The Season of Migration (23 page)

He thinks of being down in the mine, all the bodies sharing space in the underground darkness. He remembers how it felt to be at what he thought was the bottom, and then to climb down, and farther down, and farther down still, with no light but those flickering flames sometimes turning blue. The birds moving around him now are just as busy as those bodies digging at the earth back in mining country; even now they are scraping out its insides, pulling out its guts and discarding them in mountains; they are just like these birds, just like the earthworms below him where he stands now. It is all the same: creatures doing what they do, creatures making work, creatures feeding and working and being themselves.

He opens his eyes. He thinks perhaps Angeline is in the body of one of these birds; perhaps it is her wing that is brushing against him now, or now, or now. Perhaps that is Angeline who swoops across the pond in a dramatic arc, heading toward the water with incredible speed, then ducking and turning at the last moment. He smiles at this notion, and turns from the pond feeling buoyed by the rush of the birds, the fellow creatures engaged with life, but a mere few minutes past the pond he feels a cloud move back over his vision and his mind grows dark. He feels a pang of such despair that he sinks to his knees. This is a fool's errand that he is on; he is walking to nowhere, a wretched scarecrow dressed up like a man with a purpose. What does he think he will find at the end of this walk? His brother has sent him no letters for almost a year; what does he think will be accomplished by going to see him, by taking him his letters? And what in God's name will happen then?

He remembers the feeling he had when he went to the Borinage: it was as if he had been standing in front of a glass case with a treasure locked inside for almost four years, being told no and no and no every time he tried to reach it, and then one day the case was opened and he was allowed to reach inside. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt like maybe he might be good at something, maybe he might know what he was meant to do, how he could be himself and bring good to the world at the same time. He knew his path would be different—he couldn't be a preacher like his father, he couldn't get the theological degree and wear a suit and tie and say things he did not believe, but still he could bring God's message to the poor, even only as himself, as the mere Vincent.

He remembers Angeline, in Bible class, asking him something about the text they were reading, and the way that his answer dissatisfied him, the way that her probing question made a rope in his stomach start to twist. He remembers the man in the village, Monsieur Desmet, who died alone and without God; wasn't his death just the same as all the others? Louls Hartmann, the hulking man who walked before Vincent in the mine shaft, dying with his insides exploded on the long yard of the terrible hungry mine—was he any more secure than Desmet was, dying in the warmth of his bed, his body intact? He thinks of his father, telling him that God wished him to be who he was:
If God had wanted you to be a miner, He would have made you one.
A man was not supposed to live like another man; a man was not supposed to prostrate himself beyond the level that he was already prostrate. The pair of reverends in his hut, standing over him with their disapproving faces under their top hats, making those noises with their mouths:
tsk tsk tsk
, as if he were a piece of fruit gone bad.

He gets to his feet and starts to walk again. They had a cat once when he was a boy—a stray that wandered over to the parsonage and would not leave, appearing every day and mewling desperately at the door until one of the children came outside. Eventually they convinced their mother to let the cat inside, where it swished happily across the living room, rubbing its body against all of their legs and hands. Anna suggested they call it Roo, a name that quickly stuck. Roo lived with them for only a few months, and then one day she didn't return from her afternoon wanderings and was never seen again.

One day during those months Vincent came across Roo in the garden in back of the parsonage with a mouse clamped between her jaws. The mouse's body was limp and hanging from the corners of her mouth, and Roo looked up at him as if she were carrying a prize that she would share with him only if he were lucky. He did not touch the cat then, merely shooed it away to go do its terrible business where he could not see. But that evening, when Roo came back, he sat with her in the front room and prayed over her, one hand on her tiny head, asking God to forgive her for her trespass and to take away all desire for murder from her heart. He concentrated, his eyes shut tight, fervently aiming his prayer to the sky. Wasn't that the way prayers were heard? When he released her, he felt sure that she swished away from him with a new lightness, a sense of relief at being forgiven. He was seven years old.

