We took to the mountain. I pictured how we must look from above, tiny figures scrambling up a dark, shifting mound, dwarfed by the blackness, using our hands to try to gain some traction to get higher, though it seemed that every time I looked up I had gained no ground. We were a group of ants crawling up the side of an anthill. Some women began sifting and picking as soon as their feet touched the bank, but Madame Denis called to me, “Monsieur Vincent! It is always best to try to pick near the top!” so I clambered up after her and Alard, who was already near the ridge. There was immediately soot in my eyes, and when I looked down at my hands I could not see them, for they were the same color as the ground.
Something strange was happening to me, Theo. I had the momentary feeling that I had disappeared. I could feel my muscles moving, but it seemed that my limbs had plunged into the body of some unknown creature and had been absorbed. I was moving over the surface of something that had no surface, which meant that I was inside of it, climbing up its body from underneath its skin.
Through my soot-covered eyes I looked up and saw Alard, and the sight brought me back to myself. Alard’s hat had flaps that covered his ears. “Monsieur Vincent,” he called, “you are looking for the pieces that look like this!” He held up a piece of coal, proud of himself for finding one so fast. His face was swept with soot as with a thick paintbrush, his hat just as dark. Madame Denis was standing near him, looking pleased. I tried to stand, and took a scoop of the mound up to my face to inspect it. A handful of dark matter sat in my palm, and it all looked the same to me. I let a couple rocks fall, for I was sure they were not what I wanted. Already I could feel cuts on my skin from trying to keep my balance as I scrambled up the hill.
“There,” I heard a voice next to me say, and I turned to find Angeline. I was relieved to see her, as if she could pass me a map to all the treasure hidden in the mountain. She was pointing at my palm. “You’ve got a piece.”
I blinked at her and used my arm to try to wipe the soot from my eyes. It did only a little good. The image of her was darkened around the edges. “I do?”
“Yes,” she said. “Here, show me.”
I lifted my palm to her, and she pulled out a piece of the rubble. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, up by her face, and smiled at me. “Coal!”
We picked through the coal for over an hour and I barely had a third of my bag filled. Most of the women had bags so full, they could barely carry them. My hands were scraped and bleeding, my face chapped by the soot and wind, but I was exhilarated by the work, which made my body feel vibrant and alive. What were we doing but ministering to the earth? We picked our way back down the mountain and Madame Denis clapped me on the back and raised her voice to the other women. “Has any other evangelist climbed the heap with us? Monsieur Vincent is different; he is one of us!” A few of the women laughed, and I could see derision in a few of the faces I had encountered less often. I shook my head and raised my voice—“It takes a lot more than a trip up a slag heap to make a miner”—and I could feel my cheeks blushing underneath the soot that covered my skin. Inside of me I was on fire, Theo; I had found a way to belong to these people, to this place, and it was by digging my hands deep into the coal. Angeline came down the mountain next to me, and I could feel her presence by my side as pricks of cold ice all the way down my skin.
It was the first time I had done any physical work in the Borinage, and in the euphoria of the exercise and the vision before me, I felt sure I saw something new: Physicality was the way the people of the Borinage expressed their version of God. It was in their muscles and their bent-over backs; it was in their breasts given to an infant, in their broken ribs healed wrong. What a beautiful scene; the peasant women moving in dark skirts and white bonnets over the black mountain were like Millet’s images of women sowing, yet they were excavating a heap of the earth’s insides. Remembering Millet, I was invigorated, struck by the melding of art and life. How strange, to be moving in your life and at the same time feel you are an image, perfectly realized, seen by yourself from the outside!
I was exalted; even remembering it I can feel the charge, a coil of fire that comes up from inside of me and lights me all the way up. I felt powerful and clear, as if I understood everything all at once: the coal, the darkness, the filth, the warmth of the people and the blood on our hands, the way the earth communicated with our bodies to bring us understanding, the way we were born from that coal and then returned to it, and the way that God provided us with the ability to see. Just by looking around us we could learn what it was to be alive; we could be fully present; we could fully communicate. No words were necessary, only this place! Only these hands and these faces streaked with black!
