The Season of Migration (26 page)

A thunderstorm rolls in; the night is lit up in flashes and explosions. Rain pours off of him, it clouds his vision, he cannot see, and then in a flash of light all is as bright as day. The water pours off of the farmer's barn behind him and he thinks of the hulk of Noah's ark, as it would have appeared in the darkness of the Flood by the light of a lightning flash. “Stop this, Vincent,” his mother screams over the storm. He yells to her that he cannot hear her, though he can.

He remembers Alard, a few weeks ago, sitting with him in the salon, his face confused and fearful, his eyes wide; Smoke the cat had disappeared, and Vincent was weeping, his face streaked with dirt. “I am mourning!” he yelled. “Our friend is gone; she is gone, Alard! We are mourning!”

Theo! How can I show you all that is in my head, all that I have seen? Theo, can you hear me?

He crawls to the haystack to his right and tries to get close enough to it that it might shield him from the rain. He nuzzles close up to it and breathes into the hay. A lightning flash lights the night, and in the moment of light he sees a spider clinging to the hay a few inches from his face. The spider treks along, seemingly unperturbed by the weather. Where is it off to? He pulls himself up and peers at the insect. He is impressed with the spider's temerity—for the insect, the length of the haystack is an enormous way. The spider crawls, eight legs working in tandem with ease, a strange creeping magic show. It is a marvel, he thinks, that such a creature exists.

With a quick movement, he covers the spider with his hand. He feels the insect crawl onto his fingers, and thinks of how it must be startled, the world suddenly changed, the new surface of these warm fleshy things. The spider is moving, unperturbed, exploring.

He brings his hand to his face and tosses the spider into his mouth. For a second, he feels it throw itself around in there, and then he swallows it.

He lies back and lets the rain fall onto his face. His body is hot and tingling, energized as if he were still moving. The night lights up again and again in flashes of bright, unearthly light, so he can see everything plainly, in a clearer light even than daylight. He can see everything, there, from his position on the earth in the rain. He feels an incredible growing power, as if, were he to move, he might crack open the whole world.

 

1880

February 17

Petit Wasmes, the Borinage

Dear Theo,

Sometime in very early July, we held a memorial service in my hut for those who had been lost in the explosion. Yes, it was late, but I couldn't bring myself to host it any sooner.

I had had nothing but coffee for days and days. Look at me, Theo, I am not ashamed, not anymore: I had only a few coarse coal sacks draped around me for clothes. I was unshaven and starved, feverish and delirious and filthy. My lips were dry and cracked, my face streaked with shades of brown and black. I lay back on the straw in the corner of my hut while the miners came in and surrounded me. There were not many of them, but to me it was a crowd.

It was early evening and the light was dim; my lantern hung from the rafters near the door, but it hardly gave more than a glow. I kept forgetting why the people were there, thinking I was dreaming, then realizing that they were waiting for me to speak. I squirmed and resisted, left myself and came back, struggled and calmed myself a hundred times in a minute. The bodies darkened and turned to creatures; they were molded and wax, they were black stone, they were shadows, nearly a hundred shadows hovering and swaying in my hut, looming over me, dancing, a hundred versions of our brother Vincent, judging me, a hundred versions of myself, of you, of the bird Cricket, whom I had buried outside my door, of Father and Mother. Their heads shook, their fingers wagged, their eyes burned. It was a nightmare, I was dreaming, there were a hundred tired souls staring down at me and waiting for me to save them, to heal their hearts; it was a task I was not capable of. But wait, this was no nightmare, these were my friends, my gentle and sorrowful friends, my starving friends. They looked to me as if I were God, waiting for me to deliver answers. But where was God? I had lost Him.

I propped my head on my hands and began to speak. My voice was quiet, and many of the miners crouched to hear me. “My friends,” I began, “we are gathered here today to mourn together for the loss of our friends, those who were taken from us and swallowed in violence by the mine.” It was difficult for me to get the words out. My mind was interfering with my mouth; I had to concentrate on each word before I said it so that I would not merely speak nonsense. “Preachers say that God works in mysterious ways,” I said, “and this is true. We often don't understand the ways of the world, for there is much to the mystery that we simply cannot comprehend. Only one thing we know for sure, and that is that we loved those people whom we have lost, and they did not deserve to die.”

