She shook her head. “This family has already been through so much, Monsieur Vincent.” She looked at Angeline, who kept her eyes on the bed, and for a moment I thought I felt the presence of another man in the room, the fiancé who had died in the mine. Then Madame Dubois looked at her son, still standing at the foot of the bed. “That mine just keeps taking and taking; when will it give back to us?”
Angeline’s father lay still on the bed. I imagined I could hear the hissing and popping of his skin, as if it were a piece of meat frying in a skillet. How could I say to these people that the Lord works in mysterious ways? How could I tell them that this was God’s will, their husband and father lying helpless on that mattress with his skin charred and sizzling? I thought of Father, tending to his parishioners all those years ago, telling those suffering people that it was God’s will. I used to get so angry at him when I was a boy, listening to him say those things, and there I was, frantically trying to say the same thing.
I remembered the Reverend Laurillard, whom I had seen in Amsterdam the year before—such an impressive, capable preacher, who always seemed to know just what to say to address his congregation. I tried to conjure him, to think of how he might respond to Madame Dubois, but it was no simple thing. “Madame Dubois,” I said, “the Christian life has its dark side, and it is mainly men’s work. This world is incomprehensible. Is there anything that happens that we can understand? We must be as God made us, sorrowful yet ever rejoicing. In the next world…” I stopped. She was looking at me, Theo, looking me straight in the eye, her husband lying behind her. I could not say it. For a long moment I stood there with my mouth open, struggling, and then I gave up. “I don’t know, Madame Dubois,” was all I could eventually manage. I shook my head and looked away from her. “I don’t know.”
* * *
Later that night there was a knock on the door of my hut. I had never had a visitor; I opened the door with surprise, expecting Father perhaps, or you, I hoped, and then was even more surprised when I saw that it was Angeline. “Hello,” she said shyly. She could barely meet my eyes. “I’m sorry to bother you. I hope it’s all right.”
“Of course!” I said. “I was just reading. Come in, please.”
We sat on the floor by the hearth. I had only one chair, and a rickety old table that I had taken out of one of the abandoned miners’ cabins in the village; I offered her the chair, but she said she preferred the floor. Together we watched the bird in his cage; I had taken to calling him Cricket, for he reminded me in a way I cannot explain of summer evenings in Zundert, the crickets singing and the birds chirping their last songs for the night. He watched us, in turn, quietly, curious.
I had to remind myself that Angeline was only seventeen. The Borinage ages people early, and I could see it in Angeline, who had been through more than many. Women at twenty-five in the Borinage have already spent years in the mine and then birthed five or six children. They are used up and spent, hollow and sagging, and there is no second birth for them. But sitting in front of the fire in my little hovel, I could see that Angeline was just a girl. Her skin was perfect and radiant, her features unlined and fresh, but nonetheless her face carried such pain. It is always difficult to see someone so young struggling to bear such weight.
“I just didn’t know who to talk to,” she said after a time. “I needed to get out of that house, but I didn’t want to be alone.”
“I understand,” I said. “You’re always welcome.”
We sat for quite a long time in silence. The fire crackled and hissed, and I thought of her father’s skin in the dark hut, his burns lit up in patches of shadow.
“He’s so quiet,” she said about the bird.
“I know,” I said. “Paul brought him back for me from the mine. I guess he’s not used to living aboveground. Isn’t that so strange for a bird? He has let out a few chirps since I got him; I’m hoping to learn what he likes. This is Angeline,” I said to the bird. “Say hello! Hello!” Cricket was quiet, but he was listening.
Angeline stood to inspect the bird in his cage, standing before it quietly for some moments. “See the feathers on the bottom of the cage?” she said without turning around. “This bird is molting.”
“Really?” I stood up and joined her at the cage.
“Yes,” she said. “That is probably why it is quiet. When birds are molting, they often don’t sing. He might start to sing in a few months, when the molting period is over. Unless,” she added, “this bird is female. Female canaries often don’t sing much at all.”
“Oh!” We looked in together at Cricket, who stood on his one leg, looking back at us calmly. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.
“My father bred canaries for a while when I was a child. We used to raise them until they were old enough to go down in the mines. I used to help him take care of them, clean out their cages and things like that. My father loves birds.” She stopped, as if thinking about her father was dragging her elsewhere, somewhere she didn’t want to go. She turned and sat down again before the hearth and was quiet. I joined her on the floor and waited for her to speak again.
“Monsieur Vincent,” Angeline said after a while, “will you tell me about other places?”
I was confused at first; what kind of places did she mean? Was I to speak as the pastor and tell her of Heaven, promise her a future life beyond this one of suffering, or ought I speak to her as a mere man? As I had with her mother, I thought carefully about how to answer her. I tried, Theo, I tried to answer the way I thought Father might want me to. I was quiet for a time, and then began: “Perhaps when we long for other places, we are in fact longing to reach the Lord, for there is a house of the Father in which there are ‘many mansions,’ and ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are the pure in heart,’ who long to reach them.”
