The Season of Migration

by Nellie Hermann

  He is a special boy, thoughtful for his age. He impressed me from the first day as a boy destined to grow to be just like his father, prosperous and smart, with his hands ever kneading fresh quantities of delicious dough. In my first few weeks in the Denis house, I was often up late studying my Bible, reading a book, or sketching an image of the miners that would not leave my mind. Alard, who knew how to read, sat up in his bed and read his Bible, too, though most often when I looked over at him I saw his head drooping, the book propped on his knees and his chin to his chest. The sight always warmed me, for it was the vision of a boy who so dearly wanted to be a man, a human spirit trapped in time.

  There are boys who want to grow up faster and boys who don’t want to ever be men; in the Borinage, the boys don’t usually get the chance to learn the difference. I am grateful to Alard for reminding me of what it is to be a boy; he is a boy much like I was, struggling with adult questions long before it is required of him. Many nights before I moved from the Denis house, I turned Alard’s lamp down and coaxed his knees straight, taking the book from him and easing him back onto his pillow. Most nights Alard was too asleep even to mutter a response, but occasionally he whispered a good night that made a knot come into my throat. Theo, not since the two of us shared that bed in the room with the flag in the window have I felt that kind of fellowship with anyone.

  One day at the Denis house, I watched from an upstairs window as Alard and his brother Nathen played a game in the front yard. Nathen is four years older than Alard, and while I watched them I saw you and me. They were playing an imagination game, lining up rocks on the grass and moving them around, taking branches from a nearby tree to place in the path of the stones. I couldn’t hear them from where I was, but felt as if I could.

  I was telling you to move the branch just so, and you were doing what you were told, but I could see on your face that you saw something I didn’t see. I told you to put four rocks on top of the branch—the front line of the advancing army—and you did so. I watched your face; what did you see?

  “They’re swimmers,” you said.

  “Swimmers?”

  “Swimmers. See? This is the front line; they’re about to jump off the dock and into the water. It’s a competition! They’re nervous.”

  And so they were. I saw them clearly then, the swimmers, wearing trunks and with their arms up, preparing to dive. “They’re swimmers!” I said.

  You grinned. You lifted the rocks up one by one and dropped them off the branch and onto the grass. I moved them through the water and you cheered for the one in blue, who beat the others by a healthy margin. You lined up the next group of swimmers for the next race. Your face was radiant, and the lake stretched out before us.

  Nathen laughed at something Alard said; I saw him throw back his head and fall to the grass, his mouth open with glee. The look on Alard’s face was pure surprise for a moment—he was amazed that he amused his brother enough for such a response—and then pure joy. They were two brothers, laughing.

  I thought of you while I watched the two boys, thought of you embarked on a career at Goupil’s selling art, just as I once did; you now treading the same floors and galleries, but getting commendations, raises, and promotions rather than scoldings, rebukes, and transfers from one place to another.

  Do you remember when Mother used to paint those canvases in the garden in the back of the parsonage, canvas after canvas of blooming flowers, never anything else? So many afternoons the group of us would sit back there with her, sitting or playing quietly lest we disturb her. And when her mood turned dark, as it inevitably did, and she set aside her painting and went inside, she closed her bedroom door behind her and we could all hear her cries through the wood. None of us knew what to do, not even Father, to comfort her, except for you. Knocking gently, you let yourself in and after a few minutes the crying always ceased. It was the same if you were ever upset—you were the one she thought worthy of comforting. She never once held me the way she did you.

  I punished you more than you deserved for this, for being my brother, for being younger and more at ease, for being the one with father’s name, rather than the name of Uncle Cent and of that baby in the cemetery out back. I made you sleep on the floor, when I was angry and feeling spiteful; I made you do things that I wouldn’t dare to do: sneak coins from Pa’s coat pockets, steal milk from farmers’ pails, or just-sheared wool from local barns. And you did these things for me, bringing me your loot like a dog bringing his master a bone, and I turned on you, showing the proof to our parents, standing before you like an accuser, like a man who knew righteousness. And though both of us were punished, you never turned on me as I did on you.

