If only it were true that a man, holding tightly enough to another man or woman, to his mother or his father or his lover or his friend, could stop the moving of time. If only! If only there were a way to shield ourselves, to stop it from pulling us down and away and along. If only our bodies were strong enough to keep us tethered to the shore.
December 10
Dear Theo,
No doubt you remember my friend Harry Gladwell, whom I lived and worked with in Paris—the one who took over my position when I left Goupil’s? He must be your colleague now; I admit this is strange to think about.
Harry and I used to stay up late in our tiny apartment and read together passages from the Bible; he was new to it, and I was just coming into my fervor for it then, having recently left London and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the art-dealing life. I remember I dragged Harry to countless sermons on our off-hours, walked him to churches all over the city to listen to different preachers and sit in different halls of worship. He said he was interested, and humored me well, but often I could see he was tired, his hair falling in his face and his feet dragging, and had only come with me so I wouldn’t be alone. I suppose I did a lot of that with you, too, didn’t I, when we were young—though then I dragged you to birds’ nests rather than to churches.
I was thinking of Gladwell today, remembering a trip I took to London to see our sister Anna—must have been three years ago now—and how I stopped off along the way to see Harry’s parents. I was in Ramsgate, England, at the time, working at that boys’ school on the coast, and every day at dusk I would walk along the ocean. It never ceased to be amazing, watching how the day waned, the waves growing luminous in the slowly dimming light, the seagulls flying lower and seeming to hush out of respect for the ritual of the coming night. I would take off my shoes and walk barefoot in the sand, enjoying the sensation of the grains against my feet. Occasionally I saw a seal emerge from a wave, its dark, massive head turning to calmly observe me before going under again, and I thought of how at ease the creature was in the ocean, which was such an inhospitable place for me. Some evenings I walked so far away from the school that I missed supper and was late putting the boys to bed, arriving back long after dark, making my way back by the light of the swinging beam of the lighthouse.
Those walks were a great balm to the confusion that roiled in me then; they encouraged me, with their joyful solemnity, to continue on despite my fears. I walked for hours and hours, back and forth over that beach, when I was preparing my very first sermon, which I gave at the little church near the school.
I remember all of that so well, and it is so strange to think of it now. I paced the floor the whole night before I gave that first sermon, wanting so much for it to go over well, hoping I was not keeping the boys, who slept in the room with me, awake with my feverish movement. The next day, after the sermon was done, there was a charge in me, the feeling that my whole body was lit from the inside, that I had a power inside my fingertips that was magical and true. I thought it was because I had spoken the word of God; I thought it was because I was on the right path, because I had identified what I was meant for and was moving toward it. Now I know that was not true. So what was the source of that powerful feeling, and how can I make it come back again?
A few days after that first sermon, that energy unabated, I walked from Ramsgate to London to see Anna, who was teaching in Welwyn, just past the outskirts of London. It was a journey of about a day, if I walked fast, and slept a few hours somewhere along the way.
I arrived at Gladwell’s parents’ house in the evening, where I was to stay the night. His parents settled me in Harry’s bedroom, which had a familiar sensation even without my friend there.
“Vincent,” Gladwell’s mother asked me over supper, “are you happy in your new position?”
The room was warm and smelled of yams and a sharp spice I couldn’t identify. Gladwell’s sister was there, her hair tied back in a braid; she did not look at me, but kept her eyes on her plate while she cut her meat. Gladwell’s father chewed his beef while he waited for me to answer.
“Oh yes,” I said. “The boys are such fun, they don’t give me much trouble, and the other teachers at the school look out for me because they know that I’m new.”
“So is teaching what you want to do, then?” asked Mr. Gladwell, still chewing, then taking a sip of wine. He looked at me with purity—he was not judging me, he was only genuinely curious to know who I was.
“Well, right now I’m just an assistant teacher,” I said. “I’d say my job is more to be with the boys than it is to really teach them. We read together at night, we play games together and go for walks. I don’t really prepare any of their lessons.”
