Another cage ascended, leaping into place like a giant bird landing, and another group of ghostlike people looked out at us with indifference. “Come,” Paul said, “let’s go get our lamps.”
In the lamp room, hundreds of lamps sat on racks one above another, each labeled with a number. A man sat at a desk and watched as each miner examined the lamp with his number, which had been cleaned and inspected the night before, and when he was satisfied with its condition, he closed it himself. Then the man at the desk wrote the time in a big ledger. “If a man doesn’t return his lamp,” Paul explained, “that’s how we know who is missing.” On the way out of the room, another man checked to make sure each lamp had been lit and properly closed; a lamp not closed properly could ignite the firedamp.
Paul handed me a leather cap to wear for extra protection; against what, I didn’t want to think. Then it was time to descend. We were back at the pithead, the machinery whirling and swooping and the men yelling into their megaphones and the whistles and hammer blows signaling the movement of the cage, and then we were piling inside. “Keep your hands and feet and nose inside the cage.” Paul nudged me, and I thought I could just barely make out his smile. “I wouldn’t want you to lose them.” People climbed into the cage after us and squeezed in; I moved back as far as I could, but Paul’s warning had frightened me, and it was especially awkward trying to hold on to my lamp. It was just as the four hammers and whistles were sounding that I realized that Angeline was next to me. “I am afraid, too,” she whispered. “Every time I go down.”
“I feel more curious … deathly curious … than afraid,” I said, and I felt goose bumps stand up on my skin. But, Theo, I was nothing at all except afraid; my fear was my body and my body was my fear.
I want to take you down there with me somehow; I wish my words could pick you up and drag you down. When the cages were all loaded, there was a jerk and then the bottom dropped out and we fell. There was suddenly no bottom or top. My stomach leapt into my throat, my hands were my feet, my head was my gut, and I had no legs at all. We were tumbling, tumbling; Angeline’s elbow was in my side, and the place where she touched me was the only part of my body that I could feel; the rest of me had disappeared. Next to me was the wall of the shaft, there was maybe an inch between the cage and the rock, and I could see the slickness of water glinting on the stone as we hurtled by. I felt freezing-cold water on my face and did not know where it came from.
Then suddenly we jerked to a halt.
“Are we there?” I asked of no one, of everyone, and the whole cage laughed at me. This was only the fourth level, Paul explained, speaking into my ear. The mine had five, but the three upper ones had been exhausted and abandoned; they were no longer worked because there was no more coal. On the side of the shaft, water was flowing, there were tiny little streams running down the stone, and the sound of water falling on water could be heard. For one brief moment I felt a strange sense of peace, gazing at the wall of stone where the water was trickling down, my eyes just barely able to pick out a glint here and a sparkle there, Angeline’s elbow quietly touching my side, warm against me, just a tiny little elbow, the very part you see the whores in The Hague polishing sometimes with a lemon—such a small little piece of a body, but so comforting, and there was comfort for me, too, in the sound of the cageful of miners breathing and adjusting, waiting for the next plunge; and then the bottom dropped out again and we fell. And where were you when I was going down there? I wonder what you were doing in that exact second, whether you had any premonition of how far beneath the earth your brother was. Because I think I would have known, Theo, I would have known. I would be walking in bright sunshine and feel a strange weight in my belly, something sinking lower and lower, as if I had eaten a stone. And that would be you, my brother, down in the earth, much deeper than any grave, down in the earth and going deeper.
When we stopped again, we were at the bottom—seven hundred meters down. “Here we are,” said Paul. He must have seen how stunned I was, because he said, “I have been coming down here for thirty years and I still don’t like that drop. You get used to it, but you always feel some measure of horror when the cage falls.” Angeline took her elbow away at last and said, “I hate it, too.”
Looking upward from the bottom of the pit, the daylight was about the size of a star in the sky. I stood for a minute looking up at it as the cage jerked and lurched upward once more, and then the star was extinguished.
“Come on, Vincent,” said Paul, standing nearby, “stick with me. It will be very easy to get lost, and we don’t want that.”
