The Season of Migration

by Nellie Hermann

  Oh, but when I think of that day, it is as if I am remembering something that has passed and will not come again. Is it because of all that has happened since then, because a man cannot be as he was, because the future must not be as visible as it was that day—it is against the natural way—or is it because you are gone? Theo, who is not dead, and yet whom I feel I no longer know. Theo! I need you now; I need that brother grinning under that rained-on hat, not the brother who told me how I had changed, not the brother who shook his head at me. I don’t know how to reach you, boy; it has never been so hard. Without you I am more than alone.

  Theo, my boy, my brother, my friend! I am not who I was? But who now are you?

  Dear Theo,

  I want to tell you about my first sermons in the Borinage. For my very first religious meeting, I spoke about the man born blind. I did my best.

  We met on Friday night in the large shed set aside for this purpose, about halfway down the hill toward the labyrinth of cottages. It was a nice-enough room, with windows in the back and a view of the hills beyond, though I was never comfortable speaking in such a way, standing before the miners with my back to the wall, speaking at them as if I were a man more learned than they. I know this is why the clergymen thought me unsuitable for the life of the cloth, but I tell you that if it were up to me, we would all sit together, like Quakers or savages, no differences between men and women, perhaps even cross-legged on the floor.

  I was nervous before speaking, for I wanted to start on the right note, showing the miners something of who I was, and I couldn’t help but hope I might be different from the evangelists who had come before me. I paced the room for nearly two hours, waiting for people to arrive. Just after sundown, groups of miners started to trickle in, huddled into their coats and hats, for it was cold that night, women with their scarves draped around their heads and carrying babies underneath their shawls. Children hid behind their parents, their faces flushed red, as if their mothers had given their cheeks an extra scrubbing before herding them out into the cold. I greeted most of the villagers at the door, introduced myself and shook their hands, my heart pounding in my throat, swells of feeling—joy and relief to be there, at long last, greeting the people, and they nodded at me before sliding onto the benches that lined the room. Decrucq and his wife and boys arrived, and he gave me a wink and a clap on the shoulder that was nearly enough to knock me down. Then I stood before them, with only one lamp to light the room and the Bible that I held in my hand.

  I knew my voice was quiet, but I seemed incapable of making it louder, and it was all I could do to raise my eyes from the book every once in a while as I spoke.

  I told them the story of the man born blind. “As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of Him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam.’ So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.”

  “The man born blind,” I told the miners, my voice rising despite myself, “is a stand-in for all of us, for until we open our eyes to see Jesus we are all spiritually blind, and what we see before us is as nothing.” I raised my head to look at the congregation, and in the dim light the miners were but shadows shuffling in the near dark. Nonetheless, I could feel their attention, and I knew at least some of them were listening. “Jesus,” I continued, “uses the mud of the ground and His own saliva to perform the miracle and heal the blind man, and in so doing He is creating sight, rather than restoring it; it is not unlike how God created Adam from the dust of the earth. So when we believe in Jesus, we are allowing an act of creation to take place in us, and we should steel ourselves for the change; for after we begin to see, just as in the story, our closest associates may no longer recognize us. It is frightening, and it is an act of trust and obedience, but the payoff is great, for with the gift of sight comes the ability to see the kingdom of God here on earth, and to understand that all of our suffering is part of a larger plan.”

  It was not lost on me, Theo, the irony of the choice of this story, though it didn’t occur to me until I was already speaking. To tell a story about blindness to a room full of people who spend their lives in darkness! Perhaps it was foolish; perhaps it was the perfect story to tell. I couldn’t decide, but as I spoke I became increasingly distracted by the sense that something was wrong. The room was too big! The room was too bright! The room was too cold, too warm! I was looking out at a group of blind people, people who squinted when the light grew too bright, and telling them about a miracle of sight. These people, who had no experience with miracles, and would no doubt never be witness to one.

  After I finished the sermon and bid the miners good night, thanking them for coming, many of them came to say hello to me, all of them calling me “Monsieur Vincent,” a detail that brought me pleasure, for it made me feel I belonged, and that my sermon had not been too terrible. Many of them invited me to their homes, and told me of family members who were sick and might like to visit with me. I assured all of them that I would come to see them, and that I hoped I could be of some service. I loved them instantly. They had a characteristic simplicity and good nature that reminded me of the Brabant people we grew up with, and their requests and invitations seemed to me expressions of their characters, welcoming and accepting, rather than of some aspect of need.

  * * *

  Each week for those first few months I held a Bible class. I don’t like the word class, for I certainly never thought of myself as a teacher—in fact, I felt I more often learned than taught—but I suppose that is what it should be called. These meetings were held most often in the home of Else and Hubert Aerts, for they were faithful Christians and Else a bit of a gossip. She liked to feel in control, as though there was nothing that went unnoticed in her village and everything important that happened took place under her nose. Occasionally I doubted, at first, the veracity of her faith, wondering if she didn’t just want to host us because she liked to witness the occasional poor soul who came to her home seeking guidance from God; every time I felt this, however, she would make a gesture of such generosity to the strangers in her meager cottage that I had to make a concerted effort to repent for my uncharitable thoughts. Her husband, Hubert, worked the night shift at the mine, and so most often he was asleep upstairs when we were there, his snores audible whenever we paused for reflection.