Mr. Gladwell nodded. I hadn’t answered his question, we both knew.
“I’m not sure if I want to be a teacher, Mr. Gladwell,” I said, and put down my fork. I knew I could trust them. “Really, I’m not sure what I want to be. Actually, I have written some letters to ministers here in London to try to see if I might get a position in the Church.”
Their eyebrows went up, and even Gladwell’s sister looked up at me, a quick glance. “Oh!” said Mrs. Gladwell. “Well, that sounds promising! Harry told us all about how you helped him learn his Bible while you two were living together.”
“Yes,” I said, picking up my fork again and smiling as I remembered my nights with Harry, bent over the Bible in the candlelight, Harry’s eyelids drooping with fatigue. “I think I might be better suited for work in the Church than in a school like Mr. Stokes’s. They have been good to me there, but I can’t help feeling like I might be able to be of more help elsewhere.”
There was a pause. Mrs. Gladwell looked at me for a moment, smiling, then shook her head as if to get rid of a thought and turned back to her plate. I looked to Mr. Gladwell, who gazed across the table at her and said, smiling, “Mrs. Gladwell?”
She looked up, still smiling. “Oh,” she said, “it’s just that for a minute there I felt I could see why you and Harry are such good friends.” She paused, as if wondering whether to go on. Her husband and I were watching her with curiosity. She continued. “You both carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, that’s all,” she said. “Here you are, what, twenty-three?” I nodded. “Twenty-three, and you are frustrated with your job because you are not helping enough people.”
She and Mr. Gladwell laughed. I was puzzled, though I smiled politely.
After supper I helped Mrs. Gladwell clean the dishes and put them away, and then retreated to Harry’s room to be alone. When I said good night to Gladwell’s parents, Mr. Gladwell kissed me on my forehead. “Dear boy,” he said, “don’t forget, you don’t need to have it all figured out. It is foolish to even try.”
I think now of that visit with Gladwell’s parents, and I see new wisdom in the way that they dealt with me. It occurs to me that though they were kinder, they may have been saying much the same thing as you were when you came to visit me.
Just two months after that visit, their daughter, Harry’s sister, died. She fell off her horse while riding on Blackheath. I went as soon as I heard, and when I got there, they had all just come back from the funeral; it was a real house of mourning. I had feelings of embarrassment and shame at seeing that deep grief, I’m not sure why. That evening I talked with Harry for a long time about all kinds of things, about the kingdom of God and about his Bible, and we walked up and down on the station platform waiting for my train, talking. We knew each other so well, his work was my work, the people he knew at Goupil’s I knew, too, his life was my life. I felt that it was given to me to see so deeply into their family affairs because I loved them, not so much because I knew the particulars of those affairs but because I felt the tone and feeling of their being and life.
I see now that I knew nothing about death then, nothing at all. I wish I could say so to Harry.
December 13
Dear Theo,
It was Paul Fontaine who took me dow
n into the mine for the first time. It was a few mornings after Father left, in early March; I had been in the Borinage for almost three months. “If you do not go,” Paul told me, “you will not know this place at all.” Of course he was right; I had no idea how much so. I thought that climbing the coal mountain was a turning point, but I should have known—it was not the ascending but the descending that was essential. It shames me now that it took me so long to go underground.
We met outside the Denises’ at quarter past three in the morning. The world was total darkness; even the birds were quiet. My boots crunched over a thin layer of frost. Paul strode confidently down the path toward the mine, as sure-footed as if it were daylight. I followed close behind him. As we neared the gate we could see bodies begin to materialize out of the dark, miners shuffling forward to work, half-asleep. No one spoke.