When we had all descended the mountain and walked back to the path, I took Alard, Pierre, and John with me back to the salon for our afternoon lesson. The other boys came soon after. By the time they arrived, I had forgotten about the coal dust on my face, and only one of the boys mentioned it when he saw me, a particularly precocious boy named Harry. “Monsieur Vincent,” he said, “you look like a real miner now!”
“Welcome, boys,” I greeted them, feeling a new charge of confidence. “Alard, Pierre, John, and I have just been up one of the slag mountains collecting coal. This is something you have all done before, I am sure, with your mothers or sisters or aunts.”
There was general nodding and smiles from the boys, who were no doubt thinking how different I looked with my face smeared black. Carel, a boy who sat at the back and always wore his cap indoors—an eccentricity I did not mind—spoke up. “Monsieur Vincent, you should be careful doing that. My next-door neighbor went collecting one day and the slag heap swallowed her. She never came back. Now my mother won’t let me go with her anymore.”
It amazed me that these boys could be forbidden to go up the slag heap but were allowed to go down in the mines and haul coal. I asked the boys if the slag heaps scared them, and though they vehemently said no, there were a couple of boys who said nothing, and I took that to mean yes. Though they were tough children, they were children nonetheless, and I thought they were not old enough yet to be deliberately dishonest.
“It’s all right to be scared of things,” I said, trying to coax them. “All of us, even the toughest of us, are scared of certain things. Being scared can help us to protect ourselves, and to tell good from evil. Tell me some things that you are afraid of, if those slag heaps don’t scare you.” There was silence. The boys looked at one another and then at me. I could see I would have to go first. “Okay,” I said, “well, I’ll tell you some things that I’m afraid of. Sometimes I wake up in the dark and for a little while I’m frightened of the shapes in my room. I think I see the chair moving like an animal before I realize it’s a chair. Sometimes I’m afraid of running chickens”—at this the boys laughed—“really I am! And when I was a boy, I was often afraid of my father when he was angry … and sometimes I still am.”
After that, Pierre volunteered that he was afraid of fire, for once he had touched the stove without knowing it was hot and had burned his hand so terribly, he still had scars (he held out his hand for the other boys to see). Alard said he was afraid of dogs; he had seen one rip the head off a chicken by shaking it in its jaws. A usually quiet boy named Hugo said that he was afraid of losing his father in the mine; at this, a few of the boys lowered their heads and nodded. Hugo was the boy whom I had once caught with his foot raised over a caterpillar in the dew-laden grass. “Why do you want to kill that little creature?” I had asked him, taking his arm. “God created it, and it lives!” There are many caterpillars in the Borinage, and whenever I see one slinking along I pick it up and place it on a tree so as to preserve its strange beauty.
Carel, then, raised his hand and said, “Monsieur Vincent? My father says I am to be afraid of God.”
The stove was warm from the coal I had picked from the heap, but the boys had their coats on nonetheless. The lamp was burning in the corner, and the boys’ little le
gs were swinging from the benches they sat on, their feet not yet touching the floor. I was still on fire from the slag heap, my skin tingling with a strange sensation, and I tried to calm myself, knowing that I could scare the children in my present state. I knew Carel’s father, Mark, was a believer, but one who seemed twisted in his faith, so that his relationship with Christ was more similar to that of a slave and a master. He had been to quite a few of my religious meetings and I had often spoken to him down by the mine as he came out of the gate after a shift—a hard man, with dark eyebrows thick as grubs. When Carel was near him, Mark almost always had a hand on his son, a thick paw on his shoulder both protective and threatening.
