War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

  “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” The priest’s words echoed in my ears, uncomprehended. Carrying the flambeau in the weekly ritual was a way for my grandfather to carve a notch in time, a rhythm that carried the weeks all through the summer, and when I think of him, his back straight and his fragile, balding scalp glowing dully in the golden candlelight, I understand why he was so attached to it. In truth, there was something medieval about him, a shade of the eternal soldier, the chivalry described in the legends of the Grail. That was why, over many years, the brown glass case in the Blood Chapel fused with the old stories of Parsifal, and I understood that my grandfather was really the Pure Fool, and always had been, the complete innocent who earned my greatest admiration because he seemed to possess no egotism, conceit, or self-importance, but only an instinctive eagerness to be of service, a quality that made him both a hero and a first-class chump. And once I understood that, I traveled to Bruges again one day, after many years, and stood in the Blood Chapel watching with bated breath, and understood how little I truly understand.

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  Years after his death, I found in his small library a well-thumbed copy of Bruges-la-Morte. The main character of this tale, Hugues Viane, meets a frivolous double of his dead love and is ultimately forced to conclude that she is no more than a caricature of the woman he once adored. Some passages were underlined in faint pencil. I leafed through the yellowed pages with their endearing illustrations, the vaguely colored etchings that evoked the Gothic hush of nineteenth-century Bruges. There were smudges of oil paint halfway through the book, and on an empty page I found the beginnings of a small sketch of a face. “Bruges was his dead love, and his dead love was Bruges. Everything was united in a common destiny.” The ritual Procession of the Holy Blood plays a crucial role in the story. On the day of the procession, the frivolous woman is laughing at the bric-a-brac the man has accumulated over the years and naively treasured. Then she goes further, provoking him with blasphemous mockery. She takes the dead Ophelia’s lock of hair and parades around the room with it. Hugues flies into a rage and strangles her, because her blasphemy has confronted him with the ironic truth hidden beneath all his sublimation. It is a story about the impossibility of repeating a great, unique love affair. But it is also a story about a modern Orpheus. Like Orpheus, Hugues descends into the land of the dead to find the specter of his lost love, a mission doomed to catastrophe. Like Orpheus, he loses her twice, because he confuses his memory of her with her living double on earth.

  How often did my grandfather read and reread this novella of Orphic love? He underlined the sentence in which Rodenbach says that Hugues could resist suicide only thanks to his mystical recollections of Ophelia. Like the main character in the story, my grandfather secretly erected a mental mausoleum to his lost love. Like Hugues Viane, he learned that what was unique in her could not live again in her double, especially considering that the double was her timid elder sister. With that small book in my hands, I was struck by the realization that he had been a kind of married widower, mourning in secret with the same tender care as the character in the story. I then discovered something in the back of the book that surprised me, because I could not yet see the connection: a torn-out reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, the image in front of which I had once found him weeping. A couple of pages further on was a tissue-thin piece of tracing paper painstakingly folded around a few long black hairs, once neatly wound around a fingertip to form a small, perfect spiral.

  Secret passion, secret teachings that teach us nothing. Loyalty to an absence that shaped everything, giving it form and secret meaning. What mattered most to him was something he could not share with others. So he painted trees, clouds, peacocks, the Ostend beach, a poultry yard, still lifes on half-cleared tables—an immense, silent, devoted labor of grief, to put the world’s weeping to rest in the most everyday things.

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  He never painted a single war scene. It never occurred to him to draw the things he recalled from the war, and since his death I have found no trace of the charcoal portraits of his comrades-in-arms that he mentions in his memoirs. Not one of his paintings includes a soldier, except maybe a small self-portrait, fairly academic in style, in which he is wearing his medals, probably painted before 1920 and anything but military in spirit, more like an oversized passport photo in oils. Who knows, maybe he thought it would please his ailing Maria Emelia. There is only the large, framed black-and-white portrait of him in uniform, possibly an enlargement of a photo taken just after the war. It has been touched up with charcoal, and some of the lines are so vague and blurry that I always thought it was a drawing. At the bottom of the framed photo is an inscription, “Urbain, as he was when he came back from the war,” written by my grandfather himself. The same caption is repeated on the back, but in different handwriting, possibly his mother’s. That’s all there is. In his countless paintings there is nothing even slightly ominous—at most a bashful, bluish cloud sliding over the evening sun, rendered with a slightly coarser sable brush—not even the harbinger of Giorgione’s Tempest over a Biedermeier Arcadia.

