I met Pieter in a dingy university bar in the oldest section of Ghent. It was full of miserable intellectuals for the most part, people who snorted instead of laughed, as if they were entirely above humour. He was different, of course, else I’d never have bothered with him. He was all gangly and confident. He had a small logging operation. It was hard to imagine anyone logging in Belgium, and so I found him generally amusing, archaic; I suppose I fell in love with him almost immediately. He spoke a disjointed, dysfunctional English, which made everything he said sound charming and vaguely stupefied.
You like me. I like you. We are aliking each other, he said. Is this good?
Do you hire women on your logging crews? I asked this demurely and out of pure tactic. We were standing beside each other at the bar, drinking blanchkes with little peels of lemon sinking down into them. It was obvious I was having him on; I was a terrible flirt. Of course, I was over there with only one goal in mind. I could be very stubborn, a real stickler for goals and such. He was adorable, all standing-up hair and questioning eyes, clean-shaven. He stared at me, not understanding the question.
I repeated, Do you ever have women working for you?
Oh, no, never, he said.
Really? I’m very strong.
Yes, oh, I would hire you, Adriana. This is special.
That was how it started. An enormous amount of time had passed since. Pieter’s English had come to be letter perfect; I had come to see that the goal of autonomy was a shifting bastard of a thing. That ideal of self, a container of you-ness or me-ness, was a facile improbability, as all ideals are. I was not unhappy; I was hurtling toward happiness at all times. I had attained some sort of freedom — the sort given by your loved ones even as they cleave to you. Maybe that’s all a person could expect.
I wished I had slept with Erwin before he died, before Pieter felled the spindly little scrap of a tree that would decapitate him and end his days on earth. They were brothers, you know. I wish I had the pleasure and misery of certain memories of Erwin’s hand along the inside of my thigh, the surfacing of orgasm like a shattering of any possibility. I could languish in the grudge that the widow bears the dead and the almost-faux secret the adulteress coddles from her husband (for he must know, he must). My miscreant behaviour would not have been against Pieter. I would have slept with Erwin in spite of my love for Pieter, in spite of myself and all common sense, in spite of Erwin, who no doubt would have had his own good reasons for not crossing the line, yet could not, just as I could not, forestall the fates.
The poplar trees in this mess of a forest all these years later had been planted in 1946 under the instruction of the Belgian government, once the ash from the Second World War had settled. The distance between each of these trees, the distance between all trees in Belgium, was set at eight metres. The undergrowth was grassy where it wasn’t overgrown with stinging nettle or damped down by rotting leaves. A recent hurricane had spun the tops of the trees viciously in twisted circles and back on themselves, plucked them out of the earth like so many weeds and thrown them down like little sticks on top of each other. Their trunks flexed unnaturally; some of these trees were thirty metres in height (now length), and the torque buildup in their stems was enormously dangerous if you happened to want to try to trim the branches, cut the roots away, clean the butt end, and chop the leaders off, which is exactly what we intended to do. We expected the trees to violently resist our taming.
This one’s for Erwin, Pieter said. He dedicated every forest he felled or cleaned up to his brother, as if an accumulation of offerings would alter the course of history. I watched the chimney stack of the Doem nuclear station off to the left, far in the distance, its smoke billowing in a cumulus of waste and condensation. The infrastructure for the building was largely underground; the stack was huge. They were having problems with fish — herring mostly — being drawn into the reactor by the tens of thousands. They were drawn through the water intake into the heavy water tanks. Pieter and Erwin used to slide herring down their throats, whole.
These are fantastic, Adriana. Open up.
Yes, open up, Erwin had said, forcing me to sit and then pulling my head back, making me laugh so that he could bring a fish down over my tongue. I gagged on the salty ocean meat; he held his open palm along my throat.