I followed Paul into one of the buildings. Inside, it was dim and disorienting, passageways leading off this way and that, the echoing clang of noises I didn’t recognize, shadows flickering onto stairways and into unknown rooms. “This is the boiler house,” Paul said gruffly, and briefly paused for me to peer in. The heat was intense; sweat leapt to my forehead and hands. Inside the room I saw six boilers, and clouds of white steam hissing from what I assumed to be safety valves, steel pistols on their sides, the steam shooting out of the boilers like silos that had sprung leaks, violent and then easing into clouds as it billowed up. There was a man standing in the midst of the boilers, feeding one of them with shovels of coal, the door to the boiler standing open and exposing its guts, the coal burning red inside. I wondered how it was possible that he was not burned from the heat in that room.
We continued on to the locker room, where we found miners busily removing their clogs and thick wool stockings and locking them into the small cupboards that lined the walls. The cupboards were roughly built, and some of them hung from the wall, padlocks broken and rusted, the cupboard doors drooping from their hinges. Some of them had been patched with newer pieces of wood and twisted nails.
In the center of the room there was a glowing stove, packed to the brim with coal, sputtering and hissing. I thought it seemed angry, this fluttering creature. This was no tame hearth, Theo, nothing like what we had in our living room in the winter; it was a monster, gurgling flames and guzzling the precious coal. The miners were not afraid of it; they clustered around it on wooden benches, closer and closer, and if a spark flew onto them, they waved an arm as if to shoo an insect. There was a general lively din in the room as the miners warmed themselves and got ready to descend into the earth; they teased one another and flirted with the girls and laughed and shouted and stood with their backs to the fire and took deep breaths, storing up the heat in their bones. It was a form of worship—I could see that right away, and had no doubt that our father would agree with me.
I saw Hubert Aert, whose wife hosted my weekly Bible classes, sitting in the group; Mark Florine was there as well, the father of Carel, who came to my makeshift school. When the miners saw me and Paul coming into the room, a general call went up. “Fontaine!” someone hollered. “Come for your annual tour?” “Look sharp,” bellowed someone else, “Fontaine’s here for inspection, and he’s brought Pastor Vincent for extra judgment!”
“All right, settle down,” Paul said, smiling. “Don’t mind us.”
I saw Decrucq sitting by the furnace. He was in his element, holding court; it was as if all the other miners were his minions. “Monsieur Vincent,” he said, grinning, “have you come to see how we earn our fifty centimes a day?”
“That’s right,” I said. I looked around the room and was surprised, suddenly, to spot Angeline among the miners. Seeing her in her miner’s pants, thick jacket, and tight cap pulled over her hair, my eyes nearly swept right over her; she blended into the group, along with all the others. She was a miner, that was all: sexless, her story eliminated. Was this a comfort to her or a burden? She smiled at me—shyly, I thought.
I followed Paul through the door on the opposite side of the room and then up a staircase. “We’re going to the pithead now,” Paul called over his shoulder. I could not see him, it was so dark, and I was grateful for the banister along the stairs to hold to tightly as we climbed. “I want to see how things are going there, and then we’ll go on to the lamp room to get lamps before we go down.” We were moving along what seemed to be a gangway, for it trembled and bounced underfoot; I was too blind to know how far it extended on either side of me, and held my arms out before me lest I run into a structure or another man. We could have been in an enormous room or on a tiny plank of wood, I could not be sure. There were noises all around us, deep groans from places near and far, men’s voices bellowing, and coming slowly closer, the sound of a high-pitched bell and a thunderous knocking like one massive rock falling on another. In front of us were faint flickering lights, and we headed toward them.
And then suddenly we were there. It was a frightening and exhilarating sight; I had never stood in a place so strange and foreign, so fast, so loud, so filled up with elements I did not understand. I became only a vessel for seeing; the world—machines, action, noise—was too present for thought. The gaping shaft was in front of me; there were reflectors that cast the lantern light toward the mouth of it, though the feeble beams were swallowed quickly and completely by the darkness, a black so total that it hurt my eyes. Before the light disappeared, along the sides of the shaft I could see the wooden guides, along which the cages slid, taking the human cargo to its destination. Where the guides met the mouth of the shaft there was a network of beams and bolts and levers, a maze of gleaming parts, every piece of which was no doubt crucial to the safety of hundreds of people at all times of day. The lantern light danced over it all in flickering shadows. As my eyes got used to the light, I could make out the entire framework over my head, the giant cables lifting out of the shaft and rising to the pulleys and into the headgear, the whole thing supported by a huge tower of iron that rose up and up, seemingly forever, for I could not see the top. Considering the enormity of the thing, it was a miracle it was as quiet as it was. The gears merely purred, while the only screeching came from inside the shaft, where the cages were moving.
