I sat on a wooden chair near to his bed and let him exhaust himself. A few candles were burning; his hut was tiny, just the one room with the bed and a wooden chair, and along the wall a sink, a basin for bathing, and a small stove. “Throw all you want at me, Monsieur Desmet,” I told him; “I will still be here. I’m not here for any reason except to be with you, to listen and talk with you, that’s all.”
For hours, he abused me, he abused the Church, and he abused himself. He hated the world, he hated himself, he hated the bed he lay on, and he hated me. He rolled and writhed and spat into the bucket next to his bed with furious force. I sat next to him and said nothing. His abuse was infectious; I could sense its poison entering me. The dark of the hut was thick with it, it was as potent as the smell of liquor that bled out through his skin. The hatred swirled and swam through the air; the longer I sat there, the more sure I was that I could see it, the tail of it dancing and taunting me, approaching my mouth, my nostrils, my eyes, entering my body through any available way.
This was it, I told myself, this was my test; here it was. My own hatred was easily reached. I saw it there, in Desmet’s hut: my own anger, my own disbelief. We were in the dark together, he and I, with all of our demons and all of our doubt, all of our misdeeds, all of our regrets and shame and fury.
In a moment of quiet, Desmet turned on his side, away from me. I heard my own voice whisper, “Fire proves gold, and temptation proves the righteous man.” It was a quote from Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, that book you know I love, and I heard it hiss out into the air as if it were coming from someone other than me.
Desmet’s response was a grunt.
“All you have to do,” I said slowly, quietly, as much to myself as to him, “to show God that you are worthy is to resist temptation. ‘It is no great marvel if a man is fervent and devout when he feels no grief.’ If it were easy, there would be no need for belief.”
Desmet roared up in his bed like a tidal wave. “NO!” he screamed at me. It was as if he were a monster and not a man, so complete was his anger, so dark his form in the hut. “Don’t speak to me of belief,” he hissed. “Get out of here, rosary chewer, and let me die in peace.”
My heart was leaping in my chest, dodging the poison from side to side. What would Father do if he were here? I wondered. The poison would not enter him; at least that much is sure.
“There is no deed that is unforgivable,” I said to Desmet. Where were these words coming from? They came from me as if I were reading them in the air. “We have all done things we are ashamed of, Monsieur Desmet, all of us. God does not judge us based on the deed, but on the intent of the doer. ‘Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”
“Let him see it,” he mumbled from his bed. “Let him see my intent. Leave me, rosary chewer. Leave me to my God. My intent is to die.”
With those words, all of the air left the room; it became difficult, and then impossible, to breathe. I gasped; I leaned over and put my head between my knees, but there was no air to find. Desmet lay turned away from me; he would not speak again. A painful noise was growing in my ears, a cold headache, piercing like an icicle, in my mind. I saw that I had a choice: stay there and die with him, or leave the hut for air, and live.
Would I have been less a failure, Theo, less an idler, if I had sat next to his bed all night and all the next day, until he died? Perhaps. But I am sure that I would have died, as well. I chose, brother, I chose to live.
I will carry that man’s death on my back my whole life.
January 3, 1880
Cuesmes, the Borinage
Dear Theo,
What happened next is hard for me to write about. I am aware of an impulse as I sit down to write to you—an impulse to lie.
The last time Angeline came to my hut was a night of perfect calm; late April, peaceful spring, and then the end arrived like a storm.
That night, Angeline was more pensive, and she spoke more about herself than she ever had before. She was so beautiful, sitting there with the light from the flickering lantern on her, her face looking into the hearth. Cricket let out a few peeps when Angeline arrived; Angeline lit up at the sound of him, and she crouched to peer into his cage. I let her open the door and stick her hand in and he climbed onto her finger. She held him for a few minutes, and then she let him go and turned to me. “I dream of it, Monsieur Vincent,” she said. “I dream of getting out of here. I always have, ever since I was a girl, but I never allowed myself to think that it could be anything other than a dream, something unreal and unreachable. But lately, since I’ve been talking with you, I have started to want it more than ever. Why can’t it be? Why? Why can’t I, too, see the Amsterdam canals or the horseback riders in London? Why not me?”