Hollanders and the people of the lowlands have a great love for herring. They smoke by the millions those caught off the coast in the cold currents of the North Sea, and what is more, they pickle the rest and can them in attractive little aluminum tins, the lids of which peel off with the help of a sort of Allen key. They stand at market, and have done so for centuries, in little manly groups, tilting their heads back and sliding the fish down their gullets. It is a tradition — men in wooden clompen and blue marine sweaters (knitted in cables and tied with effeminate pompoms at the neck), their throats translucently white, like swans swallowing. The Doem laboratories subcontracted the job, installing underwater screens and noisemakers to keep the herring in safe water. A loud, dull, unfriendly din was broadcast beneath the sea, and still the herring were awed by the sucking intake toward the heavy water containers. Some slipped through the protective mesh. The rest huddled, their noses bumping again and again into the screen, listening to the whirr of eradication.
Pieter and Erwin had been singing a song, and when they finished, they rolled open a tin of little dead fishes and laughed at my disgust and slid them into their mouths. I felt Erwin’s hand undulate along the shape of the fish, creating space in my esophagus; his fingertips ran slightly under my sweater. I could have left Pieter in our bed that night and gone to him — his hand would run down my throat, my hand would draw his foreskin down, we should kiss then, a line of spittle between our tongues.
Pieter had introduced me to Erwin within days of my arrival in Ghent.
He’ s better than me in every way.
Erwin was a tall, tousle-haired dirty blond with a cheeky smile and a lanky off-kilter walk, like an overgrown child. He was not better in any way than Pieter but rather was a sort of complement, as if the two brothers, so close in age, had taken only certain human aspects and nurtured them but left the rest to rot, knowing that the other would compensate. We ate together every night — we called these meals homemade primitives — stews or omelettes, spaghetti. Once we dumped osso bucco unceremoniously on the table, no plates or cutlery, salad scattered in the centre. We ate like that to alleviate the banality of life and because it made us laugh. We drank plonk directly out of the bottle and laughed and laughed.
Erwin’s death precipitated a personality gap in Pieter, of course, a void which initially filled with sorrow. I believe that death became a strange life force in our relationship. The actions of our daily lives were a direct result of our sadness; we were affected, I say touched, by that ghost of loss.
He’s not coming back, I said.
I don’t expect it, either.
But you wish.
He said, There is a crooner song Erwin and I used to sing — I piss like before in the sink/ I sleep with my clothes on/ what a lousy life.
So, you don’t even wish it.
It’s like this, I think, he said as he sat down on a fallen tree trunk, which bounced like a park toy. I don’t expect it, and I don’t wish it. It’s over. But still a part of me looks over my shoulder and recognizes him in other people, as if he has scattered — little atoms and molecules seeking a place in this stranger’s hair colour, that one’s glint of the eye. He has become a series of lost pieces.
I took a swig from Pieter’s thermos. It was not coffee. The wine was bitter at first, its sweetness hidden within this cold unhappiness. I took comfort in Pieter, in his body — his handsome face which was vaguely flattened out, his high cheekbones; he was older in appearance than in reality. The muscles in his back extended up into his convex neck, giving his head a look of stability. His hair was golden in the diffused Flemish light. His lips had a curving sensuality. Weather had given his forehead a furrow o
f concern; he had an elegant body curving into natural muscles, his penis a fascinating exclamation mark.
He had been working the forests across Belgium for more than ten years. We sat quietly there on the lopped branch for some time beside a line of Stihl chainsaws, a can of oil, a can of gasoline. I wondered about it, about the atomic dispersal of Erwin. The arc of Pieter’s penis, had it changed, shifted from left to right, lightened slightly in hue? There were still parts of his body unexplored. I made a mental note to slow down, take my time about it. A waft of gasoline blew past on the wind, sweet.
When’s the crane supposed to be here?
By noon.
Do you have a plan?
It’s going to be a day from hell, I can tell you.
As far as the eye could see, not a tree was left standing. The wreckage hung limp from upturned root systems or snapped right off. The jagged, splintered wood was a pale, sap-shiny yellow. I climbed down into a crater, the negative space where the roots of a tree had been. The earth beneath was muddy. I lifted my boots, pumped the squelching mess and enjoyed the sensation of suction resistance.
If you cut off the stem now, I’ll be buried alive.
Come out.
Come in and see what it feels like.