  Be that as it may, in the period when he realized he was color-blind, he painted only a few, smaller pieces. Then, in the mid-1960s, he decided it was time for something grander. There is a fairly impressive painting by Anthony Van Dyck of St. Martin cutting his cloak in two and giving half to a beggar. The iconography refers to a well-known story; it’s a frequently painted theme, also depicted by an anonymous Hungarian master, Simone Martini, Jacob van Oost, and El Greco. Van Dyck painted two variations on this theme, opting for a dynamic, dramatic interpretation both times. My grandfather copied the version on display in the Zaventem parish church, near Brussels, which Van Dyck painted for the Dutch chancellor of the Duchy of Brabant, Ferdinand van Boisschot, the year he was knighted.

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  Martin is seated high on a pale dapple-gray. His cuirass shines darkly, exuding dignity and nobility. His one visible leg is firmly in the stirrup, suggesting strength and agility. He is still young and wears a flamboyant black cap with a large plume hanging well over the brim. To Martin’s left (that is, by his right hand) is a second mounted figure, dressed more plainly and riding a brown horse with a white star. To Martin’s right, we see the muscular back of the nude beggar seated on a mound of hay, painted in magnificent anatomical detail, already tugging covetously at the torn, flame-red cloak. Next to him is a second beggar with an Oriental-looking cap, thrusting his lower lip out half skeptically as he looks up at the generous nobleman. He is crippled and on his knees, clasping a partly visible crutch that supports his shoulder, judging by the crease in the fabric under his arm. The horse’s powerfully arched neck, its one raised hoof, the tensed muscles of the beggar’s back—the scene radiates pure motion, energy, and vivid life. Martin uses a very thin rapier, which he holds up straight in front of his chest, but because he is seated at an angle, his horizontal is our diagonal. He cuts through the upper part of his cloak at an angle of approximately ninety degrees. As he separates the lower part, it is pulled to the right and points in a new direction, toward the muscular beggar who receives it. In just a second, he will have finished cutting the cloak in two and the red cloth will fall onto the beggar in a shapeless mass. On the right, there is also a partial view of a column with an antique look; beyond it, evening clouds drift through the sky, lit by the low sun. The scene shows the hand of a master. Its vigor, bright color, and crisp lines attest not only to Van Dyck’s consummate skill, but also to his youthful drive in 1621, when he painted it, soon after turning twenty-two.

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  It was for this scene that my grandfather spent a week putting together a large stretcher frame in the greenhouse in our backyard. He allowed six by six feet for the canvas, a surprising choice, larger than the dimensions of the original painting in Zaventem, which is only about five and a half by five. That was unexpectedly daring; to enlarge the paint
ing successfully, he would have to lay down precise grid lines on the reproduction in his book. Decked out in his best suit, he went to De Gouden Pluim in Vrijdagmarkt and bought a piece of canvas measuring 250 × 250 cm, which he lugged home on the tram, gazing sullenly into space and attracting stares. As he walked, he balanced the large roll of canvas on one shoulder, almost slamming it into some passersby a few times as he turned a corner. When he was just about to mount the canvas on the stretcher, he discovered it would not fit where he had planned to hang it, directly above the entrance to his room; the right outer wall of the stairwell angles slightly there, leaving no place to hang the painting. To further complicate matters, the ceiling has a slight downward slope, which forced him to bevel the top of the frame. He disassembled the stretcher and constructed something that, unbeknownst to him, was very much in fashion in those days: a “shaped canvas,” with irregular dimensions. In an elaborate feat of carpentry, he modified the upper right corner, where the clouds meet a shrub growing out of a crack in the antique column. Parts of the column on the right were lost, but this was no great sacrifice. He mounted the canvas loosely, lightly wetted the back with a soft sponge, waited three days, carefully remounted it with clips, and only then hammered in the tacks. Once he was thoroughly satisfied with his work, he dragged the large canvas up the stairs, maneuvered it into his room, beside the bed—leaving himself hardly any space to stand or worm his way into bed at night—and launched into his great work, which would take him more than six months to complete.

  He drew grid lines on the reproduction and spent weeks poring over it with his magnifying glass and brass compasses, the latter a gift from the delectable Mrs. Lamb of Windermere. He had no need to study the actual painting in the humble parish church of St. Martin in Zaventem, where he had seen it in the autumn of 1914, during the retreat that followed the calamitous Battle of Schiplaken, and where miraculously enough, it still hangs today. He had committed every detail to memory that early Sunday afternoon when the war was still young, as he sat before his patron saint in trembling prayer, shaken by what he had been through in the weeks before, in the horror of Schiplaken and Sint-Margriete-Houtem.

  Remarkably, his copy is perfectly flawless, and as far as I can tell without actually hanging the two versions side by side, all the colors are correct. Yes, his are a little brighter, as if the original painting had been cleaned. My grandfather’s dedication to painting his patron saint echoed the work of his father, who had painted his own patron saint, Francis, in Liverpool. He must have been tremendously gratified to know that he had completed the circle, paying tribute to his lamented father.