  I can easily conjure up the strange pleasure that came from punishing you: peering down at you from the bed while you slept on the floor, feeling a curious mixture of guilt and pride and rage.

  I repent for all of this, now. I think of it and I don’t understand it. I wish to tell you I am sorry for it, but then I think of what you said to me when you came to visit, that all I’ve been doing in the Borinage is “idling,” and I fear I would do it all over again.

  And do you remember this? One day when we were boys, maybe eleven and seven, we were playing by a canal somewhere near home. I had stolen Pa’s pocketknife and showed you how to whittle small branches torn off elm trees into little spears; we were using the spears to fish in the canal. Lying on our stomachs on the bank, leaning out as far as we could over the water, peering into the darkness to see a fish swim by. I thought I saw one—a shadow turned in the water, something dark turned darker, and I thrust my spear as fast as I could into the depths. Nothing. The spear floated back to the surface and I had to reach quickly to stop it from drifting away. It happened like that over and over again: nothing, nothing, nothing, the fish effortlessly slipping away.

  I looked up at you, whom I had forgotten in my concentration. You had your face in the water, your spear poised above your head. Why hadn’t I thought of that? All of a sudden your spear went down, you were lightning fast, and you sat up with a fish. Your face and arm dripping, you grinned at me and held it up. It was a little fish, not as big as your forearm. “I did it!” you squealed.

  Anger and jealousy flooded me; the sight of your grinning face was a taunt. You were always better than I was, always. I reached for the fish and yanked it off of the spear and threw it; it cleared the canal and landed on the other side, where it flopped helplessly. You watched it in horror, and looked at me with confusion. “Why did you do that?” you wailed, your voice quickly turning to tears. The fish flopped and jumped. You got up and ran along the canal, trying to find a way across to help it. “Why did you do that, Vincent?” I could hear you crying, your voice high-pitched and desperate as you ran. I sat on the bank and watched the fish slowly suffocate.

  October 28

  Petit Wasmes, the Borinage

  Dear Theo,

  A month into my stay in the Borinage, in mid-January, a letter arrived at the Denis house; the committee had granted me a temporary salary and a six-month appointment, to begin on February first. If, after six months’ time, they were happy with my work, they would make the appointment permanent.

  When I told Madame Denis, who watched me with a grin of anticipation while I read the letter, she cooed and sat me at the table to eat a piece of bread spread with homemade apple jam. I forced myself to eat it, not wanting to disappoint her, but the happiness about being able to finally support myself, after three years of relying on Father for everything, and the eagerness to get to work made the food dry up in my mouth.

  Soon after the letter came, I set out with enthusiasm to start a school for the children of Petit Wasmes. I had learned from Alard that for the children of the town there was little schooling save what their parents might teach them, and that only in rare exceptions did this mean learning to read. I decided I wanted to give the children a sense of school, maybe a better sense than I had ever had.

  Paul told me he thought
he might know just the place to hold the school; we walked together through winding paths past the main part of the village to the outskirts of where the houses began. Nestled in a thicket of pine trees there was a large wooden building, overrun on all sides by thorny bushes and dried-up ferns. Strange to think of this now! I am writing to you now from inside this same building, which has grown to be a home of sorts to me. “It used to be a dance hall,” said Paul as we approached that day. “Many years back, there was a group of miners who loved to play music, and all the people from the village came on Friday nights for dancing.” He stopped on the path to the front door and gazed at the building. “They called it the Salon de Bébé. There was a lot of carousing and carrying on,” he said, “a few fistfights and someone’s broken arm before the management shut the place down.” He smiled vaguely and then shook his head. “Things did get out of hand, but generally the village was a happier place back then. I heard that a few of those musicians sold their instruments during a strike a few years ago.”

