While the Gods Were Sleeping (31 page)

In one of the other attics the figure of a nurse stood in the twilight, peering outside, where the sky was criss-crossed by the beams of searchlights. There were still the sounds of shooting and thundering, and the growl of aircraft, but farther away. The nurse watched and meanwhile buttoned up her apron by sense of touch. Perhaps she would be on night shift soon, like Miss Schliess, who took me to the fifth floor, where an area served as a rest room.

In the windows the day, apart from a faint glow far out to sea, was completely extinguished. Somewhere above the distant
waves stipples of light sparkled and immediately disappeared. Above the land the searchlights still slid to and fro between the horizon and the clouds.

Miss Schliess lit a small candle and brought us tea. The faint candlelight made the white cuffs which she had fished from somewhere in her apron stand out against the calm blue of her dress. She had noticed the bewilderment when I saw her lacing those stiff linen bands around her wrists, just before we entered the room. “Dress code,” she had replied. “It’s a real convent here, mademoiselle… Dress like a nun, behave like a nun.”

She poured tea. The pale pot hung like a ghostly manifestation in her hand. “So you’re visiting your brother then?” she asked as she sat down opposite me at the narrow table.

“My brother. And someone else. A friend… Though Mum’s not to know…” I drank a mouthful. The tea was lukewarm. “It’s a secret…”

“Ah, a sweetheart, a soldier sweetheart…” Miss Schliess held her tea mug near her mouth, hiding her lips, but I could hear from her voice that she was moved.

“Can’t blame you, dear. Not too badly injured, I hope?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Light injuries according to his letter.” In reality it was more a postcard scribbled all over, for safety’s sake put in an envelope and addressed to my uncle. “Haven’t seen him yet. Went to see my brother first.”

“Nothing serious, probably… There are others. Haven’t been so lucky myself, mademoiselle. Lost me darlin’ Henry two years ago…” She tried to sound breezy, but I could hear that she was finding it difficult.

She put her tea mug on the table, and clasped it with both hands. “Sometimes I dream that it’s a great big body that we
have to put back together. One big mess of bowels and limbs. One long table full of arms, legs, eyeballs, lungs…” She hesitated. “Testicles…”

She brought the mug to her lips again. Behind her back, out to sea, a fierce light flared up momentarily, which briefly silhouetted the outline of her wimple, her ear, her neck. A little later a faint thunder reached the beach. “It’s ages since I’ve seen a chap with everything in its right place, mademoiselle… And these hands…” She put the mug back on the table and spread her left and right on the table top. “The places they’ve been… Ever had to stack someone’s liver back in place, Miss?” She looked at her own fingers and shook her head. “Smelt the smell of an open belly? Filled a hole as big as a football in someone’s thigh with gauze, kept your sick down despite the stench of wound fever?”

She looked at me, she had pressed her lips together. I saw that her eyes were moist. “Saw a bunch of our boys bathing, this afternoon.” She nodded in the direction of the beach. “Couldn’t take my eyes off them. Must have stared at them with me mouth wide open, mademoiselle. The others laughed their heads off… Seen a saint, Elsie, dear? Our Lord Jesus walking the waves?” She tried to smile and brought the mug to her lips again. “Wish I had…”

Beneath her hands, which were not so much holding as supporting the tea mug, there was the glow of the white cuffs. They seemed to surround her wrists like haloes, to support her hands like pedestals, but also to separate them from her body, as if they were infected by the knowledge they had acquired, the arms, legs, groins that she had washed, the wounds and cavities she had entered to remove bandages dripping with blood,
to pour scorching carbolic acid onto flesh attacked by germs, pushing eyeballs back in their sockets, rearranging intestines under the midriff.

I drank another mouthful of tea. It tasted bitter, more like an infusion of tobacco than of tea. “I’m sorry, Miss. About your loss, I mean.” I was aware of how inadequate my words sounded.

“Never mind, love. Anyway…” She got up, produced a small watch from her breast pocket and glanced at it. “Duty calls. And you go back to your mother, mademoiselle.”

S
HE LAY ON THE BED
, the wet cloth on her face gave her the look of a dead person under a shroud. Her arms lay idle by her body, hands on the belly, between the two sides of her coat, which she had unbuttoned but not taken off.