She sat on the floor and looked out the window. Cricket stayed in his cage, perhaps feeling as helpless as I did. I held my tongue, my breath caught in my chest. She did not look at me.
“No one I know has ever gotten out of here, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” She paused again and was quiet for a few minutes. Then she spoke again. “When I saw my father after the accident,” she said, “when he was lying there so helpless and unable to move, I felt so strongly that I needed to escape that I thought I might suffocate right there and then, falling down at the foot of his bed.”
She spoke of Jens, her fiancé, and how she had thought the loss of him might kill her, but it did not, and so she must be stronger than she had thought. She said, nearly whispering, her head turned down, “Maybe you will think this cruel, but I wonder sometimes if his death might not have been the thing that set me free. It is not lost on me that it was his belief in God that led me to begin attending your services, which then led me here, and to your stories. And it is the stories, I think, that have led me to want to escape.”
“‘The bud may have a bitter taste, / But sweet will be the flower,’” I said. She didn’t ask me to explain the reference but merely nodded, as if she understood.
Understand, Theo: I’m still not sure what it was I felt for her. It was not what I felt for Eugénie, piercing and tortured, or for the prostitute Anna after her. It was not what I feel for Anna, our sister, or for our mother, or even for Lies and Wil. It was something altogether different. Every time we were together, I was trying to figure it out. I’m trying even now, imagining her sitting before me, the lamplight flickering on her face. How strange, to feel such a mystery in a person who sits before you! It was as if she were not real, as if she were a woman come from a dream. But then again, no, because there have been times when I have shared my space with people long dead or when I have dreamed while awake; this was different from that, too. She wanted to see; she was looking to me to fill her mind with images. I felt a responsibility toward her, a longing for her but an admiration, too, and a responsibility. She would never have left me, Theo, not like you have.
That night, we sat and talked for a while, and then a silence fell on us. We often shared silence in our evenings together; unlike most people, Angeline didn’t make me feel any pressure to perform for her. Silence can be as natural as a blade of grass, and when it arrived, we let it stay. It was such a comfort to be with someone whom I could be myself with in this way. It felt as if we had known each other for much longer than a matter of months; as if our souls knew each other, if that’s possible, from other lifetimes, other planets. Often, when there was a fire burning in the hearth, we would sit and gaze at it together, watching the simple, unending drama of the flames unfold.
After a long time, I looked to her and saw that her eyes were on me. How long had she been gazing at me like that? My heart began to flutter and I could feel my face blush; I was happy that it was dim in the hut and she could not see my color. Something large and unnameable passed between us then; I don’t know how else to describe it. There was a presence in the room with us, and then it was in our bodies, and then, as we gazed at each other, it was in the space between us, suspended
as if on a bridge. I was mesmerized by her gaze, I could not look away, at the same time that everything inside of me screamed for me to turn from her, to break whatever spell was being cast. A trap was being laid at my feet, a gaping mouth full of sharp teeth that would close over my flesh as soon as I took a step. The pull toward the trap and the pull away were equal in strength.
“Time for a portrait?” I managed, immediately regretting my words. Why had I broken the glorious silence in which we had been held? I was a coward to have stepped off the path of possibility the silence had contained. She blinked, and a certain presence came back to her face. “All right,” she said quietly.
I suppose I have never been great with women. I admit to a certain fear where they are concerned, a feeling not unlike being in a body of water where you can’t touch the bottom.