The miners from our cage were splitting off into groups and disappearing down the passage. I lost Angeline until we started to follow one of the groups, and it was with happiness that I saw she was in front of us; it was only a slight swing to her hips that identified her. I knew none of the men with her, save for one, Louls Hartmann, a strong, silent creature who towered over Angeline and seemed entirely too large for that underworld.
It was a big passage, with narrow railroad tracks running through it, and only occasional timber shoring up the walls. We tramped along it quietly, no one speaking, each person carrying his little lamp, lit now, and casting only a very faint light, barely enough to illuminate a body’s width in front of him. As we moved along, I thought I heard the sound of shuffling and the deep exhalations of animals, but it was a sound I associated with open fields, horses and cows nosing at their feed and chewing, and I assumed I must be mistaken. How would an animal live down there?
But after a few more yards we passed what could only be called a stable. It was carved into the rock off to the left side; about seven old horses stood between iron rails and in front of troughs of feed. Our lamps barely lit them as we passed by, but it was enough to see them standing there in the darkness, calmly chewing. Paul materialized next to me. “They pull the carts of coal to the accrochage,” he said, “the room where they are pulled to the surface. You’ll see one go by soon, I’m sure.”
“But how do they live down here?” I asked. “Don’t they need light?”
“A lot of them eventually go blind,” Paul said. “They don’t need to see to do what they do, they learn to follow the driver’s voice. Sometimes they lose the pigment in their skin, too.” We walked on past the stable, keeping up with the little group of miners. Paul continued, as if trying to reassure me: “It’s not a harder life for them down here than it is on the surface. A lot of the boys adopt them and feed them treats. I think on the whole they’re quite happy; they often live to a ripe old age. Sometimes they’ll take a horse up who is getting too old to work, and he behaves strangely on the surface; we think it is because he wishes to be back in the mine.”
I found it hard to believe that any animal could be happy living in darkness its whole life, but I didn’t argue. I imagined the death of a horse in a mine, the eventual raising of it to the surface just so that it could again be put in the earth to decompose. Could the body of a horse fit in the cage we had just ridden down there? There was something so unnatural about a horse underground. But then, why a horse more than a man? Nothing belongs down there but worms and dirt, stone and dissolving bones. I tried to think of it, Theo, I tried to picture Mother and Father down there, mother in her apron, Father wearing his tall hat; I tried to picture you and Anna and the cat that used to visit us when we were children, Roo; I tried to picture even the images that I had pinned to the wall next to my bed. Could they be hung down here? No, it was unnatural. Only the worms and the dead belonged; all the rest of us were someplace we shouldn’t be.
Paul was coughing as we walked, and I heard him spit his mouthful of phlegm into the darkness. Breathing the air down here could not be good for him. I was stumbling and stubbing my toes against every rock and uneven place, but the miners stepped nimbly, even the giant Hartmann; it was as if they had the placement of every stone memorized, their feet moving seamlessly over them. Off the road we were on there were galleries opening up on each side,
and cold wind blew from them as off a mountainside. We lost half the group in front of us to a gallery on the left, but we kept on after the other half. Angeline was still before us—I had memorized the vague shape of her in the dark—but then as I watched, the outline of her seemed to dissolve before me as sugar into hot water. Did she turn off into one of the passageways? I felt frantic wondering where she had disappeared to, and squinted into the darkness, trying to find her again, but she was gone. We had to keep moving; it was ridiculous for me to worry about her. Oh, Theo, how it pains me to write that now! I am haunted by that image of her, just visible and then out of sight.
I heard a rumbling in the distance that sounded like the beginnings of thunder, growing quickly louder. “Move off the track, Vincent,” Paul called to me. “A cart is coming through!” The rumble grew louder and louder, and then with a whoosh of warm air a white horse materialized, pulling a series of coal tubs and a boy, maybe a teenager, who sat on the front of the first tub. They were close to me—there wasn’t much room between the rail and the wall—and I could hear the horse’s breathing and smell the sweetness of his musk. Then they passed fast into the darkness, and the rumbling grew less and less, until it was gone, leaving only the hair standing up on my arms, and the thrill of something so large passing by so fast.
