I liked him. I liked his serious fun, or his funny seriousness. Later, when he told me about his life, I seemed to know everything already, as if his story had been able to transport itself to my mind, perhaps via my fingers, that afternoon, and was waiting there until he stuck words on it.
Undoubtedly my mother would have said now that I need a lot of words to make clear what is obvious: “You’re in love, child. A blind man could tell you that.” But what does that word mean? Once, twice or three times in your life you meet a person who rearranges your molecules in a trice, someone who manifests themselves as the question to answers piled up in you from long before you yourself could think, and whose existence you had never before suspected. And the only choice you’re given is to answer the question or ignore it.
“Are you getting tired, patriot?” asked my mother sarcastically. “You are getting under my feet a lot. If you need my arm, just call…”
He laughed. “I’m fine, madame.”
The houses gave way to trees, coolness and the enclosed smell of the forest floor. The front of the casino gleamed between the treetops, almost bright white in the moonlight.
“Almost there, off we go…” said the soldier walking next to my mother.
I had often been there in my childhood. Sun-drenched Sunday mornings with parades by the brass band on the small promenade in front of the terrace, and afterwards lemon sorbet or lemonade. My father liked it here. The spot, I think, stood as a symbol of his marriage, his love of my mother, whom he was fond of calling jokingly “La Belle Flamande”, just to hear her protest — she thought herself as French as Camembert.
“Vive le Roi Soleil,” she would cry because, had Louis XIV been a little less hungry for land and wealth, she would indeed have been a beautiful Flemish woman. Our families were located more or less within the borders of the old County of Flanders, invisible, many times redrawn by history, that eloquent expression of chance, where Latin and Germanic mingled promiscuously. Without the Peace of Nijmegen they might have remained compatriots, and my mother would have had to appeal to different mythologies to distinguish her from us. But I was as fond of the spot as she was, because my double origin lay at my feet there and that hill marked the watershed in my soul — the externalization of my own creation myth.
On the south side the land seemed to descend to the Mediterranean. The sun, I imagined, already had in it something of the bright light of Provence, cicadas, cypresses and the myth of Van Gogh, who sought the essence of colour, beyond pigments, and whom I discovered only much later. Above the landscape that extended to the north of the hilltop the sky had an Arctic clarity, and, in the autumn, when the sunlight fell lower on the earth, the melancholy of summers close to the pole, where the nights dawdle in a sunset that spans the whole horizon.
When we were small my father would take my brother and me on his arm, help us onto the balustrade on the edge of the plateau and show us the old Roman highways that left the town like the arms of a star and cut through the landscape of the south in straight lines. On the other side, which he called “our side”, he pointed out the towns of the north. On clear days you could see them like brown-yellow dots in the plain below us, shimmering in the hot summer air: right in the distance Nieuwpoort, under the blue-white haze of the coastline. A little farther down, Diksmuide. Farther south-east the towers of Ypres. Below that Veurne and, closer, Poperinge.
That night the plain was bathed in the alabaster moonlight. Fog banks hung like vaults above places where ponds or streams wound round woods and spires with dew. There was an unearthly peace, the almost continuous thunder of the war was absent — we again knew what silence was.
We were taken to the entrance to the casino. Someone asked us to be quiet: “The boys are well asleep.”
A door opened, that of the gaming room which I vaguely remembered from earlier years. There was a smell of sleeping bodies. The high windows cast oblique shafts of moonlight onto the floors, retrieved from the darkness the folded patterns of blankets, a sleeve, a hand, a head. On all sides soldiers were lying sleeping, alone or having crawled together. From their footwear, which lay against the gaming tables on which their rucksacks were resting, the smell of earth, summer earth, of tent canvas, oiled steel and grass rose up to the ceiling with its frivolous plasterwork, which hung surreally above the sleeping figures.
*
“Careful, mademoiselle…” He took me by the arm when I almost stumbled over a pair of boots. As we went on, one of the sleeping soldiers sat up and whispered loudly: “Blimey, George. There’s a fucking fairy hovering about…” I was suddenly very glad that my mother didn’t understand English.
“Shut up, John. Get some sleep, willya,” grunted someone else.
”If you say so, sweetheart.” And the figure lay down again, huddling up against the other, because it was noticeably cooler up there than below in the alleys of the town, where the house fronts retained the heat of the day.
A second door opened and gave onto another room, where still more soldiers were sleeping, but less lit by the moon, which did not shine in directly here, but played in the tops of the trees. I heard the party climbing a staircase in front of us, a long set of steps, to the roof, it turned out, after we’d had to wait for a moment before the sentry allowed us to go farther.
When we arrived at the top the strapping American had already taken up a position by the parapet, where she was looking at the dark roofs below us. Exclamations like “Unimaginably peaceful!” shot through the night and each time the man next to her, who obviously never left her side, mumbled something affirmative from under his white moustache, though without much enthusiasm.
My mother had her companion lead her over to the other side of the roof terrace and we followed her. Before our eyes the northern plain stretched out under the haze of fog that was drifting inland, and shrank villages and towns which in one place we could locate in that blanket of mist and in another not. Areas of woodland and rows of trees created the impression that we were looking down at a model, with the cosy attention to detail one finds in them.
“Almost picturesque, Walter dear, wouldn’t you say?” blared the American woman behind us, and we giggled, and I thought of what my uncle had said. It was splendid. Splendid, but a shame.
My mother put a handkerchief to her nose and said to the soldier next to her that it was surprisingly cool up here.
“Quite so,” he replied, without having a clue what she was talking about. I knew she was thinking of my father, and my brother.
Then, in the far north towards the coast, more or less in the spot where my father had pointed out to us as children that Nieuwpoort should be, a red glow suddenly flared out of the mist. The fog banks reflected the flickering, which went out almost immediately.
Then bright white points of light shot hither and thither, though roughly in a crooked line from north-west to south-east, up to the zenith, and descended slowly as they extinguished, before suddenly dying out again — and again, now closer to us, then more towards the coast.
My mother kept holding the handkerchief under her nose, and I heard her sigh: “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu…”
“Flares,” someone said. “They’re firing flares over the lines.”
No one spoke. Even the burly American woman had fallen silent and was standing close to the railing, staring at the spectacle through her lorgnette.
The silence became still more oppressive. There was no salvo or cannon shot to be heard, there was only that glow of lines of light, crooked needles above the landscape, and here and there the short-lived flash of what must be explosions, but without a boom or echo, and we looked at them as if at a natural phenomenon, as if down below on the plain the earth’s crust were tearing open and two pieces of land were grinding into each other or trying to separate.