  We went in. The door swung open easily, sweeping over a mat of pine needles and revealing a cavernous empty room. A couple of mice scampered out of sight with a panicked squeak and then it was quiet. Our footsteps echoed over the floorboards. The room was designed as a simple barn, with thick rafters overhead but no loft. Two windows along each wall let in the winter sun, but the windows were dirty and the light in the room was muted and dim. There was a low wooden bench and a stove on the far end, a number of chairs lined up along the sides, and a general musty smell. On the floor in one corner were a few discarded bottles. “I’m sure the young people come here to be alone,” Paul said.

  I moved slowly into the room, my footsteps echoing. “It’s like the whale,” I said out loud as I stared with awe up at the rafters. Paul looked at me with a puzzled expression. “The whale,” I repeated. “The whale that swallows Jonah. It’s like we’re inside the giant fish.”

  Paul uttered a noise of surprise and looked around him, apparently trying to envision this. He smiled at me. “Does that mean you like it?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s perfect. It brings to mind Delaroche’s Good Friday, an image I used to keep on my wall wherever I went.” Do you know that picture, Theo? They have prints of it at Goupil’s. A group of people huddle in a dark room, all of them turned toward the window, where bright light pours through. The women are bowed, praying, and the men are bracing themselves for what they see out the window—the whole picture is composed for that window, really, where the light comes in, though it is not large and it exists at the far left of the frame. In the salon, light poured similarly through the dusty windows, though the inside of the room was dark. I said to Paul, “It is like we are in the manger where Jesus was born. It will be the perfect place to teach the children.”

  Paul, still smiling gently at me, nodded. “Well, good. To me it is just a barn, but I am happy that you see all those things here. We’ll have to get it cleaned up a bit, but before too long it will be ready to use.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I think it is ready just as it is.”

  As we left the salon, Paul asked me what my schooling was like when I was a boy. Walking behind him, I was so struck by the question that I had to brace myself against the salon’s door frame before I could answer. Thoughts of Zundert are never far away, but to be asked a direct question about my boyhood invited me to bring my melancholy into the open. I didn’t want Paul to know how much of a failure I had been.

  “I went to the school across the square from the parsonage where we lived,” I said finally, walking next to Paul toward the village cottages. “And then I was schooled at home for a few years before going off to boarding school. My mother believed that a man’s education was a stamp of his class. Both of my parents were very serious about all of us children succeeding in school.”

  But I didn’t succeed, not ever, did I? Not like you did. I skipped school, got into fistfights with the other boys, and was beaten more than once by the schoolmaster, sent home across the Markt, to mother’s disapproving face. I sat diligently next to Father for lessons for three years before he gave up, sending me away to the Provily school a few towns away. Was that the first time Father gave up on me? Certainly it was not the last. Oh, what must it be like to give up again and again on someone you love? What is that, Theo, that giving up? It seems to me the opposite of faith, which otherwise Father has so much of. Now that you, too, have given up on me, perhaps you can tell me what it is, how it feels, where it comes from.

  It was raining the day Mother and Father drove me to the Provily school. I can still see the bare trees with the rain falling among them, making the bark shine and gleam, the carriage growing smaller as it raced away, seemingly never to return, driving on ever faster through the meadows until it could no more be seen. You and the others were still at home, and I imagined you all sitting around the table together with my empty chair, filling my absence up with your joy to be free of me, the moody, unpredictable one, the sullen one with the disposition of a grumpy old man. I watched the carriage drive away from me and I knew that my worst fears were true. My family had gotten rid of me.

  Paul and I walked together back to the Denis house, where he left me. Mostly, we walked in an agreeable silence. I told him the committee had granted me six months, and he nodded and smiled at me. “I am happy to hear that,” he said.