She looked at me then with patience but shook her head. “I don’t mean heavenly places,” she said, “just anywhere, just someplace other than this. You’ve been to other places, I assume, to Brussels, to Paris? I’ve never been away from here. What are those other places like? What is it like where you are from?”
Then I understood: She wanted images. She wanted visions to replace the ones in her head, visions of joy rather than of suffering, visions of a wider world than the one that confronted her here. My heart broke open for her then.
That night, a ritual began that continued in the evenings for a few weeks. I started slowly and haltingly; that first night I showed her the prints on my walls, and one of them was The Road to Rijswijk, by Weissenbruch, which you gave to me, and so I told her about the day that we had walked along that canal in The Hague and drank milk at the old mill. “The sails,” I said to her, realizing only as I spoke how difficult it was to describe them to someone who had never seen anything like them, “well, they were huge, probably each one the size of one of your smaller slag mountains, and they were slowly revolving, turning around and around one another in a beautiful slow white dance.” She sat cross-legged in front of me, holding the print in her hands, her eyes wide and attentive, as if she were a child and I were reading her a storybook full of magical details. I imagined shrinking down that print, Theo, so I could place it on her tongue, so she could swallow the image like the sacrament that it was.
Nearly every night after that, she arrived at my door, terribly shy at first, as of course I was, too, for what was it exactly that we were doing there together? But we always soon forgot ourselves. I told Angeline about Zundert, about you and me in our bed in the room where the flag flew from the window, about the garden in the back with the magpie nest, all greens and purples and blues, about the fields and heath and rivers that we explored as boys. I told her about London, about the parks and ginger beer and the women with parasols of a thousand colors and hundreds of people on horseback; I told her about Amsterdam and its canals, all the little side paths that I walked along, linden trees, interwoven and Gothic. I told her about Paris, the houseboats parked on the quays, the books and pri
nts for sale along the riverbanks, and how you could walk and walk and walk forever and never reach the end. I told her about walking along the ocean in England, watching the fisherman trawling with their nets, the waves washing up beautiful shells and smooth rocks that I then tossed back, the heads of seals poking up from the depths, the way that the sound of the surf calmed my heart. So many images, everything I had ever seen was transformed into beauty in that hut with Angeline. She was hungry for color, Theo; she was hungry to live. She was hungry for detail, for reality, for this world, not for any other.
“If only one can remember what one has seen,” I said one night, “one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” I said this, and then I thought perhaps it was wrong, for Angeline had seen almost nothing outside her tiny village. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that was insensitive, wasn’t it.”
She looked surprised, her eyebrows raised, and then she smiled. “Was it?” she asked.
“You asked me to share with you things I have seen, but not to brag, and not to proclaim that I am a happier person because I have seen these things. I am sorry; I get carried away.”
She was amused, looking at me almost as if I were a child. It was a look I often saw on her face when I knew I was becoming too animated in my description of a particular place or thing—a look of patience, of bemusement. “Thank you for your sensitivity,” she said, “but really there’s no need for it. I feel that way about what few beautiful things I have seen in my life, too, and I am not sorry you said it.”
I nodded. “Good,” I said. “Well then, I don’t take it back.”
She laughed. “Monsieur Vincent,” she said, shaking her head, “there is so much more to you than the people here know.” She said it not with judgment or even with wonder; it was just a simple statement, as if she had looked out the window and said it had begun to rain.
Yes, Theo, I was confused about my behavior. Never before had a woman been so interested in me, so attentive and quizzical, so present, and Angeline was not just any woman, but a wounded and sensitive young beauty. Angeline had a sweet and thoughtful soul, and questioned everything she encountered, so that whenever we stumbled upon the subject of theology, she probed me with well-articulated queries that I could not always answer. “But why?” she often asked. “But why?” And why, I soon learned, is not a word easily answered by Scripture.
I did not tell her of my failures; instead of telling her that I had dropped out of my theological studies, I let her think that the study I had done in Amsterdam was what led me to the Borinage. The change from art dealer to preacher was a natural one, I told her, a choice I had made because my soul was not fulfilled by the selling of prints to the public. I did not tell her of my dismissal from Goupil’s, nor of my brief stint at the school in Ramsgate or my job in that wretched bookshop in Dordrecht.
I was aware of a certain molding of my story so that it sounded crafted and planned, a series of forward steps along a road rather than a series of stumbles. My conscience pulled at me as I watched her accept my tale without question; why wouldn’t she believe me? But of course what I was telling her were terribly close to lies. Yes, I wondered whether I was falling in love with her. If so, what could happen then? I thought of Father shaking his head, and I wondered what you would say; if this were true, if I loved her, I would lose my appointment for sure. But there were times when I looked at her in the dim light and knew I did not care. After she left, ducking out of the hut with a shy bow, I would punish myself, pacing back and forth across my dusty floor and castigating myself, furiously shaking my head to shake free the part of myself that needed her to see me as other than I was. It was confusing, to be so utterly yourself with someone—I shared more of myself with her than I had ever shared with anyone else, except you—and at the same time to feel you were hiding who you really were. Some nights, I felt no torture about this; other nights, I made myself go out and lie down in the snow until I nearly froze. Yes, I thought of writing you, but I did not know what to say.
