youthful, erotic glow in her light dress, which curves around her attractive form and clings to her shapely thighs – the statue was commissioned by Mayor Léon Doux in 1905. During the Second World War, it was hidden in a cave because the Germans were taking all the bronze they could find for their cannons. As soon as the war was over, La Nesque was triumphantly restored to her pedestal. This lovely river goddess could be a girl like Hamoutal. I take a long look at her and then at the head of the griffon at her feet, spouting water into the basin. Generations of women came here to fill buckets for laundry and house cleaning. I turn back. The church clock strikes four. Life here seems to roll along timelessly.
Soon more than three-quart
ers of the world population will live in megacities and agglomerations. This old, poetic way of life will expire without a sound. Maybe we’re living through the end of an age – the age of the villages, which began in days beyond remembering and is now coming to an end.
The colossal lump of stone is still suspended over the rooftops, a millennium after it split from the rocky slope. It is barely held up by the crumbling remains of the medieval ramparts. By this stage, no one seems to believe it will ever fall. But when one day after a steep climb I lean in for a closer look, I can just make out that it’s shifting, in silence, millimetre by millimetre. Or in any case, I can see the difference from when I first came here, twenty-two years ago. Maybe it’s waiting patiently until the last villagers have left.
I’ve heard the mistral will die, like an ancient beast. Climate change will snuff it out slowly, year by year, as the glacier on top of Mont Blanc, which chills the west wind and sends it blowing back, trickles away. The ice-blue skies that have arched overhead since time out of mind, for which the Romans praised Provincia, may some day be a thing of the past. But the process is so gradual that I can grow old in melancholy anticipation.
Again I walk to the ruined village of Flaoussiers, a few kilometres away. There is something mysterious about this small valley, which has always appealed to me. You’re sheltered from the wind, except for the few days each season when it blows straight through the cleft. Then you practically cling to the ground to escape the stinging cold. Now it’s deserted and peaceful here. A pair of falcons circle over the sparse fields of grass. Somewhere a chained dog barks; the few lavender fields just above the valley look drab after the harvest. Mont Ventoux looms, large and bare, in the distance. Everything is desolate and ancient. From somewhere nearby comes the bleating of a lost lamb.
I leave the small valley, heading for the ravines of the Nesque, and sit down in the spot where Hamoutal’s bones lay whitening in the sun. You can feel the emptiness of history here. A kind of peace washes over me, so vast and silent that I too lie down in that spot by the edge of the cliff.
They still exist here, those dreamy afternoons when the slow, white clouds resemble huge, dormant Greek gods drifting through Elysium, promising us a glimpse of paradise. More and more I too want to be buried here in this hard ground when my time comes. As I imagine it, that will give me a few years’ grace – I can lie back and listen to time slipping past, to the murmuring of the cypresses, the peal of the church bells, the cry of the owl, and the chirping of the bee-eaters which glide, ecstatic, over my grave, with that untouchable blue high above my unseeing eyes.
The world spins, but if you hold your breath for a moment, it stands still.
Monieux, September 1994–July 2016
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Dr Ben Outhwaite, head of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library, and to Dr Melonie Schmierer-Lee, Research Associate in the Genizah Research Unit, who supplied me with digital versions of the relevant manuscripts, as well as to the management of the library and the Manuscript Room.
I am grateful to Professor Norman Golb and his son Dr Raphael Golb, who not only arranged for a translation of document T-S 12.532 but also provided a great deal of additional support in documenting the Monieux thesis.
I would like to thank Steve Krief, secretary to the editorial board of L’Arche in Paris, for tracking down Norman Golb’s elusive articles from that magazine.
Thanks to the Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany for the enlightening conversation about present-day Cairo, which took place in a very special spot in the city.
Thanks to Dr Raoul Bauer for the support and information and for reading my narrative with an eye to historical accuracy; he was the first to draw my attention to the Muño thesis.
Many thanks also to Andy Cosyn and Kurt Stegmaier, residents of Monieux, who first alerted me to the existence of Norman Golb’s scholarly article. I would also like to thank Andy for giving me support and information, for our conversations and rambles among the rocks and shrubbery, for his pointers, and for his book Le trésor de Monieux. His description of the pogrom in Monieux set my imagination to work. He was the first I told about the discovery of the mikveh.
Thanks to Dr Ruth Kinet for the good conversation in Berlin and for her help in mustering arguments for the Monieux thesis, and to Reuven Namdar in New York for his critical reading of manuscript T-S 16.100.
Thanks to Esther Voet for her corrections regarding Jewish customs and practices and to Leonard Ornstein of the VPRO public broadcasting company, who put me in touch with her.
Thanks to my editors, Suzanne Holtzer and Mariska Kleinhoonte van Os, for their faith in this book and intensive support; thanks also to my former editor Wil Hansen for his advice.
Thanks to Jan Vanriet for his comments and fine suggestions.
Above all, my thanks are due to my wife Sigrid, who went through the whole diaspora with me and helped me, with love and devotion, to see this story through to a good end – a story about the place where we still experience our happiest moments.
Last, I would like to thank the ageing Jewish street vendor in Old Cairo who told me about the synagogue, gave me a faded leaflet, listened to my story with tears in his eyes and kept calling out to me as I walked away – since it was Saturday – Shabbat shalom.
STEFAN HERTMANS is the prize-winning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, and at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. His first novel to be translated into English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times and Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.
DAVID McKAY is a translator of Dutch literature living in The Hague. He received the 2017 Vondel Prize for his translation of Hertmans’ War and Turpentine.
PRAISE FOR WAR AND TURPENTINE
‘Staggering richness of language; brutal, deep, haunting. Mesmerising from page one.’ Simon Schama
‘A book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history … In McKay’s lyrical translation, every detail has the heightened luminosity of poetry … War and Turpentine has all the markings of a future classic.’ Guardian
‘Masterpiece, an accolade often casually bestowed, really does describe this magnificent book … Page after page holds you rapt with admiration for both Hertmans’ writing and his hero.’ Sunday Times
‘Hertmans writes with an eloquence reminiscent of W. G. Sebald … a masterly book about memory, art, love and war.’ New York Times
‘A skilful and lyrical reconstruction of a life transformed by war, love and art … A mesmerising portrait of an artist as a young man, a significant contribution to First World War literature and a brilliant evocation of a vanished world.’ Herald (Scotland)
‘Hertmans recreates the lives and losses of the deceased with enormous empathy and skill … It is in many ways an old-fashioned book, and pleasingly so … It is sympathetic remembrance, shaped into lasting elegy.’ Australian
‘A gorgeous novel … War and Turpentine is an enthralling portrait of life, war and family.’ Canberra Weekly
‘Hertmans has written a thought-provoking novel … He comes at the subject in ways that acknowledge the difficulties of remembering.’ New Zealand Listener
‘A sophisticated and almost painterly rendering of words and images … dense with sensitive observation of the entanglement in life of peace and war, beauty and ugliness, simplicity and complexity.’ Otago Daily Times
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Originally published in the Netherlands under the title De bekeerlinge by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2016
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