The Season of Migration (13 page)

In the afternoon he stops in a village to find out where he is. In a pub he sits and eats a few potatoes and sips some black coffee.

The woman who serves him is plump and kind, and agrees to give him the food for free. He imagines that it is her kindness that makes her cheeks so round and pink. She is the first woman he has seen outside the darkness of the Borinage; he cannot help the desire to see her body without its clothes, the desire to have her kindness lavished on his aching limbs.

She tells him her name is Bertha and he is in a village called Busigny. When she comes to collect his dish and sees him inspecting his boots, where the thin rubber over the soles is giving way, she asks him suspiciously, “How far do you have to go?”

He does not tell her, for fear she will think he's mad. “About fifty kilometers,” he says, which is not half the distance before him.

She calls over the bartender, James, to take a look at Vincent's shoes. He, too, is plump, though in a hulking way; his girth stretches across a frame of enormous shoulders, and a U-shaped mustache reaches down past his chin. He is Bertha's husband, Vincent gathers, as she puts her hand to his shoulder as he bends down. “I'm fine,” Vincent tells them both. “I'll be fine.” He smiles at the way they make a fuss over him. “I've been through worse,” he says. Suddenly he feels drugged. The sudden food in his stomach, the rush from the coffee, the caring attention of these two people; he represses the urge to laugh. He wonders how he would look with a mustache like that, but when he tries to imagine it he sees Theo's face instead, his brother standing before the train to Paris; then a mustached man with his stomach torn open and spilling its contents onto the muddied earth, his hands perched on top and fluttering like butterflies.

Bertha tells James that Vincent is planning to go on another fifty kilometers in these shoes. James shakes his head and sits back on his haunches like a surprised squirrel. “You cannot!”

Of course he can. He knows he can't explain to them about the rhythm, the way that the walking undoes the pain in his feet—is the only cure for it, actually, until he has a real chance to rest. He can't explain the way that he needs it, the walking, right now, to clear certain images from his mind. He simply nods. “I can.”

Bertha says, “Well, there must be a way we can make these boots stronger.” She looks to her husband when she says it, which makes Vincent smile, for clearly he is the executor of her ideas.

Vincent asks them if they have any cardboard. This is an easy way to fortify his soles, one that he has employed on a number of walking trips before. The two of them act as if he is a genius for coming up with it. James goes into the back while Bertha helps Vincent off with his shoes; he is embarrassed for her to see the filthy socks he wears beneath the leather, bloody in spots and torn. She clucks over him as if he is her child, holding his feet gently and with such care that he feels his face flush.

He remembers Madame Denis feeding him soup one spoonful at a time during one of his bouts with fever. He looked up through his delirious daze and saw her hovering over him, a kind apparition in a brown dress. Had she come to his hut? He didn't remember her arrival, and wondered momentarily if he were back in her home again in the room under the eaves, but he was too tired to work it out. “Eat,” she was saying, “eat,” as she moved the spoon slowly toward his mouth, the liquid in it quivering quietly and threatening to drip but never doing so. “Eat, dear.” He can still hear her saying it, her voice the very sound of kindness itself. “You must eat.”

He and James and Bertha tear the cardboard into the right-size strips and slip them into his boots. James goes up to their bedroom above the bar and comes back with a clean pair of his own socks, which he insists that Vincent take, despite his nearly tearful refusal. Vincent is ashamed at the kindness of these two people; he shakes his head no and pushes their hands away, but they remain. Why does he deserve such kindness? He does not deserve it. He puts the socks on, and then puts his own socks over the new ones, and then slips his feet back into the boots. He needs to leave; he is determined to do so, before he breaks down and burdens these good people with far more than they deserve.

It is with great sadness that he takes leave of them. He wishes them both the best of luck, and thanks them deeply for their generosity, handing them a drawing of a haystack and a few crows in a field. He watches them take it, Bertha exclaiming over it with too much gusto, handing it over to James as if it were the drawing of a young child they needed to encourage.