No, Adriana.
I looked up into the gnarled mess of roots and earth. Larvae wriggled back in. Little shards of coloured glass, old detritus reflected the sun back at me.
Hey, look at this.
It’s an old landfill, a dump, that’s all.
Look, there’s a road for little creatures here, along the roots and between them, coming up along the surface.
What do you see in these worms? Anything hopeful?
What could be more hopeful than death and decay? Do me a favour and cut off that damn stem. I won’t feel a thing.
Pieter said, I have work to do.
The trees had swayed in the autumn breeze just one week before. The leaves had just begun to react to the lessening light, to turn yellow and brown and to fall. Small animals had hoarded food here. Children had played in this forest, screamed laughing, running away from imagined predation. Adults had nestled into the composting leaves and swayed to more primal necessities, in lieu of love. A forester had made the rounds, a shotgun slapping his green-corduroyed thigh, a spaniel at his side.
We’d been caught once, Pieter and I, in flagrante delicto, by the brindle hondt, the water dog that every forester seemed to own. The snuffling, cold snout had alerted us in time to hastily clothe ourselves and appear unflushed, deep into our lovemaking as we had been.
Goeie Morgen, the forester had said.
And to you, I replied.
You’re English, he said.
Canadian.
Then he noticed and spluttered, Why, you’re a girl!
I had flicked the switch on my Stihl 64 and pulled the cord; the machine roared to life. I nodded at him by way of excusing myself and got to work, using the chainsaw as a sort of machete, clearing the bramble and nettle from around the closest tree. I was wet between the legs. Pieter and I were in the bower of our love affair then, the first month. I cannot imagine making love out of doors now except as an act of pretense or desperation.
Lately, our lovemaking had taken on the sobriety of a Mass, of a wound healing; it was a communion of sadness. And we drew Erwin into even that. In the dampness of our bed, humid and hot, we talked of nothing else.
How could you, I mean, in that big forest, with all that space around. One man is so small.
I don’t know how it happened.
You don’t know?
It’s a mess right now, Adriana. In my head. Did I do it on purpose without meaning to do it on purpose — fantasy out of control? A waking dream? I wish I had done it on purpose. It would make sense then.
Pieter, I wasn’t suggesting that. I meant something about probabilities. Space and motion and mathematics. The field was so big, the tree so small, that kind of thing.
I felled the tree into an empty space. Then, there he was.
Are you suggesting . . . ? I whispered even though there were only the two of us in the house.
Inconceivable, he said.
The tree that killed Erwin was not really worth chopping. At less than half a cubic metre of useable wood, it didn’t look as if it could kill a fly. Erwin didn’t see it coming, felt, as they say, not a thing. His life did not flash before his eyes, not that that’s any consolation. He died instantly. Pieter shouted and ran, but it was too late. He held him, held him as if he could, like making a puzzle, reunite his body with his body. I was not there. I had taken the day off because my birthday was coming up and I wanted to have a day to myself. I had gone to purchase an album of Bul-garian vocal music. I had it on the turntable at top volume when Pieter came home, his hands bloodied, the tattered quilted workshirt he wore soaked through with Erwin’s stuff; bits of brain matter and wood chips clung where the flannel shirt had worn through, the cotton insulation spilling out. The nuances of the Bulgarian’s song, the layers of complex vocal arrangement were already forming into something unreliable, some memory we could try to grasp later to force sense out of the senseless.
You could have pushed the tree sideways.
I didn’t . . . it didn’t occur to me.
No. I just wondered. If he’d been just paralyzed . . .
He would have hated that.
We could wheel him around in a chair, I said. I thought about his helpless body, about undressing him, the heavy useless limbs, the limp curve of spine, like dead but not, just not.