I sat before her with my pencil and paper and tried, clumsily, to capture her. The light from the lantern on the floor near us cast a warm glow onto Angeline’s face, leaving half of it in shadow. I do not know why she wanted to be there with me—feverish and dirty and frenzied, with only one set of clothes to my name—but there she was, and I was grateful. My hand was shaking a bit as I sketched her; I felt out of control and confused, sensing a strange energy in the room with us, something from that earlier moment that still lingered. I had drawn her many times before but had never felt nervous while doing so. My lines were shaky and I went over them again and again, building the outline of her, cross-legged, her skirts pulled over her knees and tucked under her, her face half in shadow, gazing alternately at me, at the hearth, and at Cricket’s cage, with a tiny hint of a smile. In the drawing, her head grew slightly too large for her body—the proportions were off—and yet as I watched the image grow I thought it was somehow fitting, accurate, for her face was the most interesting aspect of her. I had drawn her many times before, yes, but I had never felt that there was life in those other portraits—they were all simple studies for the portrait I made that night. The light cast shadows onto her arms and her skirts; her hands, resting on her knees, were patient and delicate despite the soot permanently caked under her nails.
Cricket had crept out of his cage and was hopping around the sill on his one leg, still not quite ready to fly. “Look at him!” Angeline squealed, overjoyed to see him exploring his world. I wished I could capture her face when it looked so delighted.
The drawing wasn’t done when I put it aside, but I had reached my limit for the moment and knew that if I kept the pencil moving I would begin to do damage to whatever truth I had managed to set down. “Monsieur Vincent,” Angeline said after I had laid the paper to the side and closed Cricket’s cage, with him safely back inside, her voice a near whisper, “Can I stay here with you tonight?”
My face must have passed through a number of expressions in response to this. Was I surprised? I thought I was, though now I wonder. Of course some part of me felt I must say no to her request, but how glad I am now that I did not give in to it. I could not speak, but merely nodded to her in assent.
We lay down together on the straw. I pulled my ratty blanket over us, embarrassed at the way it smelled of dirt and animals. We did not put our arms around each other; I put all my willpower into holding myself back. I thought of her as a baby bird, in need of a nest, and commanded myself to be a better man than my instincts wanted me to be. It had been such a long time since I had lain down with a woman, and my body had trouble understanding what my mind did—that Angeline was different from all the rest.
She lay curled into my body, the back of her lightly touching my front. I breathed shallowly, not wanting her to know how my heart was dancing, how I could feel my pulse in my neck. I could smell her skin, natural and earthy, and something sweet in her hair. I breathed her in, happy to have the scent of her; I could have lain there forever with that scent in my nose. I could feel her breath against me, and spent what felt like a long time trying to align my breath to hers.
After a time, I don’t know how long it was, she reached behind her and found my arm. I gave it to her readily; she pulled it over her side and held on to it, as if it were something that might keep her in place. My hand, which she held, felt as if it had become detached from the rest of me; it was an object floating in space, anchored only by her slightly damp palm and quiet fingers.
My mind was calm, more so than it had been in months, perhaps even years. I lay there next to her and all I was aware of was my breath, and hers, and the pleasant sensation of my hand being held. Her hand was around my wrist, her fingers gently touching my palm. The lantern was slowly going out, but still it cast dim flickers of light across us, and the room seemed to glow faintly. I imagined that the light was aligned with our breathing, too, and so it seemed that the dancing shadows were a part of our communion.
Even as I write this, the beauty of it gets away from me. I am trying to stay here, trying to conjure it back by giving it enough words, trying to see it as clearly as if I were still lying there. But I can’t help feeling as if my words are not enough. Are you seeing it as it was? If a great master were to paint this moment, if the brushstrokes were placed just right, would that be a better way to translate the power of it? I am not sure if that would suffice, either.
Perhaps I just don’t want to get to what comes next. I would happily stay forever, if I could, in the flickering shadows of that night, lying next to the breathing Angeline, Cricket safely in his cage on the windowsill, and not get to what comes next.
We lay together that way until dawn. When she left, I sat up with the rising sun and finished the drawing I had made of her, finally feeling there was some life in it.
Theo, when we were boys, sometimes I would get confused as to whose body was whose. You would do something, throw a stick or run across a field, and I would be confused, just for a moment, whether it had been you or me who had done that thing. Did you ever feel that way?