We turned down a passageway to the right, which quickly began to grow narrower. The walls were more frequently shored up with timber, and the ceiling was lower and lower, so very soon we were walking stooped and slumped. Again I was amazed at the miners’ confidence in the terrain; they knew where to duck and dodge, where to lift a foot. I felt my chest constricting, and tried to quell the certainty that we were walking to our doom. A couple of times I bumped my head; I was going slowly enough that I didn’t hurt myself, but still I was grateful for the cap Paul had given me.
Now we were in territory where the men were working; we were passing cells on either side, where miners in coarse linen suits, filthy and black as chimney sweeps, were busy hewing coal by the pale light of their small lamps. The cells of the mine were of various sizes and shapes; in some the miner could stand erect, in others, he lay on the ground. It was an incredible sight. The arrangement was more or less, I thought, like the cells in a beehive, but also like a dark, gloomy passage in an underground prison, and like a row of small weaving looms, and even rather more like a row of baking ovens such as peasants had, and yes, of course, like the partitions in a crypt. The water leaked through in some, and the light of the miner’s lamp made a curious effect, reflected as in a stalactite cave. What a vision! Each cell was a complete image, a framed imagining, a rendering of reality complete in itself, and yet linked to another and another all the way across as far as I could see. So you can see how it was beautiful. It was the first beautiful thing I had seen that day under the earth; I wished I could somehow capture what I was seeing and take it home with me—to show Pa, who says, “Why would you go to such a place?” and to show you, who say “You are not the same any longer”—to illustrate to you, to grab you by the hair and show you, to rub your eyes upon it—what this place is at its heart. Because there was no question that this was what I was looking at: the heart of the Borinage, beating red through the darkness.
I must keep trying to describe it. For the most part the first cells were fairly large, some miners standing erect, some standing stooped. A few men worked at the coal face with their picks, while a few others worked to get the coal away from their feet and onto the tub, which was then removed by the haulage boys and girls, pushed to the passage where the horses hurtled by. It got increasingly warm as we went along; some of the miners were stripped to their pants, and I could see their skin glinting with sweat in the light of the lamps. I was amazed by the organization of the underworld, the immensity and function of the working world around me, a beehive, as I say, and a teeming anthill with men instead of ants. In one cell, men stood in water nearly waist-deep. How was it possible? How much more than this could a man endure? A cage with a bird in it hung from a wire; the sight of it gave me a start, and I stopped, staring. Paul explained that the birds were there to warn the men if the gas grew too dangerous for them to stay in the cell. “If the bird dies,” he said, “then the men know to get out quick.”
If the bird dies? This logic rankled me. The bird, in effect, was waiting for its death. Did any of the miners care for it? There were birds in cages in many of the cells, and all of the birds were silent. What is a bird for, if not to sing or to fly? An army of silent birds in cages, waiting for death. I could look at the men, Theo, but from the sight of the birds in their cages I had to look away. Remember that story that Uncle Cent used to read to us when we were small, the one that Father used to forbid him to read but that we begged him for again and again? A Flemish fairy tale, I think, the one with the creature men who lived in the sea and collected the souls of drowned fishermen in cages? All those years fascinated by that story, Theo, and I never knew what a soul in a cage could look like until I went down in that mine.
Paul stopped to inspect various elements, scolding the men for shoddy timbering jobs where the wood was leaning and cracked, strained and surely in danger. Each time he stopped, he would tell me to wait, and then he would explain what he saw. Even I could see that the men were in danger if they didn’t prop up more wood to keep the cells from collapsing, but they grumbled that the company didn’t pay them for timbering, only for coal. “Well,” was Paul’s answer, “you can’t collect your salary if you’re dead!” Then he erupted into coughs, which seemed to be aggravated by his mood; when he was frustrated, he could not hold them back.