“My friends,” I continued, pushing the words out, “man is a serious being. There is a string in the heart that accords to the voice of sorrow, and impressions of grief take the strongest hold of the mind. There is a time when cheerfulness gives place to melancholy, and when the house of mourning is better suited to the soul than the house of mirth. This, I think, is one of those times, and I am so happy we are all here to experience it together. For whether we think of it or not, death approaches. Every path in the world leads to the tomb, and every hour has been to some the last hour. We have learned this already, these last few months, mourning our friends who were struck down so cruelly.

“Preachers say that the lesson of death is that we will rise again in the next world; Scripture says, ‘the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.' Preachers say that we should let the grave speak to us, teach us lessons of purity and lead us away from our vanity in this world. This is what I am supposed to tell you, that our suffering will be relieved in the next world, that it is God's plan that we should suffer in this world so that we can go in glory to the next. But the truth is that I wonder about this as much as you do. What is this world, if it is just for passing through? Is it true what the preachers say, that we are not to cling to this world, not to cling to those we love? Friends, I admit it! I don't believe this. I want to cling to this world with all of my strength; I want to cling to all of you, to this place, to the people whom we lost. Friends, we are alive! We are alive, which means that we can still see this world, which means that we can still appreciate its beauty. I am not living for the next world, not now, no; I am living for this one. I want to do justice to the world I am in right now. I am moving toward the grave, yes, as are we all, but I am paying attention to every step along the way.”

The bodies in the room held me, Theo. I could feel them holding me with their attention, with their presence and their weeping eyes. I started again, feeling I must go on for them, “Friends”—and at this, there was a commotion at the door, and the miners parted. In the doorway stood Reverends De Jong and Van den Brink, two of the members of the evangelism committee. They were finely dressed, in black coats and top hats, more funereal by far than the miners. Their faces wore expressions of shock.

“Welcome, Reverends,” I managed to say after a moment. I was too weak to muster surprise. Much of me still thought I was dreaming, and the arrival of the reverends made some sort of strange sense. I addressed them: “We are conducting a service for the fifty-seven people who perished in the explosion in the Marcasse mine. Now that you're here, perhaps you'd like to offer some words of comfort to these good people?”

Of course they would do no such thing. They cleared their throats and tried to shake off their disgust; they mustered the professional stance they favored before potential believers. They waved their arms and demanded private audience with me, despite my inadequate protests, shooing the miners out of the hut as if they were crows. They believed they held jurisdiction over any roomful of people; any collection of hearts was theirs.

I am not sure why the reverends came to the Borinage. Maybe it was the letter I sent to Brussels that roused them, although they gave no help to the people while they were here. Maybe they wanted to come in person to tell me that I had been dismissed. Later, I thought it hard to believe that they would have given me another chance had they found something different upon their arrival, but perhaps they told themselves as much.

I was dismissed. The reverends called me “un-Christian” and “savage.” They chastised me for attempting to have any kind of a service in such a hovel as that little hut, and they decried my state, my weakness, and where, oh where, were my clothes? They shook their heads and spoke to each other more than they spoke to me. Their French was rapid and I was exhausted. I could not bring myself to care much at all about what they said or what judgment they passed. As I lay at their feet, their shiny black boots in my line of vision, I tried to conjure the time when I would have cared. It was so recent, but I could barely bring it to mind. They spoke at me, they spoke above me, they shook their fists and their heads. At some point, without my noticing, they disappeared.

My probationary period was up, my services no longer desired. I was not surprised. I had tried to show them that their love was the same as mine, but I failed.

