It is only some days that I don’t feel confused about this.
The woodpecker digs its beak into the bark. His beak is like a drill; he pokes violently at the tree. It seems arbitrary, but it can’t be, for he comes up with a grub. What I mean to say is that what seems aimless is not. And perhaps a man should trust his instincts. Somehow I feel that there is a purpose to this writing, that at the end of all these words there is something to find, a grub to discover in the grass. Perhaps if I look closely enough at what has passed, I will find in the prism of it the seed of what comes next. Did you think you could come visit and learn anything in a few hours, in a day? When you’ve visited for a life already and learned nothing?
I am trying to get to a place where it does not pain me to say what I mean. It is hard to tell this story; I hope that much is clear. Here I am, months after your visit, and I have not reached the end. My words are fighting with my anger and my hurt wants to turn away from you forever. I approach the page again and again. I want to explain; I want not to have to explain.
Dear Theo,
One day not too many months ago, in September perhaps, I was sitting by the entrance to the Marcasse mine with pencil and paper, sketching what I saw: a thin tree, the men coming out of the gate.
Across the yard I saw a miner making his way to the pit. He was an older man, bent and shuffling, reporting for another day of work, his body carrying him through its routine as it had for so many years, a vessel to bring him through his day and what more? He was wearing the regulation linen work clothes and a vest made of burlap sacking, and as he moved across my line of sight I saw that there was something written on the back of him. Already, before I saw what the word was, I was pleased by this, and thought for a second that it might be my imagination, for if my mind had its way there would be words on all of our backs. What would the word be if I were inventing it? I stood and moved a few steps closer, peering after him to see my own mind reveal itself, and when the word came into focus, I staggered back. Written across the old man’s back as he made his way to the yawning mouth of the mine waiting to swallow him was this word, clear as water, in red capital letters: FRAGILE.
The man moved across the ground with his label, “Fragile,” and the earth swallowed him, and it would have been so no matter the word on his back.
I spoke of that man to everyone who would listen, but when I described him to other miners, they nearly always looked at me with confused expressions: Yes, so what? It was as it has often been with me: I open my mouth to explain what I see and it is as if what comes out of me is a flurry of bees. People turn their heads and swat at their faces in confusion; they run from me, because why would you stay near a man who carries a beehive in his mouth?
February 6
Dear Theo,
Decrucq was recovered alive from the earth; Angeline and her sister never were. Decrucq, the man who claimed that the mines could not kill him, was proved right once again. The mine wanted the flesh of young women more than the tough old bones of a man hardened by its own air.
I lay in my hut as if I, too, were dead. Though it shames me to write it, I must tell you: Our baby brother Vincent appeared, wearing a shimmering nightshirt, hovering near the ceiling, waiting for me to address him. He did not speak. It had been at least a year since he had visited me—the last time was in Amsterdam, near the end, when exhaustion had a hold of me and I knew I could not go on. Please do not think I am mad for seeing him; I could, of course, not tell you about him, which might be more sane, but if I am to tell it all, if I am to trust you with it, he was there.
I thought of you, in a gallery in Goupil’s, so far from me it was as if you were across an ocean. The phrase from Michelet repeated in my mind: “We are today what we were yesterday.”
After a week or so, Decrucq back in his bed and tended to by Hannah, the rescue party gave up, backed away from the mine with their picks and shovels, and added the names of the missing to the names of the dead. Angeline Dubois and her sister, Francesca, lights in their eyes, skin like rosy petals, extinguished somewhere below the surface of the earth, swallowed back into the original dark womb. No one looked for them anymore; their mother would never see their bodies to wish them a proper farewell; there could be no burial because their burial had already occurred. Were they together when they died? Did they clasp each other’s hands in the darkness? Did they share a moment of peace or fellowship before the end? Were they crushed quickly, or was death prolonged, air slowly diminishing, delicate bodies twisted awkwardly in spaces not meant for bodies? I imagined every scenario: timbers entering flesh, ladders bent and crumbling, visitations from Heaven and Hell. Angeline’s death became the vision that I lived inside of.
Madame Denis brought me food, ducking into the dark of my hut and clucking over me. When I could not respond to her, she left me milk and warm bread on a tray. In my delirium, I did not know that I ate.
* * *
Hubert Aert came to my hut one morning just past dawn to tell me of the strike. I don’t know how many days I had been lying there; when Hubert knocked, it was the sound of someone alive knocking in the depths of the earth.
It must have been sometime in May. I was delirious from hunger, and the absence of sleep had turned all my waking moments to a dream. Baby Vincent hovered by my ears and whispered to me: I was no good, I had killed her because I had touched her, because everything I touched went wrong. I no longer knew what I believed in, and without this I no longer knew anything. If a man knows nothing, he is lost.
Cricket the bird lay dead on the bottom of his cage; I do not know if he died of natural causes or because I had ceased to feed him.