He thinks of this now, remembering the lightness and relief, the feeling that a prayer could fix something, that it was that simple. He mourns for that simplicity; he wishes to have it back with all of his soul. In his head everything is so confused, and at the end of the long trail of puzzlement is yet another question mark, for what can a man make of his life if he is so perplexed?

He is alone. He sees the sweep of the countryside; he imagines the horizon extending out past where he can see to other villages and fields and rolling heaths and eventually to oceans and ships and men in other lands. The earth is moving with human life and activity and he is alone on a road, his mind roiling in chaos, in awe at the grandeur and cowering at the fact of it, the incredible pressure, the challenge of being alive. How to be equal to the task? He does not belong to the birds. They have one another; what does he have?

He hears her voice, again and again:
Monsieur Vincent, is that you?
He doesn't know.

 

1880

January 10

Petit Wasmes, the Borinage

Dear Theo,

In 1755 there was an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, that nearly completely destroyed the city and the surrounding areas. Forty minutes after the initial earthquake, there was a massive wave, and for days afterward fires raged. Nearly 100,000 people are said to have died.

January 10

Dear Theo,

A seventy-three-year-old convicted murderer named James Legg was hanged in 1801 for his crime. Three Royal Academy of Arts members convinced the surgeon at Chelsea Hospital to let them have the body after death. They wanted to use Legg's body to study the physiology of the crucifixion of Christ, which they thought had been depicted all wrong in popular artistic renderings. The men erected a cross near the sight of Legg's hanging and affixed the corpse to the cross just as Christ had been affixed. When the body, still warm after death, had cooled, the men made a cast of it, so they could study it; they also, then, flayed the body and made a different cast of it without its skin.

January 10

Dear Theo,

Sometimes I am visited by our dead brother, Vincent, the one who died the year before I was born. I have never told anyone this. He comes to me, Theo, I see him, and sometimes he speaks to me.

January 10

Dear Theo,

Why is it easier to tell you all of these things than to tell you about the explosion? I will tell you about anything else; anything that I know, even things I don't, I will tell easier than this.

The explosion was two days after Angeline stayed the night in my hut.

I didn't think there was anything worse than what I had already seen in the Borinage, but I was wrong.

The sound of it was a clash of thunder thicker and more ominous than any I had yet heard. I felt the tremor in my hut; the earth beneath me turned to liquid for an instant; it rolled as if in the wake of a boat. Then all was still. I instantly descended into dread. Outside my hut there was sure to be death and destruction and suffering the likes of which I had not yet experienced.

In a moment I heard the breaker whistle blowing from the mine. I ran toward the sound with a churning stomach and tingling limbs, and met many others running toward it, too. Many women were already crying, anticipating that the tragedy they had been waiting for daily was surely upon them at last. There were men running also, their faces fixed and stern, though their eyes were wide and their speed gave away their fear. Who was it they had lost this time? What kind of destruction would they find, and how far would it reach? It was a run of only a minute or so, but in the minds of each of us there was the conscious crossing over from before and into after.

As we came within sight of the mine we slowed our speed, for the vision before us was fresh with darkness and evil. There was a column of dense black smoke climbing to the sky from the center of the mine, where the pit was; the blackness had erased the sun. The air was thick and choking and rife with the sound of ominous crackling and snapping. Through the smoke I could see that the wheel at the top of the pit, that giant piece of machinery that helped to move the cages, was on fire, the flames reaching through the smoke as if they, too, were suffocating and desperate for escape. The buildings surrounding the pit were damaged and charred, their windows blown and hanging, flapping like pieces of cloth. One of the buildings had half collapsed, as if it had been brought to its knees.