There were only a few miners ahead of us by the time we reached the tunnel where we descended from the gallery. It was a tunnel about the size of the big chimneys of the Brabant farms; I thought immediately of being a boy and peering up inside of the hearth to where I could see the sunshine. But there was no sunshine there; the chimney led only deeper into the darkness. A ladder was stuck on the side and we climbed carefully down. Paul instructed me to hook my lamp to a buttonhole on my coat, for I needed my hands for climbing the ladder. The rungs were wet and muddy; cold water dripped onto the back of my neck and slipped under my collar. It was as if we were descending into a bog.
At the bottom, there wasn’t room to stand anymore, so we crawled on our hands and knees. Paul, crawling before me, called back to me, “I’m sorry for this! I’m taking you to the maintenages that are farthest away from the exit. I hope it is all right! If you’re going to come down here you may as well see it all!” He couldn’t see my face and so was concerned, I think, that I might be horrified by the depth of our journey but unable to express it. I wasn’t, but I was amazed: I thought I had seen the mine, and that no part could be deeper or darker or more frightening, yet there we were crawling even farther.
I couldn’t answer him; I couldn’t come up with words; I could only dumbly follow. But my senses were completely alive. The mud beneath my hands was music, it was an ocean, I was controlling waves and landscapes with each plunge of my palm. I felt every drop of water that touched my skin, icy cold pinpricks on my skull and neck. One knee forward, one palm forward, one knee, one palm, this was how we made our way through the passage. I tried not to think of the weight above us, of how far under the ground we were, of how many hundreds of ways I could die down there, of how far a trek it was to get out. Every time I moved forward, I could see Paul’s foot in front of me for a brief second before it disappeared, and I tried to concentrate only on that. The flash of a boot, cold water in darkness.
That was how the world was: There was no space for thought, no room for past or future, for doubt, talk, concerns. Only your hand in front of you, a foot disappearing, the thin light of a kerosene lamp. Darkness, darkness, and nothing to see, and yet somehow—and how can this be?—it felt like being blind was making everything clearer. I thought of Angeline, and comforted myself that she was elsewhere in the mine, higher up, where she might be able to breathe freely.
I imagined for a while that Paul’s foot was hers, and that I was following her, like in that fairy tale Uncle Cent used to read us, down to the bottom of the sea.
We continued on; I lost track of time. Every few minutes we’d have to flatten ourselves against the wall as a tiny cart was pushed through the passageway, pushed by younger and younger boys and girls, struggling to keep the cart on track without tipping over. The cells on that level were even narrower than the ones above, and getting narrower and narrower still. There were men crouching and sitting, lying on their backs, using only their forearms to swing their picks. There were no voices, only the sounds of the work. Rats scuttled by with no fear; they approached and nosed at our sweating arms, then turned and meandered away. All of the miners down there were naked, as the heat was well beyond any human notions of shame. They were coated black and swimming in sweat. If I could have spared the energy to contort my body in such a small space and remove my clothes, I would have.
The coal face extended for quite a ways off the passageway, inclining up like a flat, wide chimney. Peering into the darkness I could see the faint glow of lamps all the way up the slope, their lights tiny ghostlike flickers, throwing into relief a brief glimpse of an arm or a mustache, a shoulder or a knee, or a pick hitting the face. When a piece of coal fell off, there was a quick glint, and then the darkness swallowed everything.
Soon the cells were so narrow that in order to get up the coal face the miners had to drag themselves by their elbows, and they could not turn their bodies all the way over. They wedged themselves into the rock like dogs trying to fit into rabbit holes, with no fear of getting stuck. Once in place, in order to get at the coal they had to twist and contort, their arms over their heads and their picks slanted, so that when they knocked off a piece it would fall to the plank below them rather than just on their heads. The temperature only got hotter as the seam slanted upward, and the more coal that collected beneath the miners, the more the ventilation was blocked from reaching them. At the top the men were caught like grapes between the grips of a vise. I was at the bottom and not even moving, and I could barely stand one more instant of the heat and the dust and the water that constantly dripped from overhead. How was it possible that these men worked down here all day long?
The Season of Migration Page 14