You will no doubt be thinking of Eugénie Loyer, remembering how tortured that whole affair was. I thought of her, too, very frequently in those weeks with Angeline, worried that I was making a similar mistake, thinking that Angeline might have any interest in me when in fact she had none. I knew that if you were there, you would remind me of Eugénie, remind me of those nights in London after she told me she was engaged, and to the man who had slept in my room before me; I had to sleep in that bed for a few ugly weeks before I could leave to come home, imagining his body in those sheets next to mine; how could I forget it? It was enough, remembering that time, to encourage me not to get too close to Angeline.
Charles Dubois slowly recovered and began going out again, walking some distance just for exercise; his hands were still weak and it would be some time before he could use them for his work, but he was out of danger. There was an outbreak of typhoid and malignant fever, which gave the villagers nightmares and made them delirious. My days were filled with visits to the sick—I gave them my money and my clothes, all but the one set that I wore on my back. I moved from bed to bed, attempting to comfort and bring warmth, but I was growing weaker; I was not eating much and my nights were filled with vivid and terrible dreams. I was sick, too, but with something other than what ailed the villagers. One day, one of the miner women, whose husband and three children lay feverish in two beds pushed together in the back of her hut, placed her hand on my shoulder and turned her eyes on me with pity. She, Theo, she pitied me! “You don’t look well, Monsieur Vincent,” she said. “Perhaps you ought to go home and rest.” She offered me a coffee and a crust of bread, neither of which she had to spare. I nearly fell to my knees right there in her hut; I wanted to crawl under those beds and die there.
My evenings with Angeline were what I gave to myself. I allowed myself them as if they were nourishment, as if she were food. Often, I sketched while I was with her, for there were so many images from the day that I wanted to capture. A few nights, I tried to draw her, sitting cross-legged before the hearth; the drawings were never right—in one she looked anonymous, as if she could be any woman at all; in another she was leaning back on her hands and so her front looked like an animal, as if it were unconnected to her arms. None of them captured her. I had to ask her permission, with some humiliation, to try again.
* * *
I was still doing the evangelical work as best I could, despite my own growing fever, brought on by overwork and lack of food and the cold in my hut. The outbreak of sickness in the village had put an end to our Bible meetings, and I was presiding over far too many funerals. I stopped giving sermons, too, for I felt my time was better spent with the ill miners and their families.
The miners were still mostly kind to me, despite the increasing frequency of strange looks cast my way and the children who hid behind their mothers’ skirts when I came near. I was still trying to hold our school lessons, though fewer children were attending; no one told me why, but I suspect it was the parents who kept them away. One day, I arrived at the salon and found only Alard there, sitting alone on one of the chairs and looking out the window. “I think it is only me today,” he said sheepishly when I stepped into the room.
He never asked me why I had moved out of his parents’ house, though I could tell he didn’t understand. He often looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if he was trying to make out just who I was. I didn’t mind; he was trying to understand me, which is more than most people have tried to do. That day in the salon, I didn’t read to him from the Bible, but instead began to read him Dickens’s Hard Times from the beginning—I had just finished it, and was pleased to share it with him. I have spoken to you about Dickens before, I think, and so perhaps you know how I feel about him—he is one of the clearest writers there are. Alard, while he listened, was enwrapped in the story, and I loved to see him so.
I thought of all those nights with Gladwell in Paris, up late reading the Bible to each other. How lucky he is,
Alard, that he will never have to go down inside that growling beast, the mine.
There was a miner who was notorious in the village for being an unbeliever; his name was Louis Desmet and he was a blasphemer, one of these sorts of men that spoke in torrents against God as a way to prove that He did not exist; why, his argument went, if He was so powerful, didn’t He strike him down when he disobeyed His commandments? He was a terrible drunk, a burly, reckless man, who had once been married but whose wife had run away from him and from the Borinage in the middle of the night. He had a mustache that curled down off of his lip and just touched the base of his chin; he must have worked hard to keep the rest of his jaw clean. I avoided contact with him for a long time, not only because of the looks he gave me when I was near him, the way he spat on the ground close to my feet and muttered pointed words, but because I had no need to occupy myself with people who had no interest in me when there were plenty of other villagers who were welcoming. But recently I had heard he was sick, and I knew the time had come for us to encounter each other. I had visited every other sick person in the village; why should he be an exception?
He must have been tipped off that I was coming, for as soon as I approached the doorway to his house, I was greeted by a volley of abuse, he didn’t want me in his house spreading God, he hadn’t invited me, no rosary chewer was welcome in his house. His words were mixed with coughing and spitting and accompanying groans. This man was no one to fear in his present condition.
“Monsieur Desmet,” I said, ducking into the darkness, “I assure you that I am no ‘rosary chewer.’ I don’t even own a rosary, and never have.”
There was something about the force of his disbelief that gave me confidence. I don’t know exactly what his experiences had been before this with religion, but clearly they had undone him, and it took some time before he would even lie still in my presence. His infirmity helped, unfortunate as it was, for if he had had his full strength, I’m sure he never would have allowed me in his house in the first place.
The Season of Migration Page 16