—
She never did; I later placed it on the newel post of our new house, and Gabrielle, who didn’t like polishing, said, You can shine that brass for yourself, Urbain. So that’s what I did, my whole life long, every Friday in the early afternoon, before the weekend began and the children came home.
—
I hear the latest stories from our neighborhood. A starving woman got pregnant by a German who had promised her a loaf of bread in exchange for “carnal intercourse”—after the war, she was dragged out of her home, shaved bald, and kicked. Soon after that, she had a miscarriage. A farmer’s daughter who had hidden a German in the barn spent her nights making love to him. When her father found her there and kicked her to death, the German crushed the farmer’s skull and fled.
Suddenly there are fervent patriots all around us, many of whom made a tidy profit from clandestine trade with the Germans during the war. All around us, people are hiding evidence and covering their tracks. All around us, I see discord, envy, backbiting, betrayal, cowardice, and looting, while the newspapers trumpet the praises of peace. We returning soldiers know better. We keep our mouths shut, wrestle with our nightmares, and sometimes burst into tears at the smell of freshly ironed linen or a cup of warm milk.
Here and there along our street, the flags are raised, flapping in the wet wind.
—
A merchant and his family have recently moved into the house behind our own on a cross street, Aannemersstraat. He’s a farmer who made his fortune in wartime, trading in grain and potatoes. People often wonder where all the money comes from, my mother tells me. His trading company has a large storage area behind the house, a long, narrow courtyard separated by a wall from our back gardens. From my bedroom window, I can see the workers and customers come and go. The farmer has two daughters. The younger of the two resembles my mother: a proud, black-haired beauty who strides slowly and confidently across the courtyard. Without meaning to, I find myself keeping watch at the window in the evening, to see if I can spot her. One evening I open the window and strum on the old lute that Jules brought home, years ago. The young woman looks up. She sees me. I play a soldiers’ tune. She laughs. She has pale, bright eyes, like my mother’s, and the same black hair. My heart pounds so hard and my nerves are so strained that I can feel the scars from my bullet wounds throbbing.
During my final weeks at the front, that image never leaves my mind for an instant. The first thing I do after the sudden armistice—after we storm the packed trains like a crazed mob and return home, singing all the way—is go to my room to keep watch. The war is over. I see the young woman at work in the courtyard below, with her back turned. As if she senses something, she abruptly whirls around, and I look directly into her luminous, pale eyes. Nausea and dizziness wash over me; I seize hold of the foot of my bed.
III
He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside.
—W. G. Sebald, Vertigo
He looks up again from his seat at the old dressing table, wondering what he should write about next. His tale of the war is finally finished, after all these years; now he has to describe how he met Maria Emelia and lost her.
It is 1976, summer, a summer that will be etched into the memory of a generation as exceptionally hot and dry. He is old; he has spent the past thirteen years working on these memoirs, on and off. There were times when he left the notebook unopened for weeks, once for as long as six months—that was when the time came to write about his third wound, and the officers’ treachery, as he called it. Beside him are his medals, which he went looking for today because his memories were so vivid. Coincidentally, his first encounter with Maria Emelia has brought him almost to the end of this second notebook; there is not enough room on the remaining pages to tell the rest of the story. He hesitates, puts down his pen, pulls a folder from under his blotter, and starts a letter:
My beloved Gabrielle,
When I contemplate the death of your beloved sister…
He puts the pen back down; the words won’t come.
It is oppressively hot, late June, and the whole world seems to be wilting. He removes his black hat from his bald head and wipes the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief.
Should he ask his daughter to buy him a third notebook?
The thought is unappealing. These last few pages have taken a lot out of him. It’s all starting to fade, anyway, his handwriting is wobbly, he has gout in his fingers. He can still paint, an hour a day, but he finds it increasingly tiring to stand at the small easel.
His grandson will soon become a father. He lives on a small farm somewhere near the Dutch border; they rarely see each other. Going off to university really changed the boy; once God-fearing and obedient, he’s now become rebellious, mocking God and his commandments and causing his parents no end of distress. That’s how it goes; parents scrimp and save so their children can have a university education, and then the children use what they learn to make their parents feel small. He has hair halfway down his back; it looks dreadful. In his day, boys had to have character, keep their hair close-cropped, show discipline. His grandson thinks of nothing but having a good time, listens to those halfwits from Liverpool—yes, Liverpool, can you believe it—and is full of big ideas about politics. His blue denim workman’s trousers are ripped and worn. That’s not how the boy was raised—with politics, and certainly not with the politics of the Red Menace.
The heat is making him a little queasy. Or is it his heart? He shouldn’t have thought about Maria Emelia. But he can’t help it.
Over the next few days, he will jot down a few brief thoughts about the early months of his engagement. After that, the second notebook contains a few stray sentences and dissolves into something about night and panic; the ink has run, as if the pages were stained with tears. There the story of his life ends. In a sense, his life itself ended there too.