*   *   *

The official letter came to the Denises' house. “The absence of certain qualities,” the reverends wrote. “Lacks a talent for speaking.” They praised me for my “devotion to the spirit of self-sacrifice,” but this was not enough to “render the exercise of an evangelist's principal function.” They granted me three months to look for another situation. Even the word
situation
was strange to me.

Function
is the word the reverends used. A man is supposed to have a function, just like a scythe or a hoe.

Madame Denis brought me a clean shirt, underwear, and a pair of pants belonging to her husband. She also brought me a piece of soap, which I used to scrub myself, standing in a basin of water as hot as I could stand it.

All of my movements were languid; it was as if I were moving through molasses. My limbs felt heavy and difficult to move, as if they were new to me, as if I were learning how to use them. As the water ran off my body, I looked down at it and barely recognized it. When I arrived in the Borinage my body was robust, it had strength I could rely on, and I knew it as my own. In less than a year, it had dwindled to something I no longer knew. I was barely more than a skeleton: There were my hip bones, my knobby knees, my ribs pushing through my skin as if they wanted to reach the air. A man does not know his skeleton like he knows his body; he can have a distinct birthmark, freckles, a patch of ruddy skin, a suit of reddish hair that covers him, but his skeleton must look the same as any man's. If he were shown a group of skeletons, could he identify his own?

It frightened me, the confrontation with my body in that warm basin. I moved the soap gently over its contours and crevices, scrubbing only just enough, scooping the water from the basin with an old metal cup and pouring it slowly over the skin to wash away the suds. I knew it was my body because I could feel the warmth of the water, the steam that rose up into my eyes, the way that beneath the layer of dirt the skin was soft and pink and alive. As the dirt fell away and I saw the rosy pink rise through the skin of my sunken stomach, my thighs, my arms, I felt tears rise into my eyes. To whom was this body sacred? No one would care for a person if he did not care for himself. It was another failure to add to the list. Through the blurring of my tears, I saw our brother Vincent hovering next to me, his body warm and rosy and plump, forever healthy. When I reached for him, he slipped away.

After the bath I shaved off the growth of months and saw my face in the small mirror over the sink. Without the fullness of the beard, my face was long and narrow. My cheekbones sat high on sunken cheeks, my eyes low valleys among steep peaks. I stared at myself for quite a while, trying to find myself in the image in that mottled mirror. Always before it had been others that I lost a hold of—other people, other ideas, other notions and professions and convictions. This time, I had lost myself. These are my failures, Theo; I lay them before you to judge.

*   *   *

And then, just a mere month later, you arrived. Before your visit, which I had been dreaming of for months, I walked to Brussels to see Reverend Pieterszen, who had always been the member of the evangelism committee who was the most supportive of me. A fairly punishing walk in the hot summer sun, though an invigorating one. Pieterszen looked at my drawings and praised them, found me lodgings in the Frank home in Cuesmes, and sent me off with a pair of new boots, a train ticket, and the encouragement to keep going, to find my own path despite my lack.

Now that you know a bit of what I have been through in this place, can you imagine how I longed to see you, how I yearned to commune with the brother who had always understood me when no one else did? I couldn't tell you about this place in a letter; my words could not do justice to it, to Angeline, to the horror of the explosion, to the wonder of the people, Decrucq and Paul Fontaine and the little school, the slag heap, the sunsets, the mine.

I couldn't tell you about it, but I thought we would have the time to talk in person. When you arrived, you were different—you, Theo, not me, for as much as I may have changed, as much as I had seen, I still, after all, wanted to talk to you and to be seen by you.

March 1

Dear Theo,

Not even a man's words can always represent what is in his mind. A man is always choosing his words, in charge of his narrative, free to omit what he wants to, to invent and to twist. I write you of the past, and yet I do not share the present.

It is March here now, seven months since you came to visit. A cover of snow is still on the ground from the last snowstorm; there have been many storms here lately. Still I have heard nothing from you, and except for that first letter that I mailed you, you have heard nothing from me. But all these months, I have been speaking to you. The letters are piled in the drawer of my desk here in Cuesmes. Why haven't I mailed them? What am I waiting for?