“Is that you Helena?” when I sat on the other bed, which with its creaking augured a sleepless night. “Is that you, Helena?” It must have been the first time in three years that she directed words at me that did not end in an exclamation mark.

“Yes, Maman, it’s me.”

She said nothing else. Between us, on the floor, stood the dark material of her bag.

I lay down, the bed protested weakly. The mattress seemed to be trying to shake me off it and, through the rags with which it was filled, to push ribs or vertebrae into my back. I looked at my mother, at the wet cloth on her face and the square silhouette of light with which the dormer window framed her head and shoulders whenever the sky outside lit up because of a flare or a searchlight, and I thought of home, of my father.

What was he doing at this moment, unaware that we were in the same country again, separated by a long scar of trenches and barbed wire, of dead people and hospitals and bare earth? I knew that my mother carried with her somewhere in her bag the few letters that had managed to get through to us. The breeziness with which he had written that it would all be over by Christmas, and that, if people wanted to repeat the adventure
of 1870, we couldn’t be in a better place than with his in-laws. In our lost backwater of the Republic no one would trouble us, he believed. Sometime later my uncle had also handed over the other letter, which my father had sent at the same time: “Should it come to it again, my wife and children could not be better off anywhere than with you, my dear Theo. According to the rumours they will pass through our country this time. I’m not deaf, or blind. I saw the sort of stuff that was being transported by rail when I was in Germany recently.”

I had read those words so often that I knew them by heart. I reread them to be able to hear his voice, his calm concern for our welfare. “Be prepared for Edgard to volunteer,” he also said in that letter to my uncle. “He won’t wait. I know my brood. I don’t expect you to put up more resistance than necessary, and my son will have enough to handle with his mother. What would we do, assuming we were still young, dear brother-in-law? Hide away and afterwards brave the scorn, sit out the shame until everyone has had his say, and then be branded a coward for the rest of one’s life? Or fight and hope that we survive the whole affair without too much damage? Let Marianne read this letter, should it be necessary. Tell her that I hope the best for her, and hope that our daughter will give her support. If the worst comes to the worst, they cannot do better than wait until this inconvenience has passed over us, with you and Josine and Yolande.”

She had slammed doors in the days before my brother left, probably in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn. She had resisted with all the means at her disposal. When he didn’t appear at breakfast that day, for a moment she was no longer my mother, but a gaping breach in the wall of her own
severity. My uncle had bashfully pushed that letter towards her, and she had withdrawn to her room for three days. Not until the fourth morning had she reappeared downstairs, pulled tight and laced up from head to toe. “
Bon!
” she had said before sitting down. “We shall take that inconvenience as it comes.”

After that we always spoke about “that inconvenience”. “It’s taking its time, that inconvenience,” she would invariably comment when going through the papers, whose reports she tried to decipher like oracles. “We’re going forward, we’re going backward, we’re standing still, but we’re still winning, for three years!” But even in the newspaper articles there was growing weariness perceptible between the lines, the tiredness of an increasingly lethargic war, which more and more frequently struck me as little more than a thoroughly spoilt child. It had set out its army of toy soldiers neatly on the floor and then abandoned them, frozen them in their positions, and its only pleasure seemed to be to crush them underfoot in seething swipes.

“Now they’re going to turn the world inside out, that’s how desperate they are,” she had sneered a few months before, when in the early morning of an early summer day the earth suddenly shook, the hens clucked indignantly in their runs, the pigs kicked their troughs in annoyance and the dogs stared in dismay at the ground beneath their feet while the quake continued under them. “That will do a lot of good!” she had exclaimed sarcastically, sticking a needle into a sock, since there would not be much more question of sleeping in the house.

My uncle’s outings also became more lethargic, as he took his ill tidings round the village and hamlets more and more slowly, a nemesis yawning with boredom. The funeral services for the fallen were lethargic, with or without a coffin in the church,
the sermons of the Abbé were more and more lethargic, the lethargic process of mourning and the sluggish march of the columns, which I saw shuffling past in the telescope in the attic, under the bare trees in the rains of November, or the troops who sometimes made a temporary camp in the barn, their lethargic bartering for eggs, potatoes, ham or bacon—everything creaked with tiredness, in everything there was a hidden painful joint, everything suffered from chilly bones.