  The main room in the Aertses’ hut was dark, as are the rooms in most of the miners’ homes. The hut was modestly decorated, with a round wooden table and a set of chairs, a long cupboard at the back of the room by the large iron kitchen stove, and two worn armchairs set before the fireplace. The Aertses’ three children had long since married and moved into cottages of their own, so their modest home seemed excessively spacious, which was the reason Else always gave when she was thanked for hosting. There were two oil lamps in opposite corners, and despite the coffee Else served to us, the room still always smelled of sour mud. The miners are used to this smell and do not notice it; it is a smell that pervades every dwelling, a smell of earth and bodies and the absence of sun. I am trying to think of a smell you will know that I can compare to it—do you remember the smell in the basement of the parsonage in Zundert where we played some days when it was too cold to go outside? The miners’ huts smell something like that, if that old basement had been overlaid by a thick, fresh layer of mud.

  I felt it was most appropriate to speak of God to the miners in rooms like that, dark and musty despite their warmth, for these were not people who were accustomed to sunlight. It suited me much better than the larger room I gave my sermons in. I found God more accessible in t
he gloom of the miners’ cottages, and I felt that the miners did, too. In the Borinage, God does not exist in the twittering of birds, in the bloom of a flower. God is in the gloom, in the must, and in the space that we created for Him when we begin to listen, to each other, and for Him.

  One evening, perhaps on our fourth gathering, there were only four people there, aside from Else, and Hubert snoring upstairs. One of them was Georges, who always came. He was an old man, over seventy I think, and spent his life down in the mine, beginning work at the age of seven. He said he came to God in his last year in the pit, when he knew he was to begin life aboveground. In the underground world the only questions were practical ones—when to timber the face to keep the wall from collapsing, when the flame that served as the firedamp warning was burning too intensely, when a piece of coal was sufficiently pried loose. There were no questions down there of where the next piece of bread would come from; there were no questions even of when it was time to stop for lunch, for the men just waited for the bell. It was only when he knew the time was approaching when he’d have to return to the surface that the questions began to come back, he said, and in the questions, there was God. Imagine that, Theo! Only when one comes out of Hell do thoughts turn to Heaven! I wonder what father would think of this, but it sure makes sense to me.

  Also with us was a robust woman, Clara Gilmart, and her husband Jan, who had come off his shift at the mine just a few hours before and had gone to the pub on his way home, though he told Clara that very morning that he would not. Clara punished him by bringing him to see me, and I could smell the drink from across the table. Jan could barely hold up his head from the combination of fatigue and drink, but his wife, when she saw it droop, lifted it from his chin with no gentle tap of the underside of her hand. “Pastor Vincent,” she said to me when she came in the room, dragging her husband by the collar of his coat, “How am I supposed to feed the family if this man drinks away his children’s food?”

  The final person in the room was a young woman of seventeen called Angeline Dubois. She sat quietly, with her hands clasped in her lap and her head turned down, yet I felt immediately as if I knew her from somewhere, though I couldn’t place where. Very occasionally she would let her eyes lift to watch me, but whenever I turned toward her she looked down again. There was something so sweet and picturesque about her, so demure and civilized, a quality not easily found in the Borinage, and I was curious about her immediately. It was only after I had opened my book and begun to speak that I realized why she was familiar: Theo, she was the girl whom I had seen on my very first day, watching me from edge of the crowd of miners! She was the one I had wondered about since then, that strange vision of interest and boldness, that genderless creature all in black! It was she, I was sure of it, and the shock of it nearly left me speechless. I had to clear my throat and pretend I had something caught in there in order to cover my surprise.

  Else told me after the others had left that Angeline had been, until a few months before, engaged to a man who died in an explosion in the Agrappe mine. This man had been a Christian, and though Angeline had resisted religion before his death, she was attending now in an attempt to continue on the way he would have wanted her to. She worked in the mine, hauling the tubs of coal away from the miners and through the narrow passageways to where horses and boys pulled them to the shaft; it was expected that after she was married she would be able to stop working in order to raise their children. Now that her man was dead, Else said, she would no doubt have to work at the mine indefinitely, for the burden on her family of another mouth to feed was now without an end in sight.