It was a vision of Hell. It was more than a vision; it was Hell materialized. Hell has been raised, Theo, I saw it with my own eyes. On the ground approaching the mine there were the bodies of injured men, legs broken and skin smeared with char and dust and blood. Men were shouting and wriggling and squirming, using their elbows, their hips, their shoulders, even their chins to inch themselves farther away from the pit. Some were not moving at all. Scattered among the bodies were severed limbs—a hand, a forearm, a thigh and knee, a calf and ankle and boot, pieces of flesh both recognizable and not—mere objects now, bloodied and ragged, where a few minutes before they had been part of a man's identity, part of how he loved and lost, part of the body he had awakened with that morning.

All was chaos, all was terror, all was noise and dust and flame. Where to run? Whom to tend to? The landscape was awash with need, and I was only a man with two hands. I staggered from man to man, this one with blood rushing from his ear, this one with an elbow bent the wrong way, bone torn through skin like paper. I bent to hear requests and pleas, murmuring words of succor and support, quickly learning that without supplies there was nothing at all I could do.

A man with a mustache lay with a hole in the center of him. He was seemingly intact and howling, but when I drew close to him I saw that his center was open as a window. He fumbled with his insides as if they were clothing overflowing from a bureau drawer. But he had only his hands, and they were not enough. He did not seem aware of me or of anything else beyond his task. For a moment, I could do nothing but stand over him, paralyzed with shock and fear, my eyes fixed on those desperate hands. Through the man's fingers his insides oozed; his hands were solid objects grasping at a hole full of snakes. They were butterflies, those hands, butterflies fluttering over an expanse of living quicksand.

I was mesmerized; the color of the hands was a pale shade that was quickly darkening, saturated by blood, dyed from the inside and the outside. I was a monster, standing over the man and gazing at him, watching him die. I was a monster, but I could not stop; I felt horror that was so complete that it stripped everything away save for my eyes. The man died within a minute or two, his hands growing limp and sinking ever so slowly into his body. Man is made in the image of God, Theo, which is also the image of grief, of terror, and of fire.

Behind the man with the hole in his stomach was a man whose legs were severed. As I approached I saw that it was Louls Hartmann, the man who had lumbered before me down the passage in the mine when I went down. He whimpered like a child. I took off my shirt and tore the sleeves from it to tie around Hartmann's thighs. He had already lost so much blood that this was most likely a futile act. Blood was pooling around him, the puddle creeping toward his chest. He was sputtering but making no words. I tied the sleeves tight, praying that I could stem the flow. I told him he was going to be all right, feeling a liar and not sure Hartmann could even hear me. His eyes were bulging and full of awe, as if he were watching Heaven approach.

Men and women were arriving with stretchers, planks of wood, horses and mules, anything they could find that might be able to transport bodies away from the mine. In the blur of faces I saw Else and Hubert Aert, their faces twisted, Jan Gilmart lifting a stretcher, Paul Fontaine bending over a man in the dirt. The Denises were there, all of them except Alard, whom they must have made stay at home. I called out to a boy leading a mule—the man without his legs would easily fit on the back of his beast. The boy came toward me, but when he saw the body at my feet he hesitated and then shook his head. “It's no use, Monsieur Vincent!” he said, and moved quickly on, for there was no time to pause for the dead. Louls Hartmann was gone: his chin on the earth, his eyes still wide and staring, but his soul departed. I paused a moment, then bent to remove my sleeves from his thighs. I used them on someone else.

January 12

Dear Theo,

How do you represent horror? How do you speak about your nightmares? If you know everything about how things should be, then tell me how to do it. When you are dreaming something horrible, you wake up in your bed and the dream disappears—sometimes as slowly as a fog burns off in the sun, but nonetheless eventually it is gone. The horrors that you see when you are awake do not disappear. When a man is burned in a fire, his skin turns to putty and runs like sand. I know this because I saw such men, such flesh. In the aftermath of the mine explosion I saw a man's face drip off of him, his skin a kind of liquid that pulled away from his eye, which stared up at me, unblinking and dead, like the eye of a fish.