With every tree he cut down, Pieter’s body took on the shape of the stem. He leaned into his work in a kind of yearning posture. He rose as the tree passed its centre and began its fall. Then he shifted and stood and watched it fall, often pulling out his Drum tobacco to roll a cigarette even as the trunk crashed to earth. When the back of Erwin’s skull broke away, when Pieter saw the brain was crushed and bits of bone had shattered like china into the mess of his brother, he did all he could. He acted pragmatically, picked up the cap of Erwin’s skull and fitted it back as well as he could manage, unaware of the blood spillage. He nestled Erwin’s head into his own lap, holding him together for some time, as if time would heal all wounds. Pieter kept his focus on Erwin’s face; he claimed it took on an otherworldly beauty. He drew his hand over it and shut the glazed eyes. Then he stood up and in horror ran out of the forest in search of help.
I cut it perfectly. He wasn’t there . . .
Then he was there?
. . . suddenly, out of nowhere.
I knew Pieter had the habit of checking the intended landing spot of each tree before he felled it. Once he waited for an hour to let a somnambulant hedgehog waddle out of danger’s path. The tree that killed Erwin was destined to be left on the forest floor as compost. It had a parasitic ivy vining up its bark, rot running through the core. Pieter glanced over and waited for his brother to get out of the way, made an all-clear sign and waited for one in return, and then he nestled his shoulder into the trunk and sliced through the last remaining hinge of wood. What he saw when he looked up was impossible. Time had reversed, mangled itself, for now Erwin was back in the way of the falling tree.
Pieter brought me to the place where Erwin had died. Together we found the inconsequential stump. It aggravated me that the tree was not bigger or of a more exotic species. It annoyed me that flowers dared bloom, flowers that Erwin would never see or smell. The stump had already begun its slow decay; the sap had risen and congealed into hard droplets. Erwin had been chemically embalmed, wrapped in plastic, his legs and arms broken to fit into a standard-size coffin. He had been mourned and buried deep in a sandy pit in the oldest working graveyard in the city. One day when I went to pay my respects, I fell, half-intentionally, into a freshly dug grave near Erwin’s tombstone. Deep in the ground, I grabbed to gain a hold along the edges, which only gave way, sprinkling my feet with sand and burying them. Pieter leaned over and laughed despite himself.<
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Going so soon? he said. Then, he jumped down with me into the grave. We lay down together in the bottom of the pit, our arms folded across our chests. We noticed artifacts of previous burials embedded in the walls, corroded metal crucifixes, a bashed set of dentures, little bones and shards of other bones, a necklace and a hearing aid. I climbed on Pieter’s shoulders to get out of the pit and pulled him up until he could brace his knee on the earth’s surface. The stone pathway out of the graveyard was an homage to those dead whose relatives could no longer afford the annual cemetery fee. The coffins had been dug up, the remains cremated, and the tombstones smashed and fashioned into a walkway. I skirted the inscriptions.
What could be more morbid than this? I asked Pieter.
It’s just a practicality.
It’s outrageous, bodies flung all over. Cats prowling everywhere.
Life goes on, Pieter said.
Even then, in the rawness of our loss, a transformation was taking place. The gap was closing in. We were quietly re-forming ourselves, nurturing aspects within ourselves and in each other that reminded us of Erwin. We were compensating, filling in the spaces he had occupied. Slowly, invisibly, he was returning to us by our sheer willingness to have him here.
I should have gone up to his room, with its unadorned simplicity — a waif walking naked through the damp chill and dark, willing the body warmth of my first bed to carry me to my second. I imagine the sex would have been rough and primal and seeking only the most primitive of human outlets, a speedy orgasm. It would be merely the closing of a circle, defining a part of my real relationship.
Pieter and I were still waiting for the crane in this godforsaken landscape, when I headed off into the destruction, hopping tree trunks and shimmying beneath giant, fallen trees until I was sure I was out of sight of the road and any other little hovel, barn, or house. I needed to find a secluded spot where I could take a shit. In the beginning, I’d found it awkward, this shitting in the midst of civilization. I judged wind direction and tried wherever possible, if not to hold it, to crap downwind. As time passed I sloughed off these concerns and acquiesced to my body; by then Erwin, had come to work in the forest with us. One night as the evening dark descended, Pieter, Erwin and I shat simultaneously, a trilogy, a trinity of defecation, calling encouragement from our separate spots across another tree-strewn farmer’s field.
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