He makes himself turn his back and leave. How do we resolve it, the constant coming and going of people from our lives? Often it seems a burden to him, the touching of one life and another, and the inevitable loss that accompanies every crossing. He thinks of Theo, his body next to Vincent's in the dark of their bedroom at Zundert, then his face grinning, a mustache of milk, by the mill at Rijswijk; he sees Angeline, standing before him covered in coal dust. Life seems a series of meetings and then leavings, of givings and receivings and then losings. You clasp a person to you, you inhale the scent of him, you feel the bend in his back beneath your palm, and then you must let go, and what has just touched you cannot be brought back.

A light drizzle is falling; his hat catches the rain before the drops hit his face. He begins a letter to Theo in his head, repeating the words until he has them exact, though he does not write them down.

Dear Theo, I am a bird, you are a man. Dear Theo, I have changed into a bird, you were right, I am not the same. When I see you next, I will have shed my feathers; I will have turned into a man.

Dear Theo, molting is a powerful experience, and I hope not to have to go through it again.

*   *   *

His body draws to a stop before a majestic wheat field. He does not notice that he has lost movement, he is so arrested by what he sees. The stalks of wheat duck and bow, dance and lower their heads and bring them back up again, shake themselves, bow and wave again. There is a smooth wind blowing, and he can hear the faint whistle as the draft drifts through the wheat, a whoosh of sound that somehow seems to unify the movement it provokes. He has, of course, seen many wheat fields before, but in that moment he feels as if he is seeing one for the first time. The wheat stalks are somehow separate and all one; one bows, then another, then another. Does each of them know that there are so many others doing the same? Do they sense their neighbors, bowing to the same wind, or does each plant feel that its plight is its alone? The effect of the field is of a rocky sea—not one wave breaking, but a whole sea rolling this way and that. Over everything, the sun casts its warmth, so that as the wheat falls and grows in the wind, the waves look alternately gold, silver, and a color that is some amalgam of both.

It is the unity of it that overwhelms him. The way sun, wheat, and wind are in such harmony, each contributing equally to a symphony of movement, color, and sound that is one simple image. On one side of the field, a patch is missing. As he watches the field, allowing his gaze to grow wider and wider, taking in the sky with its quickly moving clouds and the trees at the far edge of the field, he sees two crows swoop in and land on the patch of field where the ground is exposed. The scene is so different from anything he has seen in the Borinage, so wild with color and movement and vibrancy, he stands before it in awe. Everything shimmers, glittering with life and peace; his body is erased as he stands there, his self folded into what he sees.

There is always more life. No matter how you feel, no matter how you reach it, if you stand and look at a scene for long enough, you will always find more and more life. The baby Vincent hovers over the crows. He is dead; they are alive. This is it, Vincent thinks, this is life; this is my life.

*   *   *

He trudges through a town, the streets suddenly populated, women wearing pointy shoes and frilly hats and men in bowlers and jackets. Everyone is so busy; where are they all going? The day is warmer than yesterday was, and he stops at a pub and greedily drinks three glasses of water. When he is finished, he puts the glass on the bar and then sits there for a minute, watching the condensation fall off the sides. There is music, strangely, in the slow dance of the water drops; he realizes as he concentrates on them that he is hearing each of them as they slowly move. Each drop of water sounds a note.

In front of the pub, a woman who he is sure is a prostitute asks him for a match and holds out her pipe. She is wearing a worn velvet bodice and full, flowing skirts, torn in a few spots; her hair is done in some kind of black lace tied tight. What kind of woman smokes a pipe? She is not pretty, but coarse and manly, her face pockmarked in a strange pattern. She has a dark bruise across her right cheek, so that the pocket below her eye is yellowing and drooping low. He likes her instantly, but he tells her he doesn't have a light. She curtsies to him, the pipe in her mouth, and smiles, showing him the grip of her teeth, which are all nearly brown, a few of them missing. She calls him “Sugar” and tells him her name is Marie-Ann. She invites him upstairs.