  In the documentation he saved with his sketches, I found a few pages torn out of the famous Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine: the story of St. Martin, the Roman legionary who became a Christian. Along with all sorts of fascinating facts, de Voragine provides a list of Martin’s virtues: humility, dignity in battle, righteousness and patience, devotion to prayer, and skill in unmasking demons. My grandfather underlined this last one in red. Martin became the patron saint of soldiers; during battle, the kings of France carried his red cloak into battle. Anthony Van Dyck is also said to have owned such a cloak.

  This theme later inspired my grandfather to make a sandstone tympanum in bas-relief, which he mounted over the front door of his small house. He was seventy-two at the time, and very energetic for his age. His great work seems to have slightly softened the pain of losing his wife, allowing him to sublimate his humble origins and family name in the picturesque light of the great Van Dyck. The finished work met with cries of admiration from all who saw it, except for his friend Adolf, who eyed the large painting, pursed his lips, and said, “I just wouldn’t have the patience for that kind of thing—for making copies, I mean.” He gave Urbain’s daughter, Maria Emelia, a sly wink, and the friendship cooled.

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  When I go to Zaventem on a weekday to see the original painting, it’s raining cats and dogs. Soft music is playing in the empty church. I make my way discreetly past the massive columns to the altar on the right side of the church where the painting hangs, trying to imagine him kneeling there in his muddied uniform in October 1914, on the first of the two wooden steps, with his pack, his rifle, and his dented mess tin at his side, worn out from his first raw confrontations with the advance of the German armies. Because I am used to his slightly larger copy, the original painting looks a little small, and as I mentioned, the colors are slightly darker. It was painted on seven wide boards joined together and has obviously been restored: the oil paint added later shines a little too brightly, giving the masterpiece too strong a sheen. Furthermore, time and varying degrees of humidity have made the panels bulge slightly, so that you can see the six seams. The Corinthian columns of the altar where the painting hangs are decorated with gilt and faux marble. Above these Louis Quinze touches, the coat of arms of Ferdinand van Boisschot is on prominent display in a gilded half-arch. I notice the strong resemblance between this faux marble and that with which my grandfather covered the high-ceilinged corridor of his house, including the wall where he hung his copy of the painting. Marbling was one of my grandfather’s strongest skills; he could decorate doors, walls, and columns with wood or marble patterns like an artisan from centuries ago.

  A sexton pops out of the woodwork to the right of the altar, eager to help. When he sees that I am studying the painting at length, taking notes and snapping photos, he helpfully switches on a few lights in front of the side altar. I tell him how surprised I am that a masterpiece like this one, a crucial piece of the world’s artistic heritage, is hanging here, unprotected and practically anonymous, in a Flemish parish church. He folds his bony hands in a kind of devotion and tells me he was here during the Second World War, when the fragile panels were removed and hidden in a cellar to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. He gives me a folder to take with me. I check the information about the painting, drive back to the house on the Scheldt to look at the copy that same day, and find myself startled by its bright, clear colors and vigor—the authentic glow that sometimes lies hidden in a copy.

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  He also made successful copies of other well-known works around that time—such as an odd portrait of a boy with two leashed hounds by Jan Erasmus Quellinus II. The child poses in a showy, girlish outfit: a frilly, shimmering blue and pink dress. It’s not an especially gripping piece, but despite its anecdotal, sentimental quality, it shows the hand of a master painter. My grandfather may have chosen this typical product of the Antwerp Baroque simply because of the technical challenge involved in painting the iridescent fabric (and perhaps because of his own girlishness as a little boy, which he sometimes joked about; in the late nineteenth century, boys were often dressed as girls until they were toilet trained, because a dress saved some dirty laundry). I have not been able to figure out when he painted Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, since he did not date his paintings, but the style leads me to believe that it belongs to his early period, probably the 1930s, perhaps even earlier.

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  But—as if he were preparing for his final work of art—his most successful copy was after a famous portrait: The Man with the Golden Helmet in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, attributed to Rembrandt for centuries but later discovered not to have been painted by the master, a finding that sent its value plummeting from twenty million Deutschmarks to less than one million. My grandfather never had to hear that sobering news, since it was announced by experts in 1985, four years after his death. Without a doubt, this was his favorite copy. It was so successful that he made several more just like it for friends, and I do not know where all his copies might be found today (for example, I was once astonished to find, in the upstairs barroom of the Brussels restaurant Le Paon Royal, what appeared to be a copy by my grandfather of De Hondecoeter’s Poultry Yard with a White Peacock, an allegorical painting about the dominance of evil in the world that once inspired me to write an entire book; how it found its way there is a mystery to me;
it turned out to be unsigned, and was far inferior in technique to the copy in my possession).