  * * *

  The salon was ready for the boys’ school in just a day. I swept the cobwebs and pine needles out with a broom I borrowed from Hannah Decrucq, and put a number of my favorite prints up on the walls: Weissenbruch’s Mill by the Trekvaart—a man on his horse stands next to a dog on a path overlooking a river, in the distance an old windmill, all dwarfed by a patient sky; Breton’s The Feast of Saint John, which I got to see at the exhibition in Paris in 1875—a group of barefoot peasant women dancing, holding one another’s arms in a joyful circle around a glowing fire; Millet’s Fields in Winter—a wide snow-covered field with an abandoned plow and harrow in the foreground. I wiped the windows with an old coal sack and stepped back, pleased with my work. Paul had found me a few old schoolbooks and picture books somewhere in Wasmes and had brought them to the salon; I lined them up on the windowsill as if it were a shelf. They are still here now, collecting dust.

  It was cold, though—even after the boys arrived. No one was older than seven except for Alard, for he was the only one excused from work in the mine. The boys huddled in their coats and leaned over the books with their hands tucked into their armpits, their breath coming out in white clouds. Alard must have mentioned the cold to his mother, for a few days later, at noon, a near crowd of women appeared outside the salon, most of them carrying the ubiquitous burlap mining sacks. A few of the women pushed wheelbarrows and small wagons. Madame Denis handed me a sack. Alard was with her, and he smiled at me shyly. In the back of the group I noticed Angeline Dubois, who nodded her head at me. She and I had grown a bit more familiar, as she had continued to attend my Bible classes, asking me questions that I could not always answer. One day we had spoken to each other for quite a while outside the Aertses’ hut, and her persistence in asking me questions about a Bible passage made me wonder why it was she seemed to not want to go home. I was happy to see her that day at the school.

  “Come on with us, Monsieur Vincent,” said Madame Denis. “It is time you learned how it is we find our coal.”

  The women took me up on one of the nearby slag heaps to collect coal. Each family is typically given eight hectoliters of coal each month, and particularly in cold months this is an inadequate amount, so the women either buy more from the company or go scrambling for more over the heaps. Madame Denis told me this as we made our way to the heap we were to scavenge, Alard walking next to us, scrambling to keep up. Most families were too proud and too poor to buy more of the coal that they spent their days and sweat excavating from the earth, so most often the women and children took to the slag mountains to scavenge for themselves. But this was no simple thing, Theo, l
est you get the wrong notion: Not only did the company police often patrol the heaps—“even the refuse is company property, after all,” Madame Denis said with a tone of real frustration—sometimes confiscating the women’s sacks and breaking their wheelbarrows and wagons, but also the mountains of slag could shift underfoot, and every once in a while a woman was swallowed by the quicksand of shifting slag. They timed their visits to the pyramids carefully, aiming for the first number of hours of a shift at the mine, for it wasn’t until after the coal had been excavated and sifted through the breakers, the good stuff separated from the bad, that the cars were ready to move to the slag heaps.

  We approached a small mountain that looked more like a ravine or the bank of a small creek, though of course there was no water running through it. Madame Denis said this one had been recently begun, but that it was always good to pick coal on the banks that were most recently in use, for these were the least picked over. There was a roughly built scaffold along the side of it, the planks of wood hastily nailed together, a rickety way for the company to lug the coal cars up to the top to dump them. Atop the mound was a thin dusting of snow, like an icing of sugar. I thought again of black Egypt, feeling that we were about to tread on holy ground.

  I glanced around at the little group as we came close, the women all dressed in long, thick skirts and aprons, the bottoms of their skirts darkened from the mud and soot they walked through—stains they could never quite clean away. Some of them had their heads covered with cotton scarves and bonnets, and many of them smiled if they met my eyes. Else Aert, my gossipy Bible group hostess, was there, as was Clara Gilmart, Hannah Decrucq, and a number of other women I knew. There were a few little girls who were dressed just like their mothers, and I recognized two of the boys from my school, Pierre and John, in their little black caps, their earnest faces looking to the mound of discarded coal with determination. Angeline Dubois blinked and looked away, shy of me in a way that flattered me and made me uncomfortable all at once.