—
Something about the lost ethos of the old-time soldier is almost unthinkable to us today, in our world of terrorist attacks and virtual violence. The morality of violence has undergone a seismic shift. The generation of Belgian soldiers driven into the monstrous maw of the German machine guns in the first year of the war had been raised with exalted nineteenth-century values, with pride and honor and naive idealism. Their military ethics were based on the virtues of courage, self-discipline, honor, the love of the daily march, respect for nature and their fellow men, honesty, and the willingness to fight man to man. They read aloud from books they had brought with them, sometimes even literature—often poetry, in fact, however bombastic it may have been. They adhered to Christian morals, had an utter horror of sexual deviance, and used alcohol in moderation, or abstained. Soldiers had to set an example for the civilians they were sworn to protect.
All those old-fashioned virtues bit the dust in the trenches of the First World War. Soldiers were deliberately plied with alcohol before being driven into the firing line (this is one of the greatest taboos among patriotic historians, but my grandfather’s stories leave no room for doubt). Toward the end of the war, clandestine cafés—seedy outfits, which my grandfather called tingle-tangles—were popping up all over the place, and soldiers were encouraged to relieve their frustrated sexual urges there, not necessarily in the gentlest of ways. Cafés like these were a novelty, especially in this institutionalized form. The atrocities and massacres changed the morals, the worldview, the mentality, and the manners of that generation forever. The battlefields redolent of crushed grass, the soldiers who saluted even in their dying moments, the rural scenes of hills and glades in eighteenth-century military paintings gave way to a heap of psychological rubble choked with mustard gas, ravaged pastures filled with severed limbs, the physical annihilation of an old-fashioned breed of human being.
The royalist Flemings returned home traumatized. Although the military parade that marked the entry of Albert I into Brussels seemed triumph
ant, many returning soldiers were bent with fatigue and disillusion, despite their relief that peace had finally come to their ravaged country. Some were scarcely able to keep up the appearance of patriotism required for the occasion. In the drawer of my grandfather’s old dressing table, I found a small folder with twelve picture postcards by the Brussels photographer S. Polak. The decorative script on the plain cardboard envelope read, “Historic procession for the triumphal entry of King Albert and the Allied Armies into Brussels, November 22, 1918”—but by that time, patriotism already left a strange taste in the mouth. How could a person identify with higher ideals after they had been blown to pieces? The fields of West Flanders were strewn with the remains of naive credulity and romantic notions. There was music presented in cooperation “with the American delegation,” a picture of a reception for “Dignitaries,” a crowd of men in togas gathered around the king on the steps, a photograph of the American artillery parade, a cavalcade of the Belgian carabiniers, a procession with the flag from the Yser, Scottish and French marching bands, the solemn return to Brussels of the heroic mayor, Adolphe Max, the procession of cars with the royal family, and finally, a photograph of an excited, jostling crowd.
But somewhere a gasket had blown. That much was clear to the soldiers who looked on mutely, without joining in the cheers: the cozy intimacy of Old Europe had been destroyed forever. The war had shot humanism full of holes, and what came rushing in was the infernal heat of a barren moral wasteland that could hardly be sown with new ideals, since it was abundantly clear how far astray the old ones had led us. The new politics that would now flare up was fueled by wrath, resentment, rancor, and vengefulness, and showed even greater potential for destruction. But the old soldiers would never return, the men for whom marching was a point of honor, who had learned to fence like ballet dancers, who made absurd half-bows before skewering their enemies. In the muck of the trenches, in the clouds of lethal mustard gas and the sadistic reprisals against defenseless civilians that were carried out by the Germans wherever they went, a spark of old-fashioned humanity died out. When a peace-loving German writer commented during the Balkan wars, toward the end of that same century, that the violence had become so horrific because the ethics of warfare no longer left room for honor, because there was no human respect for the enemy, because combat no longer aspired to style or grace, what he brought to light was merely one small corner of the sense of style that Europe had lost. The press tore the author to shreds, accusing him of politically incorrect nostalgia.
My grandfather never abandoned his touching, old-fashioned view of life; it had been hammered too deeply into his psyche. But the suspicion that would seize hold of him in later years, his paranoia in the 1950s, his fits of temper and rage at no one in particular for no apparent reason—rage at his own lost innocence, perhaps—spoke silent, tight-lipped, bitter volumes to us, the people who lived with him.
—
A few years after marrying Henri, his mother moves into a house on Gentbruggestraat, not far from the Vijfhoek, a five-way junction that was a local landmark. The first of the five ways leads to his roots, across the Gentbrugge bridge over the Scheldt to where his mother came from. The second is the way to the world of painting: the Prins Albertstraat, where his friend the painter Adolf Baeyens lives. The third is the way to his memories: Gentbruggestraat to Steenweg toward Dendermonde and on from there to the Dampoort, the setting of his early childhood. The fourth is the way to the future: Destelbergenstraat, where he will later build a house on the banks of the Scheldt. The fifth is the way to love: Aannemersstraat, perpendicular to Gentbruggestraat, where a trader in potatoes and grain, Mr. Ghys from Sint-Denijs-Boekel, has made his home.