Even in that attic room, that evening in September, under the eaves of the old hotel, the artillery sounded lethargic. The salvoes resounded in bored routine, the searchlights slid grumpily through the sky, the flares were like languorous birds with a long tail, too heavy for an elegant flight—and even the bang, the huge bang which, without the roar first swelling, shook the rafters above our heads and blew the glass from the dormer window over us in a rain of slivers, even it had something lame, something gutless about it.

I saw my mother sit up, pull the cloth from her face in alarm, and shake a few slivers from her lap. She was about to say something when a second impact, close by, ear-shattering, made the woodwork of the windows whine and slammed the frames against the side wall.

A drop of blood was running from the corner of her mouth over her chin. She grabbed for the bag, meanwhile pressed the cloth against her lips, and had only just bent down when another bang smashed window glass elsewhere and blew the washbasin in the corner of our room off its base. We dived for cover, each behind the foot of our bed. I saw that she was pressing her cheeks hard against the rails of the bed and was stretching in
order to pull the bag, which was still standing between the beds, towards her over the floorboards. Outside planes were growling everywhere, invisible in the sky, among the rat-tat-tat of the antiaircraft guns. The searchlights had come to life, and were keenly sweeping the sky. Shrapnel clattered over the roof tiles above our heads into the gutters. Below us, in the stairwell, a woman’s voice called: “Everyone downstairs! Everyone downstairs!”

“We have to go, Maman. We have to go at once…”

She nodded, pulled the bag towards her across the floor and crawled out ahead of me into the narrow central corridor—the floorboards were strewn with slivers of glass and fragments of knick-knacks that had been hurled from the window sills and wall racks, and everywhere we were surrounded by the noise of aircraft; their bluebottle-like buzzing and the crackling salvoes sounded louder and closer now that not a single pane of glass remained whole.

We crawled to our feet, shuffling on along the central corridor bent double. Above our heads, seemingly grazing the roof beam, a projectile with an ethereal whistle drew a trail of light through the night. A few seconds later a fireball formed, and the front of a burning house stood out like a mask in the dark.

“We must hurry, Maman, It’s far too dangerous here.” I pulled her with me into the stairwell. Below us, a few floors down, others must be making the descent. I heard voices and the bump of soles on the treads. We had to find our way in the dark. I clasped her hand in mine, she did not let go of the bag with the other, and we must have been about halfway down when with a huge thud the whole building seemed to stretch from roof beam to cellar, groaning in all its screws, bolts, seams and ligaments, and then subsided.

My mother had let out a cry and a cascade of jars, flacons and preserves had tumbled out of her bag over the steps. She wanted to bend down and pick everything up, but I pulled her with me. “We haven’t got time. We must get downstairs. We’ll pick it up later.”

The downstairs corridor was swarming with people: soldiers, civilians, kitchen staff, cleaners and the teeming blue-and-white shapes of the nurses bringing patients from all directions in their bare feet, in pale pyjamas to chairs or sofas. Most, I saw, only had wounds to the arms or upper body, and perhaps precisely because of that were being treated in the old boarding house—if necessary they could take flight downstairs under their own steam. We tried to make our way through the throng, to find a place where we could sit down or at least stand and lean against the wall. Outside the storm seemed to be abating, there were still explosions and rattling, but less intense and farther away, farther inland.

“Edgard,” muttered my mother. “Where’s Edgard?”

Doors flew open. Wounded patients streamed in. A woman with a screeching child in her arms wrapped in a soiled sling. A woman staunching the flow of blood from a wound on the side of her head with her scarf. A small boy, deathly quiet, with eyes wide open on a stretcher, apparently insensible to the pain which one of his knees, little more than a bloody mass, must have been causing him. An old woman worked her way into the corridor, hair dishevelled, the sleeves of her coat torn to shreds. “Never thought my corset would save me,” I heard her say to a man, probably her husband, who with one hand was holding in place a tea towel wrapped round his other hand.