Angeline, he thinks. Marie-Ann, Angeline. He peers at Marie-Ann and wills her to be Angeline; she is Angeline, wearing another woman's skin as a costume. Perhaps this is where she went; she ran away to here, to this woman's life. He tries to see into Marie-Ann's eyes and find Angeline there, and nearly reaches out to touch her face, to pull the skin and see if it will come free.

“Sugar?” Marie-Ann asks.

He sways before her. He shakes his head and moves on.

*   *   *

In London in 1873, when he was twenty, his first full year at Goupil's, he lived in the home of Eugénie Loyer, and secretly loved her. For nearly a year, he let the love of Eugénie fill him up. His longing was his constant companion; it was the heat in his heart all day long, from the first light of the sun until long after dark. His longing was London, his longing made the whole landscape bright and precious; so this was what was meant when poets wrote of love! London was an exalted place; all of life was out in the streets: There were stilt walkers and dwarfs, dancers and musicians with flutes and guitars, men singing ballads, women crooning love songs, people on horseback, people selling coffee, apples, sandwiches, children selling flowers and newspapers. There were fish on wooden carts, peppermint water in little cups, books and prints by the hundreds in stalls, chimney sweeps and dustmen calling out their services with their dirty hands to their mouths. London was a microcosm of the world; it was lit up and glowing and incredible. And at his home with Eugénie and her mother, the gardens were in bloom, the lilacs and hawthorn and laburnums in every garden and the chestnut trees along the lanes.

In love, he understood everything. He knew the souls of the trees and the songs of the birds and the movement of every body inside every building, the growth of every flower in every garden. Men held out their hands to shake in greeting and he felt the tenderness of their palms; it was as if every person he met in those days had their beating hearts in the bones of their hands. Nothing could be wrong, he understood, for the state of the earth was one of love.
Love
,
love
, he had heard the word used so many times, in church and in poetry and in books and on the streets, but only then did he understand.

He thought he and Eugénie understood each other, that their love need not be spoken to be true. One day at work in the showing room at Goupil's, he was seized by the notion that he would give a print to Eugénie; with the right print, he wouldn't need to explain his feelings, for she would see the expression in the work, and it would be better than any words he could ever muster.

For days he went to work as if he were a hunter, inspecting every print he saw to see if it might be the one for her. This one was too pastoral, this one too romantic, this one too black, too sentimental, too contrary, too religious, too rushed. Then, one afternoon, just as he had almost fully turned on himself and given up the project for good, his eye fell on just the right print. It was a pastoral scene, but not too tender and sentimental; not
imagined
, he felt, so much as captured. The image was of a mother and her daughter in a field of wheat. The two females were not touching; they each bent toward the ground. Their backs were to the artist. The little girl was crouching, her arms stretched out in front of her, and her mother bent next to her, her legs straight, skirts lost in the wheat. Though they were both occupied, they seemed to communicate deeply with each other, and this was what made him stop and hold the print up and lose himself in it as if it were a lake. Somehow, the artist managed to convey a sense of security in the two women, a sense of the feeling between them, the mother trusting the little one to do her work, the little one learning from the example of her mother, the bond between the two of them as clear and crucial as the growth of that field, as much a part of the earth as the soil under their feet. It took his breath away, that little print, which had been buried in a stack of other images, none of them even the slightest bit comparable to this work, only about the size of his two palms pressed together. He gazed at it for a long time, until someone moved in the other room and the floor creaked and he came back to where he was standing, in the back room at Goupil's, in London, holding the print in his hand.

He paid for it with nearly the whole of his week's salary, and that evening after he left work, the walk home to the Loyers' was more beautiful than it had been any night before. On the Westminster Bridge, there was an Italian iceman named Sal, a man he often interacted with on walks home from work, because he stationed his cart on the bridge toward the end of the afternoon and stayed there until evening. Vincent had a great fondness for Sal, though later when his mind was twisted with heartache he found different elements in him—stinginess, fear. In those happy days, though, he saw he was a hardworking man, a man who had his sights set on the future and yet one who was able to enjoy the present. He was a foreigner, as Vincent was, his English stilted and curved, and yet he had a comfort about him, a confidence. He stood inside of his life, he knew that his choices were right, and what his purpose was.