There were men on one side of the pit, gathered around one of the pulleys, and Paul went over to speak with them. “Vincent,” he called back, “don’t go anywhere.”
Theo, I couldn’t have moved! I felt frozen, paralyzed, as if I, too, were made of metal. I was nearly blind from the darkness and the dancing shadows, nearly deaf from the noise; there was so much to take in that I could take in nothing at all. It was cold, too; there seemed to be drafts blowing from all directions. I could see the lamp room in the far distance, glowing like a beacon. Shadows from the lanterns flitted over the walls, large and small, red and nearly purple, and the walls that they lit were glistening and wet. I peered through the darkness at the miners passing me, wondering if one of them was Angeline, imagining that the glow of particular lights were held by her hand.
Set back a ways from the mouth of the pit was the engine, with the enormous drums on which the steel cables were wound that raised and lowered the cages. The drums alone were probably five meters across, and when the cages were moving, they turned so fast that you could no longer see them. A man stood at the engine and watched a display. I moved a few steps closer to where I could better see what the man looked at, which seemed to be a sort of diagram of the pit. Lead weights moved up and down vertical slots, presumably telling him where the cages were. This guess was confirmed as one of the weights reached the top of its slot and a cage rumbled up into the mouth of the shaft.
The cage was a sort of basket with two levels, and each level held thirty squatting people and two tubs, often filled with timber. If the tubs were empty, men climbed in them to conserve space, fitting even more people in the cage. I wondered how much weight the whole thing could hold before it would snap, but I did not ask.
I stood back and watched as the cage came t
o a stop and the men disembarked, first the bottom level, then the top. The wall of the cage was reinforced wire netting about waist-high, with a chain drawn across one side to give a way out. When they came up, the men were silent, presumably exhausted and ready for sleep, their white eyes staring passively out of the cage as it rose into the shaft. Those eyes, Theo! They reminded me of the eyes I had seen on my very first day in the Borinage, the same passive gaze, the same stark whiteness, so awfully contrasted against the black masks of coal on all those human faces, and then as now, I had the same fear: that they might somehow jump from their sockets on spider legs and land on my skin. Most of the eyes weren’t even looking at me, and yet they somehow moved toward me, became unattached from the bodies they lived in and floated away. A cage full of white eyes in the dark! Can you see it?
The men shuffled by me and disappeared into the darkness. In their place, a new crop of bodies arrived and filed into the now-empty cage, the men rowdier, their faces clean. One of the men hooked the chain closed, and a man by the shaft yelled something into his megaphone that I could not understand and pulled on a rope four times, which made four loud hammer sounds, signaling to men at the bottom that a cage was on its way. Then the cage made a little jolt and was instantly gone, dropped out of sight as a bucket into a well.
Suddenly, Paul was standing next to me; I hadn’t seen him approach. “Trust me,” Paul said, “it looks bad, but it’s a lot better than the ladder.”
“The ladder?”
“The only other way out of the mine is the ladder,” he said, looking at where the cage had been. “There’s an escape shaft, smaller than this one. The ladder is built onto the side of it all the way up, seven hundred meters. If something happens to the cages, men have to climb up on their own. I was down there once when there was an accident.” He stopped, presumably wondering how much he should tell me, about to go down in the mine for the first time. “Well, let’s just say the cage is a breeze by comparison. Men die who can’t make it up the ladder; they let go and fall right off, and sometimes they take other people with them.”
The Season of Migration Page 13