The truth is that even now, sometimes, it is hard for me to understand that it was me who did a particular thing, who lived through a particular moment, who witnessed a particular sight. Perhaps this is in part what these letters are—a way to prove to both of us what I have been through, so that I can believe it was really me.
1880
May 13, 7:00 p.m.
It is nearly dark when he stops by a small pond where swallows are feeding. They are diving and plunging, lunging and twisting and turning, swooping low toward the water but never touching it, their bellies missing it by barely the width of a feather. They cross one another and circle back, disappear into the trees at the water’s edge, and then turn and come again toward the center of the pond. The air is filled with the sound of their turning, their tiny twitters and chirps. At first, Vincent imagines that it must be some sort of dance they are performing, a mating ritual, or perhaps an expression of joy; then he realizes that they are eating, catching the insects that have appeared in the first cover of night. He steps closer to the water and the birds fly around him. They hum and swoosh, a few of them barely missing the edges of his jacket. Whoosh, whoosh, he holds his arms out and stands still while the birds move around him. He closes his eyes and imagines that he is a tree, a perfectly still living thing. Fellow creatures with hearts and minds and desires swoop around him, brush against him, oblivious to his presence or his goals, uncaring about his thoughts and achievements and failures. They are letting him partake; they are all sharing space on the earth. It is a moment, he thinks, that no man could reproduce.
He thinks of being down in the mine, all the bodies sharing space in the underground darkness. He remembers how it felt to be at what he thought was the bottom, and then to climb down, and farther down, and farther down still, with no light but those flickering flames sometimes turning blue. The birds moving around him now are just as busy as those bodies digging at the earth back in mining country; even now they are scraping out its insides, pulling out its guts and discarding them in mountains; they are just like these birds, just like the earthworms below him wh
ere he stands now. It is all the same: creatures doing what they do, creatures making work, creatures feeding and working and being themselves.
He opens his eyes. He thinks perhaps Angeline is in the body of one of these birds; perhaps it is her wing that is brushing against him now, or now, or now. Perhaps that is Angeline who swoops across the pond in a dramatic arc, heading toward the water with incredible speed, then ducking and turning at the last moment. He smiles at this notion, and turns from the pond feeling buoyed by the rush of the birds, the fellow creatures engaged with life, but a mere few minutes past the pond he feels a cloud move back over his vision and his mind grows dark. He feels a pang of such despair that he sinks to his knees. This is a fool’s errand that he is on; he is walking to nowhere, a wretched scarecrow dressed up like a man with a purpose. What does he think he will find at the end of this walk? His brother has sent him no letters for almost a year; what does he think will be accomplished by going to see him, by taking him his letters? And what in God’s name will happen then?
He remembers the feeling he had when he went to the Borinage: it was as if he had been standing in front of a glass case with a treasure locked inside for almost four years, being told no and no and no every time he tried to reach it, and then one day the case was opened and he was allowed to reach inside. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt like maybe he might be good at something, maybe he might know what he was meant to do, how he could be himself and bring good to the world at the same time. He knew his path would be different—he couldn’t be a preacher like his father, he couldn’t get the theological degree and wear a suit and tie and say things he did not believe, but still he could bring God’s message to the poor, even only as himself, as the mere Vincent.
He remembers Angeline, in Bible class, asking him something about the text they were reading, and the way that his answer dissatisfied him, the way that her probing question made a rope in his stomach start to twist. He remembers the man in the village, Monsieur Desmet, who died alone and without God; wasn’t his death just the same as all the others? Louls Hartmann, the hulking man who walked before Vincent in the mine shaft, dying with his insides exploded on the long yard of the terrible hungry mine—was he any more secure than Desmet was, dying in the warmth of his bed, his body intact? He thinks of his father, telling him that God wished him to be who he was: If God had wanted you to be a miner, He would have made you one. A man was not supposed to live like another man; a man was not supposed to prostrate himself beyond the level that he was already prostrate. The pair of reverends in his hut, standing over him with their disapproving faces under their top hats, making those noises with their mouths: tsk tsk tsk, as if he were a piece of fruit gone bad.
The Season of Migration Page 17