The boys were confused, but I knew I could not help them. I have had too many of my own troubles on this very topic, as you know; I tried to warn myself to tread lightly. But I could not, Theo, not as I was in that moment, my hands still bleeding and black. “Well,” I began, “we see there are many different types of fear. Carel, your father is not wrong. Certainly fearing God is an important part of listening to Him and obeying His commandments. We obey and fear our own fathers, so all the more should we obey and fear our Father in Heaven.” I held out my hands in front of them. “Look at my hands!” I said. “Do they not scare you? God made them, and God turned them black and bloody. God brought me up on that heap today so that I could be closer to Him, so that I could be closer to all of you. Now here I am, and the darkness has marked me, and perhaps we should all be afraid.” I was looking at my hands as I said this, and then remembered to raise my eyes, and I saw that the boys’ eyes were wide and frightened—not by my hands, of course, yes, Theo, I understand this, but by my outburst.
Reaching for my Bible, trying to recover, feeling a confused urge to calm myself and at the same time to rage further, to blow off the front of that furnace fed by the coal I had retrieved and to show them all the visions I had seen, I read to them from Hebrews 12:9, “Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?” I couldn’t help myself, Theo, I continued: “Live, boys! That is what God wants us to do! But we cannot do that without getting our hands dirty, without becoming covered with black. We cannot continue through our lives pure and white and untouched; we must dive into the earth and, through its dust, find the way to reach one another.”
Looking up from the book, I saw a cluster of boys in woolen pants looking back at me with fear and awe and confusion. In each one of them I saw myself. I was one of those boys, just as I was standing in front of them. I saw you, too, Theo, sitting in the front row, looking at me with that confused expression you sometimes wear.
Later that evening the miners poured into the salon. Else and Hubert Aert; Carel’s father, Mark; Decrucq and his next-door neighbors the Adelgondes. As they came through the door I greeted them, feeling pleased that I recognized so many faces. Even Paul Fontaine was there—he stoked the fire so well that with all the bodies, it was warm enough in the room for shirtsleeves. I spoke about the parable of the mustard seed, where the tiniest kernel of faith was enough to grow a whole tree, a whole universe, a whole kingdom. I felt confident, as if the Spirit were really speaking through me, perhaps for the first time, and all the souls in the room were lifted up and were as one.
When I got home to the Denises’ and looked in the mirror above the washbasin, I was staggered by what I saw: A miner’s face looked back at me. For a moment I did not remember the slag heap, but thought that by some miracle I had been transformed; I had come so close to the flock that evening that even my appearance had changed, and belonging had been granted to me. Then I remembered, but was no less pleased, for in the image of myself with my face turned black I saw a vision of myself as being of the place, and it was a vision of acceptance.
I turned back to the room I shared with Alard, who was already asleep, and saw it as if for the first time: the bed with its warm quilt of feathers, the vase of flowers on the bedside table, the white chest of drawers decorated with a delicate rendering of an apple orchard. It was lovely and simple, but nonetheless it was not a miner’s cottage; it was removed, its construction and its decoration and its placement and even its smell, always so pleasant and sweet, removed.
I could not stay at the Denises’ any longer; I knew it suddenly and with certainty. I climbed into bed without washing my face. I did not plan to ever wash it again.
The next morning, I left the Denis house and moved to a hut I had noticed near the salon, abandoned some time ago but not yet falling into the earth. Mrs. Denis was worried when I left; when she saw me with my suitcase, she was surprised, her eyebrows turned in. She questioned me. Where was I going? Where would I sleep? Was there a bed in the hut, was there food? Was I unhappy at their home? Had they not done everything to provide for me? I answered that her home was beautiful, her home was a sanctuary, but from time to time one should do as the good God and go and live among one’s own. The words coming out of my mouth sounded feeble and forced. I could hear the way they must sound to her and knew they were not as I meant them. She looked at me as if to say, You, like them? Like us? Her face was confused, her mouth tight. She was concerned; she did not understand. She pleaded with me to have a bath and wipe the soot off of my face, at least, before I left. I refused her.
November 10
Petit Wasmes, the Borinage
Dear Theo,
When did you get to be older than I? When we were boys, you would do everything that I did—I stepped first in the snow and you followed. But somewhere along the way you must have grown older, or grown past, for there you were telling me in front of the Sorcière mine that you are worried for me. Isn’t it my job to worry for you?