  Once I had sufficiently recovered, I pointed the group toward Acts 16:9, and we read together: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” The inspiration to read this passage had come to me the night before, while I was reading my Bible by candlelight in my bed at the Denises’, Alard asleep in the bed across from me. I saw my suitcase at the end of my bed, next to my worn knapsack, and I wondered about the suitcase that the man from Macedonia would carry; then I looked over at Alard and saw him, even as he lay in his bed in his very own home, as a traveler, too. What would his suitcase look like? That bed was his suitcase—he was lying inside of it; he was traveling right now through the world of dreams. Every one of us were travelers, that was it: you, Theo, with your valise and dapper suit, me with my torn socks, and all these miners in their dark huts with their barrels of water for washing.

  “The man from Macedonia was a man just like all of us,” I said to the group, “a laborer, a man who suffered and who had a family to feed and who was tired from bending his back all day long in his field. He came to Paul looking for knowledge of God, looking for the Gospel, looking with desperation for God’s word to feed him and make him full.” I pointed out that the man from Macedonia had used the word us when he asked for help, for the help he wanted was not just for himself but for all of his brethren, for all of the people like him whose lives were hard, and that included the people in the room with me at that moment; that included all of the people in the village, in the Borinage, in the world. I thought of you then; I thought of Mother and Father and Anna and Lies, of my old friend Harry Gladwell, whose sister had recently died; we all needed help, all of us in so many ways. Can you agree with me that much, brother?

  But who was listening? Georges was awake, but his eyes were unfocused and fixed on a spot somewhere behind me, a look I had seen many times on faces in church; Clara was focused on Jan, whose head was drooping and who had started to ardently shake off her attempts to keep him awake; Else was watching me, but she was sipping her coffee so lovingly that I was sure my words were merely drifting through her head, unaccompanied by any thought. Angeline, however, lifted her head at that moment and caught my eye. She seemed surprised to find me looking at her, and dropped her head quickly, but it was enough to convince me that I should continue on.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “was the great man of sorrows who knew our troubles, for He worked in a humble carpenter’s shop for thirty years in order to fulfill God’s will. He was called the son of a carpenter, though He was in fact the Son of God, and this distinction is all we need to understand how we can learn from Him.” I paused, looking around the table to see if I could catch any eyes, and taking the opportunity to sip my coffee. I hated the sound of my voice, as I always did in these situations; I fought against the sense that my words did no justice to the notions I was trying to stir, and the voices in my head that wanted to silence me. “God wills,” I continued with effort, “that in imitation of Christ man should live humbly and not reach for the sky, but should adapt himself to the earth below, learning from the Gospel to be meek and simple of heart. We have no splendor or glamour in our lives, just like the Macedonian man had none, but we all have immortal souls, and this is all it takes to belong in the kingdom of God.”

  I encouraged them to speak, to ask questions, though I felt unsure I would give the right answer. The truth is, I felt nervous and full of doubt every time I gave a class like that, as I admit I also did in every sermon I gave, mostly in the moments where my voice trailed away and I was left with a group of silent people who looked back at me with eyes darkened from years underground. What were they trained to see in the dark? These were not average people, understand; they could see in the dark, as I could not. Theo, do you suppose that eyes that live in the dark can see souls, or the shape of souls? What did they see when they looked at me sitting there—could they see the shape of my soul?

  Angeline, finally, after a few minutes of silence, raised her head to ask what had happened to the Macedonian man. It was a question I hadn’t anticipated, but perhaps should have, for it was practical, as these people most often are. “What happened to him?” she asked, her voice very quiet at first. “The Macedonian man? Did he get help?”

  It was the first time she had asked a question. I wanted to have an answer,
for I understood the need to find out how a story ended, frequently having stayed up late into the night to finish a book. But the Bible is often not this kind of a book. “Well,” I told her, “we know that Paul and the other disciples did indeed go to Macedonia, and we can only assume that the man found in their teachings the word of God that he was seeking. Most important, however, was not the outcome of the search, but the search itself.” In many ways, I said, searching was the most important aspect of finding. Reaching for the Gospel may be the most important part of the Gospel there is.

  As I said this, meeting her questioning eyes across the table, I felt the deep tendrils of doubt sweep through me, as seaweed moves from a strong current at the bottom of the sea.

  October 22

  Cuesmes, the Borinage

  Dear Theo,

  I want to tell you more about Alard, whose room I shared at the Denis house, and who remains my greatest friend in mining country. He is nine years old. He is the first boy I shared a room with since I shared one with you. You saw a drawing of him when you were here, but I’m not sure you will remember that, or if my sketch did him any justice.

  Alard is thin and quiet, with sunken eyes and a head of dark and tousled hair. He is always listening, standing in the back of rooms or in doorways, and he is never afraid to ask questions when he doesn’t understand. The other day, we walked in the nearby woods and looked at birds’ nests in the trees, even came across one nestled in the ground. “What happens to the birds in the winter?” he asked me, genuinely concerned. I explained that the birds often left their nests for the winter, moving off to warmer climates, and would come back again when it was safe for them. He seemed satisfied with that, but he asked again, “What happens to their nests?” I told him they would remain, but he needed my assurance that we would come back to the woods in the winter to find them there.