Each day he sees her from his window, the younger daughter, walking back and forth among the trade goods heaped in the back garden, her bearing stately. Their gazes meet. One evening he gathers his courage, goes around the corner, and rings the Ghys family’s doorbell. They let him in. After an hour he comes outside with her, takes her home with him, and introduces her to his mother. Mother, this is Maria Emelia. Long silence. A lump in his throat. Two black-haired women with pale eyes examining each other ironically, the one like a younger version of the other. All right, Urbain, his mother finally says. She squeezes his hand. The girl embraces the woman with the stiff smile. “Would you care for a cup of milk, young lady?” “No, thank you, very kind of you.” Silence. From that day on he visits the home of his future in-laws daily and is accepted by the trader as a son.
—
Ghent’s first cinemas open their doors. He goes out in the evening with his statuesque fiancée to watch the newsreels, images on grayish screens that symbolize a new age to them. He is mad about her. For her sake, he wants to buy a car, a Fiat, an eccentric plan for a man of his limited means. His mother and the young woman look like an older and a younger sister. The horrors of the war begin to recede, though he still has panic attacks, shortness of breath, and nightmares from which he wakes up panting and sweating. Trauma counseling has not yet been invented, so he swallows his emotions and reassures his mother when she asks him how he’s getting on. Love agrees with him. The preoccupation with religion that seemed such an essential part of him has largely disappeared. But he still prays his fingers to the bone every Sunday, seated in front of the side altar of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.
He shows the lovely Maria Emelia Ghys, who is twenty-five years old—he himself is twenty-seven—his father’s frescoes and murals, and describes the painting that he saw in Liverpool. He talks a mile a minute; they are inseparable. It’s as if the love his father felt for his mother, until his premature death, is reborn in his love for this proud, beautiful young woman. The thought calms and settles him, he worships the ground she walks on, the horrors of war fade away, and believe it or not, he is happy. They plan their wedding; by this time, he has found a job in the Belgian Railways workshops on Brusselsesteenweg in Ledeberg and is taking classes again at the art academy. He promises that he will paint her if she will pose for him.
—
In his memoirs I find the following passage:
I have found a heavenly girl with whom I can join in wedlock and forget the horror. I have said and sung it:
Sighing, breathing / Chests heaving / Be my love.
Et cetera.
We run errands together. What I like best of all is to go out into the pasture with her and see the young foals frisking and kicking their legs. On Sundays we go dancing in Het Volk Concert Hall and I tell her that she is like a foal.
When Maria is ill, I bring her books by Courths-Mahler, but she says she’d rather read something else, and then laughs and throws her arms around me. I am concerned about her health. She is as pale as an alabaster figurine, but her cheeks still have their glow, and she is always good-humored. Courage, she says, courage, my little soldier, we shall be married in the spring.
—
It is 1919. The Spanish flu races through exhausted Europe. The virus is said to have been brought to the old world by American soldiers and, ironically, to have spread like wildfire because of the crowds that gathered all over the continent to celebrate the peace. Around the globe, the virus claims more than a hundred million lives, taking a toll ten times heavier than the brutal war that Europe has just put behind it. Strangely enough, the flu hits young adults hardest, and at one point my grandfather fears that he has caught it. He has a cough, a fever, a sore throat—the first symptoms. He is confined to his bed, everyone waits in fear, but after a week he pulls through. The next person to fall ill is his lovely Maria Emelia; she looks pale and feels exhausted; she has dizzy spells and low blood pressure. One day she loses consciousness for a moment as they are leaving the cinema; he holds her up until she comes to. It’s nothing, she says, those war scenes in the newsreel, I had no idea how much you’ve been through. The following Sunday, they are strolling past the flower beds in Kouter when she starts to feel sick. He takes her home, where she is put to bed immediately. After
a few days she develops a racking cough and can no longer keep her food down. The illness leaves her drained and thinner by the day; every evening, he sits beside her bed and holds her hands in his. They talk about their future in worried tones. Then disaster strikes: Maria Emelia develops pneumonia. Nothing available at that time can relieve her suffering. Antibiotics will be invented in 1928, penicillin that same year, cortisone will be discovered in the adrenal cortex in 1935, and fenoterol, which opens up the bronchioles, will not come into widespread use till the end of the twentieth century. In the space of a few weeks, he sees the proud woman he loves waste away into a coughing, emaciated wisp, and when she begins to gasp desperately for breath, as he remembers his father doing, he thinks he will lose his mind. The doctor says she has water in her lungs. A fatal complication.
One day she says to him, “I give you back your freedom. You have no future with me.”
“Maria, please,” he begs her, “don’t say such a thing. You have a fever, that’s all.” He takes her hands in his. Her pale, exquisite eyes gaze into his own, so long and piercingly that a chill comes over him, and he feels the horror flooding back that he thought he had left behind at the end of the war. He feels himself becoming nauseous, and grows dizzy, gulps, and throws himself upon her, his face in her loose black hair. As he cries in desperation, she goes on silently staring, stroking his hair with an absent look in her eyes.
—
War and Turpentine Page 24