It has been three months since your visit, and here I am in an empty room, writing to you. But which version of you am I writing to? Is it the boy whom I shared a bed with, or the man in his top hat and dapper suit? I remember you, sick in that bed in Zundert, the curtains drawn and Ma insisting that I tiptoe quietly into the room so I would not disturb you. Am I disturbing you now, Theo, am I disturbing you?
I remember wandering over the heath with you one morning when we were boys. We came across the skeleton of a bird. Do you remember this? It lay in the tall grass by the edge of the lane, as if it had been moved off the path in order to decompose undisturbed. Most of the flesh was gone, save for a piece of the belly, the part of any creature that always looks the most revealing, as if it is the seat of an animal’s personality, as a man’s plump stomach can tell you much about what his life is like.
The bird’s wings lay beneath it, long bones tucked in close, and we could still see the rounded crown of the head, though the flesh was gone and there was no longer a face. The skeleton was perfectly intact: tiny ribs like bridges emerging from the remaining cover at its belly; an incredible immaculate spine, bleached all white from the sun, knobs fitting together like perfect minuscule fists linked in a chain. Little pieces of white fluff clung to where the face had once been.
We crouched by the skeleton for quite a time, taking in its details and contours, windows into the processes of death. For a while we were both silenced by it, the story that it told, one of creation and destruction, one of artistry, of perfection, of time and decay, and of what lay beneath the surfaces that we saw. Then I said I wanted to take it home with us. You erupted at this idea; you were horrified and frightened. How could I want to do such a thing? You grew tearful at the prospect that I would remove the bird; your eyes grew large and wet and you wailed at me, your neck and face flushing red.
I was taken aback by your protest. I had assumed that we were both seeing the same thing, while we crouched there peering at the skeleton, but your cries made me realize otherwise. What I had seen was an object—one that contained mysteries of the universe, certainly, but an object nonetheless. What you had seen was a bird. A creature once alive, now dead, that deserved to return to the earth in peace.
&
nbsp; Your vision in that moment inspired me. I had been so focused on the object before us that the rest of the world had gone fuzzy and fallen away; it is a focus of vision that I still have, and that is dangerous, for when I come back to myself after looking so closely my brain is so tired that if that sort of work is repeated often I become totally distracted and incapable of a whole lot of ordinary things. You, with your forceful cries, brought me back to the earth, the two of us kneeling in the mud by the side of a lane, that little skeleton but a tiny detail in an otherwise enormous world. My little brother was so much wiser and more sensitive than I, I saw then, with such an eye that even at your age you could already recognize that some mysteries were meant to remain so.
I have not yet mailed any of the letters I have written you since your visit. I begin to wonder if I will ever send them, if there will ever be any further contact between us again.
Dear Theo,
I remember a night in Amsterdam, toward the end of my time there, when my failure at study was near. I let myself out of the house after everyone was asleep and I walked all night, across the city and back, meandering through lanes and lots and parks and over bridges, resting on the steps of houses that held sleeping families, boys and girls tucked in tightly, mothers and fathers with their arms around each other in sleep. How does a man know if he has chosen the right path?
I was yearning to see things; my mind was crammed with the images that I encountered every day but had to ignore for the words in books. I walked and gathered images to my mind as if they were salves for wounds. There are moments when the common everyday things make an extraordinary impression and have a deep significance and a different aspect. As I walked that night, I passed a big dark wine cellar and warehouse, with the doors standing open; for a moment I had an awful vision—men with lights were running back and forth in the dark vault, and I felt suddenly sure that those men were not men at all, but creatures inside my own brain. I was looking not into a warehouse but at a window into my own mind, and the men were the workmen in the yard outside Uncle Jan’s, that long line of black figures. It was a sight that often comforted me, although in that moment it filled me with dread: Those men were a symbol of what I could not change. They were arriving for work in my body and mind; I could not turn them away. Then one of them brushed past me, and his shoe touched my ankle. “Excuse me,” he said gruffly, and I could tell from the way he looked back at me that he was wondering if I were mad.
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