I lay on the floor as if in a grave, and Hubert said my name again, and again, and consciousness began to return to me; in confusion I began to perceive the light in the room, streaming through the dirty window onto the floor near my feet, I began to understand that the man now crouching near to me was not an apparition. Hubert placed his hand on my shoulder; his palm was rough but warm and with it came a charge of life. When Lazarus was summoned, did he have a choice but to respond?
“Monsieur Vincent,” Hubert said again, and this time I heard him. “We need your help.”
I was in no position to help anyone. My spirit was more broken than many of the miners’, for I was supposed to be in a position to aid them, and instead I had given away all I had. I had nothing left. No spirit, no clothes, no money, no food, no warmth, no comfort or belief or assurance, no answers. It was Hubert who was helping me and not vice versa.
But when Hubert said, “We need your help,” again I felt my soul rise up. I shook my head against my visions and focused on Hubert’s face. He was real; he was alive. He helped me to sit up and he told me about the strike. The miners were angry. They were desperate. Explosions had been happening more and more, and this last one had devastated the village; the company’s inspections of the mines were not adequate.
“They are ignoring the dangers,” said Hubert; “the company is putting our lives in danger and offering us no compensation in return.” While the rescue teams searched for survivors in the mines, while the mines were closed, no wages were paid, and so on top of their grief and their suffering, the miners were now also hungry. Even Madame Denis could not make bread anymore. The company was now ordering them back to work. They had given them nothing, though it was, of course, not the miners’ fault that the mines were unsafe. What could they do but strike?
In my time in the Borinage I had seen the miners come close to a strike more than once; sometimes it seemed they were always on the verge of a strike. Conditions never improved, and there was never enough of anything—food, money, coal—and striking was the only commodity the miners felt they had, though it wasn’t much of a commodity at all. When they went on strike, they suffered more than anyone: Their food dwindled and disappeared; their meager ration of coal was retracted; they had nothing to do but confront the reality of their situation, which was that they lived in houses th
at were owned by the very company they were up against. Without their enemy, they were even more lost, even more nowhere and no one.
I could see from Hubert, though, that this strike was different. He sat next to me on the floor of the hut, the rectangle of light from the window creeping closer to us, slowly covering his boots.
“What is the limit of what a man can stand?” Hubert whispered, and even in the dim light I could see his eyes were shining with tears. His words were all of action, but all he was really speaking of was sorrow. He was a representative of a group of people felled by grief and by desperation. Striking was the only way they could manifest that they were still human.
My suspicions were confirmed later that day, after Else Aert fed me bread and a few cups of black coffee, and Hubert took me to the strike meeting in the salon. My legs were weak as we walked down the hill toward the building, but I dared not show my limp. As we approached the building, I could see the crowd. People were pouring into the building and standing in clusters outside, chattering and shaking their heads and fists. Everyone who could walk was there—Decrucq, though his sons were there on his behalf, had had to stay behind in his bed—and when I managed to push my way into the room, I saw Paul Fontaine was at the front, holding up his hands and fielding questions as if they were tangible objects that he could push away.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I knew nothing, least of all how a man should gamble with his livelihood or honor his pain. I was not the same man I had been a few weeks before—or perhaps I was just the same, but with a new fear that when I spoke, it would be as hot air that came out, dangerous and deceptive hot air that could help no one.
Paul saw me in the crowd and called for me to come stand with him. I thought of Angeline, her quiet smile, which gave me such confidence, which showed me how she was listening to me, that my words were gifts that were given and received. I tried to picture her in the crowd, watching me with her brown eyes under her scarf, encouraging me to be the leader that I once dreamed I was. What would she think of this strike? I was sure that she would think it sad, the desperate gesture of a population drowning in despair, a people with no means of escape.
Paul looked to me to say something. “‘In the midst of life we are in death,’” I began; “‘of whom may we seek for succor?’” But I could not answer my own question; I felt no interest in its answer. I dropped my hands.
She was gone. I stood next to Paul and all my words died in my throat.
PART III
1880
May 14, 1:00 p.m.
He is delirious with hunger, and starting to hallucinate. He dreams of water and a feast of rosemary chicken, succulent drumsticks in both his hands. Paul Fontaine walks beside him, carrying a mining lamp; Charles Decrucq lies in a pit by the side of the road, his skin slick with mud and his lamp burning blue. Angeline stands before him in her mining clothes, covered in dust; Angeline hovers before him, cross-legged and with a shy smile, her head just a bit too big for her body. Alard holds his hand and swings it with each stride, but when Vincent looks at him, he is gone.
He starts to lose time, shifting between moments near and far.
He is a boy. He is lying on the thin rug before the hearth in Zundert with a pencil gripped in his hand, so tightly that it makes a groove in his palm. He hears no sound, only the scratch of the pencil over the parchment, the dark stroke over the page.
