Without him she had lost her domestic toolbox. My uncle had proved that he could not serve as a replacement and I myself had also betrayed her. She no longer walked quite upright now things no longer moved in accordance with her thermal energy. To keep on her feet, and to punish herself, she had the maid tighten her corset until it became an eye-level fortress, a breathing suit of armour.
I see her mending clothes, in the winter after my escapade, when she kept me close to her day after day. She allowed me at most an hour, in the library or when I had to look after the chickens, outside her force field. It was bitterly cold; the days crept by beneath a tin sky. All that could be heard was the rumbling of the weapons, distant or close by, depending on the direction of the wind, and the enervating ripping sound when she, by the light of the candle we had to share, tore open the seams of old shirts or trousers. She grasped the material in both fists, pressed her lips together and pulled the seam open, having first loosened the stitching, in a single tug. She would repair or cut up the pieces. Everything can serve a turn sooner or later. I don’t know if she herself felt the threat in those words.
Under the table top in the kitchen, next to the oven, in the chest in her room, the drawers bulged with everything that in her view might one day come in handy: bottle-stoppers, strips of greaseproof paper or barbed wire — her amulets. Without my father, equally anxious, she stored up all her resentments in her bastion of whalebone, which gave her the form of a still, in which her frustrations were so concentrated and purified that the words she could direct at me unexpectedly seemed more a discharge than a question or an order.
She straightens her shoulders. Here, in this paper afterlife, she grasps both halves of the back of an old coat in her hands, but the material does not give.
I read the annoyance in her face, which is about more than the stiffness of the material. The imminence of her saying something hangs in the air, the silence announces it.
“The scissors, Hélène,” she snaps at me.
Her glory, which was the glory of that summer, the summer of 1914, which in my memory is compressed into the sun-drenched afternoon of the day after our arrival. In the summer house of silver poplars the maids are laying the long table. The tinkling of the cutlery on the trays seems to come from the light itself. She in her summer dress: that intense, glaring white shot through with a hint of blue in the long grass of June, and above the deckchair in which my brother is sitting reading in the shade — of course he immediately went to sleep — the energy, the almost suicidal passion of the sunlight that plunges into the treetops and explodes among the leaves: a fountain of slivers, light pearls, drops, sparks. I feel it swelling when, upstairs in my uncle’s library, I look up from the book that I have laid on the reading table and am staring through the open window.
I hear the wind stirring the curtains, the farmworkers washing their hands outside by the pump for the approaching meal, the snorting when they throw a splash of water in their faces, and the giggling of the kitchen girls below, interrupted by the deep growl of the maid, Madeleine, who keeps a strict order among her chicks, and with her deeply sunken eye sockets and heavily arched eyebrows reminds me of an ancestral statue from Easter Island. And there is that light, the white horses of light when the wind tosses about in the treetops outside the window; the surf, the flood, I feel it pulling through my midriff, picking me up and putting me down again as it ebbs and splashes against wall behind me. And now too, here, I hear my mother’s voice, laughing and good-humoured: “Stop all those chinoiseries, child, and come to table finally.”
What does it matter, now I close the book and run downstairs, startling the mice in the courtyard and chasing the lizards like a blush over the yellow-ochre side wall — what does it matter that of all the people who have gathered round the table I am the only one still alive? The farmhands have laid their caps in their laps and look sheepishly at their still-empty plates while my uncle, according to his annual custom in honour of my mother, makes an overblown speech of welcome to my brother and me. The children impatiently knead chunks of bread into balls. The aunts, dressed up with ribbons and earrings like temple bells, look like grotesque Bodhisattvas, to the right and left of uncle in the middle of the long table. The kitchen maids are waiting with the soup tureen and step increasingly often from one foot to the other, as if needing urgently to pee. The swarming of the leaves, my mother’s dazzling figure, the glasses that are raised and the laughter and chatter in the warm noon of the penultimate day of June 1914. In the papers the commotion about the tragic incident has subsided to a narrow column in which the word “war” is used fairly dutifully—“the umpteenth storm in a teacup” is my brother’s opinion.
Three summers later, when we visit him, one of the three sisters can remember that she was on duty when they brought him in. “We have to cut most of them out of their uniforms. He was lucky. His wounds are deep but nowhere did the grenade hit an organ and the stomach wall is intact. We saw that when we cut his clothes loose and washed away the black blood and mud. They were able to bring him here quickly. Three others were dead on arrival. We put them over there in the corner under a blanket while we cleaned the wounded for the operation. One of the others lay here on the floor on the stretcher. He’d lost a forearm and the explosion had torn his feet from his ankles. They were hanging from his lower legs just by the tendons and when he went into a convulsion on the stretcher, his feet dragged across the floorboards as if they were attached to his shins by suspenders — but actually I shouldn’t say anything about that and I think you’d better keep quiet about it to your mother. She looks upset enough already.”
I think of the sea, the jade-green sea, the surf that was like molten tin when the waves broke and with foam fingers churned up the sand the day my mother and I went to visit him: it was the first time that she set foot on Belgian soil again. The sea and the pale upper bodies of the bathing men, and their uniforms that lay in heaps on the dry part of the beach, below the promenade — dotted lines of khaki and boots in the ochre sand.
The salt air, the rising of the voices when a wave lifted the bathers up: their heads, trunks and arms rose with the water level and sank again when the waves slid underneath them, rose, arched their backs, then toppled and tumbled into the sand.
Farther out to sea, hazy because of the mist above the water: the contours of ships, just close enough to be able to see the sailors walking to and fro on deck and salvoes like light flashes spewing from the barrels of the cannon.
The sound came later, a wave of thunder that found its own surf in the cheers of the soldiers on the promenade. They threw their caps in the air or waved with both arms. It wasn’t clear whether they were replying to the salvoes or shouting at the men below, who braced themselves for the waves constantly rolling in, went under and came up again roaring with laughter.
After each cannonade the ships changed position, back, farther out to sea, far from the coastline where the men, at the call of their leader, all left the water together, ran up the beach shivering and snorting, scores of stark-naked men on their way to the clothes that were theirs, their dot in the sand below the promenade.
The soldiers around us started laughing and whistling. Some clapped their hands. On the horizon the ships’ cannon were spewing new pinpricks of light, followed by thick curtains of smoke.