His family is there, he can vaguely hear the sound of them talking over the noise of his concentration. It is a joke for them, how they can say things to him and he won’t hear them; they can insult him and poke him with their shoes and he will not respond. He is never very good at doing more than one thing at once, but this is a disappearance, so they have told him, as complete as if he has fallen through a hole in the floor.
The image his hand is molding grows before his eyes; a line turns into two, turns into a shaded corner or a shortened face. He is drawing a frog, an elephant, a beetle, the fireplace itself. It is his hand that is making this thing, his hand is growing an object that is not an object, but how can his hand do such a thing? It is his brain, it is a pencil, it is his hand, it is the parchment paper itself, stained with growing streaks of black. His head lies on his arm; he is at eye level with the paper. He sketches the lines on the paper but feels the shape of each line as if it is being carved onto his arm.
But as the image develops, so does his hatred of it. There is unease from the start, a twist in the lowest part of his stomach, not unlike what he feels as Christmas approaches each year. The image is a root that could turn into beauty or poison. And as the drawing emerges, becoming more a representation and less a collection of disconnected lines, the unease, too, gains definition. The hand cannot stop itself, the lines continue to expand and marry one another, but he resists what the hand is doing: The shading should be darker, the pencil is inferior, the face looks like an apple and not a face at all. The image looks nothing like what it should. He hates the pencil; he hates the paper; he hates his hand.
He digs the pencil deeper and deeper into the parchment; he hates the drawing and he wants it to disappear, and yet he can’t stop himself. The image grows, the parchment rips, and the lines grow angry and distorted. He scribbles over it, then sits up and tears it in two, and then four, and then a hundred pieces, and throws them into the fire.
* * *
He is ten years old, in his father’s church, listening to his father preach about sin. The concept is one Vincent has always known—the word is a part of his world, and has always been—but hearing his father at the front of the church speak of the sinners among them, he knows suddenly and without doubt that he is being spoken to. His father is speaking to him, from the pulpit; his sermon is directed at his second firstborn son. A sinner! So that’s what he is.
He feels relief, a sense of recognition, a sharpening of vision as when a steamy mirror is wiped clean. At the same time there is shame, hot and relentless, a tightening in his stomach and groin such that he immediately feels he has to relieve himself. His face flushes; his ears are on fire. He wants to hide under the pew where his family sits, block his ears with his hands so he can’t hear any more. What do you do when you are labeled, when you see yourself clearly for the first time? He sits quietly, his face burning, his hands in fists on his lap, his legs crossed, until the service is over.
Back at the parsonage, his mother preparing supper, he sneaks out of the house and dashes down the lane, running quickly to the nearest empty field. Behind a barn, he sinks to his knees, breathing heavily. He doesn’t know what to do. He is still wearing his church clothes, the long shorts coming just to his knees, his socks and black leather shoes, which are now scuffed and probably ruined, another thing he has done wrong, another reason to repent. He will be in trouble just for being here, for having sneaked out of the house, for thinking the wrong thing during his father’s sermon, which his father will never say was about him. He has ruined his clothes and, no doubt, his family’s meal. He bends over, touching his forehead to the grass, breathing in the smell of dirt and grass, taking a few blades into his mouth. He is a sinner, that is what he is. When a person is a sinner, is there any way to change? He is surprised to realize that he is crying.
He rakes his fingers through the grass behind the barn, harder and harder, tearing up the soil in clumps, feeling the dirt press in under his fingernails. It is not enough. He brings his hands to his skin and rakes the dirt across his legs, using his fingernails to scrape ruts in his skin, watching with a strange detached wonder as the dirt mixes with his blood and makes lines across him. The pain is both close and far away. The ruts light up his skin, the fiery sting of them clearing the clouds in his chest, relieving the pressure in his bladder. It is what he deserves. There is less, now, to be ashamed of.
* * *
It is late November in the Borinage, four months after his dismissal. He is back in Petit Wasmes, a ghost returning to the scene of his death.
This is where he died:
These huts, these chickens, these goats scampering away from him, these are his murderers. People peer out from behind dirty curtains; he can see their grubby hands as they shoo him away. Chickens flap their wings as they run, trying to show him that they are strong. He runs after them, shaking his head and flapping his arms like wings. Noises come from his throat that he has never heard before. He runs after the chickens and he is no longer human, he is a bird that cannot fly. His feet are claws, his arms are flightless wings, his feathers ratty and ragged.
Three boys are gathered at the end of a lane, and they are using a stick to poke a goat that is tied to a stake in the ground. One of the boys wears pants that are tattered and frayed; all three of them wear shirts of coarse linen, surely sewn by their mothers. Vincent slows to a stop in front of them. For a minute or two they just look at one another. He can see the one with the torn pants is the leader; he is deciding what nature of foe Vincent is.
The Season of Migration Page 19